Brave Together: Lead by Design, Spark Creativity, and Shape the Future with the Power of Co-Creation

PRAISE FOR

BRAVE

TOGETHER

BY CHRIS DEAVER AND IAN CLAWSON

Brave Together is a groundbreaking book that challenges the status quo and offers a refreshing perspective on work, culture, and leadership. Chris Deaver and Ian Clawson invite readers on a transformative journey to break free from fear and embrace the power of co-creation. Through their innovative concepts like the Mirror Test and the Hero’s Sacrifice, they provide a road map for unleashing our collective potential and building a better future. Brave Together is a beacon of hope that empowers us to reimagine our experiences and embrace a new way of life. Get ready to be inspired and join the co-creation movement with this remarkable book.

—DR. MARSHALL GOLDSMITH, Thinkers50 #1 Executive Coach and New York Times bestselling author of The Earned Life, Triggers, and What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

Brave Together is an exhilarating exploration of genuine collaboration, where every voice matters and every idea is a potential catalyst for transformation.

—DANIEL H. PINK, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Drive, To Sell Is Human, and The Power of Regret

A vital, generous, and urgent book, it will transform the way you think about teams. And then it will help you become a better leader.

—SETH GODIN, author of The Song of Significance

The leadership we need in the future is not about command and control or maximizing shareholder value. It’s about inspiring hearts, unleashing human magic, and building purposeful organizations together. If, like I do, you believe this, you MUST read Brave Together, as you will find that it is such a helpful guide on this journey. Thank you, Chris and Ian, for giving us such a precious companion!

—HUBERT JOLY, former CEO of Best Buy and Harvard Business School faculty

The world has shifted. To solve our greatest problems, we don’t need more fighting or ego. We need more connection, collaboration, and co-creation. Brave Together can power us all, especially leaders, to change our work and world for the better!

—KAREN DILLON, bestselling author of The Microstress Effect and How Will You Measure Your Life? (with Clayton Christensen) and former editor of the Harvard Business Review

Being brave is good but not enough. Brave Together helps us shrink down our egos and find ways to work as a team. It shows us how to harness the power of connection, co-creation, and most importantly, selfless love, as we work together in unity. Thank you, Chris and Ian!

—STEVE YOUNG, NFL Hall of Fame, Super Bowl MVP quarterback

Brave Together is the antidote to a disconnected world. For those of us feeling isolated and stuck, this book offers the path to becoming brave together: giving us the chance to move beyond selfish leadership, the possibility for deep empathy, and the magic of co-creation for supercharging culture. These principles will literally change your life and leadership.

—AMY CUDDY, PHD, New York Times bestselling author of Presence, and top-ranked TED speaker

Solid and comprehensive. Brave Together provides super clear and effective strategies to manage very complex stories in our lives. Stories of ambition, of loss, of struggle, of success; not only in our professional lives, but in our personal lives as well. Chris and Ian’s book clarified some of the more complex struggles of how ego gets in the way of just about every stage of growth in our lives.

—RYAN WOODWARD, Story Artist for blockbuster films including Iron Man, Spider-Man, Captain America, Thor, and The Avengers

We have entered a new age of leadership. The principles of co-creation in this book will become guideposts for the next generation of leaders and cultures. The time is now for us to be brave enough to create a different future together.

—RONELL HUGH, Vice President at Qualtrics, former Head of Product Marketing at Adobe, and former Lead Global Product Manager at Microsoft

Leadership is about taking responsibility, making sacrifices, building harmony, and pursuing freedom for all views and expression. Brave Together shows us the path to get there.

—JOHN ONDRASIK, Grammy-nominated lead singer of Five for Fighting and songs Superman and 100 Years

This book will change the way you see the world. For leaders who want to shape the future in a more hopeful and creative way with others, this is required reading.

—CHIP CONLEY, Cofounder and Chief Executive Officer at MEA and former Strategic Advisor and Head of Global Hospitality at Airbnb

Those who use rules-based thinking won’t lead the future. It’ll be those who embrace the singularities. Misfits who find ways to be Brave Together. Chris and Ian have created the guidebook for the rising generation of future shapers.

