What Great Leaders Do When Average Thinking Takes Over

Christine Courtney: Hello, everybody. Welcome to Stepping Into Your Leadership. I'm your host, Christine Courtney. And today I have a very special guest in the studio today.

And that is my friend, my pal, and an ever and interesting leader in our midst. And that is Scott Goodson. Just know a little bit about Scott as we go into this conversation, he is a New York based marketer, author, ⁓ a change maker, founder and chairman of Strawberry Frog, where he pioneered movement thinking, which we'll talk a little bit about the mechanics of social movements to help brands activate purpose, ⁓ shift and really drive growth. He's the author of Uprising and the co-author of Activate Brand Purpose, and he co-hosts Ink Magazine's Planet Purpose podcast.

Welcome, Scott. Scott: Well, thank you so much, Christine. purposely designed that to be more complex than Peter Piper picked a pack of pickled peppers. It's a save five times, ⁓ quickly.

Christine Courtney: How do I do? ⁓ Well, the thing I need to also tell people is how I met Scott because we are, we are friends and we live in the same town. And when I moved to this town almost seven years ago now, ⁓ he was at the dinner party I ever went to. ⁓ And then he had over to like a real, like a dinner party at his house with the most amazing people.

⁓ And I thought to when we were at that. table, I thought, wow, this is a cool place to live. This is a lot of interesting people. And Scott is very good at cultivating really interesting people and curating them around the same tables, I would say.

And in addition to that, he stopped the conversation at one point said, ⁓ I want everybody to tell, I don't remember the exact words you said, but to tell their origin story, ⁓ origin story about them. from wherever they were. And all these people happened to be from all over the world, right? I mean, lots of different places, except for me.

it was so cool ⁓ just go around the table at a dinner party where mostly people are always just talking in little groups and to have one big conversation with like 12 people ⁓ some origin story that they wanted to share. And it was a night of storytelling. with some of the most interesting people and I'll never forget some of those stories. So anyway, that's how I met Scott and I was like, I gotta be friends with this guy and I gotta learn from him.

So thanks Scott for coming on. Scott: My pleasure. What an introduction. Christine Courtney: Well, you're a special person.

right. So let's talk, why don't you tell us a little bit about how, I'd love to hear your origin story a little bit of how you even got into marketing in the first place. Like, I don't know if people are born marketers or how'd you even start Strawberry Frog or get this idea? I know Karen's involved in this, but.

Scott: Thank you. It was through a woman who killed her husband Australia. She was in prison for 25 years and I her France and we talking ⁓ I from... ⁓ college slash university, depending on where you're hearing this podcast.

That reference will make an impact. And I had never met anyone who had been in prison. And she had killed her husband because he was physically violent with her. And in those days, I know it's a thousand years ago, back in the 1980s, if a woman her husband in self-defense, she went to prison for life.

⁓ she had been that type of been in that situation. ⁓ and wanted to write a movie about this woman. was a fascinating story. ⁓ So long story short, I traveled with her and her who also was in prison for I think 15 years for bank robbery.

This was of course years before Thelma and Louise, the movie came out. So ⁓ I thought it like, I was onto something. ⁓ And... We ended up going to an island in Greece and they were much older than I was.

I was in my twenties, they were in their fifties. So it was really about me trying to kind of understand these two women. anyway, she introduced me to Karin, who I immediately fell in love with. And fast I'm living Sweden with her, my wife, Karin, who I met this woman, Maureen.

I don't think she's still alive because she was in her 50s back in the 80s. she's a hundred and something. Maybe she'll sue the lawsuit for me using her name. anyway, she's through her.

I ended up moving Sweden and I needed a job. And I grew up with a who was the creative director of Canada's Saks Fifth Avenue and a father who owned an advertising agency and a publishing company. And I really didn't want to work in communications and marketing. I wanted to do something infinitely more respectable, like being a lawyer.

that didn't work out. I did take a, needed, know, necessity is the mother of invention. So I invented myself into marketing and I got a job in Stockholm, Sweden, ended up living there for a decade. I bought an agency in I was 26 and it into an international company.

