Around here at Leading With Nice, we define leadership as anybody who is influencing others to achieve greatness. You don’t necessarily have to have the title of CEO to be a leader.
Case in point: Laurance Yap.
We have known Laurance for the better part of two decades and through various occupations. We first met him while he was travelling the globe as an automotive writer. Then we worked along side him while he was the graphic designer at a start-up publication in Toronto. And in both cases, he brought out the best in not only us, but virtually everyone he worked with.
Laurance, without a doubt, is a leader — although he’d be the first one to tell you otherwise.
“I’ve got to say, I’m so happy to be having this conversation,” he recently told Leading With Nice. “Although I’m kind of surprised because the podcast’s name is Leading With Nice, and many people that I work with probably wouldn’t consider me to be nice. And it’s funny because I don’t actually consider myself to be a leader.”
We should also mention he’s humble, too.
Laurence is currently the creative director at Pfaff Automotive Partners, an automotive retailer in Vaughn, Ont. And he’s completely aware of the uniqueness of his title, given the industry.
“[Creative director] is a title you would normally, I guess, associate with the ad agency world or the content world, that kind of thing,” he says. “And I’d like to joke that my role is doodling in meetings. I doodle in meetings when I’m bored to help keep my brain engaged, but I actually do a lot of doodling in meetings that’s quite productive. I’d like to think that the value that I bring to the organization is really in sitting in a meeting and listening to everybody talk about what they want out of something, out of a specific business, out of a building project we’re doing, and then processing all of that.”
Creativity can be used to lead, influence — and yes — sell cars. Check out the latest episode below to hear about what inspires Laurence when seeking to do just that.
Laurance Yap:
I don’t know if there’s anything specific I could point to. I mean, I could tell you what magazines I read and what websites I go to, but primarily it’s just maintaining a healthy level of curiosity about the world around us and being open to inputs from everywhere.
Mathieu Yuill:
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. It’s Mathieu Yuill from Leading With Nice, where we want to help you inspire others, build loyalty and get results. Today, I’m welcoming a good friend of mine, actually, Laurance Yap. I met Laurance many moons ago. We worked on several projects together. We have been in the same professional circles and maintain a great friendship to this day. And why I asked him to come on is Laurance is unique that he has never trained for a job he’s had. Am I right about that, Laurance?
Laurance Yap:
You’re quite correct. Yeah.
Mathieu Yuill:
Or I think that is born out of is a gift that’s not built into him. It’s one that can be taught and learned, and Laurance has definitely done it along the way, and that’s creativity. So today we’re going to be talking about creativity through the lens of leadership and how you use creativity as a leader to impact the bottom line to accomplish your goals, to build loyalty, get results, inspire others. So Laurance, man, hey, welcome to the show.
Laurance Yap:
Well, thanks for having me on, Mathieu. And I’ve got to say, I’m so happy to be having this conversation, although I’m kind of surprised because the podcast’s name is Leading With Nice, and many people that I work with probably wouldn’t consider me to be nice. And it’s funny because I don’t actually consider myself to be a leader. I think we’ll maybe get into that a little bit, but I think one of the things that we’ll talk about is maybe not so much leadership, but how communication and especially just in being able to sit back and listen and help accomplish a lot of these goals that you’ve mentioned.
Mathieu Yuill:
I define leadership as anybody who is influencing. So you don’t have to have the title of CEO or director, and you don’t necessarily have to be picking up a saber and mounting your horse and leading people into battle, but it’s about influence. And Laurance, your career has been spent influencing others, sometimes internally, sometimes externally. And you’re doing a lot of that right now in your current role at Pfaff. So why don’t you tell us a bit about what Pfaff is, and then also what your role is? And maybe even start with a little bit with how you got to that role today because it’s been a pretty quick transition to what you’re doing from what you started doing.
Laurance Yap:
Yeah, it’s actually quite interesting. For those of you that don’t know Pfaff within the greater Toronto area is a company that owns a bunch of car dealerships, primarily in the luxury space. We’re one of the largest volume Porsche dealers in North America. We’ve got McLaren. We’ve got BMW, Audi, et cetera, et cetera. I came to Pfaff after probably I’m going to say about 15 years working in and around the automotive business for 10 years as actually a journalist, which I think certainly has contributed to how I approach things. And then I spent six years at Porsche Canada in public relations and in marketing and had a brief foray into the high-end car auction world before landing here. It’s interesting because my current role is creative director, which is weird. You don’t normally have creative directors at car dealerships.
