GHD, an infrastructure company

Jack worked as the Global Head of Brand Storytelling and Executive Creative Director for GHD, a 98-year-old infrastructure company.

When Jack arrived, GHD struggled to tell its story in a world demanding more, better, faster… and interesting. He built the Storytelling and Creative Center of Excellence from zero, inheriting a team and adding to it while leveraging his professorial background to upskill twenty plus remote creatives across continents.

He led his team to completely redevelop the brand guidelines for the digital age. Creating a cultural storytelling breakthrough with the GHD Storytelling Blueprint, which Jack authored, designed and created to solve a seemingly impossible challenge: how to unite five distinct service brands under one narrative while preserving each unique voice.

Then, they needed a way to quantify the brand and so Jack led a small internal group to work with a couple of his contacts at Harvard and MIT to develop the annual Global Brand Index as a way to measure brand impact and growth YoY.

The Storytelling Blueprint became essential when acquiring new companies as part of a merger/acquisitions and cultural onboarding. Jack also rewrote, redesigned and rebranded the onboarding experience. His goal was to spread a common language. This is vital to telling the same story as one company — even if it's from your sub-brands unique lens.

Then, through development of The NEXUS, GHD's first ever thought leadership platform (set to launch later this year) Jack led his team to craft a Thought Leadership Playbook to make storytelling essential in GHD's thought leadership. For this platform he and his team created dozens of original content series and podcasts.

He made sure the transformation was powered by AI integration across the entire workflow, from Copilot and Firefly for creative production to Runway for video innovation and Synthesia for audio enhancement, video avatars and global content scaling.

All the while daily work of internal brand agency had to continue with Jack's team managing hundreds of video, design, and white paper requests per month. Under his leadership productivity skyrocketed with a 300% increase in quality video delivery. All of this culminated in top-tier, award-winning global brand campaigns.

Within two years, Jack and team created the two highest-performing brand campaigns in GHD's history, and the only two ever created in-house. Which means they effectively eliminated $1.2M in external costs, and achieved 40% productivity gains.

But the real victory is always cultural. Jack personally taught storytelling workshops to over 1,300 AEC leaders making them ambassadors of the Storytelling Blueprint.

This is leading to the rollout of all 13,000 engineers across 160 offices to becoming better storytellers themselves. Because with better storytelling of amazing work, anything is possible.