And ⁓ basically was and still is a country that is advanced technically. It's also a country that is ⁓ very not driven per se, but they really believe ⁓ in ⁓ a having an idea that's much bigger than just making money. so was a really great education for me to see that. And then ⁓ applied that way of thinking from Sweden in marketing.

So it was kind of a combination of my ⁓ original upbringing, ⁓ strong ethic, curiosity, interest in technology, ⁓ moving Sweden and adopting, you know, the positive aspects of the Swedish. marketing culture to build a new kind of business which started in Amsterdam together with my wife, Karen, who's Christine Courtney: So when you guys started, you just take, did you like, as some people do, like as a startup, do you take everybody and you're just like a regular marketing firm or did you always start with this idea of purpose or was it really just taught to you because of the Swedish culture?

It was just ingrained in the businesses you worked with. And then when you came over to New York, you just said, why aren't people doing this more? And started to apply that. Like how, how was that formed, you know?

Scott: You can't succeed unless you have a really interesting origin story that differentiates you from the competition and that creates positive bias in the marketplace, momentum, attention, all those things. So unless you craft, and at the time, ⁓ know, there were all these big corporate advertising companies and a lot of the... The articles in the media at the time were all about how big and bloated and slow and expensive these companies were. So we created a company that was the antithesis of that.

It was the strawberry frog, which was a small little red frog with blue legs, so it's a rebel with genes. the strawberry frog, happens also to be poisonous ⁓ effective, can dance around this lumbering dinosaur who's slow, bureaucratic, and has sticky saliva. So when it spits out small ideas, they tend not to go very far. ⁓ yeah.

Well, you know, we started to paint a picture of the competition. ⁓ Christine Courtney: Tiki. Scott: Instead of looking at them from above and from below and think, ⁓ they're so unassailable. They're so great.

They're so big. They're so full of money. They can beat us a million times. We started to paint them as in their worst light, slow, bureaucratic, the things that lead to bad creativity, expensive, et cetera.

How many dinosaurs does it take to screw on a light bulb? You know, that kind of stuff. And we would start every meeting that way and clients would laugh and then they would award us their business and we would beat the biggest of the biggest in the world. And we won the global Heineken business.

We won the Emirates airline business. We won Google globally. We won Pampers globally. We started picking up the largest pieces of business in the world.

And ⁓ it you know, came from that idea. Christine Courtney: Yeah, well, that's, yeah, it is a leadership idea. And I was thinking like, you know, the people listening to us, it is like looking up and going, instead of being intimidated by this, let's, let me go after it's the David and Goliath story. You know, it's like, let me see what, what ⁓ I can throw up at you.

That's going to somehow topple you down from your heaviness. did you, know, when you Scott: Leadership idea. Yeah. A peacock idea.

Christine Courtney: When you start to create this and you start going and you start talking to people about this movement, were you, did you find yourself having to change the minds of some executives that hired you to try to get them into this movement or did they just join you because that's the kind of thinking that they wanted anyway for their brand? You know what mean? Did you have to do a lot of convincing of them or you just didn't choose to work with them? Scott: So the sales process starts the first words out of your mouth or the first letter you write to them.

So even if you're in ⁓ pitch scenario or especially when you're in that situation where you're being compared to others, I mean, you're always being compared to others, but in a actual pitch situation where you're actually against two or three competitors, you have to differentiate. Otherwise, you're part of the problem. I would say most of the people, almost all the people that we and won over or acquired as clients intuitively felt that the old system was expensive, slow, bureaucratic, and all the stuff that I said.

We crystallized it for them and made it fun and poked fun at the big competitors. And ⁓ I you know, the truth was I'd spent a decade doing that in Sweden. Sweden doesn't believe in big corporate advertising agencies or big corporate having spend a lot of money for basically what is in effect a security blanket that you hold and feel like, thankfully I have this and I'm not gonna ⁓ get in when I work internationally so I need a corporate agency. Now.

You need three people. You need a strategist. You need a person who can run the business and run budgets and need a creative slash technology person who can figure out ways to engage people and everything else you can buy, you know, in on a timely basis. Everything else is irrelevant.

