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CMO Confidential
Kim Whitler | Colonel Mustard in the Study With the Job Spec How Poor Design Shortens CMO Lifespans
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Mike Linton
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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Podcast Narrator
The podcast that takes you inside the drama, decisions and choices that go with.
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Dr. Kim Whitler
Being the Head of marketing.
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Podcast Narrator
Hosted by 5 time CMO Mike Linton.
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Mike Linton
Typeface helps the world's biggest brands move from business brief to fully personalized campaigns in hours, not months with its Agentic AI marketing platform. They are the first enterprise platform with Agentic AI marketing workflows designed to instantly automate work that used to take weeks. With Typeface, one campaign scales into thousands of personalized experiences across ads, email and video while staying true to your brand. The company's AI native platform integrates seamlessly into your Martech stack and marketing workflows and includes enterprise grade security. Adweek named Typeface AI Company of the Year. Time Magazine featured them as a best invention and Fast Company called them the next big thing in tech. See how major brands like Asics and Microsoft are transforming marketing with Typeface. Learn more at Typeface aicmo. Welcome marketers, advertisers and those who love them to 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 in what is one of the most scrutinized jobs in the executive suite. I'm Mike Linton, the former Chief Marketing Officer of Best Buy, eBay, Farmers Insurance and Ancestry.com here today with my guest Dr. Kim Whitler. Today's topic Colonel Mustard in the study with the job specific How Poor Design Shortens CMO Lifespans. Now Kim started her career at P and G and went on to be a GM of Aurora Foods and CMO of David's Bridal. She then shifted to the academic world and is now a professor at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. She has served on a number of boards including Kalan Aesthetics I think I said that right, the American Marketing association and the AMA Foundation. She is a tireless researcher of the CMO position and just published new work on the impact of the job spec. Hint. It reinforces her earlier advice to candidates which was throw away the job spec and write your own. She is a CMO confidential OG as our first academic guest back in 2023. Welcome back Kim.
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Dr. Kim Whitler
Thank you Mike. It's terrific to be here and Congratulations on all of your success. It's exciting to see.
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Mike Linton
Yeah, we're having a lot of fun. Kim, let's talk about this recently published work on Chief Marketing Officer role design. Tell us about the study and why you took on this project in the first place and then how you did the research.
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Dr. Kim Whitler
Okay, so first of all, I have to say thank you. You may not remember this, but I interviewed you back in the day on an early part of this research and then subsequently interviewed over 500 different respondents. But I have you and many other people to thank for helping me kind of understand the breadth and complexity of the role. And so I also love, by the way, your intro. You made this sound super exciting. Colonel Musk, you know, talking about job specs and CMO role design and when I was getting my PhD in my 40s, I had a professor, we're talking about role design and job structure. And the professor's like, this is the most boring topic ever. And I looked him, I said, what are you talking about? This is stuff that you never learn about, you don't talk about. Nobody teaches in school, and yet it's the infrastructure of success. It's like your skeleton. We don't think about it, but it's critical for performance. And so I love the energy. I am passionate about this because I've had a belief as a former CMO and GM and that it's an overlooked topic, it's a under researched and misunderstood thing and that a lot of times we talk about CMO tenure and we're not getting at what's going on. What causes CMOs to be unhappy, what causes CEOs to be unhappy with CMOs and what can we do to identify the problems and solve them?
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Mike Linton
I think this is, and this is why we like, we love topics like this on CMO Confidential because it's a topic that people aren't always thinking about but probably should. It's like the, the disease is that the CMO and the CEO are not actually working well together and you're turning over people and you're not getting your most out of marketing. And the answer, the cure is to change CMOs when actually there's a lot of prevention that could go into this with the job spec. And you, you know, I think you talked to me back when I was at Best Buy, which is a while ago. So this study is a very long study, right? Tell us how long it's been going because it's not like some one year thing, it's pretty long.
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Dr. Kim Whitler
No, I've been, I started this 14 years ago. Welcome to academic research. I said, there's nothing I want to spend six months on, let alone 14 years. But that is what you do. I've looked at, I've interviewed hundreds of people. I've collected job specs from CMOs, CIOs, CFOs. We've had to code and analyze the job specs. So you have to take words and convert it into spreadsheet data that you can then analyze. That takes years. We then did empirical research where we did surveys with CMOS over time to try to understand what's going on. So this is a complex set of research. And the good news is, is that we have a number of different publications that come out of it. We have the current Journal of Academy of Marketing Science publication. That's an academic journal. I can talk more about that later. I have an hbr. We were on the COVID of hbr. I have a Sloan article that I think actually is very. It's high utility. I have another HBR article that's digital that is very practical. So we've got a number of different publications that if you step back and look at it in aggregate, I think it can be quite informative for CMOs, CEOs and executive recruiters.
