Robert Berkeley and the business of asking better questions

Robert Berkeley has a preferred word for his interest in other people. Curiosity. When EKCS promoted an interview in which he said that nosiness could take you a long way, he appeared in the comments to tidy up the vocabulary. “I prefer ‘curiosity’ to ‘nosiness’! Sounds better.” For someone who makes a living helping creative teams work together, the distinction has its uses. Curiosity gets invited to the meeting. Nosiness would very much like to know what happened afterwards.

The small correction is a useful introduction to Berkeley, co-founder and CEO of EKCS and executive chairman of InnerGroup. He operates in the part of marketing where the conversation turns from an idea to the work required to produce it. There are formats to deliver, people to coordinate and decisions to make. He also hosts Inside Jobs, interviewing the people who lead brands’ internal creative agencies. His business and his microphone keep bringing him back to the same subject: how people get things done.

The newspaper education

Berkeley began his career in the newspaper industry in the 1980s. That is an apt starting point for a career in creative production. A newspaper combines a creative undertaking with a delivery obligation; eventually, the beautifully considered page has to leave the building. His later work would carry him into advertising, digital content and the growing world of in-house agencies, while keeping production at its centre.

In 2002, he and Tariq Husain established the business that became EKCS. The company brought production services to brands, agencies and media businesses. Its early identity, Express KCS, suited a proposition involving speed and delivery. As the customer base and range of work changed, that identity became a less comfortable fit. A company can outgrow its description long before it outgrows the habit of answering to it.

The formal shortening arrived in September 2021. By then, clients were already calling the company EKCS. The rebrand followed their lead and acknowledged a broader creative production business. Berkeley described the exercise as a chance to reconsider what the business had become. It was a small lesson in listening: sometimes customers have edited the name before the company has commissioned the stationery.

Two founders, room for disagreement

Husain is central to this story. EKCS describes him as the leader of its Indian operations and the architect of Mediaferry, the workflow technology developed within the business. Berkeley’s public work includes explaining the proposition, talking to clients and interviewing creative leaders. The partnership joins different kinds of expertise around a shared production problem.

In a 2024 conversation with Jason Swenk, Berkeley described a relationship sustained by common values and mutual respect despite differences in personality and style. Major decisions were shared. A consequential hire or move would not happen without the other founder knowing about it. That gives disagreement somewhere useful to go: into a conversation before a commitment.

The same interview covered a harder adjustment. The founders had pursued newspaper work, then had to respond as that market declined. Berkeley described a reduction of roughly a fifth of the business and a change of emphasis towards creative teams seeking quality and flexible production support. He also discussed the danger of chasing revenue without giving enough attention to profit. The account contains the ordinary, uncomfortable work of changing direction: deciding which customers to serve and making the operation fit.

“As a naturally nosey person, I love asking questions.”

Robert Berkeley, on why he started Inside Jobs

A microphone with a business question attached

There is an unusually personal explanation behind Inside Jobs. Introducing the podcast, Berkeley writes about being a parent and watching children prefer their own experiments to expert advice. People insist on discovering things for themselves. Occasionally, things break. His interest is in the decisions that follow, and in the lives that lead people to make them.

He says that fascination prompted him to start the show. Presented with the In-House Agency Forum, Inside Jobs offers him a way to understand the in-house model through the experiences of the people running it. EKCS’s own work sits close to those teams, but the interviews make room for the individual route into the job. A title is only the beginning of the conversation.

One guest, Donovan Stohlberg, arrived in corporate creative leadership through theatre. Another, Ekaterina Bueva, discussed the international agency system at Kraft Heinz, including its internal teams known as The Kitchen. Beth Anne Mandia described changing the standing of an internal creative team at TruStage. The vocabulary varies with the guest. The recurring interest is in the movement from receiving requests to having a meaningful say in what happens next.

