Ajaz Ahmed: Solving the Leadership Crisis

Charlie Melcher:

Hi, I’m Charlie Melcher, founder of the Future of Storytelling. Welcome to the FoST podcast. AKQA is one of the most successful design and innovation agencies in the world. With 6,500 employees around the globe, AKQA has been recognized by Fast Company, Cannes Lions, the Clio Awards, and countless other prestigious awards. They recently received their 81st agency of the year award. They work with some of the world’s biggest brands such as Coca-Cola, Nike, Louis Vuitton, to name just a few. On top of that, AKQA has a reputation for being a place where creative people thrive. It’s been named one of the world’s most beloved workplaces by Newsweek, called the Best Workplace for Innovation by Fast Company, and has even been certified as a great place to work, an award based entirely on how employees judge their experience. At the helm of this success is today’s guest, AKQA’s founder and CEO Ajaz Ahmed, who started the company in his basement almost 30 years ago.

 

In addition to possessing a relentlessly creative and curious mind, Ajaz has all the qualities of a great leader as evidenced by AKQA’s stunning reputation as an agency and as a workplace. When it comes to attracting, nurturing, and retaining brilliant creative people and inspiring them to do their very best work, Ajaz is at the top of his field. He’s authored three books, Velocity, Limitless, and Defeat, and he’s also dedicated to giving back to the community. He created his own charity organization, ajaz.org, in support of disadvantaged families across the uk and sits on the board of several other prominent foundations. Ajaz is one of the most kind, decent, humble people I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know. He’s someone that I respect tremendously and am honored to be able to turn to not just for advice, but for wisdom. Please join me in welcoming my friend and guru Ajaz Ahmed. Thank you so much for being on the Future of Storytelling podcast.

Ajaz Ahmed:

Hi Charles. It’s a great privilege and honor to be with you today. I was looking at some of the people that you previously invited to be on this show, and many of them are heroes and certainly influencers, so I couldn’t be happier that we’re doing this. Thank you for including me.

Charlie Melcher:

Funny you should say that because actually you are one of my heroes, so works out well. I thought maybe we’d start by my asking you to give us a little bit of a picture of where AKQA is today.

Ajaz Ahmed:

So we started in a basement in Berkshire, and now we’re very lucky that we work across the boardrooms of many of the most successful companies in the world. And just to kind of put that– illustrate that with some metrics in respect to revenue, we’re about a billion dollars in terms of the size of the team. It’s around six and a half thousand people in respect of recognition and awards. Just this month we won our 81st Agency of the Year award, and as far as we know, that’s more than any other agency. So it is an immense honor for the team and everything that we stand for.

Charlie Melcher:

I’m just so impressed. It’s incredible. How did this all start? How did you get on a path that led you to have one of the most successful creative agencies in the world?

Ajaz Ahmed:

Well, they say that the child is the father of the man, and I was very lucky that as a child, I was born dirt poor in one of the richest boroughs in the uk. And because the borough had a lot of money, it meant that the schools were good. It meant that the people were kind and the environment was a wonderful environment to grow up in. And I was also lucky that when these amazing inspirational software companies and hardware companies from California and the rest of the USA decided to create their European headquarters, they decided the area that I lived was the place they wanted to be. And I initially fell in love with the architecture of the buildings that were sprouting up all over the place. And then because of the amazing experience that I had, once I got the chance to visit the buildings, I fell in love with the companies and their culture.

Charlie Melcher:

And I know you were sort of entrepreneurial from a very young age. How did that happen? I mean, you don’t come from a line of entrepreneurs.

Ajaz Ahmed:

Yeah, I think the classic immigrant story is one where, unless you are in some senses entrepreneurial, it’s difficult to make it. And certainly with my parents being first generation immigrants into the UK, they are exceptionally entrepreneurial. My parents instilled this culture of hard work and honesty and it’s something that I really love and honor in them. So when you grow up not surrounded by the accoutrements of wealth, you have to find ways to try and get ahead. And one of the ways was that one of the companies I eventually ended up working for, I happened to see their skip their dumpster in their car park and I saw what was rubbish to the world’s third largest software company was a gold mine to a 12-year-old kid. And so I was able to resell a lot of the discarded stuff that this incredibly large software company was throwing away and resell it and make a decent living for myself.

Charlie Melcher:

And I remember reading that at 12 years old you wanted to work for one of these companies. And so you wrote insistently to the CEO. How did that turn out?

