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The CMO Confidential Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast, I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com welcome to CMO Confidential,
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the podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions and choices that you go with being the Head of marketing. Hosted by five time CMO Mike Linton
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Typeface has completely changed the process of large campaign executions. Everyone knows AI can help with images and headlines, but the real impact is making the leap from a creative brief to a live, multi channel large campaign at speed. Typeface just announced its marketing orchestration engineering, the first platform built to automate campaign workflows. You can roll out campaigns that used to take months in just a few hours. TypeFace uses Agentic AI to orchestrate the entire process, taking one campaign and instantly orchestrating it into thousands of personalized experiences across ads, email and video. Major brands like Asics and Post holdings are already transforming their marketing with Typeface. See how to move from brief to personalized campaigns in hours, not months at Typeface AI slash cmo. Welcome marketers, advertisers and those who love them. The Chief Marketing Officer, Confidential CMO Confidential is a program that takes you inside the drama, the decisions and the politics that go with being the head of marketing at any company and in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite. I'm Mike Linton, the former CMO of Best Buy, eBay, Farmers Insurance and Ancestry.com here today with my guest Dr. David Bray. Today's topic Managing the Geopolitical Landscape. Now David is a Distinguished Fellow and Chair of the Accelerator with the Alfred Lee Loomis Innovations Consul at the Henry L. Stimson Center. I can't believe I got through that without tripping over any of the words. He's a non resident Distinguished Fellow at the Business Executives for National Security and previously served in several bipartisan roles advising on technology, bioterrorism, cybersecurity, disinformation, and all kinds of other issues that very rarely crossed your desk 10 years ago. Full disclosure, we met at an AI conference and I thought his perspective would be helpful and just too fun not to share with our listeners. Welcome David.
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C
Thank you Mike. Great to be here with you. We're going to have a great conversation.
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A
Excellent first question. Our listeners are almost all business people. Why should they care about geopolitics in the first place? Then after you answer that, you can Tell us why this has become so much gained so much importance in such a short period of time.
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C
Well, I would say the reason why business leaders, including marketing folks, should care about geopolitics is we're in one of those moments in which we're playing catch up with the ripple effects of technologies we've rolled out over the last 20 years. It may feel like AI is fairly new, but AI has been slowly building momentum, and we're now in that interesting exponential curve. But it's not just AI, it's sensors, it's space technologies, it's biotech, it's quantum tech. And so we're going to go through a very massive change in how power is distributed in the world. And that will include how it's done through businesses as well as through nations. And we may end up in another world in which it's not about nations or businesses at all, it's about networks. But you should care, because increasingly we're seeing divides and rifts between different parts of populations. There's a lack of trust. In fact, the Edelman Trust Barometer found last year 61% of respondents around the world have a moderate to high grievance against one or more groups. And some of those groups are not just governments. They're CEOs and their businesses. And 40% of respondents around the world feel it's legitimate to do an act of violence, including doxing, swatting and the like, as a result of that perceived grievance. And so the companies that.
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A
Did you just say 40%?
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C
40%. Yep. I tell people we're in interest and it's been growing this way. If you've been following the numbers, this has been 15, 20 years in the making. And it's partly because a funny thing happened on the way to globalization. Not everyone perceived that they were benefiting. And now you're talking about the future of work and AI putting people out of jobs. And I don't know if you've been seeing, just this year alone, graduation speakers. Some of the graduation speakers that talk about AI are getting booed. And so this is showing where, not just the United States, but where the world is going. And, and so companies, if you really want to have customers for life, you've got to figure out a better way to actually engender trust with your customers or your partners. Otherwise you may have a backlash.
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A
So how did this, you mentioned that a new distribution of power. How did this happen in such a short period of time?
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C
Well, I often feel like while history doesn't exactly repeat itself, it Rhymes. And so if you go back in time, actually, the reason why I know all this is I came back from Afghanistan in 2009. I was a nonpartisan, jointly reporting to the Office of Secretary of Defense and the Executive Office of the President. And at the time, if you remember 2009, there was a global financial crash. And so I got asked to do a summary for the Executive Office of the President about what the future of work might look like in 2020, 2025. And like all things, you only have five days to answer the president. I came back in five days and said, well, looking at current trends in 2009, we're going to see five technological revolutions and AI, bio, space, quantum, and the miniaturization of robots and drones. But if you go back to 1890s, we've seen the same thing happen. Where there was telegraphs, there was electricity, there were steam engines, and that created a polarization of our society. Actually, the Congress was actually more polarized in the 1890s than it is now. If you remember, Pollster and Hearst were selling newspapers with sensationalistic headlines that didn't actually match the story.