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Mike Linton
We'll post those in the comments. But when I was reading the study, and this is, I think you said it's 500 interviews. 50% of roles are misaligned. I want you to talk about the misalignment and then how is that possible that that many. It's like a random walk kind of tell us how this is possible.
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Dr. Kim Whitler
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Podcast Narrator
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Dr. Kim Whitler
Now back to our conversation with University of Virginia Business School professor Kim Whitler. Okay, so let me start by when we say misaligned, what is misalignment mean? So you're right. 54. We found and we did. We only looked at three attributes of a role and 54% of the roles were misaligned, which tells us that if I looked at a complete role, if we could do that in a model, we would have tremendous levels of misalignment. And what is. And why do we care about misalignment? At a simple level, the more aligned the role, the better marketing capability development, the better revenue growth. Okay, so there's a connection between the way that the role is designed and the performance of that role. All right, so let's start by saying, what is misalignment? I have disaggregated. Think about this. We think about a CMO role and it's all mushed together. If you break up what a CMO role is, we break it up into its pieces and parts. What do we mean? We mean that you have the position, the attributes of the position. You have the attributes and characteristics of the person in that position. Then you have the context under which that position is performed. So let me give you. I'll use a football example. Okay. I can use a 007 movie example, but let me use a football example. So to an indoctrinated football fan, let's think about Patriots circa 2015. You have the parts, the positions. You have a quarterback, you have a punt returner. You have, you know, a linebacker. Okay? Those are parts. You then have people who fill those roles. So you have Tom Brady, you have Gronkowski and everybody else. You then have the context under which that role is that. That. That that is performed. You have a coach, you have a team. The Patriots, not the Buccaneers, the Patriots. And all of these things go together to affect the performance of the quarterback. Okay? So when they're misaligned, if I put Gronkowski in the quarterback role, what happens?
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Mike Linton
Be pretty bad, right?
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Dr. Kim Whitler
If I change out Belichick, what happens? So when you start looking at the pieces and the parts, then what we're looking for is alignment. So somebody who has the training, like a Tom Brady, to be effective and in the quarterback position. So again, what I do when I explain this to executives is I have a big picture of a group of patriots. Now, to me, I just see a group of 100 guys or 50 guys wearing the same uniform coming at me. Yeah. To a CEO, I could line up 100 CMOs. They're all the same. They're interchangeable. And yet what you and I know is that you have one CMO position where the cmo. I'll use a financial services firm example. I'm not going to name the name, but they care not at all about marketing and The CMO position is only responsible for nominal pr. I have another CMO role. It's an EVP role where the CMO is responsible. Financial services as well, same industry. They have actuarial responsibility, pricing responsibility. They manage thousands of people. They manage, of course, all the marcom, but they're managing pricing, they're looking at distribution, they're looking at risk. They're being prepared to be a CEO. These are not the same positions, not the same types of CMO roles. And by the way, the people filling them have very different backgrounds. So you now start seeing how complex it is. Because the CMO position itself has tremendous variance.
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Mike Linton
You said, I think in the study of all the executive positions you've looked at, and you've looked at a lot, there's none with greater variance than that of the cmo. So. So I didn't want to jump the queue there because you were going to talk about this, but let's talk about this variance thing. You were just, you're just going on.
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Dr. Kim Whitler
Okay, so let me see how to explain this. If you. So let me use as an example where role theory comes from. It comes from the theater. So let's think about James Bond, Double oh seven. The movies, they have the position of the roles of James Bond money, Penny the villain, right? And generally from movie to movie to movie to movie, they're somewhat similar, okay? James Bond always has to be able to run, always has to look good, has to be a little tongue in cheek, although there's a little variance in that, et cetera. Okay? So CMOs are not like that. That's what's different is that the number and types of responsibilities assigned to CMO positions is greater, far greater than it is for CFOs across firms. So we did a study, it was published in Sloan, where we looked at cfo, cio, CMO roles. We pulled out of job specs every single responsibility that the roles had. And we just did account, you know, and then the count is far greater for marketers, okay? That alone makes it difficult because one job, you may. Let me use an example, in Higher Ed University, CMOs are responsible for crisis management like antisemitism on college campuses. Okay? This is a whole skill area. It's extremely difficult and, and takes training a CMO of Best Buy, a CMO of P and G. They are not trained nor are they worried about this type of regular crisis that can occur on a college campus that makes that role different. The requirements, the tasks, the expertise needed to fulfill that job is quite different than it is in another environment. And so the breadth of tasks and responsibility is just greater than it is for other C level roles. That makes it more complicated to understand and fill.