So ⁓ think that's what we showed them that we could do. ⁓ And if show them, you know, when you do that for one iconic global brand, you can do it for every. single one. So, you know, that 25, 27 years ago.

I think it's very much not only relevant today, but I would even argue it's 10 times more important because now with AI, everyone can sound really smart, even if they're really stupid. ⁓ Everyone in an instant articulate a smart differentiating idea. Christine Courtney: Thanks for spending time here on stepping into your leadership. I'd like to give a special shout out ⁓ to our podcast producer, Richard Francisco.

⁓ Check out our notes for any and if you wanna get anything out of this, go to our YouTube channel and please subscribe to Leadership Lab TV. If you heard something today, of course, that resonated with you, do something with it. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Scott: In fact, you can go into any situation. can go through AI. You can figure out who your competitors are. And you can find ways of differentiating amongst that, specifically that tiny group.

So you need to, I would say, even go bigger. I think you need to think of either you're going to be a peacock or you're going to be a duck. And if you're going to be a duck, you will not succeed in this world. Christine Courtney: It's all about the choices that you make.

It's what you say in conversations, how you show up in a moment. Share this episode with someone who's maybe starting a new job or stepping into a new level of leadership try one idea because it just might create some pretty powerful leadership ripple effects. Until time, keep stepping in. ⁓ Okay.

Scott: This world is not being created for ducks. Ducks will disappear. Peacocks have inherent in their plumage a survival strategy. It is a survival, this, this pomposity that you see in front of you, this incredibly fluorescent color scheme on the is designed to attract a mate and to ward off predators and threats.

Christine Courtney: because the room changes when you do. Scott: That is a strategy for survival. That is the strategy you need as a leader in 2026-27 when AI is going to equal everything. Scarcity used to be the center of our economy and scarcity is now disappearing.

Scarcity in the sense that a very few people had access to a certain amount of knowledge. The internet increased that to some extent. But if you went to school and did an MBA and you understand much better than anybody else, very few people could really get that. Now you can do it in three minutes on So you don't have to be the world's smartest data analyst.

So when all things are equal, what matters in leadership? That's the question you have to ask yourself. Christine Courtney: Yeah. And I think people are starting to see that and like struggle.

I worry about, you know, kids that are at kids age that are coming up into this world. Like what a different world is changing so fast. You know, who knows? So being in that peacock, let's say you're in a company, which a lot of people who listen to this podcast are right there, young leaders or their up and coming leaders or their.

working their way through, whether their own business or someone else's business or whatever, how do they apply that to their own life, like their own business, their own workplace? How do you not be a duck? How do you be peacock in that manner? ⁓ What that look like?

Scott: I think the first thing you need to do is you need to think of ways to put yourself in situations. In situations that take you outside your comfort zone. ⁓ if you're in your comfort zone, you're a duck. If you're in your comfort if things are fine and everything's and secure and comfy like that warm blanket I mentioned, it's probably uncomfortable.

It's not comfortable. It's the opposite. You're at risk. So you need to find ways to put yourself in an uncomfortable situation where you develop or you use your skills ⁓ and survival and however you've achieved your success in life, you need to really hone those in those uncomfortable situations.

And will teach you ⁓ a important lesson, which is success through either provocation or challenging the status quo or taking a fight out there for something that people really care about that no one's willing to do but do it in an intelligent way. Like find a way to become heard. If you're invisible you're duck. If you have a point of view you're your way to becoming a peacock.

And you know, if there's something you're working on in your company that no one wants to touch, that might be a good thing for you to lean in on and figure out a solution. Don't go in the room with everybody hanging out and solving what everybody else wants to solve. Go into the room that nobody wants to go into and figure out a really good solution. It may not succeed, but you will be rewarded for trying.

To me, that's the key to becoming a duck. you know, there's a very uncomfortable mindset in this country of people who they don't, you know, when the boss, boss, i.e. the person who's more authority, has more authority than you comes into the room, people defer, even if they have the better idea.

So, know, because someone comes in and they'll say, I've got a great idea. We need to go backwards a step. And everybody's like, ⁓ wow, that's really profound. That's a really interesting thought.

