Spire

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This year's Fortune 500 marks the 65th running of the list.

This year's Fortune 500 marks the 62nd running of the list.

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Toxic cultures, unchecked power, and pressure-cooker leadership have become Hollywood's favorite raw material. But what those stories can teach us about diagnosing and fixing the real thing in our own workplaces? Former CNN journalist Brian Stelter, whose book Top of the Morning inspired the Emmy-winning series The Morning Show , joins Denise Shull, the performance coach who inspired a character on the Showtime drama Billions, to discuss how fiction can be formed by real organizational dynamics—and the concrete lessons on culture leaders can take back to their own fast-paced environments.

Denise Shull, Founder and CEO, The ReThink Group
Brian Stelter, Analyst, CNN; Producer, The Morning Show
Moderator: Indrani Sen, Senior Features Editor, Fortune;, Co-Chair, Fortune Workplace Innovation Summit

When Workplace Culture Becomes a Hollywood Story

Conferences

So both of you have had roles in creating hit workplace dramas that delve into the ways that high performance sometimes comes hand in hand with tension, drama, even toxicity. Denise, you've been described as the real-life inspiration for Wendy Rhodes, the psychiatrist and in-house performance coach of the fictional hedge fund depicted in Millions. In your professional life, you advise people in extremely high pressure environments, traders, investors, athletes, coaching them on risk, decision making, emotion, and performance under pressure. Hopefully not yelling at them like the clip we just saw. Um, what did Billions reveal about the work that you do that surprised you, if you have any specific examples I'd love to hear them. I'm actually having a little trouble hearing you or understand what was the end of that? Oh, what, what did Billions reveal about the work that you do? There's a lot more to a good decision than we think there is, um, you know, in short, it does reveal the emotion behind the decision. We're always talking about take the emotion out, behave rationally, like, you know, use your head, all of that. Like, the show does demonstrate how much emotion there is even in a financial decision, which is where everyone thinks at a minimum there's not. It's not true, not true. Um, Brian, you're an accomplished journalist and your book Top of the Morning inspired the Morning Show, which you've consulted on. What has it been like to see your own workplace, perhaps some of your own experiences in newsrooms transposed onto the screen for entertainment? Has watching that fictionalized version of a TV news operation given you any Insights into the real thing. It definitely has, and you know, I will be the first to say the morning show on Apple, it's a soap opera, you know, it is not entirely true to what really happens behind the scenes at morning television shows, but the tension is real, the drama is real, the stakes are real, the human relationships are real, and I think that's what we bring to life on the show. When I wrote this book a long time ago on morning TV, I had not worked in television yet. I was still at the New York Times. Now I'm at CNN and I have a better understanding as a former anchor myself of why anchors are sometimes called anchor monsters. Like there's a reason why some of these TV egos get so inflated. There's a reason why, you know, those heads sometimes explode in TV. So I think we have certainly dramatize that and we have fun with that on the morning show, but it's getting at something very real about how to manage talent, about what talent even is in 2026. The question for both of you, um, we're watching these high-pressure TV shows and these workplace settings. They, they tend to, they feel recognizable to any of us, even if we've never worked in a venture fund or or a newsroom. Um, are all companies on some level hives of drama and, and if so, why, why is there so much drama in the workplace? Well, for one, we're human beings, right? And like human beings. We don't know this, but like I just said, you have to have emotion to make a decision. We all have a whole variety of fear, frustration, disappointment, desire, like longing, jealousy, and so we recognize it, right? And it's everywhere. So it happens in these two venues. There are a lot of really quick decisions like the, the pressure is right now. So I think it intensifies the, the demonstration of those emotions as opposed to when you at least get 5 or 10 minutes to like make a decision, you know, um. But yeah, it's that we show real human feelings. We all relate to them and we get to see these powerful, successful people experience these difficulties, conflicts that we experienced that we sort of thought, you know, maybe they've got it all together. Right, and we find out the opposite is true, and that makes us kind of happy, right? As a media beat reporter, I always operate from this sense that nobody knows anything, right, that everyone's kind of faking it, that nobody really knows what to do, that even the top, you know, people who seem to have it all figured out don't, and that's what these shows are expressing in different ways. I also look, I think about my first job in high school, and even that was a hive of drama, working at an ice cream shop, yes. Yes, I mean, even, even the, you know, even the emotions there. So you know it's such a through line, and I actually think it's wild that there aren't more shows that dramatize this. You know, we can count on our hands like the number of great workplace dramas, and then there's maybe one more hand of great workplace comedies. There's not that many of these given that we spend most of our waking hours at a workplace with colleagues and everybody can relate to those feelings and emotions, right? We're obsessed with it, right? Yes, yes. Um, Denise, one of the themes, uh, in both of these shows actually and probably in most workplaces is secrets, what people know, what people don't know, and what eventually comes out in a work setting. What happens psychologically inside an organization when some people know something important and others don't? Wow, that's a really interesting question. One is that intuition is