This week, we caught up with Tamika Abaka-Wood — Senior Strategy Director at the creative management consultancy B+A, and co-founder of Plantain Papers. Tamika works with clients including Nike, Google and Beats by Dre to help them overcome cultural challenges, and anticipate what future trends are on the horizon.
Tamika joined B+A as its first employee on a ten day contract, and four years later she is a driving force within the organisation. Here’s her story:
Newnham: What were you like growing up? How would your friends and family have described you?
Abaka-Wood: My parents met in their twenties in Elephant and Castle, got married in Hackney and raised me and my younger brother Samuel in Barking, a place which is neither ‘properly Essex’ nor ‘properly East London’, as it sits squarely in-between two very different worlds which I had to navigate. Duality was a running theme of my experience growing up — I have often felt like both an insider and outsider navigating culture, class and race (worth reading this which Tamika wrote). Being an insider-outsider has given me multiple perspectives and has given me a more nuanced, empathetic view of the world and the people within it, I think.
I was a really curious kid — curious about different types of people, and what their relationships meant. I was interested in a…