—NOLAN BUSHNELL, Founder of Atari and bestselling author of Finding the Next Steve Jobs and Shaping the Future of Education

Full of wisdom and gripping stories, Brave Together is an imaginative, inspiring, and genuinely mind-opening book. Chris and Ian offer the tools to break out of fear and ego and show how success can be powered by integrity, collaboration, and empathy.

—AMY CHUA, Yale Law Professor and author of Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations and her debut novel, The Golden Gate

Building the right team to support a mission is crucial. Brave Together provides a creative framework for the leadership and team to use as they progress toward a successful outcome.

—JOEL PETERSON, former Chairman of JetBlue, former Professor of Leadership at Stanford, and bestselling author of Entrepreneurial Leadership

What a remarkable book—insightful, inspiring, and groundbreaking. Brave Together will become the leadership guidebook for our time, and Tier 3 Leadership will become the operating system for leaders today. Brave Together compels us to see things differently and then co-create the future together.

—DAVID M. R. COVEY, bestselling author of Trap Tales and former COO of FranklinCovey

Deaver and Clawson have created a multidimensional leadership courage map. It will help you shift from going it alone to innovating together.

—LOUISE MURRAY, CEO of Lemuria Dreamer, former VP Creative Entertainment at The Walt Disney Company, and former VP at Cirque Du Soleil

Leadership is about inspiring others, building the culture, and creating an unstoppable team. Brave Together is a must-read playbook for doing that!

—SANYIN SIANG, CEO Coach, Duke University professor, Google Ventures advisor, and Executive Director of Coach K Center

Being brave is no longer about going it alone, flying solo, or building our own empires. It’s about doing it all together. This book can power you in your life and leadership to do just that!

—JONAH BERGER, Wharton professor and author of Magic Words and Invisible Influence

Brave Together offers us a path to building intentionality into our lives. It shows us how to shift from self-focused success to design better leadership habits.

—NIR EYAL, author of Indistractable

This book will reshape how you think about leadership and culture, with all its complexity and potential. It’s a road map to collaborative success that is profound and practical.

—DORIE CLARK, author of The Long Game and faculty at Columbia Business School

Brave Together is about how co-creation reinvents people and organizations. Great insider stories coupled with profound messages and relevant tips make this book a source of co-creation for anyone wanting to have a positive impact.

—DAVE ULRICH, Rensis Likert Professor at Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, and Partner at The RBL Group

It’s impossible to read Brave Together and not have your beliefs about personal and business success challenged. Using examples from their own work with the world’s most creative companies like Apple and Disney, the authors make the powerful argument that co-creation with others is a far superior strategy to working harder alone. In the end, it will feel like you just heard a sledgehammer slam into a bell pealing the message that there is a better way to live and succeed. They provide all the advice you need to change your fortunes. The rest is up to you.

—WILLIAM PASMORE, PhD, Professor at Columbia University and SVP Center for Creative Leadership

Copyright © 2024 by Chris Deaver and Ian Clawson. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Deaver, Chris, author. | Clawson, Ian, author.

Title: Brave together : lead by design, spark creativity / Chris Deaver and Ian Clawson.

Description: New York : McGraw Hill, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023033702 (print) | LCCN 2023033703 (ebook) | ISBN 9781265386672 (hardback) | ISBN 9781265387105 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Leadership. | Organizational behavior. | Management—Employee participation. | Creative thinking. | Diffusion of innovations.

Classification: LCC HD57.7 .D47125 2023 (print) | LCC HD57.7 (ebook) | DDC 658.4/092—dc23/eng/20230809

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023033702

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023033703

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To the Brave leaders of the future.

Culture isn’t what happens to us. It’s what we co-create together.

CONTENTS

FOREWORD BY RANDY NELSON

INTRODUCTION   WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE BRAVE TOGETHER?

