Rising to Leadership

08/19/19 • 40 min

Today’s guest is Ron Carucci, Cofounder and Managing Partner at Navalent, a company that works with CEOs and Executives who are pursuing transformational change. His Harvard Business Review article “Executives Fail to Execute Strategy Because They’re Too Internally Focused” put him our radar and led us to his fantastic book, Rising to Power.

We tackle both the book and the HBR article in this interview.

The crux of the episode--to borrow Ron’s phrase--is the ‘altitude sickness’ that all "rising" executives come across.

Examples of this altitude sickness are: ineffective use of power, effective and ineffective communication and organization design, as well as how effectively they are looking at the competitive landscape to leverage that information and make their organizations more profitable, successful spaces.

In This Episode

Ron’s professional background and his current work with Navalent.
Managing the competitive context for executives.
The dizzying dynamics of managing and leveraging portfolios.
Organizational ‘compression’ and strategic thinking.
Why saying no is so important.
A few words on Millennials and intergenerational connection.
Why an executive should link their strategy to their company’s budget.
Telling executives the truths they don’t want to hear but need to hear.
Organization design as a system.
A breakdown of power and its dangers.

We tackle both the book and the HBR article in this interview.

The crux of the episode--to borrow Ron’s phrase--is the ‘altitude sickness’ that all "rising" executives come across.

In This Episode

Ron’s professional background and his current work with Navalent.
Managing the competitive context for executives.
The dizzying dynamics of managing and leveraging portfolios.
Organizational ‘compression’ and strategic thinking.
Why saying no is so important.
A few words on Millennials and intergenerational connection.
Why an executive should link their strategy to their company’s budget.
Telling executives the truths they don’t want to hear but need to hear.
Organization design as a system.
A breakdown of power and its dangers.

Previous Episode

Take Care of Your Data

If you don’t take care of your data, your marketing campaigns will have a lower ROI, sales teams will be starved for leads, and your company will miss it’s revenue targets. On today’s episode, I chat with Ruth Stevens, who has spent the last 20 years helping enterprise and mid-market companies take better care of their data. Ruth has also co-authored an excellent book on the subject named B2B Data-Driven: Marketing, Sources, Uses, and Results. Ruth and I chat about several important topics. First, we tackle the challenge of data degradation. When the rate of change on nearly any customer or prospect data set is 4% to 6% per month, all companies have to address the problem, this presents. Second, we cover some thorny problems, out of a full set of 20+ in the book, that bedevils anyone who tries to deal with B2B data. We also talk about why she is “opt-out” vs. “opt-in” and why this is not just the correct legal position but the appropriate one for B2B marketing leaders to consider. Finally, we talk about new types of data sets like intent data, along with a host of other topics.

You can learn more about Ruth’s book here: https://www.amazon.com/B2B-Data-Driven-Marketing-Sources-Results/dp/1933199172

Next Episode

How to Sell New Products

Thomas Steenburgh is a business professor at the Darden School of Business, with a focus on sales management and B2B sales processes.

We discuss the launch of new products by sales teams, as well as some of the challenges that accompany these product launches. In addition, we cover the types of people who do the best at selling new products, the “shiny new thing” problem when selling to customers, and other gems that will make any company better at selling new products.

To cap off the show, we talk about how B2B and sales topics have largely been ignored as a subject within academia.

In This Episode

The research that went into Dr. Steenburgh's analysis of innovation and product launches.
The different type of salespeople you'll need for product launches.
Why face-to-face meetings are important for selling new products.
The characteristics of reps who succeed at selling new products and those who don't.
The “shiny new thing” problem when prospecting.