Dave Hayward has changed industry and discipline more times than most people change jobs. This is what all that jumping taught him, and what it cost.

In his first solo episode of Slideshow, recorded from a talk at Revved's Write-Offs event, Dave works through four lessons from a career spent jumping off the deep end: sinking before you swim, treating optimism as a tactic rather than a default, surviving bad bosses and impossible targets, and the dream job that fell apart and led him to revive Europa Creative Partners.

Along the way, he gets into forgetting the coffee for a coffee tasting and closing the deal anyway, a sales target that was doubled and then tripled with no extra resource, and the dream job that fell apart and pushed him to quit with a fresh mortgage and no plan, the write-off that became Europa Creative Partners.

He also lands on why 2026 might be the best time in years to be a generalist, and why the self-doubt never really goes away. Worth a watch if you have ever taken on a job you had no business taking, and made it work anyway.

Links:

Dave Hayward, LinkedIn

Europa Creative Partners

This episode was recorded from content that was part of Dave's talk at Revved's Write-Offs event.

Chapters

00:00 Introduction

00:50 A first solo edition: the Write-Offs talk

01:40 Imposter syndrome and the 84 percent

02:50 Breadth, depth, and optimism as a tactic

04:00 The welding job he wasn't ready for

05:20 Birmingham: a coffee tasting with no coffee

06:10 Bad bosses and a target that doubled then tripled

08:10 The dream job and the scandal that followed

09:20 Quitting with no plan, and how Europa came back

11:50 Why 2026 is a good time to be a generalist

12:40 Still jumping, just picking better watersFind full show notes, links, and transcript at europa.nz/podcasts.Produced by Europa Creative Partners.

A funnel is just the journey a customer takes from not knowing you exist to paying you money. That's it. Today’s Slideshow with Dave Hayward, we’re going to explain it clearly. Most small business owners want a viral reel. Stu Lees wants to know if they've mapped what their customers are actually afraid of. One of those will grow a business. The other is just noise.Produced by Europa Creative Partners (europa.nz).In this episode of Slideshow, host Dave Hayward speaks with Stu Lees, a marketing advisor, strategist, and founder of the Shoestring Marketer, about the three fundamentals that keep disappearing from the marketing of businesses (large and small).The conversation covers Stu's customer persona framework — built around fears, frustrations, and motivations rather than two paragraphs of demographics — and why marketing works on emotion first, with logic arriving only to validate a decision already made. Stu also shares the email nurture strategy behind $ 2 million in sales in 18 months with no cold calling, and why he believes personal brand has never mattered more for both businesses and the people who work inside them.Links:Stu Lees, LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stuartlees/The Shoestring Marketer: https://shoestringmarketer.co/Dave Hayward, LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/haywarddave/Chapters 00:00 Introduction01:00 Stu's background: the SF startup and the marketing academy05:00 Learning by osmosis: how Stu learns anything new07:30 Public speaking as a superpower09:00 The Shoestring Marketer and what it's for14:00 Setting up the three neglected things15:00 Neglected thing 1: deep customer personas17:00 Emotion first, logic second19:30 The persona framework: fears, frustrations, aspirations, context22:00 Frustrations as a cheat code for writing content24:00 Case study: "not on my watch" and a backup software campaign26:00 System 1 and system 2 in marketing27:30 Neglected thing 2: the full funnel and email nurture30:00 People don't buy from ads. They buy from relationships.32:00 The $2M case study: 40,000 emails a week, no cold calling35:00 Neglected thing 3: personal brand in the age of AI36:00 It's never been more unsafe to be an employee38:00 The daily LinkedIn connection habit (started 2014, 28,000 connections)40:30 Get out from behind your desk43:30 Being unapologetically human45:00 Public speaking and community as brand builders51:00 Real rooms beat digital channels for trust55:00 Why a monthly newsletter proves you're a reliable business58:00 Wrap up

Your community wants impact, not your slides

Laz Csite has spent decades in high-end consulting. He chose to walk away from that and spend the next 10 years on something that actually matters to him: helping charities, social enterprises, and B corps use digital tools to deliver the change they exist for.

Produced by Europa Creative Partners (europa.nz).