Mathieu Yuill:
Right. True.
Laurance Yap:
That’s a title you would normally, I guess, associate with the ad agency world or the content world, that kind of thing. And I’d like to joke that my role is doodling in meetings. I doodle in meetings when I’m bored to help keep my brain engaged, but I actually do a lot of doodling in meetings that’s quite productive. I’d like to think that the value that I bring to the organization is really in sitting in a meeting and listening to everybody talk about what they want out of something, out of a specific business, out of a building project we’re doing, and then processing all of that.
Laurance Yap:
The output of my work is often either whether it’s a sketch or whether it is a PowerPoint or whether it’s some kind of document that takes all of this input and packages in a way that people can understand. That could be our executives whose approval might be required to move a project forward. It could be something for customers. My job is really taking a lot of input, thinking about it and then processing it and distilling it into something that’s understandable by a lot of people in a short form, I guess.
Mathieu Yuill:
So here’s the thing, you said this earlier and nothing about your job could be truer is that most dealerships or dealership groups, they don’t have a creative director. So a handful of years ago, somebody in charge must have said, “We need this.” And they asked you to come and do something. What were they asking you to do? Why did they invite you into the organization?
Laurance Yap:
Well, I think like everything else in my career path, it’s complicated. I got to know Chris Pfaff and the executive team here at this company while I was at Porsche because they were one of our biggest dealers. We obviously had a relationship with them. And so when they brought me on board, I was out of work at the time. We’ve stayed in touch, and they brought me on board with essentially no fixed job description. And they said, “You know what, we’re going to figure this out. Just kind of roam around and talk to people and see where you can add some value.” Very quickly, within the first three months, I ended up running marketing for the group for a couple of years.
Laurance Yap:
After that two-plus years, they came back to me and they said, “You know what, we kind of liked you better when you weren’t really doing anything, but where you talk to a lot of people and you found areas where you could improve things or where you could start things that brought some value to the company.” So in the time since then, I’ve gone back to filling in for somebody as marketing director again, when she was on mat leave, but I’m now back in this role where I have no fixed job description, but where I seem to always be working on a bunch of different things. And primarily, that’s concentrated in the new business space, I would say.
Laurance Yap:
We’re a company that’s grown a lot over the last six years since I’ve been here. When I started, we were 500 people. We’re now well over a thousand. We’ve added a lot of brands to our portfolio since then. And we’re constantly asking ourselves, “Okay, what’s next?” And so a lot of my work is in the, okay, what’s next stuff. And that could be I’m sitting here talking to you right now at a pop-up Porsche store that we’ve just opened in Markham this week. So it could be conceptualizing that and sort of figuring out what does that look like? Who are we going to get to build it? Or it could be a completely new business idea. It could be something like the online racing championship that we started a couple of years ago. It’s kind of all over the place, but it’s really in the realm of, “Okay, what’s next? And how can we continue to grow and innovate and change?”
Mathieu Yuill:
Usually when you see a vehicle, a new vehicle inside, it is… Actually, to be honest, I see a Ford at Costco when I go there because they have a partnership.
Laurance Yap:
Inside?
Mathieu Yuill:
Yeah, inside. Yeah. At what location I go to, they have one inside. And I’ve seen it at sports arenas and whatnot. Typically, you don’t see a pop-up store. Before we started recording, you gave me a little brief overview of why this? Why? There is a question that was asked. There was a problem that was presented that you had to find a solution for and you arrived at this store. Tell us about that.
Laurance Yap:
Yeah, the problem originally, and this actually ties into the pandemic that we’re dealing with right now is we are in the process of actually building a full-sized conventional dealership here in Markham. And we’ve made an agreement with Porsche that we would sell a certain number of cars in Markham before the end of the year. And there’s a complicated formula about how allocation is done on an annual basis, but essentially what it boils down to is we needed to be able to sell cars in Markham this year. But construction delays meant that our full-scale dealership won’t be opening until probably January of next year. So we had a need to be able to sell and deliver cars in the Markham area before the end of 2020. And we didn’t really have a lot of time to figure out how to do that.