a real thing. So like you'll see, you'll hear it called intuition or you'll hear it denigrated by the behavioral finance people. It's real. There's a ton of academic research that shows it's real. And we all kind of know when we're being lied to, um, like we have that spidey sense, right? Like that's a real thing and we don't like it. Why don't we like it? The brain is always predicting if something is good or bad for us. So if we know someone is lying to us, it's a threat. We're like there's something we don't know that's creating a threat and then we may even overreact because maybe it's a little lie, but your brain is gonna say this is a threat. And people then react to threats, you know, I mean that we, we have an audience here with a lot of HR people, professionals. I wonder if you could talk about the difference between necessary confidentiality and, and when secrecy becomes a toxic culture. Well, I think by the same token, everyone understands that certain things do need to be confidential, that you don't need to know everything, you know, about a colleague or their salary or their whatever bad behavior they might be engaged in. Um, so there's a way to deliver the, the fact that it's confidential with respect and kindness, so you know you're not knowing. As opposed to being lied to when you're being told something that you get that spidey sense it's not true. I mean, at its core, it's like if you actually really listen to people and the person feels respected, they'll react better no matter what the subject, right? So it's almost like don't be secretive about the fact that there are secrets. Don't be, yeah, and don't be dismissive and don't be denigrating. Like why would you think that, you know, like so much is in tone delivery. That communicates like respect and hearing what the person asked maybe, right, right. I'll tell you what I can, I can, you know, I can say this, I can't say that. I hope you understand that it's not personal to you, right, right. Um, and Brian, I want to go back to something you said earlier about performing confidence and authority, which is a, is a thing that we do a lot in media, um, and it's certainly a big theme in the morning show. It's probably true in other fields too. How much of workplace dysfunction in your opinion comes from people faking it? Pretending to know more or control more than they really do. Yes, I sometimes like to ask folks, you know, who are, you know, kind of middle or rank and file, you know, actually, you know, keeping, keeping a channel on the air or keeping a website online, how many bosses do you feel like you have, you know, and do you feel like any of them are actually in charge, and you get really interestingly different answers sometimes, right, if folks feel like there's a dozen people who might think they They are in charge, but actually no one is in those cases. I think we see versions of that in the morning show. And as the seasons have gone on, I'm still a producer on the show. We're in the 5th season now. We're working on season 5 right now, and it's a great side hustle for me because the writers will come and ask me, we want X to happen, then we want Y and Z to happen. Can you help us get there? Can you help us make that plausible? Is there a plausible way for it to happen? And by the way, I would say, you know, oftentimes there's not, and so it's fun for me to try to brainstorm ways to make it possible, you know, I think that ultimately they are trying to depict a business that is In secular decline, right, broadcast television in all its ways, and in that environment, you know, it's a little bit, what's the line about academia, you know, the stakes are so low and so people behave a certain way. Like there's a little bit of that going on about people clinging on to what they have and trying not to change in an environment where it's slowly, gradually, but clearly declining. And I think in that environment hopefully people see through the calls for authority and the calls to fake confidence, but I certainly think that that's what we're seeing that for the last gosh, 20 years now at the actual big networks as they try to recreate themselves and rebuild themselves in real time. And but ultimately knowing that it's in decline creates, I think, even more pressure on those egos I mentioned. It makes some of those anchor monsters even bigger monsters sometimes. I'd let's talk more about Anchor Monster. Um, it's just something about the red light on the camera. Yes, you know, some people would die without the radio, you know, without, but that's what it is. It's not just in, in TV newsrooms, right, Denise? You've talked about the rainmaker, the hedge fund star who makes money but treats people badly. Every industry has some version of that kind of person, like the, you know, the brilliant jerk. Um, what should lead us do when the person creating the most value is also creating a huge amount of damage. Well, isn't that actually the question, like, really, no matter what environment, what show, like the person who creates the most value is creating the most damage. I mean, there's the, is the person at all interested in creating less damage or do they have some psychological need to create damage. Um, there's, you know, I'm always like, what are they feeling? Why are they feeling it? Can I know that? Do they want to know it? Because the problem is basically like we don't need to regulate emotions. We need to regulate behavior. Like what people feel is what they feel. Like, and the more they understand about it, the less they need to like act out onto other people. So I mean, in practicality, that's what I end up doing is helping them understand that whether it's against their team or their market. But like how do we do that in a world that thinks cognition is the most important thing, who, you know, overvalues rationality. Like you're acting out. Because it does something for you. So how do you interrupt that doing? I mean, the research, you all know the research says psychological safety is the most important thing on a team, but like the people leading the team sort of think, OK, well, it doesn't matter, you know, uh, I'm just gonna, I guess you could summarize that and say it's a different approach to both the conscious and the unconscious emotions going on in