And then the boss will walk in and they'll say, yeah, backwards. he'll go, that's nuts. We're going to go forwards. ⁓ yeah, let's go forwards.

Now, stand up in the room and say, well, hold on a second. the contrarian and we as a company should value contrarians because contrarians Christine Courtney: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Scott: Challenge groupthink.

And groupthink leads to average, to duck world. So you need to think in terms of the contrarian. make your point. Don't shrink.

Because the person with authority comes in. Be respectful. Be thoughtful. But be bold.

Be stand, stand, you're with your intelligence. You didn't get to where you are because you're stupid. Christine Courtney: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Scott: You're smart. Stop giving away your superpower, which is your ability to reason. And even if you're stand, you know, truth to power. That's really my advice.

Christine Courtney: Now, now has anyone ever done that to you in a meeting? Scott: Absolutely all the time. And I reward that. Christine Courtney: Yeah.

And they probably know that. Yeah. How do you reward it? Because a lot of leaders, I'll say this, like one of the most important things to create it.

You they say the best teams, right? Google's done a ton of studies on this and so forth. The best teams by far exactly what you're talking about, which is ⁓ safety, which is the ability to speak truth to power, the ability to say, I respectfully ⁓ I think this is a better idea. Whatever.

And that the ⁓ in the room in the moment. which it can feel like an attack, right? It can feel a little scary. It can feel uncomfortable to your point, but I always have people say to me in those moments as the leader, what's the way that you handle that?

So you say you reward that, right? And I will hear leaders say to me, yeah, I'm fine with that, but they never do it. Or when I say, what do you do ⁓ that comes up? And often they can't describe it.

because I even wonder what it really looks like to someone else besides them. But I'm saying to you, when you say you reward it, what does reward it look like in the moment? Scott: I mean, each leader obviously engages with their teams differently. situation...

I think it's everything from, you know, we have... reward for being the contrarian. When we have meetings where we're trying to hash out ideas and we look for the person to come in, because when you think about what ultimately wins in these types of meetings where you're really trying to figure out a solution to a problem, and ⁓ those situations you have the person in the room who wears the bowler hat, the business person, they're very thoughtful, typically logical and rational.

you have the strategy person who wears, you know, the graduate hat. And then you might have a magician the room who's always just so articulate and comes up with such an incredible solution. But then the joker walks in the room with the joker's hat and says something really stupid. ⁓ And stops and goes, holy shit, that's brilliant.

That is so great. So you want that. You want the Joker hat. You want somebody to say something stupid because stupidity at the very least challenges group think.

Right. If you're ever in a brainstorm, you should try this sometime. You start at it and you say, OK, we have a problem we need to solve. Let's all put our heads together and solve the problem.

And then people will work for 20 minutes and they'll come up with an idea and they'll all be passionate about that idea. and they'll present it and then you look at it and you go like, it's nothing great there average. And then I'll say to them like, okay, let's put the group think aside, go back in the room and fight it out and come back with a better idea. And then they go in the room and they fucking they go, they push, they pull, they argue, they debate and they come back with a great idea because there's that first phase of ideation where people tend to be too genteel to each other.

Christine Courtney: average. Scott: They're just like too neighborly, you know, nobody smacks anyone across the face. Nobody argues. No one's passionate.

Everybody's like, I think this idea deserves a walnut. ⁓ yes, a walnut. That's brilliant. Maybe a peanut.

Peanut's better. Yeah, that's good. Yeah, let's do that. Peanut.

Let's put them together. exactly. Christine Courtney: Or worse is both. about a peanut and a walnut?

Okay. And then they just add on. Let's make these two one thing. Yeah.

⁓ God. You're so right. Scott: So that's, I think, a way of rewarding contrarianness is to push beyond average reward it. Have where you welcome thoughts from people and reward them.

yeah. Christine Courtney: Yeah. Now I have so much insight into you. You're such a little provocateur, even in like a dinner party.

So that's interesting. Scott: That's supposed to, yeah, well, I always find the most interesting conversation comes from that, you know, even in, cause regular conversation can be also kind of like, how are you? I'm fine. What are you up to?

Not much. Other kids, other great. How's school? ⁓ you know.

