Bossing It: Adam Foley on Contagious Moments of Inspiration
Adam Foley is CEO of Bountiful Cow, a leading independent media agency focused on finding new ways to unlock transformation and growth for challenger brands.
Adam is the former advertising chief of the Guardian and a Starcom veteran. He has over 20 twenty years’ experience in the advertising industry working across brands including BT, British Gas, and Heineken.
Since joining the agency in January 2022, Adam has refined the agency's positioning, launched a brand consultancy – BC2 (BC Squared), and added creative and production services to Bountiful Cow’s existing media capabilities.
This year Bountiful Cow was named one of The Sunday Times Best Places to Work 2024.
LBB> What was your first experience of leadership?
Adam> It was probably in trying to get a band together in my late teens and early twenties. You realise very quickly that you are dealing with a group of people who have very different motivations – and levels of motivation – who you are pushing towards a vision which is shared, but which you might be more focused on.
A role like that in a band comes with a weird blend of organisation and inspiration, of admin and creativity. And a lot of frustration. Writing songs, corralling five people and booking rehearsal rooms are not necessarily complementary skills. You realise that the distance between doing nothing at all and actually making a vision come to life can be short if you have a strong enough will. But the opposite is also true, if your will falters, then you can very quickly fall back into doing nothing at all.
LBB> How did you figure out what kind of leader you wanted to be – or what kind of leader you didn’t want to be?
Adam> In one agency I worked at early on, the most senior person in the business would walk around the place giving off a very definite air of being somehow ‘apart’. He would actually avert his gaze to avoid saying hello to the most junior people in the company (or maybe that was just me). At the next place I worked, in the first week I noticed a smart, clever, funny, approachable person who was always hanging around asking everyone what they were up to. It was the CEO. That was a formative moment.
LBB> What experience or moment gave you your biggest lesson in leadership?
Adam> When I was working at Starcom MediaVest, we found out that we had lost a prestigious and high value media account which meant that we were no longer the biggest spending agency in TV.
Our chairman, Jim Marshall addressed the agency in a speech lasting just a couple of sentences: “I’ve just come off the phone from a journalist who asked me how I was dealing with the news that we were now only the second biggest TV agency in the UK. I replied ‘Well, what about third and fourth? Because they must be completely fucked’”.
It was a good lesson in perspective and the swings and roundabouts of agency life, for which the phrase ‘you can’t win ‘em all’ could have been invented.
LBB> Did you know you always wanted to take on a leadership role? If so how did you work towards it and if not, when did you start realising that you had it in you?
Adam> I’ve often found that I quickly get excited about what a group of people could achieve (perhaps annoyingly so!) and that I can articulate it in a way that inspires others to believe in the idea and bring it to life.
Even at school, I remember, aged 11, I made two of my classmates work way too hard on an English project called African Wildlife. We pretty much ended up writing a whole book with illustrations of animals and everything. We even got together at the weekends to do the drawings and work on the story. But we all got so excited about it, and we were all really proud of the end result and got a special prize from the school.
I find the moment of inspiration such a thrill – I get excited, and at that point, I just want to make it happen, for it to be contagious. Jean Touitou, the founder of APC, once said you can achieve miracles with a small group of people who all believe in the same thing. Being in a leadership role just makes that more likely to happen. That’s just a fact of life. If you want to make your vision come true then you need to be a leader.
You also then have to live with the consequences should you fail – but for me, the frustration or regret of something that never happened is much worse. Particularly when someone else then does it and gets feted for it.
To get there, I had to understand the reasons that stopped people buying into the ideas or visions I had – and I realised that to bring people along with you, they might need to get to that point in a different way. Not everyone trusts the lightning bolt of inspiration, some need to find their way there in a more logical, thought-out way. That’s something I always need to remind myself.
LBB> When it comes to 'leadership' as a skill, how much do you think is a natural part of personality, how much can be taught and learned?
Adam> There are very definite skills to leadership that you can learn and work on – and I have to every day. The ability to be just involved enough to make a decision but be able to spread your attention over a vast diverse area of responsibility is so important. That kind of rapid judgement requires good instinct and that comes from learned experience.
Whether you can learn natural authority, I don’t know. Some people follow people because they can make order out of chaos. Some people like to chase inspiration. Some people are born with it I guess, maybe others gradually assume it by virtue of the way that people treat them when they are in a leadership position.
But you’re learning all the time, because the nature of leadership changes in tandem with society, technology and generational differences. A leader in 2024 is not the same as a leader 10 or even five years ago. Ultimately, it’s all about instinct and that will adapt to change if you’re tuned in.
LBB> What are the aspects of leadership that you find most personally challenging? And how do you work through them?
Adam> I find it nigh on impossible not to take everything personally. I invest a lot of my energy into whatever I am doing and when your name is on the door, ultimately, it’s your responsibility. I feel failure much more deeply that than success and that’s something I regret in my career. I have spent far too many sleepless nights over analysing things that didn’t go well and brushing off success within seconds. I wish I had allowed myself to enjoy those moments more.
