Beyond the Conference Room: How Travel Sparks Creativity

As creative leaders, we must keep our minds young. And nothing keeps you young like travel. To see the world, especially the remote corners with all their mystery and charm, is like feeding your creative soul with nourishment that can last weeks, months, and even years. These experiences permeate your brain and when mixed with everyday life translate beautifully into original creative ideas. Forget cigarettes and booze, travel is the single best creative stimulant I have ever found.

As worldwide chief creative officer of the advertising agency GREY, I help oversee the creative work of offices in 96 countries. Twice a year, we bring our top creative minds from around the world to gather in one location for the Creative Council. These trips are about the importance of gaining perspective and sharing ideas, and where we hold the Council plays a large role in the group dynamic and massively influences what we all take from this invaluable time together.

So when you are planning a retreat for one of the largest advertising agencies in the world and 18 of its most creative employees from across the globe, you have to choose the location carefully. After scouring the planet for unsuspecting, off-the-grid places to get inspired this year, I decided that the Neemrana Fort-Palace — a remarkably beautiful 15th century military compound in rural India — would be the place we would call home for three days.

The Neemrana Fort-Palace at night. (Photo: Tor Myhren)

It’s like India’s version of The Grand Budapest Hotel, but built 550 years before Wes Anderson made the movie. All the angles were perfectly wrong, and the archaic remnants of another time were scattered around everywhere. Where some modern hotels might hang a Damian Hirst, the Neemrana hung an old rusty sword and a badly stained velvet flag. The rooms were giant and dark and the windows tiny and probably designed for shooting arrows out of and nothing much else.

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A sword on the wall at the Neemrana. (Photo: Tor Myhren)

The sun was dropping behind the tiny town in the Rajasthan valley below as members of the Council began to sprinkle in from their respective corners of the world. Jimmy from Denmark, Eduardo from Ecuador, and Ali from Singapore. Then Malvika from India, Rodrigo from Brazil, and Fabian from Germany. Alvin scooted in late from China, then Rachel the American, Diego the Argentinian, and Patrick the Canadian.

It was late by the time all 18 of us arrived. Soon most went to bed to help fight the inevitable jet lag of the next few days, while a small adventurous group wandered down to the village, found a “holy man,” and got high off his charas, a sweet milky beverage laced with hash.

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A holy man. (Photo: Tor Myhren)

And so began our 20th Creative Council. My colleagues are the same people who invented the E*TRADE Baby, created an app responsible for recovering over a dozen abducted children in Canada, saved 20 lives and counting in the UK with a CPR technique based on a Bee-Gees song, invented a bindi (the dot many Indian women put on their forehead) that is absorbed into the body to give critical nutrients to women whose culture does not believe in ingesting pills, and — importantly — put Rob Lowe in those weird DIRECTV ads.

Group shot. (Photo: Tor Myhren)

Needless to say, the Orlando Sheraton probably wasn’t gonna inspire these folks. But neither was the Four Seasons in Paris.

Let me explain why.

We do the Creative Council for only one reason: to inspire. Ultimately, it needs to be like mainlining pure inspiration from a foreign source you simply can’t find anywhere near your home. So it has to be remote. Going somewhere we can’t escape from is critical for our low-attention-span group. Too many distractions in big cities. Too much access, too much nightlife, too much Internet. We tend to go where wi-fi is low-fi, if available at all. Our previous Council was at the Ice Hotel in Kiruna, Sweden. Our next will be on safari in Tanzania.

Looking over my shoulder to the fort and the valley. (Photo: Tor Myhren)

In that context, the Neemrana Fort-Palace — a totally bizarre, low-frills military complex built into a small mountainside and located over three hours from the nearest city — seems like a fairly ideal candidate for our Council.

I woke up on day one and a monkey jumped off the iron swing in my living room, ran over, and hugged my leg. At this moment, I knew we were in the perfect place for this crew. We all ate breakfast in the only restaurant in the fort and discussed how magical and strange the environment was. After breakfast we went to the meeting room, which had giant windows and a nice balcony populated by hoards of monkeys.

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Monkeys in the window. (Photo: Tor Myhren)

The Council has a well-earned reputation for playing hard. But from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day, we work even harder. We find a great conference room with a view, then we close the doors and the shades. For three days, we become the harshest critics of our own work. We watch films, look at websites, study apps, burn through ads, critique posters, and interrogate designs. Along the way, we share best practices, look at winning pitches, examine industry and technology trends, and bring in local speakers like artists, comedians, and filmmakers to inspire us.

Conference room over my head. (Photo: Tor Myhren)

Neemrana was perfect, but all good things come to an end. So on the final night we had our traditional “Last Supper,” which is always locally themed. This one, Maharaja Nights, was particularly colorful. We had our heads wrapped in a pagdi, ate in a dungeon-like dining room, drank red wine, and then made our way to our homemade karaoke room. Karaoke is our longest standing tradition at the Council, and we were the first to ship a karaoke machine into the Neemrana Fort-Palace in Rajasthan — as we were the first to do the same at the Ice Hotel in Sweden.

Related: What I Learned About Life and Love Driving the Roads of India

Here I am, wearing a pagdi. (Photo: Tor Myhren)

Eventually, we graduated to the ping-pong hall, where we had a heated battle of enemy nations while soaking in the local Indian vibe for one last evening. The enormous wealth, extreme poverty, vibrant colors, pungent odors, infanticide controversies, Hindustani music, rape headlines, smiling people, and curry spices were no doubt infiltrating our minds. Everyone was talking excitedly about new ideas that were created in the past three days, picking each others’ brains on how to make their own ideas bigger and better.

And many of those ideas would not exist if we weren’t stranded somewhere in the middle of nowhere.

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