That makes the show a useful companion to Berkeley’s day job. Production companies encounter briefs, deadlines and revisions. Interviews can examine the decisions upstream of all three. Who gets asked to contribute? How does a team earn confidence? What changes when its colleagues begin treating it as a participant in the business? These are working relationships, with budgets and job titles attached.

What fifty conversations changed

After interviewing more than 50 senior in-house leaders, Berkeley reconsidered a familiar question: what did the successful ones have in common? His first answer had emphasised their differences. They came from an assortment of professions and followed remarkably varied routes. Looking again, he began to see shared habits beneath those different biographies.

His 2025 essay drew attention to humility combined with influence, resilience and a commitment to building a brand over time. He described leaders who ask good questions and develop an understanding of the business around them. Those observations belong to his interpretation of the interviews. They also explain the kind of leadership he chooses to examine: patient, curious and involved in the daily negotiations that keep a team useful.

There is a welcome awkwardness in this view of creative work. A company may have a tidy chart showing who reports to whom. The chart offers rather less help when several people want different things from the same deadline. Berkeley’s interest in individual judgement gives that daily complication its proper place in the story. The people doing the work have to make the arrangement function.

When the internal tool leaves the building

There is a parallel technology story. Mediaferry originated inside EKCS to automate production workflows and coordinate high-volume campaigns. It emerged from a company already carrying out the work it was trying to organise. The product’s history places Berkeley and Husain together as founders, with Husain as its technical architect.

By September 2024, EKCS was announcing Mediaferry AI for news publishers and broadcast media companies. The audience connected the business to its publishing roots, while the proposition reflected its continuing investment in software. Production expertise and workflow technology had become related parts of the offering.

A further collaboration followed in October 2025, when EKCS partnered with CHILI publish on templates for its GraFx platform. The work covered digital, print, animation and video, with templates intended to support variations across channels. This is the practical end of the automation conversation: the mechanics of producing related assets while maintaining a recognisable brand.

For Berkeley, these developments extend a familiar concern into different tools. Creative teams have to turn decisions into deliverables, often across several formats. Software changes what can be coordinated and repeated. Someone still has to decide what the work should accomplish, who will approve it and whether the result is ready to go.

A wider job for the same partnership

InnerGroup launched in March 2025 with Fred Schuster as CEO and James Sanderson as global president. An EKCS company, it brought advisory work together with access to production services and technology. Its arrival gave the founders a broader way to work with internal marketing organisations: examining how they operate as well as helping deliver their content.

In April 2026, Sanderson succeeded Schuster as CEO. Berkeley, speaking as chairman, described Sanderson’s involvement from the beginning and the company’s next phase of growth. The appointment puts Berkeley in another kind of working relationship, supporting a chief executive responsible for running the newer organisation.

The distinction matters in a personal profile. A founder’s career can become an endless list of company announcements. Here, the development is also a change in Berkeley’s responsibilities. He remains identified as EKCS’s co-founder and CEO while serving as InnerGroup’s executive chairman. The work now includes helping other leaders build an operation around an idea he and Husain have pursued for years.

Occasionally, somebody hands him a guitar

His American travels have supplied some less corporate memories. Berkeley recalls being invited onstage to perform in Nashville, only to be upstaged by his son, who had joined the trip. The photograph shows him with an acoustic guitar at a microphone, musicians behind him. It is a pleasing interruption to the succession of conference appearances and job titles: a business trip with an unexpected set list.

In August 2026, he appeared on My Duvet Flip to discuss careers, entrepreneurship and leadership with Jackson Parsons. The conversation returned to curiosity, the habit he is willing to defend even in a comments section. After years of asking creative leaders how they arrived at their jobs, he was answering questions about his own.

That exchange suits the career. Berkeley helps organise the making of things, but keeps making room for the person who has to make the decision. The next useful question may concern a production system, a founder’s disagreement or the path somebody took into creative work. Give him a microphone and there is a reasonable chance he will ask it.