all of the people, but particularly the leader that's behaving badly. I realized. Yeah I mean I guess what do you do with that, but I. The manager has to be empowered, I guess, to, to be able to make that distinction. Say that again. The manager has to be empowered from the top to be able to make that distinction about a player on their team who is, um, perhaps, you know, helping them meet all their goals, but, uh, but it's making everyone else miserable. Yeah, I mean, I'll say it again, I forgive me for sounding like a broken record, but I think the more we understand how human emotion actually works. It's not this leftover thing from like evolution. It's a real thing with information. We need it now. It's exaggerated and distorted by our past and by situations, but like if, if the workplace began to really understand how emotion works, I think there would be less bad behavior and more strategies to address it. Right. How about you, Brian? Anchor monsters, how do we deal with them and anchor monsters in ice cream shops as well? Yes, right, exactly. Well, you know, I'm thinking about the biggest news this week on my beat is Stephen Colbert signing off The Late Show, and he's been choosing to be so positive. He's radiated gratitude. He has said, I'd rather be grateful for the time I had on air than be angry that it's ending, even though he thinks he's probably the victim of a political hit and he thinks that there's all sorts of shenanigans going on behind the scenes. I really admire that and I found myself wanting to lift that up in my reports because we need those kind of role models, you know, we need, I mean, as someone who was canceled by CNN years ago and now I'm back at CNN, you know, you need role models in every phase of your career, phase of your life, about how to go about living a certain way, and I'm thinking about Colbert as exactly what you want to be. As opposed to I have someone in mind for what I just heard is the opposite about the kind of people who are fearful, who are acting out of fear, who are acting out of, you know, self, you know, protection, but those, but you're right, they're in every company. It just happens to be in my case in television with the morning show where we're dramatizing and making it real. I love that you brought up Stephen Colbert. I think he's actually kind of a great example, Denise, of what you're talking about, about emotion at work too. Like he's someone who you can kind of see his emotion constantly, um, you've said, Denise, that, um, you know, as you just mentioned. Taking the emotion out of it is a mess. And even that some of the emotions we think of as kind of banned in the workplace like fear, desire, jealousy, frustration, you're kind of not allowed to express a lot of these feelings in the in the workplace. What would it look like for a workplace to acknowledge these emotions without excusing bad behavior. I mean. You know, I come from a modern psychoanalytic background, which is not Freud, which is not you did this because your dad did that. It's, it's more about like what's your emotional experience? How do we help you have a different emotional experience, and everyone knows the value of being able to just say how they feel without fear of retribution, like in no judgment, not judging yourself and not judging the person. Like if we literally could give people the ability to talk to someone, you know, maybe it's your group, um, or it's a coach, where they can say what they really think and what they really feel, so they can find the feelings that help them make the decisions in their jobs, like it would be a radical change. It would literally be a radical change because all that happens is the emotion gets acted out. Like that's all that happens, you know, um, it gets, you know. Perpetrated onto some junior person or um yeah. We need real conversa we need to be able to have real conversations and like To take it one step further. My thing is that what we do. Like we need a real conversation about sexual desire and power. It's not as much in millions as it is in the morning show, but like we don't talk about it, you know, all human beings have sexual desire, and ones that have power may misapply that. Like we need to talk about it without judgment. The benefits will be astonishing. Last thought, um, for, for our audience here, HR leaders, um, what should HR leaders take seriously in workplace TV and our obsession with it as audiences, even if we know that it's exaggerated, sometimes satirical or surreal. Hm. I take that first. I was talking a lot. I was thinking you could say, yeah, but I'm learning a lot listening to you. I mean what comes to my mind is that idea that those secrets which eventually always come out and blow up in at least on the morning show, we're showing those blowing up and taking you in ways that are out of control in ways that I find really interesting, you know, but that's in a dramatic way. What's yours? What was the question again? What, what should, what should HR leaders take seriously about how obsessed we are with the drama of workplace TV? Well, that this stuff is actually real. Like we can know that it's dramatized, but like this stuff really happens. So let's like not pretend that it doesn't and then actually think about like, OK, how can we make a difference like. As opposed to just viewing it as entertainment. I mean, it's definitely dramatized, but. Also, we like it because it's real. And there are times where for me as a consultant on the morning show, we've worked on plot lines and ideas that I thought were kind of too outrageous, and then I swear they've come true two or three years later. It is breathtaking how often that happens. I was just in Washington when the dinner shooting happened. And by the way, the HR folks were so good to us afterwards. I was so grateful to work at an institution that knew how to support folks who had been through traumatic stress, but I'm not joking when I say we've talked about one of those plot lines for the morning show, and then I found myself in that ballroom. So it's constantly art imitating life and life imitating art, and so that is why there's a lot we can learn from these shows. Truth is. Truth is stranger than fiction. That's right. Yes. Thank you so much. Thank you for such a rich conversation.