Ajaz Ahmed:

I kept writing letter after letter from the age of 12 and I never got a single response. And then when I was about 14 or 15, I made this decision that maybe my approach is wrong. And so instead of asking for a job, maybe I should suggest what I could do. And I put together a letter where I suggested here’s some of the projects that I can work on. And I think it was about a week or two later, I got a hand-delivered letter from the company, which said that as soon as you’ve got a national insurance number–I suppose in the USA, it’s a social security number–you can, and I think in America you get social security, you get a number when you’re born and in the UK you get a national insurance number when you’re a certain age. And I think the age is 15 and it just happened. I got it. And so they invited me into work during the holiday and the managing director then did something extraordinary for me. He let me work in every single department. So sales, marketing, distribution, logistics, technical support, finance was the department I started in. So you can imagine in my formative years being influenced by the world’s third most successful software company, it was like being in heaven.

Charlie Melcher:

I have this image of Charlie Bucket from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory of getting that golden ticket. Somehow you managed score the ticket that got you access to the chocolate factory. And in fact today it feels to me like you run one of the great creative chocolate factories of all time.

Ajaz Ahmed:

Well, it’s a testament to the enormous creativity of all of our people that you give us that compliment and we’re lucky to have it and it is really their hard work that makes that happen. But there’s no question that we’re incredibly fortunate that we get to produce some remarkable work that has real resonance.

Charlie Melcher:

Now you started the company, if I recall, by leaving university–didn’t graduate, but felt this need to go start this company. Why? And that was when that you started it?

Ajaz Ahmed:

Yeah, so it was 1995, so just before the internet became mainstream and one of my friends at university showed me an early web and something just must have clicked where I could see convergence in action. And because I’d worked in these large companies, I’d realized that they outsource a lot of projects and assignments to firms. And so the idea was with AKQA that we would be one of those firms that would help companies get on the highway.

Charlie Melcher:

And so you started as this little company, but you sort of quickly grew. I read you having said a quote, “grow or die.” Why were you so driven to make it large?

Ajaz Ahmed:

Yeah, the quote is the “get big or die trying.” Where that quote emerged from one of our clients, Nike, invited us to a pitch and this was when we were very small and they said, you did the best work. It’s the most creative ideas, but we can’t appoint you for this project because you’re too small. And I was so gutted when I put the phone down, I just had this feeling, which is get big or die trying. And so it was so important to never lose a pitch for being too small. And that was really what set us off on this adventure to be a global agency and try and contribute globally. It is been incredible because often people think there’s an inverse relationship between being big and not being creative, whereas we found the opposite is true.

Charlie Melcher:

I’d love to unpack that more because I’ve certainly heard people talking about being over the big agencies feeling like they weren’t getting the best creative work that way and actually seeking out smaller shops with specialties. And yet you’re saying that scale is helping you be creative or maintain that level of excellence for creativity and innovation. How is that why?

Ajaz Ahmed:

I found that when you are a larger organization, you have access to various resources and can make various investments which allows you to attract the highest caliber of talent and also invest in initiatives not just for today but for the future as well. AKQA’s reason for existing is with the imaginative application of art and science. And so for us what’s important is making sure that we’re continue contributing and putting to use the new technology such as artificial intelligence and some of the other aspects as well.

Charlie Melcher:

One of the other things that seems very clear is its ability to evolve and to find the new opportunities, whether that’s about the new technologies as you mentioned starting with the web and now at AI and everything in between, but also to be able to adapt I think to the changing needs of the marketplace. How is it that you’ve been able to continue to Bob and weave like that?

Ajaz Ahmed:

We have such a passion for what’s new and we’re always looking for what’s exciting, what’s new, what can be put to use. And I think there’s another aspect which is incredibly liberating and empowering, which is the willingness to fail gives us the freedom to succeed. So within our company, there’s never this pressure about winning or losing a pitch, but the pressure is have we in our own hearts felt like we’ve done the best job?

Charlie Melcher:

And is that another example of how scale helps you because you can afford to put the resources into a pitch and lose it? I know that that can be very painful and life-threatening sometimes for smaller agencies,

Ajaz Ahmed:

Yes, we definitely have the resources, but what we have to remember is we did start in a basement that there’s a saying which is success has the seeds of failure built in. And I also believe that defeat can help you to make your most profound achievements as well because if you keep trying and keep improving and keep learning, then you can hopefully win the next time. And certainly that we won this very important pitch a long time ago and then we won 12 straight after. And I can categorically say that had we not lost that first pitch and felt so bad about it, we would not have won the other 12. And then once we won the other 12, there was such a momentum that really drove a lot of future wins as well.

