Surveying the tightly packed group of 19 award-winning CMOs, I had two challenges. The first was being heard over the Broadway mezzo-soprano who was rehearsing in a nearby room. The second was making sure the conversation about leadership was as scintillating as the singer.

As it turns out, this particular Tuesday at The CMO Club’s annual CMO Awards was a smash hit. The singer stopped practice shortly ...

While assessing four distinct gins, a few of the 27 CMOs assembled quietly wondered if there was any connection between that tasting process and the promised B2B marketing simplification workshop that was to follow. Before I explain the undiluted connection, let me provide a bit more context. I hosted this gathering right before the kickoff of The CMO Club Fall Summit, an action-packed conference that yielded liters of insights ...

The first time I bristled at the word “persona” was around 1998, when we were working on one of the early websites for Panasonic. One of our clients had come back all pumped up from a Forrester conference at which they declared personas were the only way to drive effective customer experiences. Next thing you know, we’re drafting faux bios of stereotypical visitors like Donna Dealseeker and Tom Techie ...

When I call my summer reading list “eclectic,” I’m not kidding. I’ve bounced from a Mary Renault classic to Lee Child’s latest; childhood memoirs from Trevor Noah and Tara Westover; biographies of Ben Franklin and Richard Holbrooke; Yuval Noah Harari’s look at the future and Georgia Hunter’s reimagining of how her Polish relatives survived the Holocaust. Since I listened to about half of these ...

If I’m going to shout anyone’s quotes from the rooftops, I’m glad they’re Thomas Barta’s. Why? Well, it’s not often you have an hour-long chat with someone who has enjoyed (and is enjoying) such a storied career. He was a partner and senior marketer at McKinsey, led the world’s largest study of marketing leadership (68,000 assessments—not too shabby!), published a book on ...

Right when my wife and I were about to head off to Paris (perhaps the start of every good story?), the savvy folks at Airbnb delivered the summer edition of their beautiful magazine, which they co-produce with Hearst. Having read the Fall 2018 issue cover to cover and being struck by the irony of a “digital” brand reverting to “traditional” print, I was only slightly disappointed to not find any ...