Laurance Yap:
And that’s where between myself, our executive vice president, who has the relationships on the real estate side of things, and a few other people got together, secured a retail location inside Markville mall. And then that’s where the doodling started. It’s like, “Okay, how many cars can we fit in here? What’s it going to look like? Who’s actually going to be able to do this for us?” And so the creativity came in three forms. One, what does the customer experience going to be like? Is this going to look like a conventional dealership? Is it going to feel like walking into a showroom? Two, what is the physical space actually going to look like? How is it going to be configured? And three, how are we actually going to get it done in as little time as possible?
Laurance Yap:
And so those are the three areas that I was involved in, because of my previous experience with… While I was at Porsche actually, I had a relationship with a company that still works for them that builds exhibits and trade show displays and that kind of thing. So that actually 2,700 square feet that needed to be open in a few weeks was nothing for them because they’re used to putting up a trade show display in three or four days. The customer experience there was… This is where there was a lot of input gathering from different areas of the organization. We are changing up the customer experience at this location, where the conventional handoff from a sales person to a finance manager is not going to happen. The sales person is going to handle all of that work. Plus, even things like logistically, “Okay, we’re operating inside of a mall, what if somebody wants to take a test drive? How are we going to get them to a car where they’re going to take a test drive?” That kind of thing.
Laurance Yap:
And then the physical configuration of the space literally started as a bunch of doodles that then got sent to Porsche for approval. They provided a lot of wonderful input on similar locations that they’d opened around the world and about how it really needed to feel a little bit less like a retail environment and more welcoming. So we incorporated that, had some back and forth with the display company. Yeah. Two months later, here we are, and we’re just finishing up our first week of operations. And I think the last I looked, we’d sold six cars.
Mathieu Yuill:
That’s amazing.
Laurance Yap:
It’s really not bad for a 2,700 square foot space inside a mall.
Mathieu Yuill:
No. I have two reflections, and then one I want to ask you about something else as well. You hear Laurance talking about doodling a lot. And this, I don’t want you to miss the significance of the doodling.
Laurance Yap:
No, the doodling is like the most significant thing.
Mathieu Yuill:
Yeah. I mean, Laurance has artistry in him. So I think I’ve done a podcast in the past or I have an article on my website about creativity versus artistry. And not everybody’s an artist, but everybody can be creative. And so I’m just going to take a second to encourage you, if you’re listening. There’s a book by Sunni Brown, S-U-N-N-I Brown, called The Doodle Revolution.
Laurance Yap:
That was a great book. Yeah.
Mathieu Yuill:
Yeah. If you do not come naturally to doodling, pick it up. I should probably get an affiliate store manager from them, “Go to my website, click on my link.” No, you just go to Amazon or or Chapters or Indigo, pick up The Doodle Revolution because doodling for anybody can spark creativity because you know what, I’m hearing you talk about this store and I understand and appreciate how ambitious this project was, but I’m not sure that… Because of the nature of who you are, yes, you understood the scope of it, but you just got it done. So I want to back up and just talk about something that somebody who maybe doesn’t think in this space a whole lot could maybe comprehend a bit easier. Let’s talk about some really simple content type marketing.
Laurance Yap:
Okay.
Mathieu Yuill:
You’ve done some films. There is one I remember had a bunch of exotic cars at night in Toronto.
Laurance Yap:
Right.
Mathieu Yuill:
Yeah. So talk to us about that project and why you would do it, and what the outcome would be, what kind of questions you need to ask yourself before even starting that sort of project.
Laurance Yap:
Well, yeah. I think that project was a great example of actually just getting things done and not overthinking it. And it’s one of those projects I’m actually quite proud of because it just got done in such a short amount of time. It didn’t involve a lot of cost. It was all done by people internally. It was just great because I think sometimes in marketing land, especially now when you’re just surrounded by data, there’s this tendency to just overthink everything. This project was 2015. I just joined the company. And one of the challenges that we were trying to deal with at the time was that we’d acquired some new dealerships. This has happened before I’d showed up. And there was a real problem with people didn’t know that we had certain brands, right?
Laurance Yap:
Pfaff’s association with Porsche goes back to the ’60s. With Volkswagen, goes back to the ’60s. With Audi, goes back to 1971. So people knew we had those brands, right? There’s a long association. But what they didn’t know is that we had Toyota or that we had recently acquired BMW, and that we were the Canadian representatives for McLaren and for Pagani. And so the idea was like, “Hey, let’s just tell people that we have eight brands in some sort of cool film.” And so literally, it was a bunch of phone calls and emails saying like, “Okay, we’re all going to meet downtown at the base of the Gardiner one night. You bring a car. You bring a car. You bring a car. You bring a car. This guy is going to bring the camera and we’re going to go driving around Toronto.” And that’s basically what we did.