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Mike Linton
So one, I totally agree with you, you know, and, and I think there's a lot of CMOs that are really good ones. I know they won't take the job unless they have a lot of, unless they know they're walking into the right, right gig. But then in your study you said there's a giant definition gap where 90% of CEOs say this job is really designed well and 22% of the marketers say, no, I don't think so. This is a massive gap. I mean it's like it's a four times gap. How like talk about the gaps and the factors and how this actually happens and then we can talk about what to do about it.
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Dr. Kim Whitler
But so Mike, there's two things. This is research that was done, I believe by McKinsey reported in Wall Street Journal. I think it's very interesting because you have, at one level there's some insight in this number and that CEOs and CMOs don't see CMO roles the same. CEOs are saying they're well designed and CMOs are saying, no, they're not.
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Mike Linton
I'm a genius for doing this design and I hired the recruiting firm and I got the cmo and now the CMO is no good and hence the clue reference about Colonel Mustard with the job spec. But yeah, let's talk about it.
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Dr. Kim Whitler
So that says that there's a gap there. We'll talk about that. But there's a second insight in this data that I find very interesting, which is if CMOs don't believe that the role is well designed, are they talking to the CEO? Are they not negotiating the role up front? If they're dissatisfied with the role, they think it's poorly designed, what do they believe is their role and responsibility in getting to an optimal design? And even if you step into a role and you go, wow, this isn't working right, how do so I am about empowering CMOs and giving them knowledge and insights so that they can design better roles up front. But importantly, if you're stuck in a bad role, you don't fill out on a survey, I don't have a good role. You try to take steps to shift, navigate, negotiate, et cetera, out of that bad position. There's two things going on. Why is the gap existing? I think the reality is that CMOs and CEOs are not experts in at designing or, or understanding or accepting good jobs? Yes. How many CMOs are CEOs going to hire in a lifetime? I don't know. Three, four, five. I don't know. They're not experts yet. They have a lot of other responsibilities. CMOs, how many times are they really going to interview and accept jobs? Their job is to figure out how to be a good marketer, not how to be a good interviewer negotiator of roles. They are not expert. The experts in all of this are executive recruiters.
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Mike Linton
And so do you roll HR in with that in addition to executive recruiters? Because I would say I can't just stick it on the executive recruiter because sometimes the HR department, especially for small companies running the whole show here, right.
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Dr. Kim Whitler
I would say so. But I still, I'm going to place most of the responsibility on the executive career. Here's why. They're the ones hired for hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars to be the experts at finding them. HR acknowledges, CHROs acknowledge. They also are not experts on CMO roles. They have to manage all of the human assets in their company. So they're not experts on CFO, CIOs, CMOs, et cetera, any more so than VPs or directors. And so they, the one group that's hired to be expert at this are executive recruiters who technically have studied and understand all the different types who understand how to write a job spec that accurately reflects the role and helps identify the perfect fit candidate. They're the ones who ultimately are held accountable for there's a guarantee of a year or two years if the candidate doesn't perform. So I still place a lot of responsibility on executive recruiters. That's your full time job. And if they're in this space, then they're saying I'm an expert at hiring these type of positions.
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Mike Linton
So, and in here you talk about the factors, the factors of design and operation that go sideways that, that create the whole, you know, this massive gap. And I think you broke them into responsibility, experience and status. Give our, give our listeners the cliff notes of those things because what you're saying is the search firms may be not doing it. The HR department can't, the CMO probably can't, the CEO can't. Let's put it out there so everyone can take their best shot at these three things.