Dani Richa is the Chairman and Group CEO of Impact BBDO, the famed ad agency that partly inspired Matt Weiner’s classic show Mad Men. Dani joins Diane Brady and Kristin Stoller On Leadership Next to talk about the night he spent watching ads from all over the world, his favorite campaigns, the project he killed, and advertising successfully in MENA. Of course, it wouldn’t be a 2025 conversation without talking about AI and Dani dives in to discuss why ignoring AI tools would be a “missed opportunity,” while still believing that only humans “can do what’s never been done before.”

Ad legend Dani Richa on AI, risk taking, and how advertising has changed

Leadership

Charles and Ray Eames, famed for their iconic furniture, believed in constant prototyping to improve and refine their designs. They insisted that well-made products should be functional and accessible for all. Their granddaughter and the president of their institute, who keep their legacy alive, introduce their plans for a new art and design museum and describe their mission to cultivate curiosity that inspires positive problem-solving for our world.

Constant Curiosity

Hello, everybody. It's wonderful to be here to share about the work of Ray and Charles Eames and the work that we're doing today at the institute. I think I'm pushing the right button. M Ah, we're gonna go, can we go back? You can go back. Here we are. Ray and Charles Eames were a husband and wife team that worked together for over 30 years. Some of you might recognize their iconic lounge chair and Ottoman. When they were designing this chair, they actually said they were designing seating, not chairs. They said if you call it designing a chair, you're eliminating the ottoman before you've even thought of it. And this is part of what we love to share with the work of Ray and Charles is not just the objects themselves, but the questions Ray and Charles were asking while working on the projects. These are 3 etchings that Charles did. He trained as an architect and then also taught himself photography, working with his father's wet plate prints and also as a painter. When he traveled, he liked to do sketches that he turned into etchings when he got back home. Now Ray grew up in California. She studied fashion in New York and then also painting at Hans Hoffman's studio in New York and became one of the co-founders of the American Abstract Artists in 1937. This is one of her paintings from the Hans Hoffman era. Now, because so many of us were traveling here today, we thought you might like a glimpse of their passports for all the many travels that they did around the world. What we do is we love to compare and add the itineraries that they have with their passports, and it helps us show how they went around the world doing everything from IBM Pavilion in New York to also working in Moscow and even India too. Now the thing about Ray and Charles is they worked very hard, but as they also said they like to take their pleasure seriously. So on one of the photo shoots they actually jumped on this motorcycle. Do you notice the kick stand is down and it's one of the iconic pictures of them working together today. Now in about after 25 years of working together, they were asked to explain the design process, and this is how they did it. What they said is there's one circle that their office and themselves want to accomplish on the project. The second was also their client, but there was always a third circle society as a whole, and you had to focus on the part that overlapped for all three. That might be making the exhibit Mathematica for IBM in 1961. It might be making a leg splint during World War II to help the Navy with some of the injured soldiers, so everything they did fell into that area of overlapping interest. Now what's interesting is they took that idea farther with that little smaller diagram below. That's actually 5 circles, and when they spoke about making chairs for Herman Miller and Vitra, it actually had to be 5 areas of overlapping interest. It had to be good for the company, good for the person on the line actually making your chair, good for the designer, good for the community, and good for the environment. That's goodness all the way down is what they called it. Another way they like to say that is we wanted to make the best for the most for the least, the best product for the most people for the least amount. That was always the goal. This is my mother with Ray. I don't know if you know. Ray actually designed some of her own clothing. She'd often make one for my mother too. The best part of my grandmother's clothing was that she would put 8 to 10 pockets in her skirts, so she had a place for her camera, her sewing kit, her sketch pad, her keys. It was really what I realized later was her tool kit, and she was always prepared. Now, something that was also made special for my mother when she was growing up were letters that my grandfather used to write to her. It's called a rebus. This was before there were emojis. They were called Rebus letters. And what this says is, Lucia. I am so sorry that I cannot take you to school. Are you drinking milk like an angel? It rained all the way to Arkansas. Love Daddy. That was from one of his business trips when he was working on the churches in 1930s. It's one of my favorite artifacts in the collection. Now here's me with my grandfather. I love getting a chance to go visit them. They never talked down to us. They shared whatever they were working on. It could be a film, a toy, an exhibit, and what I loved was just being around them. You learned how they were solving problems. They call that more found learning less teaching, just being aware that way. Something they told when I said I wanted to be a sculptor, the most important thing is that you love what you're doing, and the second that you're not afraid of where your next idea will lead, and they really did that themselves. They really let their designs come from the learning. They said one of the most important