Recommendation of the week:
1) My friend Joe Pulizzi writes the most delightful and deeply human newsletter about marketing in the age of AI and building a career as a creator. I particularly loved his latest edition about how decision-making is a superpower. Joe writes: “In this age of AI, an age of unlimited choices, the people who flourish will be the ones who can turn endless options into clear choices.” Subscribe here.
Programming note:
2) On Friday, I’m hosting a closed-door content strategy session for paid subscribers! (Paid subscribers: Check your email for the invite link.) This is just one of the perks you get when you upgrade to a paid subscription. You’ll also support my work and allow me to keep posts like this free for all. Upgrade to get:
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The Poet Laureate of Corporate America
Twenty-one years ago, Nike CMO Trevor Edwards needed help transforming Nike’s business. But he didn’t call Accenture. There was no time for consultants. Edwards needed a poet.
So he called Sekou Andrews, who had just won back-to-back National Slam Poetry championships.
Edwards told Sekou he needed to communicate a crucial message to Nike’s employees: with the rise of the digital age, the power dynamics had changed. Consumers were now in charge, not Nike. And they had to completely change the way they worked.
In 24 hours, Sekou wrote a performance called “Consumer 2.0” that melded spoken word poetry with keynote speaking into a new art form he called “The Poetic Voice.” His talk lifted Nike’s stoic analysts to their feet. It changed the direction of not only Nike’s business, but Sekou’s career—transforming him into a near-mythical being: a poet that corporations eagerly pay $50,000+ per performance to inspire their teams.
Sekou Andrews’ credentials are dizzying: two Independent Music Awards, a Grammy nomination alongside Michelle Obama and the Beastie Boys, and six CLIO Awards. Oprah Winfrey even personally requested him to perform at her inauguration party for Barack Obama. Forbes has called him the “de facto Poet Laureate of Corporate America” with a client list that includes Nike, Apple, Microsoft, Toyota, and Gartner.
For the latest episode of our podcast, The Art of the Zag, Shane Snow and I wanted to have Sekou on to learn his secrets. How does a poet have CEOs clamoring to pay $40,000 to $70,000 (his listed fees with Washington Speakers Bureau) to inspire their teams? And what does his success tell us about the value of human storytelling, connection, and art in the AI Age?
I left this conversation inspired to become a better speaker, storyteller, and artist, and I think you will too. Listen to or watch our full podcast episode below, and please excuse my mic giving me a lisp because I messed up the settings.
If you prefer to read (yay, reading!), an edited version of our interview appears below.
Listen/watch on:
On becoming a “full-time mermaid.”
Joe: Was there a moment you knew you could actually pull this off—making a living as a poet?
Sekou: People ask me this a lot, and usually I don’t have one moment. It’s a series of cumulative moments. But this is one where I actually have the moment.
I had taken my tax refund—this was January 2002—and decided I was going to upgrade my recording studio and release my first spoken-word CD. I told myself, I think I’m gonna quit my job. I think I’m going to try to see what it means to be a full-time poet.
And I always joke about this in my keynotes: when I introduced myself as a full-time poet, people looked at me like I’d said I was a full-time mermaid. A mythical creature. How do you exist? Are you real? What do you do? No, but what do you DO do?
So I pulled up to the school during my off-track time—we were year-round schools, two months off, four months on — and I was recording my album. My girlfriend at the time was with me in the car. I was like, I’ve got to go tell the principal I’m quitting. I had my whole speech prepared. I sat down in her office, and she looked at me and said, “You’re leaving me, aren’t you?” I was like, yeah—you don’t want the speech though?
And the speech didn’t have any rhyme in it, no cadence, no limericks. It was just pure survival. Pure conquering fear. But I found it really empowering that her sentiment was, “Yeah, I always knew you were meant for a bigger stage. I appreciate what you brought to our school, but I always knew this was not a stopping place for you.” You just get these little confirmations and validations along the way.
Fast forward to June. I have my last day of teaching on a Friday. That night, I have my CD release show at my poetry venue, a spot called Fly Poet Music and Spoken Word Showcase. But the CD is not back from the manufacturer yet and I’m freaking out. They finally call that afternoon: it’s ready. I drive an hour down to pick it up, drive back up to LA, walk in late to the venue. The guy’s like, “You’re on in 20 minutes. Where have you been?” I’m pacing backstage, sweaty, nervous. I get on stage. I rock one of the best sets of my life. I step out onto the streets, surrounded by fans on Santa Monica Boulevard. And I made my rent in CD sales that night.
When I introduced myself as a full-time poet, people looked at me like I’d said I was a full-time mermaid.
When the crowd cleared, and I was standing on the street by myself, I looked up at the sky and said, “I can do this.” All the fear I’d had, and I just made my rent. I can do this.
