Nearly 30 years ago, James Hilton answered an ad in Creative Review, met a stranger named Ajaz Ahmed, and they signed Virgin as their first client. That was the beginning of AKQA.
AKQA went on to win Grand Prix Cannes Lions, James was named the UK's number one digital creative director three times, and they were acquired by WPP for around $550 million. He also made the Creativity 50 alongside Jonathan Ive and Lady Gaga.
What followed was a design studio, a custom motorcycle brand featured by Netflix and Top Gear, a Chief Creative Officer role at Native, and now a position inside Abbott, helping a 100,000-person healthcare company grow.
He invited Future London Academy to his home outside London to chat about his journey. Below are our favourite insights, and you can watch the full conversation (and an exclusive tour around his house) or listen to it as a podcast on your favourite platform: Spotify, Apple or Pocket Casts
The reason why AKQA grew bigger than any other agency wasn't just about doing great work. It was about genuinely caring about their clients’ businesses. They weren't waiting for a brief. They were proactively thinking about their clients' problems all the time and showing up with ideas nobody asked for.
Those ideas weren't a way to upsell more work. They were just ideas shared because they actually wanted to help.
James finds this rare now. Working as a client himself, he sees agencies that wait to be told what to do, and optimise for their own return rather than their client's success. The work might still look incredible from the outside, but it creates a very different relationship.
When AKQA was about 70-people big, James found himself in Photoshop manually cutting out pictures of packaging for a Sainsbury's supermarket website. Was it the best use of his time as a co-founder? Probably not. But, as James explains, if you start keeping the exciting projects for yourself and passing the dull ones down, people notice and leave.
Your job as a leader is to build a platform where the people around you can do the best work of their careers. That only works if you protect them from the jobs nobody wants. And that protection has to start with you.
James is direct with feedback. Always has been. But he draws a line that matters: he would never tell someone they were bad at their job. He would tell them the work wasn't good enough. Then immediately ask how to make it better.
This came from art college, where all the work went up on the wall and the feedback was brutal. It was hard to hear sometimes. But nobody left with mediocre work. Ambiguity, he says, is the real enemy, not bluntness.
The other half of this that people miss: if you're going to be honest when the work is poor, you have to be equally honest when it's brilliant. Tell people clearly and without hesitation. When people know there's no game being played, trust builds fast.
James stayed hands-on while running a global agency by splitting his time into three equal parts.
A third was spent with clients: inspiring and helping them see what was possible.
A third was spent on talent: finding new people to bring in or spotting people inside AKQA who were ready for more.
And a third was spent doing the actual work: not just delegating or signing it off, but working hard to push the quality of work forward.
When James thought of leaving AKQA, he wanted to make sure he was not making a mistake with this big decision. So he decided to run an experiment. For one week, he lived as if he were leaving. The following week, he lived as he was staying. He did it for a few weeks and at the end of it, he asked himself which one felt better.
And the answer was clear – it’s time to move on. He's made most of his big decisions this way, and he has a near-perfect track record of being right.
The most transformative thing James has done in the last five years was discovering stoicism – reading Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius – and slowly putting it into practice.
The insight that has stayed with him most is this: hope and fear are the same thing. Both are just you living in a future that doesn't exist yet. And while you're doing that, you're missing the only moment you actually have, which is right now.
Doing the best you can with what's in front of you is a concept so simple to understand yet genuinely hard to do.
If you want to learn from all these top experts how to build and scale companies, find out more about our Executive Programme for Design Leaders. Take your career and leadership to the next level by expanding your network and learning from the C-level faculty.
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