In this episode of Slideshow, host Dave Hayward speaks with Laz Csite, founder of 360tuned, about why digital transformation keeps failing in mission-led organisations, and what it actually takes to get it right. Laz brings a rare combination: the rigour of a career at KPMG and PwC, and a philosophy shaped more by rice terraces and bamboo than by tech roadmaps.

The conversation covers the gap between board-approved strategy and the people who have to deliver it, why most nonprofits are nowhere near ready for AI and what to do first, the spaghetti problem hiding in almost every nonprofit back office, and the pizza framework for thinking about digital architecture. Laz also shares the "black Toyota Corolla" approach to choosing tools, a story about donor lifetime value that stopped a 15-year-old nonprofit in its tracks, and why boring, reliable systems beat shiny ones every time.

Links:

Laszlo Csite, LinkedIn

360tuned

Dave Hayward

A framework that is both actionable AND delicious

In this episode of Slideshow, Dave Hayward speaks with Laura Burkhauser, CEO of Descript, the AI-native video editing platform, about her practical framework for surviving the AI hype cycle without losing your ability to think clearly.

The conversation covers the sandwich bet technique for defusing doom-spiral conversations by forcing specifics (what exactly, by when, measured how?), the "work slop" problem and Laura's internal Descript memo on AI and human thinking, why generative AI is missing its "Finding Nemo" moment, Dave's audience sandwich bets from Bright Objects readers, and what the word "intrepid" means when you're running a company through genuine disruption.

Links:

Laura Burkhauser, LinkedIn

Descript

Dave Hayward, LinkedIn

Chapters

00:00 Cold open: intrepid

00:45 Introduction

02:00 Why AI hype exists: the cynical and good-faith takes

03:30 The AI political horseshoe: doomers vs hypers

05:30 Descript's AI-native origins (before AI was a discourse)

08:00 The generative AI problem: slop and the wrong conversation

09:00 Finding Nemo and what generative media is still missing

10:30 Human creativity will survive this moment

11:30 Vibe-coded briefs and the limits of AI in creative work

12:00 Work slop at Descript and the human collaboration memo

13:30 Writing as two acts: what you cannot delegate to AI

15:00 From hype to action: becoming a translation layer

16:30 AI hasn't reduced the workload: the rising tide reality

17:30 AI vs the internet: scale of impact and the 30-year problem

20:00 Non-linear careers: German literature meets tech

22:00 The sandwich bet: framework explained

24:00 Why sandwich bets shift conversations from fear to curiosity

25:00 Sandwich bets as an internal leadership tool at Descript

26:30 The Lisa Oakley crossover: depersonalising difficult decisions

27:30 Bread talk and Vogels toast

28:00 The Descript Slack bet: getting concrete on the labour market

29:30 From vague doom to specific, measurable hypotheses

30:30 Kahneman's system 2 and shifting from reacting to thinking

31:00 Optimism, the pandemic, and humanity's problem-solving capacity

32:00 Andrew Mason identified Laura as his successor within weeks

33:00 Intrepid: the leadership quality for a disruptive moment

34:30 Serenity prayer, Rumsfeld, and the limits of what you can control

35:00 The VP-to-CEO paradox: more accountability, less control

36:30 Wrap up

FAQ

What is a sandwich bet and how does it work?

A sandwich bet is a conversational technique for defusing AI doom-spiral conversations. When someone makes a large, fear-inducing prediction, you ask them to make it specific and measurable: what exactly will happen, by when, and what metric would prove it? If they're right, you buy them a sandwich. The low stakes lower the emotional temperature. The act of getting concrete forces rational thinking. Laura uses it at Descript both in team conversations and externally when AI discourse becomes unproductive.

How should business leaders think about AI's impact on jobs and the economy?

Laura's position: people consistently overestimate AI's short-term impact and underestimate its long-term impact, the same pattern that played out with the internet. The internet took 30 years to fully reshape the economy. AI likely works on the same horizon. At Descript, full adoption of AI coding tools has actually increased the urgency to hire engineers, not reduced it.

What is Descript and what does it do?

