Lisa Rothstein, CEO, Drawing Out Your Genius
Lisa Rothstein is a former New York City street performer, Madison Avenue associate creative director/copywriter, and is a cartoonist for The New Yorker Magazine, bestselling authors, and innovative companies. Her consultancy, Drawing Out Your Genius™ supports organizations in mapping out and transmitting a new vision and message, simplifying complex topics, inspiring enthusiasm among staff and customers maximizing the ROI of meetings and events, and accelerating change through the power of visual and verbal communication. When she’s not helping clients dream up new product features or advertising campaigns, she trains leaders and teams in doodling for business. Brands impacted by Lisa’s creative thinking include IBM, Cybercrime Magazine, Merck, Unilever, Hanes, Dole, and many more. A native New Yorker, Lisa led ad agency creative departments in Europe for 12 years and speaks fluent French. She is a Certified Virtual Facilitator™, a Certified Design Sprint™ Facilitator, and holds a degree in Semiotics from Brown University.
What is your favourite social media platform?
I have come to really love LinkedIn for the window it gives into a person's history, career, how they got where they are, and why they do what they do. Reading someone's profile before we meet helps me feel I know them. It's odd because one would think that a platform like Facebook or Instagram would be more revealing, but I find LinkedIn tells unexpectedly full and authentic stories about people.
Tell us about you and your current role or area of interest.
I'm enjoying finally bringing together my love of language, my passion for brand storytelling, and my lifelong interest in cartooning into my work as a consultant and creative catalyst for companies that want to get their people on the same page and cut through the confusion, endless meetings, and meaningless jargon to get better, smarter, faster results. I also love helping them unlock their own visual language to be able to communicate better on a uniquely human level. Kierkegaard said, "Life can be understood backwards, but it must be lived forward." After stints as a street performer, decades as a creative on Madison Avenue and in Europe, writing everything from TV commercials to song lyrics to screenplays, and eventually getting cartoons published in The New Yorker (a lifelong dream), I feel like I'm finally understanding my own life, as well as, I hope, I help companies understand their brand message and their colleagues.
What do you like about your career or area of focus?
I love collaborating with my clients to create understanding, fun, and connection where there might have been boredom, mixed signals, and disengagement before. I love taking a product or an initiative that might seem complicated or nothing special at first and finding the meaning in it that stirs up a bigger shared vision and instant emotional response.
What is the best advice you have ever received?
In Semiotics at Brown University, I learned that "the reader creates the text." That's about all I remember of my academic study, but it rings true in marketing, advertising, and all kinds of communication: the customer or stakeholder is the most important element of any message, NOT what you want to say. I've received and given that advice over and over. It's so easy to forget.
What inspires you, motivates you, or helps you to move forward?
Stories of people who've overcome not only external adversity but their own issues: imposter syndrome, fear, self-criticism, pessimism, and other mindset baggage to finally step into their calling or purpose always make me feel inspired. I'm hoping my own life can be an inspiration to others in that way.
What are you proud of in your life so far?
I'm especially proud that I never gave up - at least not forever - on my childhood dream of becoming a professional cartoonist. Having been raised by parents who lived through the Depression era, I was constantly told that I'd be begging on the street if I tried to do this for a living. That's how I ended up in the advertising business, which I also loved. I'm proud of the work I did there for clients like IBM, Colgate, and Hanes, including the long-running "Wait'll we get our Hanes on You" campaign that transformed that brand from generic white underwear to a casual fashion icon. I'm proud that I managed to become fluent in French after a decade in Paris, despite my lacklustre performance in French classes in school. I"m proud that I'm a good cook who rarely goes by a recipe, which is pretty much my recipe for life.
What is your preferred way to meet new people/network?
When live, in-person events are happening, that's my favourite. Chance meetings in the bar that end up with us mapping out an idea on the back of a napkin, or realizing one of us has a great introduction to make for the other, are the best! Failing that, some new online event platforms have gotten really good at replicating the live event networking experience, and I enjoy meeting people at virtual "tables" and "speed dating" activities. Because I'm a New Yorker, I talk fast!
What skills or qualities do you feel have helped you?
In all my visual, verbal, and strategic work, the common thread that my clients appreciate most is my ability to "get it" and see connections fast, even in an industry I'm not familiar with. This lets me cut to the chase to identify the main idea, problem, or talking point in a massive amount of complex information and articulate in a few words or a doodle what it really means. This helps whether I'm writing a tagline, creating a product name, drawing a cartoon, or mapping out a strategy. I also have a wellspring of enthusiasm that clients find contagious. I get excited when I see a bigger vision for a product, an event, or a brand, and that gets a lot of people "on board." Finally, I like to make people laugh and lighten up, and who doesn't need that?
What do you wish you had known when you started?
