In this episode of Inside the Collective, Brad Amos sits down with Frances Gaillard, brand strategist, self-described advertising nerd and founder of 43 Elephants, a specialist brand and growth collective for founder-led and challenger businesses.

Frances and Brad talk about why literal, word-for-word localisation is a wasted opportunity, and what “freedom within a framework” looks like when it works.

They dig into how ambition and taste shift across Singapore, Shanghai, London and the US, why “feedforward” beats feedback, and how easily good teams slide into what Frances calls the “vortex of doom” — months of committee-driven churn that produces work nobody actually believes in. They also talk candidly about trust, friction, and the disappearing courage to call bullshit.

A conversation about building brands and client relationships that can hold structure and nuance at the same time.

Inside the Collective is a podcast from The Carrot Collective, exploring the thinking behind how people work.

In this episode of Inside the Collective, Brad Amos sits down with Sushma Panchawati, co-founder and CEO of a stealth AI startup and a strategist with nearly two decades in consumer insights and brand strategy.

Sushma reflects on why strategy so often feels like starting from scratch, what causes good insights to die quietly inside organisations, and why AI produces mediocre output in the hands of non-experts but becomes a superpower for people who already know their craft.

She talks about the difference between an insight that's interesting and one that actually changes a decision, why leaders should ask "what do we already know?" before commissioning more data, and how strategists do their best work by holding many lenses at once without drowning in them.

A conversation about signal over noise, expertise over automation, and why the simplest question is often the most useful one.

Inside the Collective is a podcast from The Carrot Collective, exploring the thinking behind how people work.

In this episode of Inside the Collective, Brad Amos sits down with May Seow, who has spent her career building systems across tech, consulting, banking and creative environments.

May reflects on what happens when you use structure to unlock better thinking rather than constrain it. She talks about why leaders are defined by the questions they ask, how small experiments can lead to outsized change, and why the role of technology should be to free people and imagination, not flatten them.

Along the way, she talks about abundance versus scarcity in teams, what separates a healthy creative engine from a shiny but hollow one, why cost-cutting so often fails as a growth move, and how to keep human judgment sharp when AI makes it easy to move fast and sound certain.

A conversation about clarity, curiosity, systems and staying meaningfully human while everything else speeds up.

Inside the Collective is a podcast from The Carrot Collective, exploring the thinking behind how people work.