The next day, I took off on a tour in DC. Toured for about a week and a half, came back with a wad of cash. DC was like, you can do this. Three weeks later, I toured Atlanta for a week and a half, came home with a wad of cash. Atlanta was like, you can do this. A couple of weeks later, I won the National Poetry Slam Championship—the number one slam poet in the nation. You can do this. Then a couple of months later, I joined my first national spoken word poetry tour as a fundraiser for fallen firefighters from 9/11. You can do this, you can do this, you can do this.
I got all this confirmation from the world. And I don’t impose my spiritual beliefs on anyone, but for me, it felt like God was saying, “Boy, what took you so long? I’ve been out here holding all your stuff, waiting for you to come get it.” That was the confirmation. And I never looked back.
How one meeting with Nike changed everything
Joe: Tell us about that Nike analyst meeting. I find it fascinating to hear about people’s first corporate light-bulb moment.
Sekou: I’ve got to shout out my friend Tony Broussard, who founded Now and Zen Productions. Nike was one of her big clients on the event planning side. She’d discovered me through the Nike film I did with MTV and started using me as her secret weapon.
But it was all entertainment stuff. Then one day, I got a call from her and Trevor Edwards, who was the third-highest executive at Nike at the time. He was the one driving Nike’s focus on the consumer—saying it’s not about us as the brand, it’s about the consumer. The power dynamics have shifted, and they’re not coming back. With technology and the access people have, we don’t get to control the marketplace anymore. It’s about what consumers demand, not just what we supply.
He said, “I need to communicate this to our company in a powerful way. I need our analysts to hear that this is our strong commitment.” So he called me up and said, I need you. Do something that communicates that.
I wrote the piece in about 24 to 36 hours. It became probably one of the highest-value pieces I’ve ever written—I’ve reused and repurposed it for years. It was called “Consumer 2.0.” The gist of it was exactly his message, written from the voice of the consumer, saying: you had a good run, we’re up.
Allow me to explain this to you as plainly as possible. You have entered the age of consumer climate control. We decide something’s hot — hope you dress light. We say it’s cool — hope you like ice. Resistance is futile. It is a custom-made, made-to-order life now, navigated by a generation born in cyberspace with unbound places to go and people to interface with. So face it, the old model has been replaced with the new matrix. And I know adaptation is tough to take quick, if — okay, I’m gonna need you people to keep up. Keep up.
It just kept going, faster and faster, talking about all the technology. Then it would just stop: You better keep up. I’m not slowing down for you anymore.
It was aggressive. Trevor wanted it aggressive. In your face. And it took off like folklore at Nike.
The audience at the analyst meeting—the event team told me backstage, “This is our hardest audience. They don’t applaud for anybody. Even when we have celebrity athletes, they just sit there.” And they were applauding. Nike was like, this is a huge hit.
It was aggressive. Trevor wanted it aggressive. In your face. And it took off like folklore at Nike.
That was the light-bulb moment for them: this has business value. I was like, yes. I’ve been telling you. Welcome to five minutes ago. All of a sudden, every business unit started calling: do something for Finance to communicate the importance of our financial strategy. Do something for Marketing to communicate the importance of marketing.
It’s been this dynamic over the course of my entire career, where I am simultaneously being educated by the biggest companies in the world while educating the biggest companies in the world. I give them my thought leadership through my small-business and artist mindset, and they give me an understanding of their strategy. Then I figure out how to deliver it in a way that actually resonates and feels human. And they just flip out.
“They place their value on information over inspiration. And they’re wrong.”
Joe: What is that mindset you bring that allows you to be so successful with corporate clients?
Sekou: Human and art.
That has been the battle of my entire career, because the business world does not value either of those first. They place their value on information over inspiration. They place their value on strategy over story. They place their value on technology over humanity. And they’re wrong. And it bites them every single time.
Then they come crawling to someone like me saying, “Oops, our bad, we overcorrected. It doesn’t matter that we got everybody implementing this new technology if they don’t care about it, if it’s not connected to meaning.” So we need you to bring the meaning.
Twenty years later, I’m still saying it. When I have my creative call with a client, I say, “Be clear. My goal is to take your business messaging and create a human experience around it.” So I start with human beings.
What’s your audience struggling with? What’s keeping them up at night? Are you messing with their commission? Did you just have a merger that’s disrupting the way they feed their kids? Are you giving them confusing messages — telling them to embrace failure while also demanding they hit their exact numbers? Is there a disconnect in your leadership? Are they overworked? Are they burned out? They love the cause so much that they’re not refilling their own tanks?
That’s where I start. What do they need to know? What do their customers need to know? How are they looking to serve? What do they love about the work they do? I’m going to start there.
“You’re sitting on a classic Lamborghini.”
