What would Ryan Reynolds, Lin&Manuel Miranda, or Sara Nelson do?

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week, this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. An actor, a playwright, and a union leader walked into a business conference and—this is not a joke—schooled entrepreneurs and executives on how to innovate and create change. The Fast Company Innovation Festival in New York last week featured conversations with CEOs such as Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Expedia’s Ariane Gorin, and Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, who dispensed smart observations about their companies. But for me, some of the most thought-provoking nuggets of wisdom came from the non-CEO speakers at the festival. Here are three insights that stood out: Inspiration can come from anywhere. Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda spoke about creating or building “the thing that you think is missing or you haven’t seen out there in the world yet,” which sounds like a pretty good characterization of innovation. For Miranda, that means going to a lot of theater and observing not just what works, but what doesn’t work. “When I see something I don’t like, I don’t turn my brain off.” In the process of taking in all that information, Miranda says, you may find your voice. “As long as you stay open to all of it and you figure out who you are amidst everything you’re consuming, you’re going to make stuff that really excites you,” he says. Power isn’t about personal relationships. Sara Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, AFL-CIO, offered an important reminder of the power dynamics in any negotiation. She may have a productive working relationship with an airline CEO, but she recognizes that those executives answer to investors and other stakeholders who “do not really care about me or the people I represent.” Nelson says her power comes from her members’ willingness to hold companies accountable. And like the Founding Fathers in Miranda’s Hamilton, she underscored the importance of being in the room where it happens. “You don’t want to just be able to attend an event at the White House,” she told attendees. “You want to actually be in the room before that event, shaping that policy that they’re going to announce.” Constraint is good for creativity. To be sure, Ryan Reynolds isn’t just an actor. He’s acquired and sold businesses and serves as chief creative officer of advertising software company MNTN. Still, he says “all the greatest lessons I learned in life” came from producing the first Deadpool movie, which reportedly had a budget of $58 million—“miniscule for a comic book movie,” he says. In an interview ahead of the Innovation Festival, Reynolds extolled the virtue of having to make the movie on a relative shoestring: “The more constraints you place in a creative process, the more asymmetrical your thinking is, the more you’re finding inspiration and whimsy in the most unexpected of places.” Did you attend the Fast Company Innovation Festival? What moments stood out for you, or where did you glean unexpected wisdom? Send your stories and notes to me at stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. I’d love to share your observations in a future newsletter. Watch and read more: unconventional wisdom Why Lin-Manuel Miranda thinks AI will never match his creative process Ryan Reynolds is one of Fast Company’s 10 most innovative people Union leader Sara Nelson talks about unchecked capitalism