PART I

THE MIRROR TEST

CHAPTER 1   STUCK IN STATUS QUO

CHAPTER 2   NO MORE MIND CONTROL

CHAPTER 3   THE GREAT REALIZATION

CHAPTER 4   LEAD WITH A QUESTION: The Wisdom Principle

CHAPTER 5   GET OUT OF SURVIVAL MODE

PART II

THE HERO’S SACRIFICE

CHAPTER 6   THINK DIFFERENT TO DIFFERENT TOGETHER (an Untold Apple Story)

CHAPTER 7   TURN PAIN INTO POWER: The Passion Principle

CHAPTER 8   TRADE IN EGO

CHAPTER 9   SHATTER THE SHARK TANK

CHAPTER 10   MAKE OTHERS THE MISSION: The Compassion Principle

PART III

BECOME THE FUTURE

CHAPTER 11   THE FUTURE OF INFLUENCE

CHAPTER 12   THE RISE OF CREATORS

CHAPTER 13   DEFINE THE SITUATION: The Action Principle

CHAPTER 14   CREATE CONTEXT: The Purpose Principle

CHAPTER 15   FOLLOW TRUE NORTH: The Alignment Principle

CHAPTER 16   CO-CREATION SUPERCHARGES CULTURE

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

INDEX

FOREWORD

The future is already here—it’s just not very evenly distributed.

—WILLIAM GIBSON

Pioneer of cyberpunk, deep thinker William Gibson is many things, but don’t call him a futurist. He said, I’m not trying to predict the future. I’m trying to let us see the present.

Throughout my career, my present yielded some remarkable glimpses into the future. Most of that opportunity came as the result of working for Steve Jobs at NeXT, Pixar, and Apple. At NeXT, I taught object-oriented programming. At Pixar, I ran education and training as the Dean of Pixar University. At Apple, I was a member of the Apple University faculty.

In those organizations—at times—I saw something different. What Chris and Ian would call co-creation. A way of working together, of being valued while creating value. An individual-centric approach to being team-centric. A fierce interest in creating experiences for themselves and others that required making new things in new ways, never for the newness, but because getting the thing right mattered so deeply to every person on the team. Not only their shared expertise, but their shared beliefs stood out on every facet of the finished product.

The artifacts that were produced, like NeXTSTEP, still in the heart of Apple’s products today, like Pixar’s collection of characters and stories, like Apple’s family of surprising and delightful devices, are memorable and have lasting impact. But it wasn’t innovative products that evidenced the future I saw in glimpses. No, it was the organizations themselves, their beliefs and behaviors in action, their culture. The people.

These were organizations—NeXT, Pixar, Apple—that in their best moments were seeking to see—and be—what comes after collaboration, when it isn’t the labor we need to share, or even the thinking. They were about creating amplifiers out of human beings, amplifiers that the humans themselves intrinsically take pleasure in being part of, that make their processes and products and themselves all geometrically better. What Steve called, Insanely great.

This book will help you look for and identify bits of future in your present. In the everyday of your work and your home, as well as in the privacy of your hopes and ambitions. Places where what you are doing may already contain a bit of that insane greatness, if you can just get to see it from the right point of view. This book’s perspective will prepare you to recognize and thrive in environments where creation is shared.

I found the book to be broad and descriptive. It has something to offer to a range of readers because anyone who works with other people has dreamed of better ways to work together. It speaks to varied experience and roles, because being brave together allows us—and requires us—to show up whole and complex, to be ourselves. Co-creation works because of, not in spite of, our differences. This is the kind of book that could help leaders to explore their creativity and creatives to expand their leadership.

I think the work is dense, in the sense of rich, thorough, thoughtful. I don’t think you’ll read it on the plane and be ready to put co-creation into action at your next meeting. I read it slowly. It took me some reflection to digest each chapter. I enjoyed the contrast and compare from my history that the reflection brought about. It gave those memories of past success and failure some clarity. I hope you’ll enjoy the book in the same way, sharpening your recollections with fresh perspective.

This book is Chris and Ian’s story. So it is personal, it unfolds, it isn’t a manifesto, more a really well-documented journal. This journal, itself, created through their co-creation: an example for the book is the book itself. Their observations rang genuine and authentic to me. You’ll hear both voices, and I hope sense the discovery as their shared experiences with co-creative environments brought them together and deepened their desire to share what they’ve both seen.

Enjoy the book, and get ready to take your place among those stirring things up, to make sure the future is more evenly distributed. Welcome to the team.

Randy Nelson

Boulder Creek

INTRODUCTION

WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO BE BRAVE TOGETHER?

Be brave. Things will find their shape.