Christine Courtney: Yeah, it does! Yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. you know, where's that, that thought that's, you know, nobody wants to say or everybody's thinking or something's happening or just gets people going.

Yeah. Scott: So. You got to wake up the room. Yeah, you know, well, you're good at that too, which is wonderful.

Yeah. Christine Courtney: Yes. Well, where's you know, because you're you're really a creativity and a strategic, you're both strategy and creativity agency when I think about it. But like, how do you balance those two things like your creative side?

And then like, how do we how do we use this creativity for business? And and you know, how do we balance those two things? Is it different people or is it the same person? Scott: Well.

So the difference between strategy and creativity is strategy is where are you going? Where's the finish line? And creativity is how you get there. So a lot of people say, ⁓ I want to be creative.

Let's be creative. OK, well, to what end? What do you for what reason? Like, what is the business goal?

I always say to people like, what is the business goal here? Why? What are you trying to solve? Because if you just start thinking of it as a race, if I say, OK, and go and everybody starts running.

Christine Courtney: Mm-hmm. Scott: Where are you running to? Strategy is what is the goal and what is the strategic insight helps us get there? And then ⁓ creativity is taking that and coming up with the means by which you achieve that goal.

So. ⁓ Christine Courtney: I've never heard it like that. That's cool. Yeah, that's a means.

Yeah. Scott: So think those are the two things. And it's often two people, know, occasionally can be the same person, it, you know, someone who's a really good strategist is someone who can take a very complex picture and make it sound super simple. A really bad strategist is someone who takes something that's really simple and makes it sound so complicated.

That's like basic, you know, it's true. Yeah. Christine Courtney: I it. It's true.

I'm even thinking for myself, like, how often do I do that? Yeah, that's a really, that's a good point. When you know, listening to you, I'm wondering, because ⁓ when you were growing up, okay, in your kind of formative years, were you, what did you, were you a, did you, I think you played hockey, but like, what did you do that kind of formed some of these ideas too? Do you know what mean?

⁓ what experiences, ⁓ Did you have growing up, you know, some people, they're musicians, some people are actors, some people play sports. Like what was the thing that you think, ⁓ this kind of formed how I come alive or how I compete or how I think? Scott: I think a lot of those things you mentioned, some of my formative years obviously were in my home and I grew up in a house with four sisters, all of them very smart and very articulate and love to argue. So we debated everything.

Doesn't matter what it was. It could have been like the time for dinner. It could have been, you know, the cross-cutting implications of, you know, the, I don't know, like We had a party in Canada when I grew up called the Rhinoceros Party and we had debates around the Rhinoceros Party because it was like a, it was the party everyone voted for because they didn't want to vote for any other of the established parties. So we would talk, you know, debate everything.

⁓ I think that really helped me understand like strategic thinking, how I could win an argument in that complex, very emotional world. And Playing hockey, let's see, I think hockey, you know, we were a very small school and we ended up winning the championships, top championships in Canada. We were like 200 kids, 250 kids, ⁓ like and women, male female. And yet we had a small hockey team and we ended up beating all these big schools.

And I always, I guess from a small age, I always believed that you don't have to be big and famous to win. You just need to be smart and you need to work hard and you need to treat people well and kind and that can do that. ⁓ I think being Canadian was very influential because as a as ⁓ a Canadian, would study every other country because we'd always compare it to ourselves. You know, so we knew everything about America.

We knew everything about Texas. We knew everything about every country. That other planet, yeah, but we knew everything. I mean, as a kid, I knew, you if you think about what does a young kid know, we used to study, you know, Sweden and social democracies and how things were solved in other countries.

And I think it just made us stronger mentally, allowed us to Christine Courtney: That country in Texas, country of Texas. Scott: I guess absorb all the really smart ideas coming from all over the planet. I think that helped to make us feel more confident, made me feel more confident. Christine Courtney: You've been running this company for decades, right?

Scott: Yeah, my God, long time. Christine Courtney: mean, long time. We're all in the same boat in that way. And you're moving into this new kind of role a bit, right?

As chairman and founder and stepping back in this way. And I'm sure that means stepping into new opportunities or new things that are maybe you're in the middle, like figuring that out. But what do you think's next for you? Do you know, you have any sense?