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A
I don't remember because I wasn't alive then, but I read about it.
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C
I was going to say, you weren't alive then, but we can go back to history. And it was called yellow journalism. And there was also we went to war with Spain over a disinformation event. Remember the Maine. Supposedly you should have done it, when in fact it was just blew up. And actually there were security guards being hired by railroad companies that were shooting at workers who were protesting over working conditions. So I put forward back in 2009, I said, if we look at what's happened in the past, usually when there's this sort of massive series of parallel tech revolutions, there's haves and have nots. People are anxious. They're trying to figure out how they're going to provide for themselves and their families. And the brain does not like to stay in a state of anxiety for long. It wants to go to anger, because anger, at least, you feel like you're in control, even if it's misplaced. And that's why you have so many conspiracy theories and so many grievances, is people don't know which way is up, and they're angry and they're blaming companies, they're blaming countries, they're blaming different folks. And so the challenge is how to navigate this when a lie can get halfway around the world, when truth is still getting its sneakers off.
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So it's A. I just want to summarize. If I put 10 people in a room, four of them are okay with doing something bad.
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C
Yeah.
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A
And this has happened before. Yes, probably more than once, going back and back. So. And then humans in general get better at it or they become more accepting or becomes normal. Because, you know, we're going to talk about the impact on supply chains and data and regulation and all this other stuff next. But. Right. Do I have faith that this is going to self correct or is this different than the telegraph and electricity and everything?
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C
I think it will self correct eventually. The question is how much messier will it get? And so I'll give a more recent story. Back in 2014, I spoke at a singularity event. This was exponential medicine. Ray Kurzweil, Peter Dandis are the ones that believe at some point in time where we used a singularity where AI improves itself faster than we can. And so I gave a talk on exponential biology and said, that's great. But you mentioned this word, governance. What is governance? And I said, it's how we make sure we don't fall into anarchy. And even in 2014 they said, well, we don't think we need governance. So we went our separate ways. And then three years later in 2017, they're like, well, maybe there's something to this governance thing. Maybe. Could you be our faculty chair for disruption in governance? Which I love that they put the two together. But even then, 2017-2020, before COVID I
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was giving like anarchy and structure.
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C
Well, I had to go to Silicon Valley and make the case as to why care about governance. And Silicon Valley was like, eh, we don't need no governance. And so we are living in that world. And I think we will figure out new ways of doing this that actually helps people feel less anxious, that feel like they can provide, that they can have purpose. But right now I challenge both sides of the aisle. I'm a nonpartisan, so I get shot at from both sides, but I challenge both the left and the right. What are your solutions for the future of work? And right now it's, you know, they're just throwing their hands up in the air. And so until that's solved, whether it's Europe, the United States, South America, Africa or Asia, people are anxious and that's spilling over to anger. And that's why you see the distrust and the violence.
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A
Okay, so let's talk about the impact of all this distrust and violence and everything on supply chains, data and regulation and then what it's doing to business
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C
leaders so let's begin with supply chains. So supply chains, interestingly enough, obviously there was first Venezuela, now there's Iran. Iran has gone longer than people expected. And the straight, it's unclear every given day is it open or is it closed? And I've been telling boards they should be prepared for a period of increased uncertainty as to the state of anything, including your supply chains. And so it's not that you want your board or your CEO to be micromanaging the company, because that would be death, but what you should be doing is saying, what will we do if we can no longer source from this part of the world, or we can no longer source from this part of the world, or source from this part of the world and have tripwires already identified, that if this happens, then we're going to fall back to this backup option, because the best laid plans will probably only last about two or three weeks before something else will happen in the world. You don't want to have board meetings every two or three weeks, but what you do want to have is your C suite. Say, here's our fallback option if we can no longer source from the Middle east or we can no longer source from Asia, because who knows? Fortunately, President Trump met with Chairman Xi recently and they decided not to go to violence. But there's no guarantee in a few or few weeks now. At the same time, there may also be other things that surprise us. I'm hearing this summer, and again, Putin gets a voice, but it may actually be that we actually finally see a ceasefire. It'll take the hot war and maybe make it a cold war between Ukraine and Russia, which would be very interesting because already Europe has now approved, just recently, in the spring, $90 billion euro. Sorry, €90 billion euros as a loan to Ukraine to help Ukraine rebuild if there is a ceasefire. I'm also hearing there would actually be money on the table to help Russia rebuild as well. So, you know, the world is in an interesting position where boards now have to plan for contingencies if something is no longer accessible. But they also have to be keeping their eyes scanning for opportunities because there may be opportunities to help with reconstruction too. We are taking a short break from
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this show for a word from our sponsor, Typeface, To orchestrate workflows across channels. Meet ARC agents, your AI teammates handling complexity so you can focus on what matters all within a reimagined workspace where you and AI create as one spaces works the way you do create anything from documents to videos to entire campaigns at scale. Our agents help you Craft campaign storyboards powered by your brand hub, giving you the perfect starting point. Transform one asset into countless variations for every audience and market. Join industry leaders already reimagining their content lifecycle with typeface. Welcome to marketing's next chapter, where every story finds its voice. Now back to our discussion.
