The Politics of Dancing (Remix)

Welcome to The Beat by Rockstar CMO. I’m Ian Truscott, not a rock star, but a CMO and trusted advisor, and in this newsletter, I’d like to share a mix of marketing street knowledge that I hope will help unlock the rockstar marketer in you.

Hello!

If you follow this newsletter closely, you may notice that around this time last year, I used the same song title for the title and subject line.

But today I listened to a really interesting conversation on the Uncensored Renegades podcast, with the title “How Not to Get Fired”, and it just fits, so you have to excuse me for putting it on repeat.

Uncensored Renegades is a spin-off podcast from Uncensored CMO hosted by experienced B2C CMO Jon Evans that I shared in the My Favorite Things issue a couple of weeks ago. It features Kory Marchisotto, the CMO at e.l.f., who is fascinating.

As I mentioned, their most recent episode was about being fired, and the thread I picked up from their stories was politics.

The skill of successfully navigating the upper echelons of a business was not just down to being brilliant at marketing, as no doubt these two folks are, but when the wheels fell off for them, they were blind sided by politics, and when it went well, they recognised how they’d been able to read the room and probably the other rooms. You know the ones.

There is work to be done to create the right environment for success.

But aside from the teachings of the harsh bastard that is “experience”, how do you learn that?

We in marketing have a bad enough rep for not being trained as marketers, let alone as managers or sharp political operators.

Well, Kory shared an interesting story of being in an environment where all her instincts and chums were saying “leave”, but, as she loved the work, instead she wandered into a book shop seeking some sort of solution. She was recommended “Cultural Misunderstanding, The French American Experience” (I assume her boss was French), and she stayed with the company for 18 years.

I’ve summarised the story wildly, and I don’t want this to be a spoiler, as I’d like to encourage you to listen, but the lesson was, of course, you need to recognise the situation and adapt.

As a lover of business and marketing books, I love that this story has a book in it. Similarly, at one point in my career, one of my favorite bosses recommended a book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team by Patrick Lencioni. The basic premise of the book is that anything can be achieved if everyone is rowing in the same direction.

If I put what I was hearing on the podcast into the context of the rowing analogy of the book, we need to recognise that, however far you’ve shimmied up the greasy pole of a marketing career, you are one of the rowers. Sometimes it’s your stroke that needs to change.

Anyway, fabulous podcast and I hope you find some of this “street knowledge” I share here helpful.

Have a splendid week!

Cheers!

Ian

On repeat, I know.. :-)