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Dr. Kim Whitler
Okay, so, so first of all, let me, let me also say I don't think any of this is malicious. It's not like anybody's not trying to do their job or trying to do A bad job. I think it's, again, it's understudied, it's misunderstood. And so I think it's just a lack of knowledge. All right, so let me tell you what we did in this academic research is we start. The first thing is we have a huge conceptual framework and model for the role, the pieces and parts. Okay. A lot of different variables that help explain how a CMO can have better or worse performance outcomes. Okay. Then we just took three attributes of the model that represented each of the three buckets. One that represented the position, that's responsibility. One that represented the CMO person, that's the type of training and experience they had. And then one that represents the context, and that's the status afforded the position. More or less status than other players, other C suite players. So we look at the interaction of these three and their effects on marketing capability development and revenue growth. All right, so we just looked at those three and what we found, like you said, are that most jobs are misaligned 54% of the study. What we find generally is that. Well, I'm not going to get into the details because it's a little too complicated for a short answer. Let me talk about what I find most interesting. Okay. Find that the nature of the responsibility set, whether it's. It's relegated to just core marketing activities like marketing communication, or it's broader, the nature of the fit of the type of responsibility with the fit of the CMO experience when you add status when those two things fit. So the type of experience that a CMO has fits with the responsibility set given to the position. When that fits. When you add status, the positive outcomes are amplified. So if I have. I'm going to. I'm going to say if I have a general management trained marketer, a P and L trained marketer who has a broad set of responsibilities that goes beyond marketing communication, that's a fit. When I give that position more status, you get better firm outcomes. When I give it less status, you get worse firm outcomes. But here's what's interesting. What happens when you have a misfit? Let's say I have a broad set of responsibilities. They're responsible for pricing and distribution and a broad set. And I have a staff trained marketer who is really focused on, let's just say downstream marketing communication, promotion. So stuff.
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Mike Linton
Yeah. Or just, or just pure brand building. Not. Not, you know.
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Dr. Kim Whitler
Yeah, right. Not. So. So it's, it's a misfit when you give them more status. So. So that you get worse firm Outcomes when it's a misfit. When you give them more status, you amplify the negative outcomes. So giving a misfit more status hurts firm outcomes even more. So this. So this shows, you know, we. I would have thought, okay, in my heart of hearts that more status for marketers is always better. That's not true. If you, if you put Gronkas, Gronkowski in his quarterback. And you may. Or let me put. Say it differently, you put Tom Brady in his punt returner.
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Mike Linton
Yeah.
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Dr. Kim Whitler
And you give that role even heightened responsibility and status, or I should say status. The outcomes are even worse if you marginally.
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Mike Linton
An Edelman gets really mad. Yeah, so.
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Dr. Kim Whitler
Yeah, exactly. So. So I, I think, you know, it. In hindsight, it makes sense. But when I started, you know, you start with some biases. My bias was that more status is always better for market, for cmo. Well, that's not the case because with.
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Mike Linton
Status goes expectation or with status also goes a belief of incompetence. If you can't run that with the peer group. So there's. Is that a good way to look at it? Which is if I am brought in and I have all this responsibility and all this status and then I can't run it, I am not just failing in my job. I'm. I'm losing status for the whole department emotionally around the C suite. Is that right?
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Dr. Kim Whitler
It's a. I really would say it's a competency issue. Right. What's going on is that I need a corporate quarterback. I have. Okay, now I'm going to. I'm way out over my skis in terms of. Understand. I don't understand football. I should have used basketball terms. I understand that much better. But if, If I bring in the wrong experience, like let's say I have an offense that's a running offense, but I bring in a quarterback that's a passing quarterback, we have a problem. There's a misfit in the competency and the skill and expertise of. Of the quarterback to be able to fill the needs of that position on that team. And so when. And then when the misfit happens, to your point, it doesn't just blow back on a perception that the CMO is bad. It can spill over onto the perception of the value and capability of marketing in general. And so I want to say something here that I think is. It goes back to one of the very first things you said when we started. What do we do? When I work with executive. I start with this question. I say, okay, you have a situation you're at the C level and somebody underneath you is not performing well. Right? That's always the assessment. The assessment is they're not doing well. I said, what do you do? The answer is always performance improvement plan. Move them, fire them, coach them. Okay. I said, but we're going to go back to the beginning. Have you actually set the roll up to succeed? Right. And so the answer to your point is the, the outcome assessment, when things aren't right is always that it's the person's fault. But if what happened is that you needed a passing quarterback and you hired a running quarterback, you've got a miss.
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Mike Linton
It's not that the set yourself up, you shot yourself in the foot, and then you blame the choice that you made as the problem. And then if you do it two or three times in a row, your marketing is totally screwed up. And your company's view of marketing is probably that it totally stinks, it's wasting tons of money. And because, you know, you have this running quarterback who can't throw the ball. And so, you know, it's, it's clearly the quarterback's fault. When you're saying it's the system and you are cure, you are not curing the problem, you are actually exacerbating the problem.