Charlie Melcher:

That’s quite a run, 12 in a row.

Ajaz Ahmed:

The success with the team now’s even better than that. If you focus on the right aspects, the right values, the right characteristics, and if the clients you’re speaking to have just as honest intentions as the teams that have got the passion to deliver work, then it does have the right environment and potential for success.

Charlie Melcher:

So what are those things that you need to focus on?

Ajaz Ahmed:

When we think about our work, we think it has to be about stimulating the imagination. For us, the best work is always an invitation. And for us that means that it’s liberating, it radiates a sense of charm. It’s got the essence of friendship and humor and warmth. It’s also got to be about connection. And so we have to produce work that taps into a universal human experience. And that universal human experience means that it transcends cultural boundaries. And if that’s in a utility such as an app, it means we’re saving the user time. If that’s in storytelling such as a film, it means that it elevates the spirit of the audience who get to experience it.

Charlie Melcher:

That sounds beautiful and certainly a recipe for amazing work, but how do you keep a team able to operate at that high level so consistently? I mean I imagine there’s burnout, there’s just, sort of, lack of ability to come up with new ideas. I mean, what are some of the practical things that you apply to be able to prime the team to do their best work?

Ajaz Ahmed:

I think it’s really important to remember what business we’re in. And I think the problem with a lot of agencies, especially the larger agencies, is they think they’re in the hours selling business rather than in the ideas business. And when that equation gets mixed up, bad things tend to happen. And so for AKQA, hopefully we know what business we’re in. We are in the business of creating a better future. So what does that mean? It means improving quality of life for all life. That’s our key metric. And I think everyone in our organization tends to understand that. And I think there’s another great quote, which is the future is already here. It is just not widely distributed.

Charlie Melcher:

Wait a minute, you’re using my quotes now. I use that all the time for FoST.

Ajaz Ahmed:

It’s a beautiful quote. We have to be one of the organizations like FoST that helps distribute that future as widely and as usefully and as inspirationally as we possibly can. And I think the other area is an understanding that the hardest part of this business or any business is a realization that what we knew yesterday and all the things that gave us sense of empowerment and prestige and security and safety are perhaps not relevant today.

Charlie Melcher:

Or tomorrow.

Ajaz Ahmed:

Or tomorrow. And perhaps somebody else see something that we missed because we kept thinking we knew it all. And I think that the endless curiosity and the endless passion for the future is what drives any business.

Charlie Melcher:

What are the things that kill this kind of mindset for great work?

Ajaz Ahmed:

When I was working on the first book, Velocity, that’s been the gift that hasn’t stopped giving that book and it never made it into the book. But one of the thoughts I had in terms of respect to the research and inspiration was that I think there’s three kinds of manager. Gardeners are the best kind of manager. They plant seeds, they’re leaders who build businesses, not bureaucracies. And they’re the kind of managers that define success as doing better today than you did yesterday and better tomorrow than we did today. They’re great leaders, they’re great managers. Then there’s caretakers and these are the maintainers who keep things running but often don’t have the sense of vision or quality control. And what can happen is they’ll drop the standards and just like that Brian Wilson quote from the Beach Boys: beware the lollipop of mediocrity, lick it once and you’ll suck forever.

 

And so that’s what caretakers have to be careful about not dropping the standards. And the third kind are the value destroyers, and these are the ones who somehow managed to ruin a good thing and the potential it had. And I think when you look at world events right now, you see that there’s a lot of value destroying that’s going on because there’s leaders who have got this self-aggrandizement and ego, and they’re dangerous not just to the company but to the planet. And I think the issue then is you’ve got those three kinds of leaders and then you’ve also got the issue within a lot of conglomerates, a lot of large groups, which is they’re often designed to inadvertently kill the entrepreneurial spirit. So they really crush the soul. And I think bad leaders are really good at one thing and that’s demotivating people by crushing any sense of passion they have left. And that’s in fact why so many people are not engaged in their work. And people talk about this productivity crisis in the workplace. There isn’t a productivity crisis, there’s a leadership crisis, and if we can solve our leadership issues, then I think the productivity will make gains.

Charlie Melcher:

So those are some examples of bad management, bad leadership. Describe your style of leadership.

