Meet our Creative Executive Coaches

At the Creative Executive, we work with some pretty amazing people. We work with teams who are striving to communicate and collaborate better. We work with corporate clients to improve the way that work gets done throughout the organization, with an eye towards a more sustainable culture and profitable outcomes. We couldn’t do any of this work without our incredible team of coaches who work alongside these clients. In this ongoing series, we’ll be profiling all of our coaches. Our talented coaching team helps fuel the magic we facilitate for companies, teams, and leaders every day. This month, meet Lead Trainer and Coach, Lauren Russo.

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I recently sat down with Jasmine Holan of Veriditas Money Management to chat about her philosophies around wealth and the creative professional.

My husband and I found out about Jasmine and sought her out as a way to help us save for having a baby. If you’re self-employed, two months off with baby = need for savings! While Jasmine is not a financial planner or CPA, she anchors everything she does in numbers. Within the first six months of working with her, Read more…

The New York Times recently featured an article touting the benefits of meditation and looking at how the worlds of business, networking and meditation are all converging. But more importantly, this article was on the front page of the Style section.

Now as a journalism major/ex-dotcommer/Pilates teacher and studio owner/sustainability consultant/entrepreneur/breast cancer survivor/meditation teacher, all with a consistent and underlying minor obsession with all things style and fashion, this was beyond exciting for me. It was as if all my worlds were coming together in the New York Times Style section – the epitome of external validation.

But while I love spreading the good word  of meditation and its benefits, if there is anything that the past two years have taught me it’s that this external validation doesn’t define who we are Read more…

Great ideas can be fleeting, fragile things at first. They need a protector to grow and thrive — and sometimes even appear at all.

That’s you, Creative Executive.

“Most of us have tons of great ideas throughout the day, but without a sounding board or platform, we may shrug off these ideas as whimsy,” says Aaron Burgess, director of content for the User Experience Design Group — and a protector of ideas — at PayPal.

Based in Austin, Texas, Burgess leads a couple dozen content designers and video producers and works with colleagues across six states and four continents. While he admits that he’s never really off the clock, he also points out that his “work rarely feels like work,” and that his life beyond PayPal includes skateboarding (“I think my wife and my knees would prefer I stuck to a safer form of exercise”), meditating, going for runs to the sounds of Minor Threat and Slayer and starting to make stuff again. He’ll tell us more about that in this Creative Leadership in Action interview, where he also delves into building culture, nurturing ideas and creativity and forgiving yourself. Read more…

Thomas Wylde, a luxury lifestyle brand based in L.A., creates some seriously glamorous clothes and accessories.

And as COO of the company, Jene Park helps create the environment where these beautiful things can come to life. Read more…

We’re just going to say it: Fashion executive Jene Park is a badass.

Jene, a native of Korea, wasn’t born into success. But she was born into a tradition of determination. She’s the daughter of a single mom who worked constantly — as in having only six days off a year.  “She sacrificed her life to raising her four children,” Jene says.

Jene came to the U.S. at age 29 and enrolled at Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising in L.A. She was older than most of the other students, didn’t speak English and had no background in design or art. But she excelled, earning a scholarship to study in Paris. Read more…

Alison Williams has good news for you:

The world will not end if you mess something up.

“I’ve taken so many wrong turns that the paradigm of failure is no longer relevant to me,” says the founder of Raconteur . “It’s just one more interesting experiment. ”

She continues, “After many of these false apocalypses, at some point you realize the world is not going to end, and that the feeling that you’re about to fall off a cliff is just you stepping out of your comfort zone and learning.” Read more…

We tell Creative Executives all the time to think about what kind of legacy they want to leave.

Josh Jones-Dilworth says that when he got clear on that question, it changed everything. Read more…

Welcome to June!

This past month we’ve focused on managing your people. Whether you are a solopreneur working with contract teams or an executive managing a large team of people internally, these principles apply although the context might shift. Read more…

You can’t do business as usual with Millennials.

Your Gen Y employees will zone out when you start talking about “paying dues.” And Millennial customers won’t flock to you just because you have a Twitter account.

So what works instead? Christine Hassler knows what makes this generation thrive in their jobs and what marketing messages they’ll actually pay attention to. Read more…

Lazy.
Entitled.
Lousy communicators.

Millennials — aka Gen Y — get trash-talked a lot, but Christine Hassler is spreading the word on how this misunderstood generation is actually pretty awesome. Read more…

Not many people can claim both Courtney Love and Walmart in their portfolio, but Romy Suskin can. She’s also shot Ozzy Osbourne, Alicia Keyes and Christina Aguilera; been published in Rolling Stone; and worked with VH1, Motorola, Verizon, Samsung, BBDO and R/GA. The photographer/studio owner/retouching genius is also a Creative Executive Method grad. She gave us some time to share what works for her as a solopreneur.
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The Creative Executive: Jenny Daly.

Resume: Founded T-Group Productions, a reality based production company, in 2011. About 20 shows in various phases of production, including Mystery Diners (Food Network), Celebrities Undercover (Oxygen) and House of Food (MTV). Last year’s sales were over $40 million. Mom of two young kids.

Honors: In Variety’s 2013 Reality Impact Report, Jenny was listed as one of the most influential people in reality television, Top 100 Companies in the World by Realscreen, and Top 25 Reality Players in The Hollywood Reporter.

How to succeed (really fast)

I think the success I’ve reached is based on Read more…

How do you champion your team?

I always give credit where credit is due.  Also, my wins and my teammate’s wins are the team’s wins.

How do you build trust with your team? 

I encourage Read more…