Minette Yao, Progressive Companies' Thinking Partner

November 23rd, 2020

Minette Yao is the Director of Strategy at Gemic, a global strategy, innovation, and thinking partner for progressive corporations. Her role is focused on having a lot of critical, speculative, fun conversations with clients, team members, experts, and everyday people. From studying Cultural Anthropology and Visual Culture & Media Studies at Duke University, her roles prior to Gemic has been largely focused on cultural strategy.

In this feature, Minette shares with us how her early experiences at Now What was incredibly nurturing for her career growth, the upsides of growing with a company, her role as Director of Strategy at Gemic, and her advice for individuals interested in pursuing strategy roles. Read along to soak up her incredible career advice for ambitious women, such as yourself.

Early Career

You graduated from Duke University with a degree in Cultural Anthropology, Visual Culture & Media Studies, and then started your career at Now What - a market research meets creative think tank, as a strategist. How did your studies influence your first job post-grad?

For the longest time, I had known I wanted to ‘do’ anthropology but no idea what that meant in the modern world. My interest had always been less about studying culture out there (shipping off to a remote country to learn about their ways of life) and so much more about studying our culture right here (making sense of what’s going on in popular media, consumer culture, new technologies, etc.)

The world of market research and creative brand strategy requires asking questions about the assumptions built into daily life, and identifying how to tap into that through powerful campaigns and intuitively-positioned products. While anthropology ended up being the signpost that pointed me to this career path, it was the curiosity that you’re asked to exercise in the social sciences, media studies, journalism that first equipped me with an investigative mindset to ask the right questions and tell stories that resonate.

You held roles at Now What as a Junior Strategist, Strategist, and In-House Anthropologist. How did these roles differ and what skills did you find to be most impactful as you moved up the ladder?

Now What was this incredibly nurturing place, where we grew from 5 people when I started to something near 40 by the time I left. We each had the opportunity to shape the research methods, dream up weird approaches, experiment with designers on deliverables like magazines, short films, card games, exhibits.

The unique thing there was that seniority wasn’t a major factor when it came to generating good thinking. So, growing up from Junior Strat to Strategist was about finding your own voice to present your thinking to the clients and building the confidence to own and run research, deck-writing, and whatever other part of the job you wanted to.

In-House Anthropologist was a role I created for myself in the last 2 years of my time there. We leaned somewhat heavier on behavioral economics and psychology at Now What, and I felt we were missing a perspective on what drives people at group or societal level… so I applied for and pitched a Masters in an anthropology of ‘Material Culture’ to the company, with the idea to bring back and implement what I learned. This was my way of finding and defining my own voice, by forging a role of my own. They empowered me to do that and I feel extremely grateful to the leadership for being open-minded.

After 5 years at Now What, you joined Flamingo, a cultural strategy agency, as a Project Director. Why did you switch companies and when did you realize you were ready for a change?

It wasn’t really until 5 years that I even began considering looking elsewhere. From year 1, people pressed that it’s good to keep eyes and ears open for other opportunities, but I usually brushed those remarks aside. Now What had been very good to me: the working relationships I built there were formative, the leadership had really set the conditions for me to take ownership of my own role. I wondered for some time whether I was being naïve by being so loyal, but am honestly glad that I hadn’t taken the advice that ‘churn is a healthy part of the industry’ because I learned a lot about myself and my own limits by sticking around and seeing what it takes to grow up with a company and see your relationships with your coworkers evolve and mature over time.

Gemic

You’re currently the Director of Strategy at Gemic, a global strategy, innovation, and thinking partner for progressive corporations. What does your role entail and what is your day-to-day like?

My role today involves having a lot of critical, speculative, fun conversations - with clients, with team members, with experts, and with everyday people. Whether helping a global footwear and apparel company define their pipeline for truly responsible & sustainable product innovation, working with financial services to re-think the question of home ownership, affordable housing, and the dream of American progress, or studying the shifts that are shaping home and family life today in order to define the role of paper towels and toilet paper into the future.

We do all sorts of research to better understand different phenomena, what’s driving them, and the day-to-day experiences or behaviors underpinning them. Doing this kind of analysis helps us paint a picture for our clients of what their businesses can or should do – to build a future that they can aspire to, along with the people they serve. On a very practical basis, this means I’m usually doing one of a few things: (a) coordinating a team to conduct large landscape scans (making sense of the sociocultural, technological, business, and other forces shaping an industry, (b) heading ‘into the field’ to spend 2-3 hours in people’s homes and cities to put their experiences in full context, (c) hosting half- and full-day workshops with business leaders from insights, marketing, R&D, corporate strategy, product engineers, legal teams and (d) a lot of time in a room just thinking, scratching our heads, and trying again. A good chunk of this happens on hours and hours of videochat, in the Covid era.

What excites you most about your role and the future of Gemic?

Gemic often advises clients who are at an inflection point – who are looking for ways to grow their business in its next direction & set the foundational principles and conditions to do so. At the moment, we are at this exact inflection point ourselves. We have carved some territory at the overlapping edges of academia, management consulting, and design. As we grow in offices (expanding from Helsinki to New York, Toronto, and most recently Berlin) and bring on talent & perspectives from diverse backgrounds and disciplines – we find ourselves working with our clients on increasingly complex and transformational projects.

What this means practically, though, is enabling our 30-some person team to do deep thinking, rigorous analysis, and collaboration – in ways that still allow us the mental space and energy to devote to the life projects and ambitions and sensibilities that drew us here in the first place. I currently sit on a small management team looking to define the policies, practices, and more unwritten philosophies that make this happen. It’s exciting, scary, and refreshing to turn a critical eye back on ourselves and see how we’re making the workplace itself a place where everyone feels they are given opportunities to keep growing and challenging themselves.

Advice

What do you wish you knew when you were first starting your career?

For me, the group of coworkers I got to surround myself with at each company along the way have been infinitely more valuable than names of places to stamp on a resume. The things that fueled my personal growth (and therefore career growth) at each company have been environments and supportive individuals who encouraged me to define what it was that would really satisfy me, give it a go, and feel comfortable writing and re-writing my own role descriptions.

What advice do you have for women interested in pursuing roles in strategy?

When it comes to defining strategy, the best work comes out of dialogue and interchange of ideas – and no matter what level you’re at in a career in strategy, your ability to listen thoughtfully as well as share your own ideas openly, matters.

Many strategy shops have very different conversation styles. Find a place where the people who you work with feel like fun, engaging, inspiring conversation partners! Feel it out through your interviews, and remember that you’re looking for someone to enter into a conversation with, not someone who you feel your voice doesn’t match.

Who is one woman you aspire to be like?

Throughout her two years at Gemic, a Strategist who was my mentee inadvertently became an unknowing mentor to me. With her, trying something new, unfamiliar, and maybe even implausible is sheer fun - even when ancillary to her own project work. With this energy, she quietly enlisted people in each attempt to figure it out, while always being candid about where she’s getting tripped up, and calling people out to defend their own ideas. In this way, she empowers others to own the challenge and the satisfaction of carving out something new, right alongside her. This kind of bold honesty and humility I hope defines many more generations of leaders to come.