“When we had our company meeting last week and this week, my three pieces of homework for everybody were the following—one: to honor your emotions, and your emotions, they’re signals, they’re clues, and we have to be able to feel them and process them and get them up and out. And then two: know what the knowing feels like. When you know something in your gut like that thing I felt when I was at the lunch with that big manager who was trying to convince me I needed to sell my company, and I knew in my gut that it wasn’t right. What is that feeling? How do you know when you know? And to get more confident and comfortable with your own knowing, your own gut. And then the third, was to use our imagination because I think we can only really come up with a better company, a better coexistence, a better future for our democracy, a better way forward if we can imagine the greatest version of what something could be.”
In this week’s very special (re)wind episode, THE IDEALISTS. podcast host and entrepreneur, Melissa Kiguwa, revisits her conversation with Ty Stiklorius, CEO of Friends at Work, a 21st-century management and social impact firm, which handles some of the world’s most respected and beloved artists, including John Legend, Lindsey Stirling, Charlie Puth, and the list goes on. Ty also served as Executive Producer on the Oscar-winning film La La Land and won an Emmy for Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert on NBC. Billboard named Ty one of the most powerful women in music and after this conversation, you’ll understand why.
in the episode:
Ty leads off with how she was in talks with a manager who wanted to buy her company and she was discussing the contrarian notion that instead of maximizing shareholder value we should be thinking about workers, the planet, and the whole enterprise and that one of the initiatives she wanted to pursue with the company was to establish the Silicon South to drive job development, social impact projects, and meaningful internships, and his response was, you need to do philanthropy on your own time. It was a moment that crystallized things for her—that because of her roots in Quakerism, because of her perspective, having an MBA from Wharton, and working in consulting—she could do something different.
Next, she discusses the ethos behind her company Friends at Work, and taking a holistic approach to managing artists. They function as the CEO for their clients, handling everything from digital strategy to tour planning, to brand strategy, to advertising, to social impact strategy, and provide infrastructure for them.
Building on that, she discusses what it means to trust your gut, and sense of knowing in the face of veteran managers who might play upon your fears or insecurities when making critical decisions—like whether to sell your company to established players or to go it alone and build something that aligns more with your mission and which serves a more humanistic purpose with a greater sense of ownership, equity, responsibility, and autonomy for all involved.
Lastly, as part of her inadvertent audacious vision for the world, Ty reads from a first draft of the Real-Life Manifesto, a collaborative document meant to embrace ideals of care, difference, and equity, so everyone comes away with their needs met—in a more hopeful win-win-win scenario.
Resource(s): https://friendsatwork.com/