—ERIN BOW

Standing on the grass in front of the glassy campus, which looks like a spaceship freshly landed on Earth, Tim Cook smiles. We’re excited to introduce the next generation of AirPods Pro, our most advanced AirPods yet.¹

Music starts pumping and the camera zooms in, showing the silhouette of a man dancing, and then Tim says, To tell you more about AirPods Pro, here’s Mary-Ann . . .

Wait, did he just hand over the virtual stage? And who’s Mary-Ann? Where’s the rock star magician, waving at the starstruck crowd, promising the next best thing? Not this time. Now it was about the most innovative teams presenting the best new products and sharing the spotlight. It was a perfect example of how Apple’s culture had transformed from think different to working different together.

Mary-Ann highlights the brand-new chip in AirPods Pro, which upgrades performance for breakthrough audio experiences, as well as the beloved active noise cancellation and spatial audio that makes it feel like we’re on stage performing with our favorite band. Mary-Ann isn’t the head of marketing or SVP of product. She’s a senior firmware engineer who is part of the collective of industrial designers, architects, and project managers who’ve made this new iteration of AirPods possible—which included people like Jerzy Guterman, who led his antenna team through the phases of this is impossible; it can’t be done to this is the future of audio.

In short order, AirPods have not only surprised and delighted hundreds of millions of people but become a $24 billion business of their own—seemingly overnight. And the story of how this came to be is more than a technical treatise on innovative features. It’s a story we were involved deeply in shaping with senior leaders and teams at Apple. It started with a directive from Apple when they hired me (Chris) with this extraordinary challenge: Seventy percent of our people have been here five years or less. We can’t teach them Apple culture fast enough. Can you help?

The most valuable company in the world was asking me to take it to the next level by focusing on culture. But this was not a company in decline or a toxic fixer-upper. The leadership team wanted to keep what made Apple great and make things even better. What started as a small braintrust turned into a grassroots movement, and grew organically with the help of brave leaders, timeless principles, and the promise of co-creation. We began by asking a different question: How can we shape the future culture together? We needed to involve the new people and learn from those who had already made an impact. It became a massive cultural shift at Apple, from think different to working different together that powered over 100,000 people to move the future of innovation forward. We witnessed an iconic company with a venerable history transform. In some ways, Apple was not so different from any organization that experiences growing pains. It had to deal with struggles on how to handle secrecy, the usual infighting, and friction when it came to collaboration.

This is about the power of co-creation, about being brave together, especially in moments when we’re confronted by fear. Apple was part of a beta test for how to approach culture shaping. We’ve gained broader insights in our careers for how to apply co-creation to any domain. As a leadership coach in the tech industry, I (Chris) have identified the correlation between timeless principles and culture, while I (Ian) offer unique perspectives based on world philosophies having pursued an education in international cultural studies, and as a leader in healthcare. Together, we’ve established BraveCore to help leaders lean into the co-creative future. Bringing Brave Together to life has become our true calling. We offer this new framework to enable us all to become co-creators in a world in desperate need of it.

A REDEFINITION OF SUCCESS: FROM SELF-MADE TO SHARED

Great things . . . are never done by one person. They’re done by a team.

—STEVE JOBS

When I (Chris) was young, I believed achievement was everything. I joined the Boy Scouts, and earned every merit badge to become an Eagle Scout by the age of 12. In school, I worked hard to get the best grades. To me, these achievements brought not just accolades but validation: I felt successful. Most of all, I felt worth. I meant something. I was someone. What could possibly go wrong? Everything.

I kept pushing myself for years, pursuing every dream. But something happened along the way. I got tired of it all. In college, I’d written a letter to Roy Disney, asking for a job at Disney animation. Later, a Disney recruiter called me. Hi! This is Lisa. Roy said to talk to you.

There was pixie dust flying everywhere! This was my big break! I’d wished upon a star, and it had actually come true! I felt my dad’s words of advice ringing in my ears, Never give up your dream.

But something strange happened next. Thanks, I replied. Then I felt compelled to say, But . . . no, thanks. And I hung up the phone. Why? Why do we sometimes skip certain dreams, as painful as it seems?

I realized something was missing in my life. I’d been on a treadmill chasing solo success. I felt empty and alone. That dream job, at that time, was not the answer for me. I found myself wanting more in life. Everyone around me was telling me that success was about grinding out the hustle, building my own empire, and running full speed toward my dreams. I watched them frantically chasing their own, but never looking satisfied. In their minds, they never had enough followers, never enough likes on posts, never enough of anything. I didn’t want to be stuck animating someone else’s ideas or obsessing about building my own empire. I wanted something different.