Ajaz Ahmed:

Well, I think you’d have to speak to the team to really give you the authentic aspect of leadership, but we have a lot of mantras or sayings within AKQA and one of them is the one minute MBA and the one minute MBA is, make a list of all the things that were done to you that you didn’t like and don’t ever do those to anyone else. And then make a list of all the things that gave you empowerment and motivation and do those all the time. And I think fundamentally what I want AKQA to represent as an organization is really one word, which is respect. So respect for our employees, respect for our clients, respect for the work and respect for the audiences we serve.

Charlie Melcher:

Where do you find the best creative talent and how do you nurture it?

Ajaz Ahmed:

One of the aspects of AKQA that I’m incredibly proud about, if we look at our six and a half thousand people, we have a five-people leadership team and that five-people leadership team comprises of three women, two men and two people of color. And I feel like that leadership diversity at the global aspect of the organization really has a ripple effect across the entire group. And so recently when we were looking at our client survey results, the clients were telling us we were getting incredibly high scores for the level of diversity of our teams. Diversity and inclusion are areas where you have to continually keep focused on. And I think the whole idea of diversity is that diversity is being invited to the party. Inclusion is being invited to dance and belonging is being invited to choose a song for the playlist that everyone else can dance to.

 

Diversity brings different perspectives, different insights, and it helps us thrive. There’s also the kind of businesses that reinforce prejudices, that perpetuate through ignorance and a lack of empathy, and that creates stress for the employees and they decide it’s just too much and I can’t deal with this. But also what stress does is it shuts down the part of the brain that’s responsible for creative and innovative thought. And what happens is in those situations is that people and teams revert to what’s familiar and well rehearsed. And so the companies where there’s a lot of stress in leadership, it cascades through the ranks and it means it’s a vicious circle of lack of creativity and a lack of innovation

Charlie Melcher:

That really resonates for me. I think personally, when I can think of situations where we’ve been under tremendous stress and it’s not the environment that’s bringing out our best work. That said, sometimes a little fear I find to be very motivating. I think sometimes when you’re not doing something you haven’t done before, for example, you get tremendous focus. You don’t know what you’re doing and you’re like, oh, I’m really all in on this. And then you can do great work.

Ajaz Ahmed:

Fear can also be understood as excitement, and I think when we are excited about a challenge that we know is growing us, then it’s really beneficial.

Charlie Melcher:

That’s better said. I use the word “fear” and people–

Ajaz Ahmed:

That’s why I’m your guru.

Charlie Melcher:

Thank you, guru. It seems to me that one of the ways that you’ve been able to attract the best and most creative is by letting them have the opportunity to express that creativity to work on the most interesting kinds of projects. But not every client is that evolved. Not every client is choosing the best work. They’re looking to sell things to improve their bottom line. There must be conflict between your ideal creative output and the needs of your clients. And that’s a constant rub, isn’t it?

Ajaz Ahmed:

I think why would somebody hire a creative agency? One of the reasons they might hire the creative agency is because this understanding that the agency has excellent creative judgment, so knows what’s likely to resonate in the hearts and minds of audiences. Another aspect related to that is taste. So you hire a creative agency because their level of taste is of an elevated nature. But I think for AKQA, one of the reasons why brands come to us is that we’re a agent of change and we have to be at the vanguard. So for us, that means not being the old guard, not trying to protect what might have existed in the past. And I think it’s the combination of when artistry is blended with pragmatism, you launch these defining moments that then open up the horizon of possibilities and carve out new territory and they then illuminate a path that hasn’t been explored before. But I do think it is thinking of an agency as an energy, a team energy, very much similar to a great sports team. We have to make sure that every time we turn up, we really give it our all and then we might get to play again. So we never have a sense of entitlement. We always feel like we have to give our all every opportunity.

Charlie Melcher:

So you create the opportunity to continue to do the great work by having done great work. And it’s a self-selecting process then for your clients because the people who come to you are looking for that and are going to trust you for it. So therefore they’re less likely to second guess you or undermine the good work.

Ajaz Ahmed:

Yeah, I think the agency world at the moment faces a large number of challenges, more challenges that any time in history. So I think what’s happened to a lot of agencies is they let the politics and the bureaucracy overshadow and take over and they really enumerated their business and made it about how much they charge for the hour and becoming a race to the bottom. And as a result, the work suffered, the standard slipped and they lost their connection to culture and therefore their relevance to clients and audiences. But if you have the courageous leaders that have the good intentions about the people, about the work, about the client, and mostly about the contribution that the work is making, you can rekindle the fire and enable a reawakening, but increasingly it’s becoming rare, especially when you have those challenges facing the industry.