Laurance Yap:
The film is very simple. It’s about two minutes long, and it’s just this train of cars driving around Toronto and cars pulling out of side streets joining this train of cars. And it really didn’t require much thinking. Logistically, it was challenging just to get the right cars. But yeah, it was something that it could be summarized on a piece of paper.
Mathieu Yuill:
And anybody can do that. If you’re listening, you could solve a simple problem like, “What is something that is a challenge for us?” Yours was, “Oh, not everybody knows we have these brands.” You weren’t trying to change the world.
Laurance Yap:
No. No, we’re selling cars. None of this that we’re doing is trying to change the world.
Mathieu Yuill:
And this is where I think a lot of people get hung up when they’re thinking strategically about communications and marketing. From a leadership perspective, they’re like, “Okay, if we’re going to do this film thing, we need to communicate our values and what’s important to…” And there is a place for that. That can happen, but you can also be like, “Hey, we’re launching a new product and we’re going to just make a film with some great B-roll and it’d be okay.”
Laurance Yap:
Yeah. Yeah, that’s exactly right. And I think that from a communications perspective and from a strategic thinking perspective, I think one of the most valuable skills one can have is actually being an editor. In one way that can mean cutting together a film beautifully 100%. But really what an editor’s job is to know what to leave out, right? Forget about strategic thinking or anything else, but when you’re just talking about design in general, Apple is the cliche, right? But so many of the great Apple products were great because of the conscious decisions about what to leave out rather than what to add in. When they launched the iPhone, it was a conscious decision not to keep adding on extra features and buttons, but really to remove things.
Laurance Yap:
So a large part of what any of us need to do as thinkers is really ask ourselves the question, “Okay. Does this need to be in here? Do we really need this?” And that’s half the fun, right? And I think that’s probably where 10 years of working with really talented editors has helped me is in being able to ask that question, “What can we actually leave out? What don’t we need to do?”
Mathieu Yuill:
When we worked together on a magazine, I interviewed director or an editor who had won an Oscar. I thought it was for the Pursuit of Happiness, but it could be wrong. And he told me that in one of his previous films that was a comedy, in the test screenings, there’s this one joke that they thought was a killer, but was not getting any laughs. And he edited it and took out two-tenths of a second and it killed. He said that two-tenths of a second got him his next job, and then got him the job that got him an Oscar, right? And it’s so important about what to leave out. So that’s a great segue way into the next question I wanted to ask you about. And I know you’re always seeing new things. And so I’m curious, from a design perspective, and I’m not just speaking about a beautiful piece of art or whatnot, but it could be that, what’s inspiring the way your design thinking is happening now and why?
Laurance Yap:
You know what, it’s interesting because the current situation, and now I use air quotes around this because I don’t mean unprecedented times.
Mathieu Yuill:
Honestly, right? We’ve got to find… That’s my rest of my goal for 2020 is to find a new way to say-
Laurance Yap:
Unprecedented times.
Mathieu Yuill:
… unprecedented times.
Laurance Yap:
It’s not as easy as it used to be, right? Because I think watching things on a screen just isn’t the same, but I think where… Especially in my current role, car dealer land and let’s face it, even the automotive business can be very inward looking a lot of times, right? And so the job of a creative person, whether that’s a marketing person, whether that’s a designer, whether that is somebody that’s working on strategy stuff is to somehow look outside of that, of what we would normally do and just try and optimize things and to see like, “Okay, where can we pull inspiration from?”
Laurance Yap:
Actually, we’ve been talking about movies and books and stuff all the way through this. A lot of it actually comes from what I would call pop culture, right? And it’s like, “What’s actually going on out there that we can connect to and that will get people excited?” Because so much of the work that I’m trying to do is to bring people in and get them excited about cars. So as an example, the space that I’m standing in right now, when we first mocked this space up, we agreed on the layout and the flow of things. We’re going to put two cars in here. We’re going to have a lounge. We need to have a semi-private area, where if somebody wants to have a sales conversation and inspect a car, or whatever we need, we need those things. And we needed some stuff on the walls, right?