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So that's reconstructing. Super interesting. I want to talk about supply chain and planning and everything, because one of the things you can look at is microprocessors and chips and the concentration of the machines that make them. You know, if you read the book Chip Words, you get a whole exercise in this and you think, so much business depends on this, and so much of this stuff is sourced from around the world. How do I contingency plan for stuff like that? It's so complex.
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C
It is. And I don't want to thoroughly depress your viewers, but I'm here to tell you, and I can tell you openly that I have seen evidence going back at least three and a half, almost four years now, that chips sold to the United States from a country of 1.3 billion people were trying to found home. And this was the case where it was U.S. equipment. And certain parts of the U.S. equipment somehow, possibly even inside the United States, through insider threat, certain parts got replaced with Huawei boards and other things like that that we're attempting to call home. And this happened to be in some very sensitive environments. But we also have evidence to believe that they're basically just trying to figure out wherever they can get on routers, on switches. And we shouldn't be surprised, because while all of us like our smartphones and we like the fact that our smartphones aren't that expensive, what we succeeded in doing over the last 15 years was a massive technology transfer in terms of how to build chips. And if you know how to build chips, then you also know how to reverse engineer chips. And again, geopolitics gets a vote.
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A
How do I, if I'm thinking as a, I'm on the board, a bunch of people listening are presenting boards, on the boards, whatever, and I'm planning for the possibilities. How do I even get my head around that? Because, you know, chips are the easiest example because they go in so many things. But how do I contingency plan for that? Especially when I look at how many chips are made in Taiwan, for example, or how many things are assembled and out of the country. How do I get my head around all this?
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C
So for public companies, they should have a risk management committee. The challenge is most risk management committees are only used to business risks and are not familiar with either tech or geopolitical risks. So my first step is your board should ask your risk management committee to upgrade itself and include perspectives. And it doesn't have to be that they're full fledged board members. But just like no one would ever go to the board without understanding what a P and L profit and loss sheet looks like. Need to have people on your board either as directors or advisors to the directors on technology risk and geopolitical risk. The second thing that they should do is they should go to the company and say, okay, general counsel, you are going to not just be our compliance people, general counsel, you are going to be the people that are going to increasingly scan for geopolitical risk. Working alongside the CIO and cio, we used to look at you as you kept the IT trains running on time and that's great. But you also need to get smart about technology risk as well and that together you will be briefing the CEO as to how do I get my head around again, hardware risk or how do I get my head around the fact that now helium is increasingly tied up and we're already seeing Taiwan play pay somewhere between two to four times as much as they normally paid for helium because it's tied up in the Gulf and that's going to have ripple effects on the cost of chips. And if anything, I tell people you're going to have to set aside certain things that you want to have for a rainy day. So you may not need that hardware yet. But we already are seeing, for example, certain Mac M4s are backordered for at least 9 to 12 months. And so if you think you're going to need them within the next year, maybe you need to put in a purchase order now, even if it's not actually due or it's not needed for your business planning until next year.
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A
So we were talking pre show about the pressure on CEOs and how many and CEO turnover and I assume that's probably going to happen as CIOs or CTOs as well, given this pressure. Why don't you talk about that and the impact of all this on the top jobs in a company.
