Leadership on The Findings Report

The Oracle of the C-Suite

Fri, 28 Nov 2025 21:19:00 -0800

About a year ago, I was asked to meet with a serial CMO who wanted to collaborate on a study about the declining influence of marketing leaders. She had a few tours of duty under her belt, all at well-recognized enterprise technology companies. I expected to swap war stories. Instead, I was an audience to an indictment.

She lamented that marketing’s responsibilities were being delegated to sales or to newly installed Chief Revenue Officers. She noted shrinking sponsorship and advertising budgets. She complained about CFOs who demanded justification for every dollar as if she were running a lemonade stand instead of a global brand. Her seat at the strategic table, she said, had become a folding chair in the hallway.

Flatter, Faster, Smarter: The New Shape of Work

Wed, 18 Jun 2025 14:24:00 -0700

Two headlines collided in my feed this afternoon. One from The Wall Street Journal noted that several companies, despite strong profits and growth, are cutting headcount. Another, from Bloomberg, reported that Microsoft was preparing sweeping layoffs in its sales, marketing, and customer-facing teams.

Layoffs in times of plenty? The easy answer is AI. But the real story is more complicated.

AI is reshaping the workplace, but I believe these co-occurrences are part of a pattern that hints at something deeper than automation replacing human roles. We’re in the middle of a cultural shift in perspectives on productivity, the structure of organizations, and the value of human work. We are perhaps witnessing a reset, rather than a preemptive strike against recession. I believe it traces back to COVID.

Leading a Brand

Sat, 17 Mar 2012 16:32:00 +0000

Here’s the most important reality check to consider when really leading a brand from the inside out: it needs to be a transformational leadership process, rather than a transactional leadership process. One of the most interesting and comprehensive studies to quantify this fact was published in 2009 in the Journal of Marketing. Based on a thorough review of the data, the study team concluded:

Managers would do much better by opening their minds to a Transformational Leadership approach, which would entail behaviors such as articulating a unifying brand vision, acting as an appropriate role model by living the brand values, giving followers freedom to individually interpret their roles as brand representatives, and providing individualized support by acting as a coach and mentor. This would allow followers to experience the feelings of relatedness, autonomy, and competence in their roles as brand representatives, which would ultimately spill over into the commitment, authenticity, and proactivity that characterize a real brand champion.

The study differentiated this model of transformational leadership from a transactional leadership model that primarily focuses on contingent rewards (clarifying expectations and offering rewards when expectations are met) and management-by-exception (monitoring and reprimanding deviances from prescribed performance standards). The study didn’t dismiss the value of transactional leadership. In fact, the data suggested that successful transformational brand alignment initiatives incorporate some layer of transactional elements. But the data stunningly demonstrated that organizational behavior changed with greater significance when a transformational leadership approach was emphasized.