things was to get away, put away your preconceived notions and let your designs come from the learning and working in those materials. Here's me and my mother and Charles on one of those visits. It was always exciting to get a chance to go visit Venice, California, not Venice, Italy, Venice, California, and yet to see what they were working on. I remember these as a grandchild, but today what's exciting is to look at these things as a chief curator because really everything that my grandparents did was about communicating ideas. It just happened to be through a piece of furniture, an exhibit, a graphic, whatever. And so what we're doing that today is sharing how they apply these ideas and really what was the best way to share what they wanted to communicate. Here's just one of the love correspondences when they shared with me, and I'm realizing now the greatest gift they gave me was the time that I got to spend with them. Now this is the place that my mother and I called home. She was on this side. My husband and I and our children are over there on the right hand side. She built this home when she inherited the collection from their space at 901 Washington Boulevard in Los Angeles, and she wanted to create a space where she could house the collection, share it with. who wanted to borrow pieces, but what ended up happening is friends and colleagues would come over and we started immersing and showing people all the different areas that Ray and Charles worked in. Most people enter the world of their work through the furniture, but for this case they could also be seeing some of the raw materials that Ray and Charles were working with at the time. Now what's fun about the drawers, these drawers happen to come from the graphics room at the office, is when you get to open them. And you get to see some of the raw materials that they worked with to actually make the products that they did. And in this time of so much of a digital age, it's been so exciting to watch our guests be able to see the tools that Ray and Charles, the prototypes that they made, being so hands on in the learning. This is the gallery space at my mom's home. What's really special about this for me is something that I'm hearing mentioned a few times today. As I look at each one of those chairs, I'm thinking about that Ray and Charles used to talk about the sum of all constraints. Each project that they worked on had its own peculiar list, they said, whether it was a chair, an exhibit, a film, and so what you have to think about, they always said, is, is it a constraint of price, of material, of surface, of time, and really think through. Everybody who's going to touch that chair from the sourcing of the material to when it might be thrown away later. And so what I appreciate is the discussions I've heard today is really thinking through that guest host relationship, something else that my grandparents talked about, which is anticipating the needs of your client before they've thought of it. Here's my mom and me. I'm so excited that today we are John and I are going to work together on a dream that was my mother's with how do we share this collection even more. And 7 years ago yesterday, John and I met, author and also ar. Test himself and wanting to really take this idea and amplify it in as many ways as possible, we've been doing things with pop-up exhibits, creating publications, and so with this, I would like to hand it over to my extraordinary partner and co-founder John. Thank you, Lisa. At the core of Charles and Ray's work is curiosity. They had this insatiable curiosity for the world around them. And so when we were conceiving of this organization, we came up with the name the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity. We wanted Eames and Institute to be even more fun than Eames alone implies, and so we modeled it after Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and this is what we got. So we've been really intrigued by how curiosity has piqued people's interests as much, sometimes even more so than Eames. So there were 5 things that I think we want to walk through very quickly with the work of the institute. The first is about being a good host, and we do that at our principal headquarters now in Richmond, California. And there is no better host, let me assure you, than my co-founder Lisa. This is Lisa taking care of the land at the Eames Ranch on the left, and Lisa guiding tours as she does almost every day at our archives. Here's a small glimpse into what guests get to experience, and as Clay mentioned, it's this amazing sampling of the parts and pieces that went into what Lisa describes as the home runs, their iconic chairs, their films, their exhibits, things of that sort, and we get to watch day over day people react to these physical objects in such a, you know, a time of digital consumption, and we're so fortunate to be able to do that. The second area is craft, and this is something that I certainly associated with Eames because Lisa and her mother had their practices, their art practices at the ranch long before I arrived, and we've tried to in the in the time period that we're going to create an immersive Eames experience again at the ranch, we've tried to welcome artists, designers, and creatives to come and hone their craft, and so they've drawn on some of the most basic tools. Which we think are very important to return to again in this time of digital technology. They've tended to our textile studio, our wood studio, our metal shops, etc. They've also worked with our team to draw on the collection for inspiration, and they've worked with our team that tends to the land. Our farmers and others in order to bring new new modes of of medium to their practices, and these are but two of our amazing artists that were part of our pilot year cohort this year. On one hand, a very experienced artist named Wendy Chin, and on the other, a very up and coming artist who had her first residency with us at the Eames Ranch, Kristen Steyn, and we're so