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C
Right. So what we're seeing in the last six to eight months is record numbers of CEOs resign voluntarily. And so I think what you're seeing is they're just saying, you know, it's not worth it anymore. This is not what I signed up for. This ambiguity and also just the public scrutiny because I guarantee what's going to happen is every company is going to make the best decision they can with the information they have available at the time. But there's so much of a fog of war. You're going to discover things in one week and two weeks and three weeks that say you have to update your, your decisions. So I think the way you solve this is it's hiring for leaders in your C suite as your CEO, even with your board and say, look, we need to actually reframe what we do, which is not perfect decision making. In fact, I was at an event, it was with the Wall Street Journal in December. Yeah, these were general counsels who said, I guess we finally have to make decisions with incomplete information. And I sort of smile because the reality is that's been the world for decades, but now lawyers are recognizing it, accountants are recognizing it. And so business needs to recognize. What you really need to do is frame the idea that we will make decisions with the best information we have, but again have tripwires that say if new information comes to light that we need to change our plans, that's okay. And in fact, that's what we should be doing is new information comes in, we, we may need to update our business strategy, our customer engagement, our marketing and the like.
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Let's talk about the marketing, because if I'm sitting here and I'm marketing and I think of 4 of 10 people
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will violence to me. Yes, exactly.
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Savage me if they get the chance. How should marketers be thinking about all this stuff? Because once you put out the marketing, you can't take it back, Correct?
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C
Yes. And in fact, we have seen over the last few years cases where marketing backfired and there was effort. So I'm not a marketer, so I can't necessarily give advice to marketers other than to say, find a way to have early signal networks. And what I mean by that, we're in a world in which things that are faint echoes can very rapidly become very real things. And if you're only sort of looking in the known places that you normally go, you may miss something that's a weak signal. That's both an opportunity or telling you something to avoid. And so one of the things I've been doing actually since I got back from Afghanistan in 2009 is I started off first with an in person community and now it's a signal community of about 300 people where the deal is it's non attribution. We don't talk about who said what. We can talk about the ideas, but not who said what and it really is just tracking what we're seeing in tech and data and geopolitics. You as a marketer may want to have a similar community. It doesn't have to be 300 people, but it really is just like, where are we seeing, for example, it's again, it's only fairly recently in the last few weeks because it's graduation time that we're seeing graduation speakers get booed over AI. Well, that should tell you something if you're a marketer, in terms of when I make my next ad, maybe I shouldn't necessarily be leaning into, or if
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I do, I shouldn't announce that it's an AI ad. But this says, this also says to me, and we've had some of our guests, particularly Kim Whitler, Virginia talk about you gotta be really aware of your own echo chamber as a marketer. And if you're not getting input from people that are mad at you or don't agree with you, you are gonna step in it.
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C
Pretty big spot on. Well, and that's what link so what I celebrate about President Lincoln. He intentionally made his cabinet be a set of rivals, including people that ran against him, and he figured out a way to make a big enough tent. What you're pointing on is what we in the intelligence community always does, which is if we go into any situation and we're all thinking the same thing, then we're all irrelevant here. What we really want is people thinking differently, seeing around corners. And I call this collective intelligence. In fact, that's what motivated me after I responded to the events of 911 and I saw after 911 and the anthrax event. I saw people making mistakes that were very smart people. And I asked why and it was because they didn't have enough different perspectives. And so I think good leaders and I think good CEOs, good marketers will create a big enough tent where, where you can say we're all united under the goal of making sure our company succeeds. But it's okay to be a responsible heretic. It's okay to say, I think that's something we need to change, because that's either silly or it's out of date and the person's not penalized. But you and I know there's a lot of organizations right now that if you said that out loud, your career might be sidelined.
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Oh, sidelined. Because there's a lot of group think.
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C
Yeah.
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You know, while we're on it, I'm going to jump to jump the queue a little bit. You use the word responsible heretic.
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C
Yes.
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And one of the things you can see, particularly in some marketing places, is the company is taking sociopolitical stance. It doesn't have to.
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C
No.
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But it takes them anyways. And then it gets in hot water. It doesn't know how to get out of it. Some of our guests have said, and I think this is where the responsible heretic is going, is that is because they're not listening to the other side. They're crushing it. Tell us about responsible heretics. And if I have that question right, sure.