At the time, I couldn’t pinpoint what this all meant. Meanwhile, the world was changing. Work was changing. Companies, once titans of industries, were fading overnight. Self-made celebrities were quitting, disappearing, and deleting their accounts. Others were getting canceled for insensitive things they’d said or done. The culture wars were heating up, characterized by extreme political divisions and tribalism. The world had changed. We have a heightened awareness that we need each other now more than ever before—and yet, we’ve never felt so disconnected, distanced by distractions. How will we define our future? And what first principles do we need to apply to get there?

Instead of going to Disney, together with some Albanian and Brazilian friends, I started the nonprofit International Mentoring Network Organization, which brought together aspiring professionals from around the world to meet their dream mentors—people like Stan Lee and Stephen Covey. We were featured in Fast Company and Entrepreneur. We didn’t make any money, but we reached millions of people in more than 70 different countries. And I learned something during this experience: the future isn’t self-made; it’s shared.

Fast-forward, and I eventually joined Disney. But I came in as an HR business partner most passionate about shaping culture. Before Disney, I had reinvented my role at Dell by forming a team to reimagine their leadership to become better listeners who empower innovation. This brought me into the boardroom, consulting with founder Michael Dell on how to transform the culture, which took his team to a $100 billion future.

When I joined Disney, they were acquiring Pixar and wanted to expand the braintrust mindset, which we did, across businesses. At that time, I wrote a book proposal and got an agent (who represented the Shark Tank stars). That led to a book deal that I felt compelled to turn down. Why? How could another book about next-level personal habits add to anything? I wondered. Having seen and read a lot, I’d become skeptical of the self-help hacks offered in the marketplace—everything from 4 a.m. wake-ups to freezing cold showers, atomic email batching, and firewalking our way to rapid success. None of it had created a revolution in my life. Why would anyone need a new book with more of the same?

I also realized I was writing a book alone. It’s not unusual for authors to do, but I felt the future was meant to be shared. I needed a team. I pressed pause on publishing and, following my success at Disney, took that job at Apple. Right out of the gate, they challenged me to improve their culture.

In an upcoming chapter, we’ll share how we discovered the first principles that powered the culture change at Apple from think different to working different together—enabling teams to be more collaborative and to build innovative products in new, co-creative ways. This was a reflection of Tim Cook’s words: If I share my idea with you, that idea will grow and get bigger and be better because you may have a different viewpoint on it. . . . You might add something to it. And, if I share it yet somebody else, it gets even bigger. That process is how Apple creates products. It’s not that somebody goes off in a corner or a closet and figures something out by themselves. It’s a collaborative effort.²

I skipped the dream of publishing a book on my own. In the back of my mind, I knew I needed to first be brave enough to build a future with others. I needed to experience co-creation—something I’d been yearning for but didn’t know it. It would change my life forever.

I met Ian Clawson in 2017 in Gilroy, California, the garlic capital of the world. We weren’t interested in buying garlic (as tempting as that garlic ice cream was). We wanted to build worlds. We shared a passion for creative work. We got vulnerable and started sharing story ideas we’d developed for decades but had never brought to life. I’d designed some comic strip characters that had never taken off, and Ian had a powerful storyline. We brought them together and saw something special start to take shape, a world of its own.

We flew to LA to pitch our movie concept to a Marvel story artist who’d worked on The Avengers, Iron Man, Spider-Man, and Captain America—the classics. The clock started ticking on our 30-minute pitch meeting. We jumped right into our story, world exposition, and characters. We didn’t have answers for all his questions but remained hungry for and open to learning. He could see we’d thought about this world layers deep and that we’d poured our souls into it. We explored with him where the story could go. From the glass windows of the conference room, we saw his coworkers leaving for the day. The energy in that room was special. Shared flow. We hadn’t looked at a clock the entire time. When our meeting reached the three-hour mark, he paused, looked us in the eyes, and said, Guys, this is epic! This will get made.

This was pure validation for us, not only of the power of our idea for The Vigilant world that’s now in development but of the power of co-creation—and the potential to transcend solo success and