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Dr. Kim Whitler
You know, so there's a great quote from Urban Meyer, who, when he moved into the pros, his team was failing tremendously. And there's a beautiful quote, and I'm going to paraphrase it because I will not do it accurately. But. But he basically said, they're terrible. They're terrible. Everybody's underperforming. And somebody in the media said, well, who hired all of these losers? He was talking about all the coaches. The coaches are terrible. And he said, well, who hired all these losers? Right. It reflects the paradigm in my position, when they don't perform, it's their fault. But we as architects of the role, we decide what responsibility to give them. We decide what skill set I need to hire to. To fit that responsibility. And then I need to give it appropriate status and the appropriate environment in which to succeed. I own that. So as we're trying to figure out what's not working, why is it the easy answer is they fail? Well, even if they're failing, let's say that they're. That means that you didn't hire somebody who has the competency set, the experience to fit into the position. You need to go back and say, how did I miss the mark? How did my executive recruiter miss the mark? Because I Don't want to do it a second time and a third time and a fourth time.
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Mike Linton
Yeah. And that is probably first. First advice. Look in the mirror and see it may be you. I have a question here. Let's say that, you know, we'll take the search firms out of it. We'll also take the. You know, I'm. I'm. If I'm interviewing for a job, you know, and I've thrown away the job spec, what are the two or three questions I should ask to see if I'm going to fit the team offense?
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Dr. Kim Whitler
That's a great question. So the. So the first thing I say is throw away the job spec. The job spec. Think of it as a promotional ad sheet.
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Mike Linton
In the door, 50% off. All right, you're in the door.
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Dr. Kim Whitler
Exactly. So throw it away. So the first thing I would do is, I would. I would say help me understand what the responsibilities, expectations and accountabilities are. Is there alignment? By the way, in the Sloan document, I have a tool that I use with executives on how you can disaggregate the pieces and parts. Okay, so what I would do is I would pull out and say, help me understand. What am I Like, tell me what I own. Do I own data analysis or does somebody else own that? Do I own R and D or does somebody else own that? Do I own pricing or does somebody else own that? Like, go through. What is it that you own? Okay, help me understand what I own. Then say, what am I held accountable for? Okay, so think about this. You own growth. Great. You just told me I don't own R and D. I don't own.
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Mike Linton
This other stuff.
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Dr. Kim Whitler
I said, so you do understand that growth comes from decisions around pricing, decisions around the innovation platform, platform, strategic positioning of the firm. You just told me, I don't own any of those. How can I possibly be responsible unilaterally for growth outcomes? So now all of a sudden, you can start kind of matching up. So the first thing I would do is I'd ask questions around, what's the responsibility? What is success look like? How are you going to measure me? I would also ask for, show me the org chart. This happened to me. I was told I own something, and then when I got in, a whole department was parallel to me. I didn't own it. And so I spent a year trying to move it over. Okay.
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Mike Linton
A lot of times there's shadow orcs that are doing the work already, and they're not going to give up any power. And I, I think the org chart Thing is really great. I will say I think your, your advice on throwing the job spec is great. The other thing I have always done is I run sample big decisions by who is the final decider. Yes, capital, money, creative decision, the hiring, budget allocation. Like, do I own it or are people just checkboxing me? Because if I don't own it, I'm not taking the job.
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Dr. Kim Whitler
Well, yeah, you can't hold me accountable for the results. And so that's a managerial discretion. What is my authority level over what types of decisions then? The last thing I would say, Mike, is you must write this down. Okay. So I was told at one company I own something. I didn't at another company, I asked that question. I said, do I have the authority to change the organization, to hire and fire whomever I want? I get there. I wanted to make a change and the CEO said no. And so now the difference is I had written this down. So you write it down and say, thank you so much. Again, all of this is back end negotiation. Get the job offer. Don't negotiate before you get the job offer. Understand? Ahead of time, once they decide they want you, then you step back and you go, okay, let's have a conversation about how we structure this role. And what's important here is, is that you want success out of this position. You need it. I want to work with you to design it in a way that makes sense so that you and I and the marketing organization, the firm, are most successful. So I know you're absolutely right. I think writing it down. And after you have that negotiation discussion, you say, here's my understanding of what we just talked about. Here's what I own. Here's what's expected of me. Now you're writing your own job spec. Here's the level of discretion I have. Again, it doesn't mean, Mike, that when you get in, they won't change it. But now you have a piece of paper where they can. And you say, if any of this is incorrect, please let me know. Not will you please confirm? Because they're never going to confirm if it's incorrect. Let me know. They don't. They don't fix anything or change anything. Now when you get in, you have a piece of paper. Say, if you recall when I came here, I came here under this assumption.
