Andrew Robertson Has Shaped Ideas for 40 Years, Now He’s Written the Manual

When I meet Andrew Robertson, it’s in BBDO New York’s office, and the sounds of the city he has long called home are battering through tall glass windows. He’s recently become chairman of BBDO Worldwide, following two decades as president and CEO, years in which the network became a benchmark for effective creativity.

Direct, warm, and unfussy, he’s in that odd phase of a career when there is enough distance to reflect, but enough proximity to still feel deeply invested in what comes next.

His new book, ‘The Creative Shift: How to Power Up Your Organisation by Making Space for New Ideas’, is his attempt to codify what he’s learned about making creativity work inside large, hard-running organisations. It feels part memoir, part manual, and, as becomes clear over the course of our conversation, rooted in a lifetime spent reframing discomfort as opportunity.

Before advertising, there was engineering, or at least, that was the plan. Growing up with a father who worked for Nestlé, “a technical guy – he ran factories”, Andrew set his sights on Imperial College London. In the nine months between finishing school in South Africa and starting his degree, he took a trainee civil engineering job on a building site in Windsor.

“It was the winter of discontent, and it was freezing cold,” he says. And he absolutely hated it. Switching to economics, he supplemented the cheap beer of his bar job with a commission-only sales role at an insurance brokerage. For nearly two years, his life had become a bit of a loop of rotary-dial cold calls, evening appointments, clubs, and backgammon until dawn. One of the best times of his life, but as his final semester approached, reality set in.

His father pointed out, “You know this can’t go on, right?” And that same night, in a Maidenhead nightclub as chairs went up, Andrew asked a man with an Alfa Romeo what he did for a living. “He said, ‘I’m an account director in an advertising agency. And I said, “OK, I’m gonna do that.”

Andrew changed his dissertation topic overnight to something that would get him into agencies, the first small decision in what would become one of the industry’s most durable and consequential careers.

Why the book exists

About two years ago, he started kicking the idea for 'The Creative Shift' around in his head. At first he thought the most valuable thing he could offer was a panoramic view of “lots and lots of different clients… in just about every vertical.” Publishers pushed him further. “They told me, ‘That’s interesting, but what’s much more interesting is any kind of personal stories you can connect to that.’ So that changed the way I was thinking about it.”

The book sits at the junction of those stories and the clear, almost procedural view of how ideas are actually made. “You need big ideas to thrive in business. I’m not just talking about advertising ideas – I would say that, wouldn’t I? – but you need ideas,” he says. The challenge is less about talent, and more about the systems.

The op system for ideas & thinking like a banker

“John Cleese has this great line – creativity isn’t a talent, it’s an operating system,” says Andrew. “The first step is to recognise that you have to do this intentionally. Not just think it’s a good thing, or ‘encourage’ it. You have to actually build an operating system that’s going to allow you to unlock the creativity that people have.”

The operating system unfolds into four distinct stages. First, define a great question – turn ‘We want to increase sales by two billion pounds’ into ‘How can we add £1.14 to the basket of every shopper on every visit?’ Second, create the conditions where people can generate lots of ideas, most of them bad. He loves David Guerrero’s ‘Crap Ideas Book’ printed on recycled elephant dung: 'If only one idea in ten is good, you need ten ideas. It’s just maths.’

“The flip you have to make is from ‘a good idea can come from anyone’ and ‘there are no bad ideas’ to ‘everyone can have bad ideas – and we need lots of them’,” says Andrew. “The more ideas you generate, the more ideas will be generated. You’re telling your people that everybody should be throwing out ideas, including bad ones.”

Third comes judgement – and here he argues that many organisations get it backwards. Rather than ‘deselecting’ ideas by hunting for flaws, he suggests looking for what’s good in each, using simple tools like sticky notes to create instant peer review. And then there is the mindset shift he calls “thinking like a banker”.

“Ideas on their own have no risk,” he says. “That’s the beautiful thing. That’s why you can afford to have lots of them and they can be terrible, because nothing bad can come from a bad idea. But you have to make a judgement about whether you should execute it or not: instead of goading clients to be “brave” to chase impossible certainty, he argues for identifying and sizing the downside properly.

It’s a perspective shaped in part by a conversation with the CEO of an Australian bank – a client at the time. Andrew thanked him for being so bold with a campaign. He replied, “You’re out of your mind. I’m a banker. I manage risk.”

Finally, execution belongs with the experts, or as Andrew puts it, “Let the artists colour it in.” The real failure mode, he suggests, is when all four phases are mashed together into a single “brainstorm”, with people shifting the question, generating, judging, and planning execution all in the same breath.

On leadership

Given his own transition from CEO to chairman in October 2024, it’s hard not to read the book as leadership counsel too. There are two things he wishes he’d learned earlier.

The first is the discipline of regularly bringing in outsiders at a senior level. “If I were to do it again, or give advice to anybody doing it, I’d say: every year, bring in one person from outside to report to you.

Every year. Even if it doesn’t work. Because those people will see things you’ve stopped seeing.”

The second is to resist the “next in line” mindset and look a generation down for provocation and progression – not just five years below you, but 20.

Closing the idea & execution gap

‘The Creative Shift’ is concerned with how organisations make space for new ideas, and AI, for Andrew, becomes a question of how fast those ideas can be brought to life. In his four decades in the business, he points to three big technology shifts – the internet, smartphones, and AI. The first two transformed distribution, but the third is reshaping production.

“For me, the really exciting thing about generative AI is that it transforms our ability to make things. There are three big gaps that often get in the way. Time, money, and ‘It’s impossible’... AI is changing all three. It’s closing the gaps.” He cites a recent Volkswagen Brazil film, reuniting a woman and her long-deceased mother to sing the same song in an old and new Kombi.

“Four years ago, you couldn’t have done that – or you could have, but it would have cost gazillions of dollars and taken nine months of post-production. And now it was doable.”

He’s certain, though, that scale alone isn’t the ambition. “An infinite amount of average, produced for nothing, does not make it better for them,” he says of audiences. “Something that’s more personalised makes it better for them. Something that’s more engaging and entertaining makes it better for them. Something that’s more surprising and interesting makes it better for them. AI is only useful if it helps creative people “make more things” that people actually notice.

The creativity we unlearn

For all the frameworks, the book returns to the simple idea that most people are far more creative than their working lives currently allow. Andrew tells me about a creativity test originally developed for NASA engineers by George Land.

Run on five-year-olds, 98% scored at ‘genius’ level; by 20, that figure had fallen to 2%. “These kids were all creative – it has been conditioned out of them,” he says. “Part of that is neurological, but most of it is that to survive in society, we need to conform.”

It’s a belief he holds dear – that the creativity many organisations need is already present, if only leaders make space for it.

This conviction is what makes ‘The Creative Shift’ an invitation to the challenge and rethink how we work.

Start with noticing

As we wrap up, I ask about Andrew’s father, Iain, to whom the book is dedicated. Andrew tells me he once turned an observation about how people ate Milo powder straight from the tin into a chocolate bar that still exists today.

“He didn’t go through a long process. He made an observation and then created a prototype… He was a production guy, not marketing, not new products, but he had an idea,” he says, smiling as he recalls spotting a Milo bar in a meeting room in Australia just last year.

The quiet anecdote lands on the very same truth Andrew is trying to surface now. Pay attention, reframe, try something.

‘The shift’, it seems, is rarely as dramatic as people fear – and more within reach than most leaders allow themselves to believe.