An Interview with Peter Cowie
Peter Cowie is the founder of innovative consulting agency From Good to Great, runs the Ad Forum summits, and regularly works with Blitzworks, the strategic and creative agency launched by Marcus Brown, Ajab Samrai and John Pallant.
Life Experiences and Career Path
Cowie cites his early experience on an international rowing team — and the daily training that this entailed — as being fundamental to the development of his ideas around collaborative working. Everyone on the team needed to pull together in a specific fashion, and support each other, to power the boat through the water effectively.
After marrying the love of his life at the age of twenty-two and becoming the father to three children by twenty-eight, Cowie was made Board Director at Collett Dickenson Pearce. His propensity to build dynamic teams led to the subsequent founding of Oystercatchers with his business partner Suki Thompson.
Peter surmises that the key to success is getting as close as you can to clever people — something he says he learnt early on in his career.
Working Through the Pandemic
For Peter, the pandemic, and the shift to home and distance working it necessitated, made him appreciate the different pace of work life — with running from meeting to meeting becoming a thing of the past. He explains how he has learnt that he can remain effectively connected to colleagues and partners via screens… although he does lament the missed opportunities for business lunches.
Blitz Squad
When asked about the team he would assemble for a dream Blitz Squad (the consortium of multi-discipline creative professionals that Blitzworks assembles to deliver for its clients), Cowie mentioned the Chief Executive of Pablo — Gareth Mercer — as well as Graham Fink’s father — a former butler, now an artist — along with some key team members at the agencies he currently works with. Peter values high energy, warmth and laughter, and suggests that they are the key traits for success, along with talent.
He also added the founders of Neverland, Jon Forsyth and Simon Massey, Graham Fink, and Heston Blumenthal, who is, in his opinion, a creative genius. Cowie recalled getting ‘married’ to Heston on a mountaintop in the middle of the night, but declined to elaborate further…
