EP44 - Be a Successful Leader with Cindy Wahler

05/11/23 • 19 min

Successful leaders have a number of common attributes. Some of them include having a sense of humility and humbleness, to be able to say that they don't have all the answers, that they have made mistakes, and that they are human and vulnerable. One of the most important characteristics is that they try to surround themselves with people who can teach them as well.
Cindy Wahler understands that no single human is successful all by themselves. We all require mentors and advocates. A mentor is someone that's going to help you with a certain skillset that you want to achieve, whether it's presentation skills or executive presence. On the other hand, an advocate is somebody that's willing to risk their own reputation and career to be your voice at the table. Listen in as Cindy and I discuss these and other important leadership and development topics including how everyone at one point or another faces common challenges like imposter syndrome.
Cindy is a leadership consultant with broad based experience in positioning organizations for success, within both the private and public sectors. She works with senior executives at the CEO, EVP and SVP levels developing leaders who can execute organizational strategy and drive business results. She offers a wide range of corporate leadership programs, including leadership assessment, executive coaching, succession planning, and talent management. Cindy is a regular contributor to Forbes, Huffington Post, CNN, and Chief Executive Officer and an author of a
recent book on leadership entitled 20 Effective Habits for Mastery at Work. She can be found at https://www.cindywahler.com/.

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EP43 - Invent Status Quo with Sean Downey

Many of us strive to work at the intersection of really smart people, really strong technology advancement and differentiated thinking. That combination of elements ultimately leads to better results. Sean Downey, President, Americas & Global Partners at Google lives at that intersection.
As Sean explains, you have to have a really innovative culture that has tremendous amounts of psychological safety, where people feel like they can come in and contribute ideas and that they belong. Only then will they feel really comfortable pushing the envelope on how to innovate and make things better. Oh, and he never punishes failure. As Sean states, "I love a healthy dose of failure and it's something that as long as we learn something, we can fall forward on it."
Sean believes that innovative organizations strike a healthy balance between innovation and doing the common things commonly. He states that "we're here to invent status quo." What does this mean? Well, Sean likes to innovate on the edge, and he has a cycle that starts with incubation as an idea in the form of a test, which then he proves works. Then and only then does Sean think about growing it, along with a handful of other things that were also successful. And then, he thinks about scaling it. Once scaled, it become the new common and the new starting point for the cycle to start over.
As President of Americas & Global Partners at Google, Sean leads the company’s advertising business in North and South America. Before this role he served as the Vice President of the Google Marketing Platform for the Americas, helping Marketers, Agencies and Partners leverage data and technology to advance their Digital Marketing Maturity and buy and measure media more efficiently. Prior to joining Google in 2008, Sean was the Vice President of Buy Side Sales at DoubleClick, where he led their agency and advertiser business. Sean has also worked in various ad technology and software startups, and over the course of his career has brought various evolving advertising technologies to market such as rich media and programmatic buying and analytics.

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EP45 - If You're Not Already Playing With AI You're Far Behind with Adam Brotman and Andy Sack

Helping organizations embrace emerging technologies so that they can have a better relationship with their customers, unlock growth and build their brand is the goal of Forum3. Co-founders Adam Brotman and Andy Sack know a thing or two about each of those goals, which is why they started the business in the first place, and the emerging technology of focus, Generative AI.
Adam is the former Chief Digital Officer at Starbucks, where he was responsible for building the brand’s Odyssey loyalty platform, Mobile App and led the company through its massive digital transformation. Andy is a seasoned tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist who recently spent 7+ years advising Satya Nadella on new product innovation and digital transformation. Together, they seek to connect the flywheels between new technology, brands and customer engagement.

As Adam and Andy discuss, organizations, brands and leaders have to get over their fear of new technologies like Generative AI, and just start experimenting. The trend line that's going on with this technology is so fast that brands need to start now with experimentation. They need to start thinking about how to incorporate it in their workflow, how to introduce it to their customer relationship strategy, if not directly to their customers, because if they don't start to experiment with it, Adam and Andy are confident they will be left behind.
To help with this, the two started Forum3 and their initial product Hive3, a competitive AI league where top creators compete for cash prizes and rewards from leading consumer brands. They provide a platform for AI creators to showcase their talent and compete against fellow innovators. As the two co-founders put it, "We have our own community of a couple of thousand of what we call, super prompters, providing intelligence as a service."
So listen in on how AI is going to change everything, how to best take advantage, and how to not get left behind. Oh, did I also mention they are writing a book with Harvard Press to be released soon? What can't they do?