Laurance Yap:
And so fortunately, we’ve got this big video screen, so that’s kind of cool. We can just stream whatever we want onto that screen. But for the static artwork, we mocked up the space with Porsche’s corporate image database stuff. And funnily enough, it was Porsche that came back to us and said, “The space looks good, but it doesn’t feel like it connects to the Markham area in any way. It feels like it could be anywhere in the world. What can you do to tie it into the local area?” So I actually spent half a day driving around Markham because I don’t know the area all that well and came across in an underground parking lot of all things, a street art project that the city of Markham had executed with a photographer that used to work for the CIA.
Laurance Yap:
And so I shot some pictures of a car against these backdrops in this underground parking lot and we hastily Photoshop them into the renderings and sent them over to Porsche. And they said, “Oh, that’s awesome. Where the hell are those?” I’m like, “Well, actually, that artwork is about three blocks from here.” And the Porsche guys said, “Well, that’s awesome. We love it, but do you have permission to use this stuff?” I’m like, “Not really.” But fortunately, we had a contact at the city. We reached out to them and they connected us to the right people, who came back and said, “We love the fact that you’re using this street art because it actually brings attention to this project that maybe we wouldn’t have had before.”
Mathieu Yuill:
For sure.
Laurance Yap:
And so that’s a great example of… The inspiration for this space actually came from just driving around and sort of artwork that’s out there, but I don’t know if there’s anything specific I could point to. I mean, I could tell you what magazines I read and what websites I go to, but primarily it’s just maintaining a healthy level of curiosity about the world around us and being open to inputs from everywhere, right?
Mathieu Yuill:
I’m bouncing in my chair over here because this is actually… When somebody says to me, when a leader says to me, “Oh, I’m looking for a creative person. Do you know anybody? How do I find them?” The thing I encourage leaders to ask when they’re interviewing a creative person, I say, “Ask them what they do on their free time, their spare time. Do they take their camera out and just shoot for fun or to post on their Instagram?”
Laurance Yap:
Which I love to do, right?
Mathieu Yuill:
Yeah, you do that all the time. Half your feed is, I never know if it’s for Pfaff or just because you were out getting coffee and you’re like, “I like the way my car looks against this brick wall.”
Laurance Yap:
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Mathieu Yuill:
One of the things I do personally is I return to this video on YouTube of… And I can’t even believe it because growing up, I did not enjoy this, but at Walt Disney World, there’s a hall of presidents and has animatronics. And the way they’ve put together Abe Lincoln in Gettysburg Address, I actually go back and watch footage people have filmed where they’ve been on vacation of that portion because I find it so inspiring and it gets my creative juices flowing.
Mathieu Yuill:
But this is so great, because one thing I wanted to ask you is, there’s people that are listening right now that are like, “Oh man, I want what this guy is talking about, but that’s not me. Yes, I’m the CEO. I’m the COO. I’m the executive vice president, and I’m a great operations person, but I don’t know how to… I wouldn’t even know where to start if it was talking about a film to introduce our new products or a pop-up store, because our retail space we were building wouldn’t be done in time. And hence, our obligation to a third party was in jeopardy.” So what advice would you give a leader who’s sitting in their chair, in their car, in the bathroom, most likely?
Laurance Yap:
That’s where I do a lot of my best thinking, Mathieu.
Mathieu Yuill:
Exactly, that’s where. I have three kids. It’s where my only alone time.
Laurance Yap:
Right.
Mathieu Yuill:
And they’re saying, “I want that.” So how do they move toward getting what we’ve been talking about?
Laurance Yap:
I don’t know, but think that being curious is something that can be easily taught. And it’s funny, we have the world’s most fascinating and amusing finance team at Pfaff. Every month, they do lunch and learns. And they asked me to come in and do a lunch and learn with them about… Because a couple of them… As you alluded to, I like taking pictures of cars. And so I did a lunch and learn for our finance team about taking pictures of cars. I mean, like a lot of people who like to think of themselves as photographers, I get obsessed with the gear and everything else, but the primary lesson of that lunch and learn, there’s this one slide where I think the headline is like your three most important tools and there’s three pictures.