Charlie Melcher:

So what’s your response to all of those barbarians at the gate? All of those challenges.

Ajaz Ahmed:

So through a set of principles and concrete goals and metrics, the AKQA framework was born, and the AKQA framework has four pillars, employee, client, reputation, and commercial. What it does is it provides this methodology that gives guidance and defines the standards and objectives and aspirations that we’ve got from the work, from the organization and each other. And what it helps us do is we think of AKQA framework as the operating system for our company. And the reason it was born was can we help creativity and our values to scale? And certainly for us, by every objective measure, it’s turned out to be true. It’s helped us to have more consistency, more collaboration, more accountability. And every quarter I will send out to every single one of our employees the AKQA framework report, which shows how we’re tracking against those four pillars and we’re quite transparent in sharing where we could do better, where we’re succeeding, what it’s is. I feel like it’s liberated us because it shows you without any ambiguity what we’re focused on, which means that people are free not to worry about the kind of stuff that doesn’t matter to us.

Charlie Melcher:

How does it feel for you having started as a young boy, not well off, and having now gotten to this place where you’ve built this massively impressive company on so many levels, economically, reputationally, scale, 50 countries around the world, do you feel a tremendous sense of satisfaction? Does that feel like you expected it to feel to have gotten to that place that you probably dreamed of at some point? As a young man.

Ajaz Ahmed:

I’ve been immensely lucky that my parents are my greatest role models in terms of their work and their values and their kindness and compassion. Not just lucky in that respect, but immensely lucky that when I was participating in the workplace, every single adult I would come across was someone who is encouraging and kind, and that’s something I can’t take for granted. Then you look at the community where we all stand on the shoulders of giants and we can learn so much from so many people. So one of the lessons I’ve learned is that the most successful people are the ones who help other people to succeed the most. And just remembering that every single one of us was given a hand to go up the next rung of the ladder. And so it’s our duty to make sure that we are helping everyone to get on the next rung of the ladder as well, if we’ve got that sense of service. AKQA values are innovation, service quality, and thought and service is such an important one because it doesn’t just manifest itself in the work. It’s also service in how we’re of service to the community and to each other.

Charlie Melcher:

I always think when I work with people and I’m impressed by their values, their skills, their drive, just impressed with them as human beings, I always think that I want to thank their parents. Those are the role models. It gets imprinted on them that these are not things that they learned in school or in business or they sort of learn them at home and I just can’t imagine how wonderful your parents are or were.

Ajaz Ahmed:

And I think for us, because we’re blessed to be parents as well, again, we have to think about our kids and their kids and how our kids and future generations are going to contribute so meaningfully to our planet. And one of the people that I’ve learned a great deal from is an anthropologist called Wade Davis. And Wade Davis has taught me a lot. He talks in a speech about a meeting that he had with an ancient tribal elder. And if you’re happy to, I could share the quote, and explain why it means so much to me. And the quote is, in the first years you live beneath the shadow of the past too young to know what to do in your last years, you find that you are too old to understand the world coming at you from behind. In between, there is a small and narrow beam of light that illuminates your life. And I feel like we are at that exact moment now and our children are. And I think that small narrow beam of light that illuminates your life can also help illuminate so many lives, and that’s the responsibility and the privilege.

Charlie Melcher:

So tell me about what you’re doing with your beam of light right now. How’s that inspiring your actions?

Ajaz Ahmed:

One of the areas that we have now is a foundation that makes grants to families and children in crisis. And so what we do is we make at least 15 grants every year to the organizations that are doing incredibly important work. And these are often the organizations at the grassroots who don’t have a big profile, aren’t well-funded, they don’t have the connections to get the funding. So we help those. And I think when you look at the statistics, they are somewhat depressing. The one in six children in the UK and in the USA will go to sleep hungry tonight and every day, I suppose trying to do make some contribution to try and help improve that is also an obligation. But again, I learned that from my parents and I learned that from the shoulders of giants that I’ve been lucky to hang out with over the years.

Charlie Melcher:

Important work.

Ajaz Ahmed:

It’s the only work, that’s the thing. What other, the job is there for a grown person than making a useful contribution. And that useful contribution can also be entertainment.

Charlie Melcher:

It can be many forms, absolutely, but to leave the world a little better.