Descript is an AI-native video and audio editing platform that lets users edit footage by editing a transcript, the same way you'd edit a text document. Its AI co-editor Underlord executes entire editing workflows from a single text prompt. Used by podcasters, content creators, business teams, and marketers who want professional results without specialist editing skills.

Lisa Oakley has a private investigator's licence and a habit of walking into rooms where things have gone badly wrong. What she's found: the conflict usually wasn't the problem. The avoidance was.

Produced by Europa Creative Partners (europa.nz).

In this episode of Slideshow, host Dave Hayward speaks with Lisa Oakley, Director and Lead Consultant at People Associates, about why workplace conflict is best understood as data — information your organisation is generating, whether you act on it or not.

The conversation covers the three types of conversations that prevent most workplace friction from escalating (expectation, accountability, and repair), a practical, hard-conversation framework drawn from problem-solving science, and why formal investigations often make things worse rather than better. Lisa also shares what she's seeing on the frontier of workplace HR: AI-generated complaints that are genuinely difficult to authenticate.

Links:

Lisa Oakley, LinkedIn

Dave Hayward, LinkedIn

Chapters

00:00 Introduction

01:00 Conflict is Data: The Core Reframe

03:00 Why Leaders Avoid Conflict (and What It Costs)

06:00 Intercultural Conflict in NZ Workplaces

09:00 The Three Conversations Every Leader Needs

12:00 A Problem-Solving Framework for Hard Conversations

15:00 Is This Relationship Recoverable?

18:00 Where Conflict Ends and Bullying Begins

19:00 What Leaders Get Wrong: Kindness Without Clarity

22:00 Delegating Conflict Upwards

24:00 PI Meets HR: AI-Generated Complaints

28:00 When Investigations Protract the Problem

31:00 The Art of a Real Apology

34:00 Conflict as Progress: The Boardroom Story

36:00 The "I Like, I Wonder" Technique

39:00 Wrap Up

FAQ

What is "conflict as data" and why does it matter for business leaders? Lisa Oakley's core idea is that conflict isn't a dysfunction to suppress — it's information your organisation is producing. The way a team handles disagreement, friction, or tension tells you something about your culture, your clarity, and your leadership. Treating it as data rather than a problem to eliminate means you can actually learn from it and act on it.

Keywords conflict resolution, workplace conflict, leadership, difficult conversations, HR, people management, organisational culture, conflict management, New Zealand business, team performance, mediation, psychological safety, accountability, leadership development, high-performing teams

Ed Ortega has spent 20 years in Silicon Valley at the intersection of technology, strategy, and how people actually work. He's a partner at Machine & Folk, and he's one of the clearest, most grounded thinkers on AI we've ever had on Slideshow. He's also, as we say in New Zealand, a bloody good bloke.

This episode went somewhere neither of us expected.

It starts in 1950, on a factory floor in postwar Tokyo, where an obscure American statistician named W. Edwards Deming was about to change the way the world makes things. It runs through the Toyota Production System, the Andon cord, a notorious GM plant in Fremont California where one in five workers didn't show up on any given day and thermoses of vodka were a workplace accessory, and a joint venture that transformed the same chaotic workforce into one of the best-performing plants in the country.

Then it lands squarely in 2025 — and why most AI transformations are failing for exactly the same reason GM couldn't take what they learned at Fremont back to their other plants.

The constraint is gone. The process stayed. That's the problem.

We also watched a tool called Pencil build a fully designed CRM interface from a single prompt. About ten minutes, start to finish. Ed's seen the future of the designer/developer relationship and it looks nothing like the briefs, markups, and JIRA tickets most teams are still running today.

And we talked about what happens to people when AI dissolves the bottleneck their entire workflow was built around — and why that's not a threat. It's the most interesting opportunity in business right now.

No "AI is coming for your job" panic here. Ed Ortega, partner at Machine and Folk, joins Dave to talk about what AI transformation actually looks like from the inside — and then builds a working CRM prototype live on screen.Ed has spent the last few years watching companies navigate this shift in real time.

In this conversation, he explains why the fear of job displacement misses the point, why the smartest leaders are using AI to multiply their teams, and why the biggest risk right now is standing still while your competitors speed up.Halfway through, we switch gears into a live demo of Pencil — a design tool where drawing and code are the same thing — and watch Ed build a fully designed CRM app from a single prompt. In about ten minutes.

