Millard "Mickey" S. Drexler built Gap into a cultural brand, launched Old Navy, led J.Crew, and now chairs Alex Mill. He also spent 16 years on Apple's board — and played a pivotal role in shaping the Apple Store as we know it today.

But this conversation isn't about the résumé. It's about how Mickey thinks.

He leads through taste, instinct, and an obsessive attention to what a customer actually experiences. He'll tell you data doesn't design product. That most CEOs never talk to customers. That creativity is in the DNA — and you can spot it in five minutes if you know how to look.

In this episode: what instinct actually is and where it comes from, why the best leaders protect the creative process instead of delegating it, how the Apple Store was born from a warehouse prototype and one honest conversation, and what it means to micromanage the customer experience — not the people.

A conversation about taste, imagination, and what it takes to build something people actually love.

Thank you to Mike Cerre for making this conversation possible.

Links:

• Alex Mill — alexmill.com
• Mickey Drexler on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/millard-mickey-drexler-1b00a9269/
• Business Artistry Course — courses.theartisan.com

What does it take to create something that changes everything? In this episode, I sit down with Steve Hayden - the man who wrote the 1984 Apple commercial, still considered one of the greatest ads ever made. But this conversation goes far beyond that sixty seconds. We talk about where revolutionary ideas actually come from, what Steve Jobs was really like to work with, the disaster of 1985 that almost nobody talks about, and why the business world keeps choosing efficiency over creativity - even when history proves creativity wins every time.

What we cover in this episode

- Where the idea for the 1984 commercial actually came from - including Russian soldiers in Afghanistan, Orwell, and a South African Olympian with a hammer

- Why Apple's board wanted to kill the greatest ad ever made before it ever aired

- The disaster of 1985 - the campaign that crashed Apple's stock and contributed to Jobs being pushed out of his own company

- Why you can't measure creativity - and why that's exactly the reason boardrooms keep killing it

- Steve's final message to business leaders: creativity is not an exercise in feelings. It's an exercise in horizons.

Steve Hayden passed away last year. This is one of his last conversations. I hope it stays with you.

Special thanks Kathy Mandato, for making this conversation possible.

The Business Artistry Organizational Course:

https://courses.theartian.com/business-artistry-for-organizations/

What happens when an artist imagines the future decades before the rest of the world catches up?

In this episode, Nir Hindie sits down with pioneering media artist and researcher Michael Naimark, whose work has shaped immersive and interactive media for more than forty years. If you’ve used Google Street View, you’ve seen the shadow of a project he helped create at MIT in the late 1970s: the Aspen Movie Map, a radically early experiment in “surrogate travel.”

Michael’s career moved across some of the most influential innovation environments of the last half-century: MIT, Atari, Lucasfilm, the Apple–Lucas multimedia labs, and Interval Research, Paul Allen’s legendary “five to ten years ahead” laboratory. Across those settings he explored how artists, engineers, and researchers push each other toward breakthroughs that conventional corporate structures rarely allow.

Shownotes:

Michael's website: http://www.naimark.net/

Michael's workshop: MediatedPresence.com

Aspen Movie Map: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aspen_Movie_Map

Steve Jobs at the 1983 International Design Conference in Aspen - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9HmOz8H0qI

This episode dives into one of the most overlooked turning points in modern innovation: the moment artists and engineers decided to build the future together. Julie Martin, co-director of E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology), joins Nir Hindie for a deep exploration of the collaborations that shaped contemporary tech culture long before Silicon Valley existed.

They unpack how the legendary “Nine Evenings” project brought together world-class artists and Bell Labs engineers to create performances that pushed the limits of sound, movement, computing, and imagination. Julie explains why these collaborations worked, what tensions and breakthroughs shaped them, and how they became a template for cross-disciplinary innovation in every industry.

For leaders, creators, and anyone trying to understand how real innovation happens, this conversation is both historical and uncomfortably relevant. It’s a reminder that progress doesn’t emerge from optimizing what already exists. It comes from people with different languages, disciplines, and obsessions daring to build something new together.

Resources:

Experiments in Art and Technology Website
https://www.experimentsinartandtechnology.org/

Silver Clouds by Andy Warhol:
https://www.brooksmuseum.org/exhibitions/andy-warhol-silver-clouds

In this episode, Andrew Zolli, Chief Impact Officer at Planet, the imagery company, speaks about the initiative he leads, “Art as Planet.” We discuss what the role of art in communicating scientific vision is? How artists have been helping in shaping an innovative culture in a satellite company, and why should small startups launch their own artist in residence?

Zolli is a technologist, strategic foresight expert, and author. In the past he was the primary creative and curatorial force behind PopTech, a well-known innovation, and social change network; he served as a Fellow of the National Geographic Society and served on the Boards of the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

See the show notes here. 

In this episode, Dr. Claudia Schnugg, an author, curator, researcher, and producer of art and science collaborations, shares her knowledge about building art-science collaborations, examples of successful partnerships, and what organizations can benefit from these collaborations.

Check the show notes to learn more.

In this episode, Dr. John Maeda, speaks about art and artists, the difference between art and design, why parents who sent their kids to RISD thought about innovation, and why, art and design are positioned to transform the economy of the 21st-century economy.

Click here to see the show notes.

Voices:
John Maeda's Ted Talk
David Bowie in an interview to BBC 1999

In this episode, we host Anouk Wipprecht, artist, designer, and innovator, together with Christoph Guger, the founder and CEO of GTEC. The two have been working for more than six years, creating robotic dresses and brain-computer interface devices that are extremely exciting in their thinking and innovation.

Anouk Wipprecht is working in the emerging field of "FashionTech" - a rare combination of fashion design combined with engineering, robotics, science, and interaction/user experience design to make fashion an experience that transcends mere appearances.

Christoph Guger is the founder and CEO of GTEC, a company that develops and produces high-end brain-computer interfaces and biosignal processing hardware and software.

See all images and videos on the episode's show notes. 

In this episode, Jeffrey Madoff, the founder of Madoff Productions, fashion designer, film director, and educator speaks about creativity, entrepreneurship, and how to lead creative teams. Madoff is on the faculty at Parsons School for Design, teaching a course he developed called “Creativity: Making a Living With Your Ideas”.  Madoff published the book entitled based on his course.

Click here for the show notes. 

In this episode, Dr. Arthur I. Miller is back on our show to discuss his latest book - The Artist in The Machine. We discussed machine and creativity, why there is not enough AI in the world, and why, after all, you need creativity to stay relevant in the future.

For the shownotes click here.

In this episode, Noah Weinstein, the previous creative director of Autodesk Pier 9 - The world's greatest creative workshop - speaks about how to build creative communities, what is the role of management in supporting creative initiatives, and how one space in San Francisco became the epitome for experimentation in digital fabrication, robotics, nanotechnology, 3D, and biotechnology, all led by artists.

See the show notes for more information.