Ajaz Ahmed:

And I think stories help. It’s not just the material aspects that can–it’s also the idea of hope. And in an absence… if we don’t have hope the future is going to be better than the past, what do we have? The world has never been free of troubles. And despite the onslaught of the media right now, we shouldn’t fuel the flames of despair because as Wade Davis would also teach us that despair is an insult to the human imagination. And what we should be thinking about is how through every one of our actions, how we can improve things. And I really believe it starts with ourselves and our family.

Charlie Melcher:

I mean, I couldn’t agree with you more about the role of storytelling in terms of giving hope and helping to present a future, an idea for a future possibilities for a future that can be realized. And so I do really believe that we as storytellers have a role to tell the kind of optimistic stories that give people not just hope, but inspire them to want to make that world a world that they want to live in,

Ajaz Ahmed:

Right? It’s stories that change the world, not bullet points or indeed bullets. It’s stories. And that’s what has the sense of profound change.

Charlie Melcher:

Our lives are led in this linear way, and we don’t ever get to see what they would be like if we made other decisions or went down other paths. We only have the one that’s unfolded and we’ve chosen and Ajaz, you seem to me to represent another way my life might have gone. I run a company with 16 people and I have for 30 years. Basically, you went down a path of building a large successful global agency, 6,500. We’re at, like, two ends of a spectrum. And I’m just so curious to hear a little bit from your perspective. You managed to stay true to quality and creativity, but to do it at this very other scale. So for somebody who has lived literally in the same set of rooms for so long, what did I miss?

Ajaz Ahmed:

I don’t think you missed anything because I think what we share is an immense respect for the art of storytelling and for art. And when I look at the work your team has produced that you’ve led and championed and curated, I’m in awe. And Robert McKee, the great Hollywood script writer and script editor, renowned as a great storyteller, he teaches us that when we are in the presence of a great story, whether that story is a song or a work of art or a building, we surrender. And I feel that whenever I see a lot of the work that you and your team produced, Charles, I surrender to his excellence. I become immensely absorbed and I’m really in love with it because I completely find that, and I feel the isn’t that the pursuit of what we do is to create work that touches people’s heart and soul that inspires them and encourages them and gives hope or saves them time or added something great to their day that otherwise wouldn’t have done.

 

That’s why we do this. So I was asked by a very successful finance person a few months ago who didn’t have much time for the meeting. He gave me a 15 minute slot. And the question he asked me is, so what’s your role? And it was a very direct question, and I could have answered and said, oh, I’m the CEO the founder. But for some reason, the cosmos gave me another answer at that moment. The gift from the cosmos was “quality control and relationships.” That’s what I felt my role is. And the relationships don’t just span our employees or our clients. The relationships also span the audiences we serve.

Charlie Melcher:

Well, I just want to say that I leave my conversations with you every time feeling that the message is really about being true to yourself, that you can do that whether you’re at a scale at 16, or you can do that if you’re at a scale at 6,500, which is a beautiful message too, because I don’t know that many examples actually of companies that have been able to keep that kind of character of its founder and have it permeate through the ranks and through the work and out into the world. But I would say that the work that AKQA has done does embody that set of values and spirit and large heart that you have. It’s not surprising to me that it therefore has done so extraordinarily well. I don’t know if you remember the last lines from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but Charlie is in the glass elevator with Willy Wonka and Willy Wonka turns to Charlie and says, “do you know what happened to the boy who all of a sudden got everything he ever wanted in life? He lives happily ever after.”

Ajaz Ahmed:

Love that– Roald Dahl. The genius of Roald Dahl. Amazing.

Charlie Melcher:

Thank you for sharing from your heart and from your experience with us today. And I’ll be back for more lessons from my guru.

Ajaz Ahmed:

Well, thank you Charles for including me. Thank you for inviting me to be part of your community, and thank you for this opportunity to share some of the exceptional magic of our 6,500 strong community that inspire me every day and I feel like is the best team we’ve ever had.

Charlie Melcher:

I’m Charlie Melcher, and this has been the FoST Podcast. Thanks for tuning in. The FoST community is made up of creative leaders, entrepreneurs, innovators, and storytellers of all stripes. Stay up to date on what the FoST team is discovering and creating by subscribing to our monthly newsletter and get even more immersed by checking out the FoST Explorers Club, our annual membership program. You can learn more about both on our website at fost.org. The FoST podcast is produced by Melcher Media in collaboration with our talented friends and production partners, Charts & Leisure. I hope to see you again soon for another deep dive into the world of storytelling. Until then, please be safe, stay strong, and story on.