Chanelle
de Nysschen

I know how to create a culture where artists inspire each other instead of competing. How to set standards that push people to grow without making them afraid to fail. How to recognize what's holding a team back and make room for bigger creative ambitions.

Culture unlocks discretionary effort: the initiative people bring to work because they're genuinely invested in what they're making. Great work doesn't happen without it.

I learned this piece by piece over 15 years at agencies of 20, 500, and 70,000 people. Working shoulder to shoulder with teammates, posing pumpkins and paper Minecraft characters for stop-motion animations. Directing cross-agency teams on opposite coasts as we created work for the Sphere in Las Vegas.

At Ten Gun Design, my team didn't wait for clients to hand us bigger opportunities. We explored new technologies and built prototypes. We found problems we could solve before anyone asked. What started as small, last-minute assignments for Xbox grew into a decade-long creative partnership across marketing, Xbox.com, and retail, helping grow the agency from 26 people to more than 140. That same initiative helped us diversify beyond Xbox and win work where we led the creative, not just the production.

At Dentsu, I worked to establish a common spine for creative operations within our Experience Design & Innovation team. We built workflows that could flex from multimillion-dollar GM and T-Mobile accounts to one-off projects. Morale improved. So did the work. And we spent less of our budget fixing avoidable mistakes.

That's what drives me. Shaping an environment where creative teams thrive, the work gets better, and people notice. As AI makes it easier to produce just about anything, knowing what to make and why matters more than ever. That takes curiosity, good judgment, and people who trust each other enough to challenge the obvious.