Laurance Yap:
So there’s one picture of a clock and there’s one picture of your feet. And I’m trying to think of what the third one is. Anyway, let’s talk about the two. So the clock and your feet. The feet were super important because one of the things I’ve learned from photography and through a lot of creative work is the first time you look at something is rarely going to produce the best result. So from a photography perspective, there’s one slide in this deck where I show them three pictures of a car that were taken in exactly the same place, but look completely different because I literally just walked to a different point and took a picture from a different place. So the lesson there is really look at the problem the way that you would look at the problem, but then try to find a different angle to look at that problem from, right?
Laurance Yap:
And the clock thing from a photography perspective was about the time of day that you take a photo. And again, I had this slide where it’s like, “Here’s a photo of the side profile of a Porsche taken in the middle of the day. Here’s one that was taken early in the morning. Here’s one that was taken late at night. All in the same place and look at how different each of these images feels, right?” And the magic of time in terms of creativity, thinking about a problem at a different time of day, coming back to it multiple times, I think that’s a really valuable one. I found for myself finding the right time of day to bring creative is really important.
Laurance Yap:
I doodle a lot in meetings during the day because I’m in meetings with other people and I have to listen to them to get all of their ideas, but where the real creative work happens tends to be before I even get into work. Before all of this COVID stuff, I’ve got a coffee shop that I stopped at every morning, and that’s where I would do my heavy duty creative work between 8:00 in the morning. And I’m kind of useless in the evening from a productivity standpoint, but that’s also a good time to be maybe ingesting stimuli from the world around you.
Mathieu Yuill:
So a few things, if I can just repeat back a few things I’ve heard, so if you’re the leader looking to bring on somebody new or engage with a third party, probably some of the questions you want to ask is ask them, “How do you get inspired? What do you look at? What’s your routine? Tell me about what you do in your spare time to be creative.” Some people write. Some people do woodworking. Some people doodle. Some people take photos. And that’s just a good place to start, right?
Laurance Yap:
Yeah. Yeah. And I think that creativity is as much about your inputs as your output, right? You can’t be creative in terms of your output without having ingested a lot of input. The more varied and numerous your inputs are, I would argue the better your output is going to be because you’ve considered more things, and you’ve thought about things from different angles, right?
Mathieu Yuill:
I used to have a DVD library of 300 DVDs or something, which was a lot for my circle of friends and others, people out there that have many more than that. And I had, back when I was working in the education system, my boss, I come home back from lunch from HMV with a new DVD, and she’s like, “Why did you… You possibly don’t have time to watch all of this.” But what I bought them for, I bought films based on their font treatments and opening credit.
Laurance Yap:
Yeah. Yeah.
Mathieu Yuill:
Because I wanted to emulate that in print. I wanted to know how can I bring that in effect into print. And my wife used to hate going to movies. Well, she probably still hates going to movies with me, but I would sit there during the opening credits and be like, “Oh, that future, what a lazy font choice.”
Laurance Yap:
Yeah. It’s funny, you and I, I think, share a love of great movie title sequences.
Mathieu Yuill:
Totally.
Laurance Yap:
One of my great inspirations earlier on in my career when I was actually doing graphic design work, which I never trained for it either, was a company called Imaginary Forces that did the titles for Seven and a bunch of movies, like iconic title sequences, because you had to put so much information onto the screen in such a small amount of time. It’s a real art.
Mathieu Yuill:
When I was working education and I had… I wasn’t a teacher, but I worked in the communications office and I would hire students. One of the things we would do in training at… Because these students were going to be putting together a student publications, student handbooks, day-timers, et cetera, et cetera. One of the things I would do is I’d have them watch Saving Private Ryan on mute. And they were to take note of the color palettes because Saving Private Ryan, I think, does a really good job of communicating emotion through color palettes. So they would always be amazed when they’d come back and they’d be like, “Oh, I don’t know if this is right, but I saw a lot of greens and brown in this scene.” And they all be like, “I saw greens and browns too.” And they were amazed at how they could pick up on the emotion just from the color palette. So anyhow, that was one place I went to.
Laurance Yap:
Yeah. Yeah.
Mathieu Yuill:
I was actually thinking as I got ready for this, the huge impact you have had on what Leading With Nice is today, because you probably… I don’t know if I’ve ever shared this with you actually, but I tell this story quite often. So Laurance and I worked at a magazine together in the mid-2000. It was a lot of fun. It was like very startup.
Laurance Yap:
Crazy.