It's ok not to have it all figured out ahead of time. Like a work of art, sometimes the life and career you end up creating isn't the one you planned, or, to paraphrase the author and cartoonist Lynda Barry, you discover "what it is" as a function of the creative process.
Who do you most admire in business, academic or creative circles, and why?
I most admire fellow polymaths who've managed to find innovative ways to use, combine, and honour more of their talents in their life and work: the actor Steve Martin who is also a playwright, poet, and Grammy-winning banjo player. Oprah Winfrey with a portfolio of careers as an actress, producer, publisher, talk show host, and philanthropist. Lin Manuel-Miranda saw the potential in a massive biography of Alexander Hamilton and wrote, directed, and starred in the musical that became a huge phenomenon. These are people who charted their own career courses that were nothing like anyone else's.
Outside of your professional/work area, what hobbies or interests do you have or what other areas of your life are of real importance to you?
I love choral singing and have since I was a child. Many unique voices combining to create one sound have always been fascinating and exhilarating to me. It's similar to painting. I love how a roomful of people can be painting the exact same scene, and each captures it perfectly, yet totally differently. Those activities that highlight the separate-yet-one experience of being human recharge me and give me hope that we can truly see and understand one another if only we allow ourselves to.
Has the pandemic had a positive or a negative effect on you and/or your business, and how have you been managing it?
The pandemic has had both negative and positive effects. The negative was all the cancelled travel and engagements, and that was disappointing. But soon, I had more opportunities than I could handle as so many folks wanted to have me document their virtual meetings and events visually. While this type of graphic recording is only a small part of what I do, it's been great to be able to contribute to making online gatherings more fun, more meaningful, and more memorable. I've also upgraded all my technology to make creating and sharing the visual capture faster and easier. This will stand me in good stead to support my clients even better after things re-open.
Do you have a mentor, or have you ever mentored anyone?
I have had so many mentors, some who knew it and more who did not. Jason Chatfield, now the President of the National Cartoonists' Society, encouraged me to give the New Yorker one more try 30 years after I first submitted cartoons to them, and I'm not sure I would have had the nerve without his help. My first boss in the advertising business is still a good friend many years later. I'm not formally mentoring anyone myself, but every so often, someone who's been following me will contact me and tell me how something I did or said, or just my example, has helped them. You never know who is being inspired by how you are showing up in the world. We are all mentors to someone.
What advice would you have for someone looking to get into the same area of work or interests?
That depends on the interests! Those looking to combine drawing or cartooning with business might want to look at the examples of Hugh MacLeod (@gapiingvoid), fellow New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donelly, Tom Fishburne (@marketoonist), and "Dilbert" comic creator Scott Adams. If you are interested in graphic recording (a.k.a. Sketchnoting) and visual thinking, good people to follow are Diane Bleck, Mike Rohde, and Brandy Agerbeck. More than technique or business model, though, is what type of problems you'd like to help solve. What companies, people, or issues need more clarity, more inspiring stories, to get people thinking or laughing, or to get them on the same page?
What do you feel is the most common reason for people failing or giving up?
A lack of belief in yourself is the underlying reason for most failures. Many of us have had important people in our lives who undermined our confidence, intentionally or not, and we live according to our perception of their opinion of us. But there comes a time when you just have to decide to be who you really are. No one else can give you permission, even if they wanted to, and some don't. Also, even some of the brightest and most talented people you've ever heard of still suffer from Impostor Syndrome, and they do the things anyway. I wish I would have discovered this sooner. Better late than never, I guess! Valerie Young has a great book on this topic, especially as it affects successful women.
Is there a phrase, quote, or a saying that you really like?
"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." - Leonardo Da Vinci. Also: "I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy." - Groucho Marx.
What companies, brands, or institutions do you like or think are getting it right?
I love brands that walk their talk, and where you know, the people who work there are proud T-shirt wearers because their external brand message also holds true inside the company. Warby Parker tells great stories about how their eyewear is made and sold and about the people they help with their “buy a pair, give a pair” program. Tesla has a different kind of brand integrity - where the coolness and futurism of space travel can be partly yours in the form of the car parked in your own driveway. I love the Snickers "You're not you when you're hungry" ad campaign because its human premise is so true, and the execution pays it off so well.
How do you define success, and what lessons have you learned so far that you could share with our audience/readership?
Success is giving yourself permission to want what you want and to live life according to your own rules. If you want to stay in a small one-person shop, no law says you have to build an empire. Success is truly understanding what gifts you have and then exploiting them to their fullest in service to others and the world. To paraphrase Steve Jobs from his famous commencement speech at Stanford, your time is limited; don't waste it living someone else's life. It's worth taking the time to find your Ikegai: the intersection of what you love, what you're good at, what you can be paid for, and what the world needs. The time will pass anyway.