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C
Yeah. So I think responsible heretics are people you intentionally bring in and you give them permission to disagree. You say, at the end of the day, we're going to make a decision. And if you're okay with, once we make a decision, we're all going to move forward in the interim. It's almost like in the military, we say, permission to speak freely, and a good XO will turn around and say, tell me before I commit the action, if there's something I should know. Now, I think what you're touching on is we saw this happen again in the 1880s, 1890s, when things felt so anxious and felt so turbulent. In the 1890s, there were people that would do virtue signaling where they would come out and they might pin an op ed or they might take a stance that may not necessarily be tied directly to their business or even tied to how they're living, but they felt like that was signaling something. But as you noted, that can actually be dividing and actually could be pulling people apart. And so I have chosen the very vastly unpopular route currently by remaining a nonpartisan. I feel like you're intelligent. Intelligence officers should not pick a political side because bad things happen. But I think the same thing could be true for business, which is the reality is, in any given election year, there will be someone who becomes president, and you may support them, you may not. But the reality is we have to move forward as a country. And right now, what we're seeing is people who feel like. And again, this goes back to the anxiety leading to anger, leading to grievances. I think people feel like if they're not heard on either side of the aisle, it's okay to hold on to that grievance. When I'm like, no, no, no. A good stoic says, whatever happens, you say good, and you proceed to recognize that the only person you can really change is yourself. So change your actions, given whatever's happened, to make the world a better place.
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A
Hey, so following on here, there's A bunch of companies managing employees and managing issues where people are saying, I don't want to engage with the government, I don't want to engage with the military. Thoughts on that and thoughts about how you manage employees within the organization that have strong feelings about the government or the military or whatever.
- [24:15]
C
Right. So I would say at the end of the day, this is where good leaders for a company need to communicate. Why are we here? What's our purpose? And ideally, you know, it's not just to bring in money, hopefully it is actually, you know, to delight our customers or to deliver the best service possible in whatever industry we're in now you're going to have employees because again, what I tell people is we have super empowered people with smartphones. There are 2 billion out of 8.2 billion people with smartphones. Smartphones, you can call anybody a moment's notice in the world. Also, hopefully, with their permission, you can track any person or any asset tied to them using air tags and download satellite footage as recent as 15 minutes ago using commercial apps. That's at 0.25 meter resolution. So we've given you the capabilities of the CIA and the KGB with a smartphone circuit. 25, 0.25 meter resolution if you're in Argentina, by the way, 1.25. Even higher resolution if you're in Argentina, winning. But anyway, so. And that's 15 minutes ago. So, you know, when do we start worrying about CEOs and C suites where someone's going to pull up satellite footage just where they were anyway? I raise that because I guarantee you Presidents Reagan, Presidents Bush 41, President Clinton, and even President Bush 43 would have loved to have had your smartphone in the situation where. And so what marketers need to recognize is we've given people the capabilities of the CIA and the KGB circuit late 1970s, early 1980s. But what we haven't done is figure out how do you deal with a world in which everyone's now a mini version of the CIA? And it's keeping in mind that in the 1980s, there was a thing called Operation Denver. It was done by KGB. In the 1980s, they were trying to spread disinformation that somehow the CIA created HIV AIDS in a lab. It was wrong, it was untrue. And by the mid-1990s, Gorbachev, during glasnost, came out and actually said, yeah, we did it, we owned it. But people still think it's true. But it took the entire KGB to do the 1980s. Now, for things that we think are conspiracy theories and Again, you can never disprove a conspiracy theory, but things we reasonably think are a conspiracy theory. There's evidence that of the millions of impressions you see online, they're really generated by 7 or 8 people using lots of bots. And so that's an.
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A
Interesting to be watching Slow horses.
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C
Yeah, exactly.
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A
Because now everyone's a miniature version of the kgb.
- [26:34]
C
And I think what it's going to get us to, I think in the short term is just like how in business we had the word caveat emptor, buyer beware. Yeah, I think again, there's going to be initially a reaction that says, don't assume everything you see online is real until you've triangulated from multiple sources. And so you as a marketer need to think about how do I not just have my company line, but do I find advocates? Maybe they're advocates from other companies, other alliances, other nonprofits or things like that. Because increasingly, discernment comes from not just what you say, because they're going to say, of course you're going to say that. It's what other people can say about you as well.
- [27:08]
A
And so when I'm managing my employees, I have to assume if I have a large group of employees, someone is going to go rogue secret agent on me every day, 100%.
- [27:18]
C
Well, and keep in mind, like when the founding fathers got together for the Constitutional Convention, they were doing so in secret. They swore to secret. And they were able to do that for several months before they came out with the Constitution. Imagine trying to do that nowadays with smartphones. You guarantee within a week someone was going to leak and say, here's the first draft of the Constitution, and everyone would be critiquing it.