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Mike Linton
I think this is good. And what I'm going to call it is this is prevention versus cure. You know, you got, you get this all done and then you don't have to have the fight after the fact. When you get Slammed. I think that's really a good way to get us to our traditional last question, which you are very familiar with. Now, practical advice for our audience we haven't discussed yet or the funniest story you can tell on the air. You can pick one or both, but you must pick at least one.
- [33:58]
Dr. Kim Whitler
Well, I was going to say, we've already talked a little about this. I was going to say, normally I would not do this, but I would say for anybody aspiring to be a CMO or CMO to read kind of the set of research, okay, Everything I've done is to try to help board CEOs and CMOs better understand and leverage marketing for firm advantage. And I do think all of this is around how do we get to better roles? How do we set CMOs up for success? So the one thing I would say is, is, you know, if you get a chance, scan it. That UVA has been kind enough to pay for open access to the academic article is free. HBR and Sloan. There's always some sort of subscription, but I would encourage folks to read it. But I want to end on a funny. I'll end on a funny story because it relates to what we were just talking about. You just sparked my head. So, you know, by the end of my career, I had finally figured out that I was not negotiating or understanding CMO roles. So every time I would re interview, I would fix mistakes I'd made in the past. And so in my last role, I negotiated discretion. Right. So I want to understand, can I hire fire? Can I change the organization? Yes, of course you can. So I put it down in paper, etc. So I get a call, I only been there like three weeks and I get a call from the CEOs admin that one of my people was going to be meeting on a topic that was in my responsibility set. She was invited to the meeting with the CEO and other team and I wasn't. And I just assumed at that time that it was a mistake. He forgot I was there. And so I called up the admin and I said is just FYI was I left off. And she goes, no, he said not to include you in this. Oh, and this. So I. Well, what I realized. So here's what happened. I'm walking down the hallway toward his office and I'm trying to think of how am I going to manage his situation. And he's walking to me. And in that moment I realized he was playing a game. I could see it in his eyes. There was something. There was a power game going on, etc. And he, he said to me, he goes, I was wondering how long it was going to take before this would. Something like this would bother you. And you know, I come from an environment where I would never do that. I would never go to 2 below, right, and ignore their boss and blah blah, blah. And, and I, and I thought, okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna call his love. I said, no, actually I was coming to you and I have a suggestion. I was thinking of spinning off that group. I don't think it fits with the rest of the marketing responsibility and I would suggest if you want to manage it, that maybe we spin it off and have her report directly to you. And I said that would allow me to focus on where the core problems are and you can manage it. Right. So what I'm subtly saying is if you're going to make the decisions, then I'm not responsible for. And, but, but I could see what was going on. It also was an early indicator this was not going to be a really enjoyable experience because he was enjoying the game. It was, I felt like I was a little mouse and he was a cat right now. He and I ended up having a great relationship. That's not how I would lead or manage. But, but my point is, is that here's an example of where I did everything to try to be clear about discretion up front and then I got to the job and you still have to navigate problems.
- [37:39]
Mike Linton
It's not, it's never easy. I want to say as, as I get to, because I think that's a great way to close the show. But we have talked football, double oh seven, a little bit of basketball, all kinds of stuff. So a very wide ranging show. And thank you Kim for joining us once again and thanks to everyone for listening to CMO Confidential. If you are enjoying the show, hit the like button and subscribe. Look for all of our shows on Spotify, Apple and YouTube which include marketing the battle between Believers and Non Believers, Parts one, two and three, A perspective on business schools, the race to keep up with the market, the case for and against CMOs and Kim's previous shows which include the Budweiser case and a comprehensive look at fixing the CMO position. Hey all you marketers, stay safe out there. This is Mike Linton signing off for CMO Confidential. Legacy marketing tools weren't built for AI. Typeface is the first multimodal platform where agentic workflows handle everything from brainstorming to launch across every channel and customer. Touchpoint. Their AI native design transforms manual marketing tasks into automated workflows that create perfect personalized text, imagery and video at enterprise scale typefaces AI integrates with existing martech stacks through APIs and native connections so you keep your processes while gaining AI superpowers and enterprise grade security. See how brands like Asics and Microsoft accelerate innovation and transform a single idea into thousands of personalized on brand experiences. Instantly ready to see what marketing looks like when AI handles the heavy lifting? Learn more at Typeface AI, CMO.