Shane: Joe and I have been writing about this for years—how the real power of storytelling is to pierce into the human brain and heart. Even hearing that snippet of Consumer 2.0, I felt chills. I had a physical reaction.
Sekou: I preach the value of storytelling in almost every keynote, regardless of the theme. I always tell clients, no matter what topics they want me to cover, expect story to be in there. Because it’s the vehicle for everything you’re trying to do. You’ve just been letting it collect dust in the garage. You’re sitting on a classic Lamborghini. You’ve disconnected yourself from your power as a storyteller and told yourself it doesn’t have value in business.
But it’s not just storytelling—it’s the art of storytelling. That was one of my unique differentiators: I was bringing art to the business stage. And people don’t understand artists. Artists don’t even understand artists. We don’t even know how the hell we do what we do half the time. It’s just magic. And certainly folks in the business world don’t understand it, because they come from a very linear, rigid, project-management mindset.
You’re sitting on a classic Lamborghini. You’ve disconnected yourself from your power as a storyteller and told yourself it doesn’t have value in business.
The very thing that made me stand out was also the thing that stood most in my way. I had so many advisors when I was creating the speaking category who kept telling me, “I feel like you should get rid of the word poetry.” Take poetry out of it, and you’ll increase your paycheck by two zeros right off the bat. Because when people hear poetry, what do they think? Some slam poet yelling at them. Some revolutionary poet from the ‘60s. Some beat poet in a beret. The dead art form they hated in high school. Somebody doing a soliloquy to a daffodil for three minutes.
And in the business world specifically, let’s say someone recommends to the CEO, “We should bring this poet in.” And the CEO thinks, the thing I just suffered through at my kid’s seventh-grade poetry slam—that’s what you want to bring to my senior leadership meeting? Are you out of your mind?
That’s what I’m up against all the time. But here’s what they forget.
To start that same senior leadership meeting, they play music, and it raises the energy of the room. When the music ends, they play a video, using the power of film and design. In between speakers, they bring in singer-songwriters and pianists and dancers. As the emcee, they hire a comedian. They recognize the power of art. When it’s over: come to the party, Bruno Mars is rocking the stage. They go to their hotel room—there’s art on the wall that they appreciate.
Art is around their entire life. They understand its power as human beings. But they’ve disconnected themselves from that power in business.
So when I was creating Poetic Voice, I asked a simple question: What if art was not the break from the content, but the vehicle for the content? Instead of using art to make people feel better after they learn all this stuff, I said, let me raise the vibration of the room while I’m teaching you. Because the information is going to be stickier, more moving and memorable. And most importantly, the power of inspiration is that it makes the content survive the turbulence of going back to your desk.
Art is around their entire life. They understand its power as human beings. But they’ve disconnected themselves from that power in business.
Because you go to this event, you learn all this amazing stuff, you go back to the turbulence of real life—your office, your boss, your kids. And everything just shakes off. Everything you got at the conference shakes off. But inspiration, art, storytelling—it makes it sticky. You don’t forget it because you received it through a vehicle you weren’t expecting. A lot of what I do is helping people understand the neuroscience, the emotional intelligence, the science behind why art is so impactful, and then connecting that to their business strategy.
The one skill AI can’t touch
Joe: As you talk about this, I can’t help but think about AI. We’re in a world where there’s been enormous effort to make AI a great writer and artist, and yet it falls short. Sam Altman recently said that MAYBE by ChatGPT 6 or 7, it’ll be able to write what appears to be a half-decent poem. So much of what makes art and storytelling meaningful comes from our voice as authors—from breaking convention, not following it. How do you think about this moment where AI can do so many things, but there seems to be this one truly human thing it can’t touch?
Sekou: It’s funny—I literally just got off a staff meeting with my team, and one of the things I told them was: everybody’s afraid of AI taking over their jobs, but you also have so many people that are handing their jobs to AI. They’re saying, “AI can just do this proposal I was going to write, this strategy I needed to create.” They pop it into AI, scan it, and go, “Looks pretty good. Did it in three minutes. Saved me all this time. I’m going to send it.”
And then I, as the boss, go, “You just had AI write this.” I don’t see you in it.
It’s one thing if you say, “I partnered with AI. It gave me a launchpad, a jumping-off point. And then I sat back and edited. I prompted. I reprompted. I argued with it. I figured out where it was wrong. And then I added the layers that are indelibly human — my judgment, my taste, my intuition, my experience, the meaning.” Those are our domains. That’s where we have sovereign rule right now.
But if you’re not in it at all, why do I need you? You’re so worried about AI taking over your job, but you just gave your job to AI and didn’t show me your value. I believe in your brilliance as a human being. That’s why I hired you.
