How do you build a business with kindness at its heart? How do you give your employees a voice in your decision making? How do you do great work and create a great place to work at the same time? Jenny Kitchen is co-founder and CEO of Yoyo Design. Boasting an impressive list of clients, Yoyo regularly produce groundbreaking creative work. What’s more, they are a B Corp and in the top 5% of B Corps globally for ‘Workers’ – meaning they are one of the world’s leading employers. In this conversation we discuss:
- Jenny’s upbringing in rural France and how it shaped her
- Founding Yoyo at just 24
- Her membership of Extinction Rebellion and how it has shaped her approach to business and leadership
- Yoyo the company and her work
- Her favourite project, partnering with Spotify and University of Southampton
- The power of not sticking to a specific sector
- How she turned down a company that didn’t align with Yoyo’s values and the fallout
- How she embeds democratic principles into the operations of Yoyo
- Her methods to ensure she hears the truth from her team in feedback sessions and ‘closes the loop’
- Her burning desire to be kind without people pleasing
- How treating your people well drives business results
- The need to break the toxic idea that successful business requires suffering
- How to take your first steps in developing a more progressive work culture
- Her little bit radical idea to introduce universal wage caps and the cap she’s imposed at Yoyo
Want to appear? Email podcast@standingongiants.com
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