The assets are the people. Musa Kalenga on grind culture and the shared value agency

Listening is always free — watch on YouTube, Spotify, or Apple Podcasts.

What this episode is about

Musa Kalenga is group CEO of the Brave Group, the agency group that grew out of an investment into House of Brave. He did not come up the agency ladder, and that shows in where he starts: not with how to win more work, but with whether he believed in the model he was being asked to lead. His answer was no, and most of this conversation is about what he built instead.

It is a blunt account of how creative businesses came to treat people as consumable, why the awards economy made that worse, and what a shared value agency looks like in practice. If you manage marketers, or you are quietly deciding whether to stay in an agency at all, this is the conversation about the other side of the work.

Three things we took away

• The industry never learned to manage its actual asset. Musa's comparison is mining. Sink equipment into a site and you treat the site as a resource, the communities around it as a resource, and you plan for wear and tear and maintenance. Creative businesses never extended that thinking to the people making the work. Weekend work was normal. Endless rounds of reverts were normal. “What that does to your psychological states, no one really cared much about” — which he links directly to how common substance abuse became in the industry. The prevailing model, in his words: find interns with potential, put them in a bucket like crabs, make them compete, “and then ride them until the wheels fall off.”
• Disposability was structural, not accidental. He gives three causes. The industry inherited industrial-era thinking, where the higher up the cognitive ranks you went the less disposable you became. Indispensability then got measured by the awards you had won rather than by being a good citizen inside the business, which makes talent management nearly impossible. And the ability to attract good people was tied to servicing top-tier clients, so when an account moved the whole team moved with it and nobody built the next layer. “It was more about self-preservation than actually developing the industry.”
• Dare, care, share — and he has the numbers. The three pillars are specific. Dare is technology and hard client conversations, held to a collective rather than an individual outcome: “we don't go there because we're to win an award.” Care is treating feedback as a gift and critiquing the work against the collective outcome rather than the person. Share is the concrete one — personal development plans, quarterly incentives tied to both business and individual performance, and telling staff to open an EasyEquities account and buy R50 of shares in the clients they work on. “We want junior copywriters to leave our business being shareholders in a financial services company.” Three years in, he has evidence: 85% work-free weekends, 90 to 95% first-time approval, and a top-ten placing for independent agencies to work for.

Our guest: Musa Kalenga, group CEO of the Brave Group. Connect with Musa on LinkedIn.