If you work with designers, developers, or anyone trying to figure out where AI fits in your business, this one is worth your time.

In this episode:

• The gap between AI fear and AI reality
• The sandwich bet: a framework for specific predictions over vague anxiety
• Why AI multiplies great teams rather than replacing them- The Cezanne vs Picasso theory of transformation
• Case study: automating document data extraction (and what the team discovered halfway through)
• The designer-developer handoff problem — and how Pencil solves it
• Live demo: building a CRM in Pencil using Claude as the engine
• Reverse migration: taking existing code back into a design environment
• What the Toyota production line has to do with your AI workflow

Links:

• Ed Ortega on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hellomundo/
• Dave Hayward on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/haywarddave/
• Machine and Folk: https://machineandfolk.com/
• Europa Creative Partners: https://europa.nz/
• Bright Objects newsletter (AI, marketing, strategy): https://europa.nz/#subscribe

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction

01:00 Ed Ortega and Machine and Folk

02:00 Is AI going to steal my job?

04:00 The sandwich bet framework

05:30 Early adopter advantage

06:30 The rising tide: multiplying engineers

08:00 The learning curve before the rocket ship

09:00 Switching from ChatGPT to Claude

11:00 Cezanne vs Picasso: two types of transformation

13:30 Agile and lean as the AI framework

15:00 Data extraction case study

18:00 Liberating people from work they shouldn't be doing

20:00 How design sprints have evolved

23:00 Vibe coding and its limits

25:00 The designer-developer handoff problem

27:00 Introducing Pencil

30:00 Toyota, Kaizen, and continuous improvement

33:30 Setting up the live demo

34:00 Demo: building a CRM in Pencil

40:00 Iterating without breaking the code

43:00 Reverse migration

45:00 Generating the Next.js prototype

49:00 Out-of-body experience for designers

50:30 Wrap up

Slideshow with Dave Hayward is produced by Europa Creative Partners.

#AI #FutureOfWork #AITransformation #VibeCoding #ProductDesign #ArtificialIntelligence #TechPodcast #ClaudeAI #MachineLearning #StartupGrowth

No "seven-figure consulting entrepreneurs" here! How do you show up online in a way that is consistent with you and your values?This episode is a lot of fun - hilarious, creative, and strategic. Check it out.Produced by ⁠Europa Creative Partners (europa.nz).⁠In this episode of Slideshow, host Dave Hayward speaks with Kerry Milne, founder and MD of Gap Strategy, about the often-misunderstood concept of personal branding.Links:Kerry Milne, LinkedIn GAP. Strategic Marketing

Dave Hayward, LinkedInThe conversation challenges common misconceptions about personal brand and reframes it as intentional reputation management for business leaders. Kerry shares her unique approach, drawing from her father's example as a small-town bank manager in 1980s Western Australia, to demonstrate how consistency and authenticity have always been at the heart of building trust.The discussion covers practical frameworks for defining your voice, signature beliefs, and content pillars, while addressing common concerns about appearing "braggy" or inauthentic. Kerry also shares insights from Dave's personal brand assessment, demonstrating how the process works in real time.Chapters00:00 Introduction: Confronting Personal Brand Scepticism03:04 Kevin Milne: The Original Personal Brand08:50 Why Personal Brand Matters for Commercial Success13:42 Liberation Through Audience Definition19:24 The Fellow Travelers Philosophy24:08 Vulnerability vs. Empathy in Professional Settings28:46 Finding Your Voice After Corporate Conformity34:32 The Five Components of Personal Brand40:15 Credibility vs. Authority: Understanding the Difference48:20 Dave's Personal Brand Revealed: The Chaos Monk55:37 Content Pillars and the Redo Paradox62:14 Networking Strategy and Channel Selection68:30 Dave's Blueprint Analysis and Implementation75:12 Wrap UpKeywordspersonal branding, reputation management, professional development, LinkedIn strategy, content strategy, business leadership, authenticity, consistency, entrepreneurship, career development, personal brand framework