You just have to immerse yourself in it. You should just constantly be building. That's what's going to give you the best chance of having the relevant skill set that is needed to make a difference in technology.
I've always been interested in structure and teamwork. Growing up, I was very active in sport. I wrestled competitively and was ranked in the province. That taught me discipline and the importance of working together towards a common goal.
ERA has structured its recruitment model around four growth pathways; increasing existing agent productivity, recruiting outside agents, adding ancillary revenue streams, such as mortgage and title, and pursuing M&A. The approach has found traction among brokers who view the brand as a vehicle for expansion rather than a simple flag-planting exercise.
Climbing up was fairly natural and easy, simply because I just disregarded all the status quo and the rules and realized what's the right thing to do, and went all the way with it.
In the AI era, it should be easier than ever for people to build new businesses. We want to build the services that enable this. This is important for ensuring that people broadly share in the prosperity created by superintelligence.
The biggest challenge is that Learning and Development is not positioned as a strategic function in many organizations. Instead, L&D often operates as a function for the sake of having a function. It is rarely used by executive leadership as a strategic support capability and is more often treated as a nice-to-have necessity rather than an integral part of business decision-making.
People recognize polish, but they respond to purpose. What the industry is starting to learn is that value is in the principles those tools represent. Technology is initially and temporarily impressive, whereas values are unforgettable.
Too many CMOs have been doing the business of marketing, which is the role of a VP of marketing. The business of marketing is doing campaigns, managing channels, communications, engagements, and brand. The role of the CMO should be to do the business of the company: vision, deciding where the company is going, what the company stands for, and how it grows.
CMOs sit at the apex of brand, revenue, customer experience, technology, product, sales and data. Yet they're spending less time in top jobs. The average tenure of a CMO at a Fortune 500 company is now just 3.9 years. Furthermore, fewer Fortune 500 companies are employing marketing executives who report at a C-suite level; these once all-important roles are being absorbed and redistributed to chief customer and chief growth officers.
On one side stood Dell, fighting to take his eponymous company private and rebuild it away from the merciless glare of quarterly earnings calls. On the other stood famed activist raider Carl Icahn, who aggressively peddled a proposal amounting to purely destructive financial engineering at the cost of the company - a scheme involving stock buybacks, warrants for future shares, and ruthless plans to carve up Dell's creation for quick, extractive cash.
According to Dealroom's 2024 European Tech report, mentions of "AI" in European startup pitch decks increased by over 200% between 2022 and 2024. VC funding for AI-adjacent startups surged, even as overall funding in Europe contracted. The signal was unmistakable: if you want capital, you need to speak the language of artificial intelligence.
One came in the form of an open letter from more than 60 Minnesota-based CEOs, released by the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce. The letter exemplifies a now-familiar pattern of corporate timidity and reticence: it takes no position, names no facts, and identifies no responsible actor. Instead, it relies on generic language about "de-escalation" and "finding real solutions," urging officials at all levels of government to work together in response to what it vaguely describes as "yesterday's tragic news."
Definition of insanity. That's what SapientNitro's European MD Nigel Vaz calls the idea of any company trying to stick to the status quo. There's simply no place for it in today's continuously shifting, connected landscape, in which consumers' media consumption habits are changing beyond recognition.
In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Jamie Dimon explained why JPMorgan Chase is spending billions more on AI. He was making a long-term bet. The same kind of leaders make when they build headquarters, factories or infrastructure that won't "pay off" this quarter but will define competitiveness for decades. It's exactly how marketers should think about and position differentiation in the eyes of the C-Suite.
Traditionally, leaders and managers often treat technology as a tool or capability that can help get work done more efficiently, but doesn't drastically change the nature of that work. Email, for instance, allows for faster communication. The supply chain management (SCM) system reduces supply chain costs, shortens delivery cycles, and ensures that products are delivered to customers quickly and accurately. Increasingly, however, this view is out of date. In recent years, the role of technology in shaping organizations has undergone revolutionary changes.
In his reflections on the 2025 Wall Street Journal CEO Council summit held in December, WSJ Leadership Institute president Alan Murray noted that CEOs are not actually preoccupied with AI, tariffs, or geopolitics. Instead, they're focused on something far more fundamental: people and culture. How do you build an organization that can adapt, collaborate, and innovate amid persistent volatility? That instinct is correct. Yet one of the most effective tools for strengthening culture and developing talent remains surprisingly underused-skills-based volunteering (SBV).