proud to be working with both of them. The third area is around connections around community. Community was so important to the life and the work of Ray and Charles, and this quote, I think, speaks to it well. Eventually everything connects people's ideas, objects, the quality of the connections is the key to the quality per se. And so with that we knew that there were many more people than just Ray and Charles or just us or just our team or even our artists and residents who were using curious problem solving to address some of the world's most intractable challenges, as well as simply bring the light and joy into our world. And so we conceived of this program called the Curious 100 through through which we would identify 100 curious problem solvers initially in the United States and expanding in 2027 to be more global, and it was such an amazing opportunity for us to convene this group of people. We broke it down into 10 categories. We hoped that we could identify like what what are the variety of people that practice curious problem solving. And so within each one of these categories are 10 people as well, including one of our speakers coming up soon, Kevin Bethune, and we had a chance to welcome this group of people in a couple of different formats to our archives to be in community and work with us and workshop ideas, and we hope to do a lot more of that going forward. The third area is around the details. The 4th area is around the details, and this is something that we have a chance to share when people can get up close with the material, sometimes even hold it in their hands. And we had an opportunity this year to take one of San Francisco's most iconic buildings, the Transamerica Pyramid Center, and to partner with Chave Development that owns Transamerica now and bring not just our brand to the pinnacle of the of the Transeric pyramid but bring our collection to the city. San Francisco and so we selected a small group of objects. We brought them to the Transamerica Annex gallery and over the course of the past 6 months we've welcomed over 40,000 people through these doors free and open to the public seven days a week and it's such a beautiful exhibit bathed in natural light. It's called Past as Prologue The Last Decade of Eames furniture in 1968 to 1978. And we've held public programming of all types, outdoor movie screenings, um, you know, talks and other things of the sort in the gallery, and it's just been amazing to be right in the heart of San Francisco, especially at this time of rebirth there. And the fourth area is, excuse me, the 5th area is to think about, well, what do we take from all of this, how do we keep iterating, and how do we bring all of this to scale? And so the quote that we love from Ray and Charles is, how do we get from where we are today to where we want to be. And in August of this year we had a chance to acquire this extraordinary complex. It's a former corporate campus for two multinational corporations, McGraw Hill Publishers and Birkenstock later, and we are planning to transform this building and campus that was essentially Not utilized for the past decade or more and turned into a world class art design and creativity museum. We're so thrilled to be the stories of this new campus, and we've got the opportunity now to work with Herzog and Demeron, Basel-based architects that have designed multiple major museums as well as worked on adaptive reuse in really compelling ways. So today for the first time we're sharing a few interior images from the conceptual design phase of this work and so this is inside the warehouse which is this very distinct hyper parabolic roof structure and our intention is to take this from a super raw industrial space and to bring slightly warmer elements like wood. into it as well as to open up and create a true indoor outdoor connection. It's a curtain wall system so we're able to effectively eliminate all of the exterior walls, and we're so excited to be working with this with these spaces. There will also be Huge spaces like the Tate Modern or the the Armory in New York that have opportunities for extremely large, flexible events, temporary exhibits, and who knows what else we can dream up. There will also be extraordinary outdoor spaces, public plazas, water features, sculpture, and miles and miles and miles of walking trails across both this 90 acre site as well as our adjacent properties. And we're not just working with the existing spaces, we're taking, for example, this underside of a of a parking lot and turning it into a conditioned space that could be an educational center or something of the sort. And these are just some of the spaces that we've started to consider as we enter into our schematic design phase. We're so excited to bring this project online. Our goal is by 2030. We've got an incredible group of partners. We're always looking for more. In the meantime, we're so excited to be welcoming an array of groups, companies, organizations, institutions to partake in our ENS archives experience as well. And In 2030 we hope to welcome you all to what we are calling the Museum of Infinite Curiosity, and it will use Ray and Charles's legacy as the cornerstone, but it will expand far and wide to other creative legacies. It will showcase the work of other contemporary stars, people that you could name, and it will bring to the world emerging artists and emerging voices that have really truly yet to be discovered. This is a quote by John as we've been interviewing more and more and sharing about this extraordinary next step, but for me, I just think it really sums up what our goal is. The world's greatest resource is human curiosity. It is the force that guided the Eameses through a lifetime of exploration, fuels every act of design, and will continue to shape our collective future. The Museum of Infinite Curiosity will honor that for, give it form, space, and voice, becoming a home for curious problem solvers, and we look forward to welcoming you in 2030. Thank you.