Now, one of the challenges with being a poet is that there’s a brand expectation that this is your writing. I always differentiate it this way: think about the difference between a singer and a rapper. If you’re a singer, you’re not expected to write every song — you’re expected to perform it. If you’re a rapper, you’re expected to write and perform. Nobody has a controversy about Taylor Swift having a ghostwriter, but there’s controversy about whether Drake has one. Different brand expectations.
With a poet, there’s an added layer: we’re expected to write it, perform it, and have it be authentic to who we are and what we’ve lived. So I have to be very careful about where I hand that off. If I’m doing a general email that isn’t my poetic writing, fine—let’s train AI on my voice for that. But I’m not going to have it write my book. I’m not going to have it write my poems.
My tech guy put it well: the problem with me is that AI can help 90% of the world write better — it raises them up. But I’m part of this elite 10%, this Navy SEALs Delta Force of writers, where it actually makes you worse.
“The more human you sound, the more inimitable and uncopyable you will be”
Sekou: I have a keynote called “The Golden Hour of AI.” One of the things I say in it is: What if AI wants nothing more than to give us goosebumps? Because it understands the algorithm of how to create them. It understands the physiology of what happens on your skin. It understands the types of things that give you goosebumps. But it can never experience goosebumps.
So maybe the best partnership is for us to say: you go do the tactical utility, the machinations of it. I’ve got the goosebump part. Let me make sure that stays my domain. Because in an age where AI is starting to make everyone sound the same, pushing everyone toward the medium—the more human you sound, the more inimitable and uncopyable you will be.
We already live in that world on social media. Look at the comments on any post: “Is that AI? I don’t know. Used to be people would comment about the content — now all they do is ask if it’s AI.” There’s almost a distrust. People can’t experience what you’re providing because they’re too busy wondering: is it true? Is it authentic?
Now imagine the person who stands out and you instantly know: that is definitely not AI. That was real. I felt it. Suddenly, you have set yourself apart from the crowd.
“Upgrade your human operating system”
Joe: What’s one counterintuitive, zaggy idea you think everyone listening should take away?
Sekou: Use this era to double down on upgrading your human operating system.
We constantly update our tech operating systems. We can’t wait for the latest feature, the newest upgrade, that download. But the more that happens, the more tech steals our superpowers—the power of our humanity.
Now imagine the person who stands out and you instantly know: that is definitely not AI. That was real. I felt it. Suddenly, you have set yourself apart from the crowd.
There’s an opportunity now, in your communication as a leader, a parent, a teacher, an influencer — whatever your stage is — to amplify your ability to connect with your audience on a deeper human level. The expertise you have as a human being is increasingly valuable. And it’s the one area where you will never experience imposter syndrome — because your experience as a human being is your expertise. It’s your degree. It’s the letters behind your name.
So how can you upgrade that? How can you focus on upgrading the way you deliver resonance through your humanity? The way you hack the algorithm of a goosebump? The way you architect narratives as a storyteller?
I tell people all the time: it doesn’t matter what your stage is. People say, “I’m not a public speaker, I don’t have a stage.” If you have a voice and an audience, you have a stage, and you have an opportunity to be mighty on it. That’s why I named my speaker training program Stage Might. It started as a play on stage fright — but ultimately it’s about being mighty on any stage you touch.
The way I teach it is through rockstar secrets for public speakers. I teach people performance techniques from rockstar artists, applied to the presentation stage. It’s not learning from dancers how to become a dancer — it’s learning from dancers how to be more graceful in your body during investor meetings. It’s not learning from songwriters how to write songs — it’s learning how a songwriter gets a song stuck in your head, and then doing that with your message as an attorney or a teacher.
If you have a voice and an audience, you have a stage, and you have an opportunity to be mighty on it.
It’s learning improv techniques so you can own any stage. You’re in a job interview, and they throw you a curveball — you think like an improv artist: give me another suggestion, what else you got?
I’ve had fire alarms go off during presentations. I’ve had the stage collapse as I was about to deliver a commencement speech. And as the stage started to give way, I told those students: “When you step up and walk across this stage, you will be walking into a world where the ground won’t always be stable. Sometimes it will feel like the rug is being pulled from under you. But you have to find that stability. You now hold a diploma that is your pillar.”
They were like, “Oh my God, this is crazy.” And it happened seamlessly. Not because I learned to speak like a speaker, but because I learned to speak like an improv artist, like an actor, like a poet.
Art, storytelling, humanity, experience — it’s time to double down on that. It’s what’s going to make us uncopyable, inimitable, incomparable in how we communicate, how we teach, how we lead, and how we connect with other human beings in a world that is becoming more and more disconnected.
So while you’re upgrading your digital tech operating system, make sure you’re finding ways to upgrade your human operating system.
I’m the best-selling author of The Storytelling Edge and Super Skill: Why Storytelling Is the Superpower of the AI Age and the fractional CMO at Pepper.
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