- [27:42]
A
So this is like, you've got to look at your processes as a business person. Let's also talk about, you know, you've Talked about the two sides of issues, ethics versus competitiveness, consequences, etc. Talk about the two edged swords of, of ethics and competitiveness and how to think about all that.
- [28:04]
C
Right. So clearly, you know, business works because of competitiveness. I define ethics as, as socially and temporally defined and defined by time. Because we can all think of things in the 1700s and the 1800s that they thought were ethical, that nowadays we'd be like, that's definitely not ethical.
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A
Yeah.
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C
But I'll give you an even more recent example. In World War I, the British thought these things called cuboats, these were military boats disguised as civilian boats, were perfectly okay. And then Lusitania got sunk and they're like, oh, a little mistake.
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A
Sorry about that, all you passengers.
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C
But they also, they initially had thought that submarines were unethical in World War I. And by World War II, they're like, yeah, okay, perfectly fine now. So I think as a business, what you really need to do is not get into ethical versus not, because there may be things 25 years from now, 50 years from now, maybe even faster. Again, as you see what's happening with graduations and booing on AI, what people believe is ethical or not is changing at a fast pace. What you really want to do is what are the principles we want to hold true to that also allow us to have enough fuel in the fuel tank to operate as a business to do what we want in terms of our purpose, and again, back into our purpose, which is either to delight our customers or to provide excellent service. But if you make sure you figure out what are the principles aligned to your purpose, then you can actually navigate any storm and you can actually engage people when they come back and they say, that's not ethical or whatever. You can say, look, here's the principles we thought about, here's our purpose, and then you navigate from there.
- [29:30]
A
So with that as background, we have all the CMO confidential listeners out there. What should they be testing or preparing for the next two to three years, other than reviewing all their processes and being really good at contingency planning? Give us some other things they should be working on.
- [29:50]
C
I'll give three things. First, one, reassess this idea that data is the new oil, which, as you and I know, that dates back to the mid 2010s. I never understood how it lasted more than five minutes. Because oil used it up, it's gone. Whereas data use it, it's still there. And what we're finding is actually if you involve people who helped create the data, maybe they're your customers, maybe they're your stakeholders. If you involve the people that created data, they'll sp. They'll make better data, they'll make more data. And so you actually have more data and better data to work with. And I think that's going to be important because we're in a world by 2030, 40% of the data on the face of the planet will be AI generated. What could go wrong? You know? And so I think it's the idea. Instead, think of data as a way to involve your customers, involve your clients, and you will be much better than those that are currently hoarding data and are getting a backlash. So that's the first one.
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A
When you Just said almost half of the data is going to be generated by non humans.
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C
Correct.
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A
Okay.
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C
And some of it may be usable and some of it may be completely slop and fake. And so try to imagine making decisions as a business or a government. That leads to my second point, which is get better at the art of discernment as to what is more reliable or not. And that includes not just people, that includes technology, that includes Data, that includes AI, because again, we're already at a point where 37 seconds of your voice, I can create an AI that sounds just like you. We already are seeing real time AI, deepfakes that look like public figures and zoom calls, even there's zoom calls now, where in real time, that person you think you're talking to is not really who you're talking to. So as a marketer, given that you work in a world in which you may think you're engaging with actual humans that have disagreements with your company or not, you've got to figure out what's your tradecraft. It's almost like what the intelligence community does when someone walks in, how do I know if this person really wants to defect and join me? Or are they trying to spread me disinformation knowingly? Or maybe they really believe what they're saying, but in fact it's not true.
- [31:44]
A
And so to be better at discernment, I have to really become a lot more thoughtful and less reactionary on everything.
- [31:51]
C
Correct. And the challenge is it's not like we have copious amounts of free time. Right?
- [31:55]
A
Right. But this says a lot about self discipline and reaction time and also to question what could be wrong.
- [32:04]
C
Yes. And that leads to my final point, which is when you do make a decision, make sure you give yourself enough headspace for as long as you can. It might be you only get two minutes before you have to make a decision, might be you get two hours, you get two days. But give yourself enough head space to say, what do I need to believe to continue on this path? And then similarly, if I'm wrong, what are my pivot options later on? So that way you never back yourself into a corner. So in other words, if later I made the best decision I could with the information I had, and later I found out that some of that information was missing or wrong, then I'm going to do this other pivot option or this other pivot option. And so when you make a decision, like you said, be mindful, take a breath, hold your breath and say, okay, what do I need to believe? And then if I Later find out that the information I got was not full or complete. What am I going to do?