I think you have to work through that by realising that it’s maybe an ego-centric view of the world. Not that that’s a bad thing – it means you’re conscious of your role in the world and being aware of the impact you can have will often lead you to being ultra-conscientious or thoughtful about how you treat other people. Often, it’s the people who don’t worry that you have to watch out for. But sometimes you have to get out of your own way.
Google has this phrase – something like ‘beware of the hippo’. The highest paid person’s opinion. You have to be careful because people will default to you in a room and you haven’t got all the answers. So you gain a disproportionate voice, when often you just want your team to do their thing. Sometimes you can walk away thinking – this thing is going to be the way it is because I shaped it, when I would have been more interested to see what it would have been if I hadn’t.
LBB> Have you ever felt like you've failed whilst in charge? How did you address the issue and what did you learn from it?
Adam> Success has many fathers, but failure is a bastard. It’s rare that I don’t feel personal responsibility for failure, regardless of how much I had to do with the problem at hand. I think that’s the job. All you can do is own it. You have to accept that sometimes you are going to make decisions that don’t achieve the desired result.
When that happens, you’ve got to explain why you made that call and clearly articulate what went wrong. That necessitates being scrupulously, uncomfortably honest with yourself or you are doomed to repeat the error. Most of the time you will have good reasons for doing what you did, and people will respect that. So much can happen outside of your control to turn something from being a good idea to a bad one.
Hindsight can be a wonderful thing. But also a terrible thing because you can react more decisively to failure than to success.
It's also rare that everything is either totally right or wrong. You need the honesty to admit which bits were good and which bits were bad and to be able to express those to the people who have invested their time in the project. It’s important not to yo-yo from one position to another. We could lose one pitch because I urged the team to be too radical and over-react and lose the next because the client thought we were too safe.
LBB> In terms of leadership and openness, what’s your approach there? Do you think it’s important to be transparent as possible in the service of being authentic? Or is there a value in being careful and considered?
Adam> I’d like to be more careful and considered, but I tend to be instinctive and immediate. I’ll typically balance that out by surrounding myself with people I trust, so I can react quickly in a safe environment, then work it through. I do believe in transparency and authenticity. One of our values here is no bullshit and I’d like to think I live that.
LBB> As you developed your leadership skills did you have a mentor, if so who were/are they and what have you learned? And on the flip side, do you mentor any aspiring leaders and how do you approach that relationship?
Adam> It’s funny. When I think about my leadership mentor, the person I was most inspired by as a leader, I don’t think I emulate them at all because their character was so so different to mine. They were aggressive, blunt, rude, totally self assured and didn’t care who they upset to achieve the best possible work. It pushed me to my best. But you can’t pretend to be something you’re not.
With mentoring people, I think the best thing I can do is to help people see the best in what they do. Most of the time people overdo things. They will come up with a thousand ideas and I think my job is to help them to identify just one of those to take forward and work up.
It’s like pruning. You cut away the leaves so you can see the flowers better. But when it’s something that’s come from their own head as opposed to something you’ve suggested, it will build their confidence and help them realise what they’re great at and what’s authentically theirs.
LBB> This year has seen the industry confronted with its lack of action/progress on diversity and inclusion. As a leader how have you dealt with this?
Adam> It’s really important to have a diverse team because you need lots of different inputs to crack a problem in an original way. To achieve that, by definition, you have to have a very broad understanding of what diversity means. You need people from lots of different backgrounds, experiences and ages. You also need diversity of thought – you need to encourage people to express opinions outside of the ordinary – something that’s becoming increasingly rare in the advertising industry.
Our agency ethos of relative advantage is all about finding clear spaces that our competitors have neglected. Diversity is essential for that. I’m always interested in people who think differently, and I would hope I create a safe place for people to explore different ideas. One concrete thing we’ve done is to start recruiting apprentices at entry-level. I don’t think young people should be penalised for not wanting to start their working life £50k in debt from going to university.
LBB> How important is your company culture to the success of your business? And how have you managed to keep it alive with staff working remotely in 2020?
Adam> Culture is really important. I used to say nothing bonds an office like a shared hangover, but it’s important to be more inclusive as so many people are finding that binge-drinking can be incompatible with leading a healthy, functional happy life. Nothing beats a team spending lots of time together IRL. Honestly, the pandemic and excessive working from home has damaged that connection.
People need space to think and to manage ever more complicated lives, but ultimately the culture comes from pride in the work. If we’re producing brilliant work that we all love, every other aspect of culture is secondary. People will naturally spend time together if they are proud of what they do together. Shared success bonds a team together more than any bake sale.
LBB> What are the most useful resources you’ve found to help you along your leadership journey?
Adam> I mean there are loads of books and podcasts that people will point to. And if LinkedIn is to be believed, it’s a daily ice bath or an alarm clock permanently set to 4.30am.
But the answer for me is a poem that my dad always had tucked into his wallet. He kept it there because he had a really demanding and intense job in the police which required a cool head in circumstances more strenuous than most of us will ever be able to imagine. The poem was ‘If’ by Rudyard Kipling and if it kept my dad sane in his job as a leader, then it’s more than good enough for me.
As he said to me when I was younger – ‘it’s all in there, son’, and thirty years on I can’t think of a better guide to the constant demands of leadership.