Scott: Well, I was CEO of Strawberry Farb for 27 years it's a long time. And you do ⁓ the things we've been talking about and then you go home and you do all the real work, all operational work, the financial work, the planning, ⁓ et And ⁓ just that that side of my life I've done very well. We had a really good year last year. so I've handed over the operational side of the company to an amazing group of people.

Our new CEO, Steve Scolaretto, is an extraordinary leader in the advertising marketing world, innovation world. He's ⁓ led of the best companies in the industry on both coasts. has an extraordinary track record across just a broad range of companies. everything from retail to technology and travel and air.

Just a really amazing track record. And he's a really good guy and really enjoy him as a person. And I think that's the biggest challenge when you hand over, you know, CEO roles, having someone you trust is too simple a word. I think it's much multidimensional.

Some of the things I mentioned to intellectual capacity in strive for greatness and there's so much, you know, in that aspect of it. he's all of those things and around him, he has a dozen folks who are very senior executives who are leading the company. And so the perfect time for me to take on this chairman role, which really lets me think more about the future, about where the industry is going, what kind of partnerships are we going to moving forward? And we're already moving in that space.

with some extraordinary, we're actually gonna announce a ⁓ huge partnership in the near future. that's where my energy is right now. And a couple of client engagements where I've been asked to lean I'm trying to let others step up. I'm not the kind boss that tries to control their own situation.

I'm ⁓ more happy to people forward. ⁓ Christine Courtney: Well, you know, that's one of the things I'd say that I get the most questions about when I'm out working with companies. two generally too super popular ⁓ that people struggle with. One is difficult conversations.

⁓ one thing. ⁓ the second conflict, which you kind of talked about in ⁓ that right being the contrarian. But the second thing is this whole idea of delegation and letting things go ⁓ being able to be having other step up and take over. whether it's for clients or whether it's this.

And I find leaders at all levels are struggling with that. Any thoughts as you are doing it in the biggest way possible? I mean, you're really giving your baby over, right? You're saying, here, you go ahead and raise it now.

But any tips for folks that you can see on that? Scott: Mm-hmm. I mean, we all need to grow as people and it's very easy to get stale. It's very easy to live in a default mode where you're constantly, about how complex it is to drive a car, right?

How many things you need to do really well at the same time. And yet you don't think of anything when you're driving. You just kind of nod your head to the music and you know. That's called default mode, meaning your brain is turned off and you're kind of you're in the zone, you know?

That's not a good place to be. You're not sharp. You're not provocative. You're not questioning.

You're not curious. So, you know, we all need to grow stronger. And if you're a leader and you're constantly keeping people away from taking more responsibility, you're not growing. I think that is a, that's a disservice to companies and businesses and organizations.

⁓ The of a leader is to make other people successful. And ⁓ you do that, you know, you're not doing, then if you're in a company that you're not given that opportunity, should leave and find another place because that's, or have an open conversation and say, look, you know, I need to grow. I need to grow stronger. I need to grow.

Because when I grow, this company grows. And great leaders will see that and know that and reward that. Christine Courtney: Yeah, yeah, it's true. There's so many good little nuggets here today.

I hope you guys have been listening, figuring out how not to be a duck. I know that one. I'm even worried about that. Be a peacock, not a duck.

that whole idea also, I think that everybody can take away is how do you differentiate yourself ⁓ this time of AI? I think one thing is how does your job differ from what AI can do? Scott: Don't be a duck. Be a peacock.

Ooh. Yeah. Christine Courtney: huge, like just that you made me have that like aha moment of like all people are looking at like how do I differentiate my talk to my boss over something that an email that someone else is sending from AI is generating, you know, any of that. I thought that was a really cool thought.

So anyway, thank you so much Scott for joining us today and for giving us a little bit of your time and your background and I'm Scott: Yeah. Christine Courtney: I'm looking forward to seeing how you grow in this next phase and also how the wonderful work that Strawberry Frog is going to continue to do. So thanks so much. Scott: What a pleasure, thank you for having me, a lot of fun.

All right. Christine Courtney: Yeah.