Mathieu Yuill:
Crazy. We had a really awesome… The editor in chief was just this big, big vision guy. And we worked with some great copy editors and assistant editors. It was really good. So I often did a lot of the interviews of profiles. Not all of them, but a lot. I didn’t interview him, but we had just interviewed a real estate developer sales guy in Toronto. That was pretty big. And I just remember, I wasn’t a big fan and I told you why. And then you said, “Well, who have you been a big fan of?” And I told you who I was and why. And you said, “I’ve heard you actually say the same kind of thing about a few different people.” You said to me, “What is it about those people that you really like?” And so I went back to my notes, and it was… You mentioned about 12 different people that I’d interviewed over two years. You said that about these 12 people and you were the creative, you were doing the layout and stuff. So you saw my work and you laid it out.
Mathieu Yuill:
And it was when I went back to my notes that I wrote down the six attributes that I define as Leading With Nice. And that was you. You asked me the question that set me on this journey. And from there, I went and met with a friend at U of T who was a vice chancellor at the time. I told her the question you’d asked me, the research, the conclusions I came with. And she said, “You should do a masters in this. This sounds like masters level research and work.” And so I went and did a master’s in leadership and management on this Leading With Nice. And then full circle, when it came time to develop the logo, who did I call?
Laurance Yap:
Right.
Mathieu Yuill:
Laurance Yap. So dude, you’ve been like… Listen, I’m going to give you one Class B share as a thank you.
Laurance Yap:
Okay.
Mathieu Yuill:
[Inaudible 00:34:51]. But man, you’ve had a huge impact. And I just want to thank you for three things. First, for your awesome friendship. What a pleasure it is to converse and talk all of this with you. I know you don’t call yourself nice. I know it’s because you demand results, but actually I think you do share a lot of the attributes of a nice leader. It’s not about being fluffy and, “Oh, everything’s okay.” Being nice also includes honesty, trust, generosity, which these are all attributes you have in spades. And so first, thank you for your friendship. Two, thank you for being on here because I think if people… If you were hearing this and you’re like, “Okay, I kind of get it,” take a few days, come back and listen to it again or maybe bookmark a few spots that you’ve heard that really got your juices flowing.
Mathieu Yuill:
Laurance talked a lot about curiosity. There’s another podcast with Latif Nasser from Radiolab and he has a Netflix show called Connected, he lives for curiosity. So check that one out too, but that Laurance has some great thoughts in here. If you’re seeking this, you want to hear what Laurance talked about today and you want to find that either somebody in your organization already or you want to find that in the outside. And it’s a creative person that can help you accomplish larger business goals.
Laurance Yap:
Try to find the most curious person in the organization. You may find that person in places you don’t expect.
Mathieu Yuill:
And most likely you will, I would say even. And thirdly, thank you for pulling back the curtain a bit on Pfaff and just being so candid with like, “Why are we doing this?” It’s more than just being cool.
Laurance Yap:
Yeah. I’m so fortunate to be working for an organization that understands that it’s important and values it. This is the other thing I would say to anybody that’s listening, particularly in a leadership situation, it’s one thing to pay a lip service to it, but I’ve been so lucky that this company has chosen to invest in it. Nevermind from paying my salary, but to actually say like, “Okay, we’re going to pay the rent on this space for three or four months. And we’re going to spend the money that’s required to outfit it and to hire people to staff it, because we believe it’s the right thing to do.” And so it’s one thing, I think, for any organization to say, “Yeah, we value creativity, but how much you value creativity is defined by how much you actually value creativity.”
Mathieu Yuill:
Yes, there’s no more left to say after that. Laurance, thank you so much for being on today.
Laurance Yap:
Thanks, Mathieu. It’s great to reconnect. Maybe we can actually have a coffee in person [inaudible 00:37:39].
Mathieu Yuill:
I know, I would love that. I also want to thank the dude, Austin Pomeroy. He’s going to cut this all together for us. He does all the audio production and post-production. If you want a podcast, send me a note, I’ll connect you with Austin. Audio gear, recording, post-production, he’s your guy. And also, I want to, of course, remind you, check out leadingwithnice.com. you’ll find this podcast and others, and also a lot of blog posts on the very topic we’ve discussed today. Thanks so much for listening. Laurance, thank you again.
Laurance Yap:
Mathieu, thank you.
Mathieu Yuill:
And have a great day.