When we picture the future, what informs our vision? A futurist argues that literature and entertainment exert an overwhelming influence on how we think about what’s next. How can governments, companies, and brands learn from this insight? How can Sci-Fi world-building inspire or distort the way we design policies and products?

Prototyping the Future

Many of our visions of the future with a capital F are inspired or influenced by stories and literature and entertainment. Our next speaker spent much of her youth immersed in science fiction. Starting as a creative director, she made a career in Hollywood, which included futurist consultancy for Disney and Marvel, Black Panther, Wakanda Forever. And advisory work for other media companies such as the BBC, DreamWorks, Universal, as well as other Fortune 500 firms. Now the resident futurist at Nike, Monica Belska, will explore how governments, companies, and brands can apply sci-fi world building techniques to prototype our future and shape the world we want to inhabit. Please welcome Monica to the stage. Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to join y'all here today. So we will be speaking how we could be utilizing techniques of sci-fi world building to shape real world impacts. But before we go to the depth of it, I have to share a disclaimer that all views of my own and should not be used to extrapolate future strategies of the companies that I work with or for. So, the real value of IPs such as Avatar and Black Panther is not merely in the narratives on the screen. It is in the universes they have created Pandora and Wakanda. Desire to belong and even more so to feel inspired to participate in a vision of the future creates loyalty and engagement that almost nothing outside of entertainment fandom has achieved. Story world design is a design framework I have been developing, inspired by the world building techniques of sci-fi entertainment, repurposed for real world challenges and opportunities. It is a to prototype compelling future vision and consistent future strategy to flow out of it that is applicable again for the real world challenges for the brands and governments and hopefully to shape better impacts. So now the reason why I wanted to move away from the term world building within sci-fi to story world design. Because world building, when applied to the real world, evokes projects such as Chandigarh or Brasilia. A genius architect descending upon the land and shaping everything in this very much top-down vision. Now story world design goes beyond that by taking into account the organic processes through which cities grow, encompassing the diverse communities, but also another great inspiration for me has been gardening, right? When you garden. It's not just about that first grand act of engineering. It's about adapting to the land because not all seeds grow in the same way and not everything that you first considered to be a weed is a weed. And so in this way, successful story world design sets the foundation for cohesive narratives, heroes, spaces, platforms, and experiences and This success is not just measured by external engagement and the hype that it could create. It is also how do you communicate the future vision that you are creating, not just putting out products, right, but every product creating new opportunities in the world to the stakeholders of the brand and for the government to their own leaders. And it's not just about being reactive, but really proactive in how you shape the future. So sci-fi serves as a lot of inspiration for us. But we have this misconception that it predicts the future. More than anything, it prototypes, sometimes misdirecting us to think that something is futuristic, when really it is not. Many a time it has actually closed down our imagination. To what actually is interesting. And so much of today's misperceptions about the future have in fact been shaped by sci-fi bias, and it has rendered ground fertile for misinformation and especially a lot of misconceptions around science. We think of AI development leading to consciousness as some kind of natural fact, when really it is a sci-fi fantasy, not proven by science. We think that Mars colonialism is a real thing and it is a frontier of rocket engineering rather than biology. And in a way sci-fi is to blame for it. So if we acknowledge that it is those that control the fantasy. Control the future. How we would like them, us to wield that fantasy. Dystopia is one of the two most popular ways to think about the future. But the issue with that is that it's not any more caution tale. Regurgitation of doom and gloom has become A reason to disengage. If we believe that the future is doomed and there's nothing we can do about it, well, then we do nothing about it, but also possibly worse. It becomes a product roadmap because there will always be those that will want to make money, not just as the world burns but also by setting the world on fire and so utopias are oppositioned as the answer to dystopianism, but historically they have been deeply homogenous and exclusionary. In a way, if disabled or elderly people still exist? Is it even utopia? And what does it take? What kind of ends justify the means? Right? So it's not really a binary, it's two reverse sides of the same coin. Every historical utopia. Has been somebody else's dystopia and today's techno utopian propositions are not really that different. Famous venture capitalists such as Marc Andreessen I unironically quotes. Filippo Tomaso Marinetti, who was an author of Futurist manifesto, but also of fascist manifesto and an ideologue of Mussolini. So it's not that. We should not be critical, as again, Mark Andresen identifies tech ethicists and tech criticists as the enemies of progress in his techno optimist manifesto. I believe that to think that what we currently have is not the best thing that we can have is actually the most optimistic approach. So when we acknowledge the power of fiction, future fiction specifically. When we try to apply that world design strategy to real world challenges, what are the traps we shouldn't fall into? And so, the first trap is really nostalgia. It's trying to return to the past rather than learn from it. Our capacity for memory, for