- [32:53]
A
Instead of well, and in here is a revision of what decisiveness really means. Correct rather than being certain and right, it's being directionally correct and thoughtful. Is that right?
- [33:08]
C
100%. And that's the reality, is that's what Special Operations always says. Special Operations assumes any plan will last the first five minutes before it's out of date. And so if you're asking like we want to operate like a SEAL team or we want to operate like the Rangers or we want to do something like the Delta Force, the reality is, yep, you practice, yes, you make a decision, but you have fallback options because I guarantee you when you actually get on the ground, it's not going to be what you expected.
- [33:33]
A
Got it. Before we get to our traditional last question, any prediction for the back half of 2026 that you want to share with our listeners?
- [33:43]
C
I think we're going to see more of a pushback on AI in the future of work. At the same time, I think that's kind of healthy because it will actually start forcing businesses and governments and community organizations to say what are we going to do to help people navigate this? But I think it's going to get more turbulent before it gets better. And then on an optimistic note, I would not be surprised. In places that are currently fighting conflict, we see at least a de escalation from a hot war to a colder war. At least something that's below the surface.
- [34:13]
A
Okay. That's one of the bigger predictions we've had ever on the show. Which brings us to our traditional last question. It's a two parter. You can take one or both. But you must take at least one funniest story you can share on the air or practical advice we have not yet discussed.
- [34:32]
C
I'll do both. I'll do the funniest story first and then the practical advice for the close the funniest story. I was 17. I was doing science fair projects that caught the attention of the US Government. So I got sent to South America for the South American Science Fair. This was the 90s.
- [34:47]
A
And wait, what was the project that got you sent to South America?
- [34:53]
C
A computer model of an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. So my rebellion against my parents, my father was a Methodist minister, my mom was a school teacher. Was to figure out who they worked for. So I did natural computer simulations of natural events, ozone layer deterioration and oil spills. And so the government's like, we have a job for you. And they sent me to South America. Now, back then, if you remember, in the 90s, it was popular to sort of like toss people in the air for their birthday celebration. Was my birthday. The trouble was they were tossing me in this building that had ceiling fans and I realized the ceiling fans were getting dangerously close to my head. So I said, let me teach you something instead. And I said, it was a 90s. Let me teach you how to mosh. And so I taught them how to do like a stage dive into a crowd. Well, that was good. Except for some reason they missed the fact that you actually have to have enough people to catch you. Because then after I showed them how to do it, they all got on stage to do it and jumped. And of course there was nobody.
- [35:46]
A
That's like South American relations went south.
- [35:49]
C
Exactly. It's all my fault. And then practical advice I tell people distinguish between leadership and management. Leadership is when you step outside of expectations and we need to do that. But you shouldn't step outside of expectations all the time. But you also shouldn't be meeting status quo all the time. If all you're doing is managing and just meeting status quo, you will not survive this new world. So figure it out as almost like a dial you turn between when am I meeting expectations, hitting what I need to do, and when am I intentionally stepping outside of expectations and managing the friction that results.
- [36:19]
A
Okay, I think that is a great way to end the show and I do want to get you back sometime and to talk about geopolitical things, but also lessons learned presenting to, you know, the House and Senate that are applicable to business. So David, thank you for being on the show and thanks to everyone for listening to CMO Confidential. If you're enjoying the show, please like share and subscribe. You can find all of our more than 165 episodes on Apple, YouTube and Spotify. New shows drop every Tuesday and historical shows include an update from the front lines of AI, a Spock on the bridge perspective, Colonel Mustard in the study with the job spec how poor design shortens CMO lifespans. Your customers aren't as loyal as you think they are, and managing the gray area, the fine line between puffery and lying. Hey all you marketers, stay safe out there. This is Mike Linton signing off for CMO Confidential. Typeface is changing the way to think about brand marketing at scale. Their marketing orchestration engine is the first of its kind and built specifically for the enterprise. The orchestration engine uses shared brand intelligence designed to turn brand guidelines into personalized voice visuals and messaging delivered in a way that fits the context of your audience. It's how brands like Asics and Post holdings scale what works without sacrificing quality. Start orchestrating your brand at Typeface, AI CMO.