remembering our past, did not evolve to remember the past, but really to make better future decisions. But in a way, we cannot succumb to technos solutionism, techno fetishism, or dare I say, even technocultism. In this battle today between scientists and Tedros, we must prioritize science, technology, is actually a material manifestation and outflow of scientific research. Without that fundamental science. Innovation stops happening. So always take the side of a scientists that are telling you inconvenient truths. Now, I find a very interesting real world example of these two different story world designs. Taken by the government, are the Project 2025 versus Made in China 2025. One tries to escape material reality, the other leans into it. And the emerging common point between religious extremists in the Western world and many of its cultists is that they both believe in the fantasy oft times coming. Bought brought by religious rapture or AI god slash demon, A nerd rapture. The most striking difference for me between what the most powerful people in America versus China pronounced about the future is that in the former they want to escape the body in favor of matrix mind uploading. They want to escape the earth in favor of Mars colonialism and in the other, it's about leaning in this contextual reality of the land. With the millennial lineage before and after, and I think it's so important to lean into that reality as inconvenient as it is and sure ecological civilization might seem like a distant dream. But surely it is more realistic than Mars as the plan B. Now, over the long term control of delusional voices, Can really save us from that social fracturing. The answer to that is finding a way to awaken our genuine scientific curiosity and reinforce information literacy. The change we need is not going to happen overnight, but we start with identifying our shared yes visions and informed hope is key in that. Informed hope is not doing something because it's easy. But because I we understand the scope of the challenges and we embrace this amazing opportunity to learn. So what if the future could be everything we hope for. But not what we were told to expect. Narratives are not really enough anymore. There were beautiful narratives put out with the great reset of 15 Minute City. And what happened? These think tank manifestos got. Misinterpreted. And became a fodder to conspiracies that flooded YouTube. So putting out words, putting out manifestos, putting out narratives is not enough. We need to bring people into that world that we say we are designing or making policy to words. We need to flesh it out visually sensorially. And so we could really be learning from the best techniques of cier world building to design future scenarios and world prototypes beyond these finite visions of utopia and dystopia and find insights in the edges that we have overlooked. And could the future actually be? What we hope for. But so very different to what sci-fi conditioned us to be, to believe. Maybe it's not about the flying cars. As replacement of the Uber for the uber rich, but about rewilding city skies. Now, that does not mean that we should be Luddite and abandon technological research or scientific developments. It's about thinking how these technologies, these innovations serve real utilities. There will be plenty need for flying cars for emergency services, disaster leave, etc. etc. etc. So my proposition for the practical guides beyond utopianism and dystopianism is protopia. Now protopia differently than utopia and dystopia is more of a process than a destination. And instead of being this vague middle ground between the two, it is imagination beyond it, understanding status quo. But not resigning to it. It is meant to be expanded and questioned. It is not a better future built through magical tech, but upon evolved values assisted by the bleeding edge scientific research and technological development. And could we try and imagine this path to a future that is not merely sustainable but actually regenerative. Sustainability is not exciting for the people, right? It just feels like ah. Another Lecture I need to, to listen through, right? But when we propose something that is regenerative, that offers new way of doing things, when we lean into the embodiment, rather than disembodiment. We might find something joyful to strive for and joy and imagination is where it all begins. So this is a bit of a cheat sheet, the six principles that are not meant to be considered as some kind of hierarchical mahos pyramid of needs, but really, As interlinked circles to be thought of as together plurality. What if instead of tolerance we fostered curiosity into dependence? What if we acknowledge that the real strength is not in not needing others but about weaving these resilient systems, regeneration, what if we moved past. User centric, human centric into life centered design and recognize how biology is not this kind of strain which should transcend but infinite source for inspiration. Creative forcing. What if we assume that Creativity is the beginning of a solution to all problems. Sensory embodiment, again, recognizing how future doesn't happen to technology because technology, but to our bodies and to our bodies and spiritual fulfillment, right? Because in the absence of that, conspiracies and cultism rises. So I know I threw a lot of big ideas at you, but I hope that protopian story world design could become this cheat sheet whenever you approach any project that you're working on. Not specifically something that requires immediate foresight practice because none of us in this room. Is doing technology or marketing or business. With every action, no matter how big or small, we are shaping the future. But the future also gets shaped by our apathy. So this is an opportunity to get curious, to learn, to disentangle ourselves from a sci-fi biases we've been conditioned to, but also see the power of creatives and imagers. that have inspired us. That have inspired some of the world's most powerful people to design towards a particular future. And maybe we need new inspiration. Maybe all of us need to become future story world designers. Thank you.

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