Don’t Risk Playing It Safe: B2B Lessons from Leaders Leap

  

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketer!  If this is your first time, welcome, and if you’re a regular listener, welcome back. You’re about to listen to a Career Huddle where the CMO Huddles community gets exclusive access to the authors of some of the world’s best-selling business books. Steven Dennis, author of “Leaders Leap,” joins us for a conversation about transformation at scale. Well, time for the start of 2025. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You’ll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B marketing podcast. All right, let’s dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through, proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here’s your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Hello, Huddlers. It is an absolute pleasure to be here today with a remarkable guest, Steve Dennis, who has long been a thought leader in the realm of business strategy, leadership, and most importantly, retail. In fact, I know Steve from way back when. I know him as Mr. Retail because we met as part of an IBM futurist program—I’m thinking 15 years ago. Steve’s latest book, “Leaders Leap,” delves into the moments when leaders must make bold decisions to drive change, embrace innovation, and transform their organizations, and it’s something we talk a lot about innovation in the course of Huddles and what role CMO plays. So Steve’s going to help us sort of guide through that conversation. Anyway, Steve, great to see you. Delighted you can join us today.

Steve: Yeah, it’s great to reconnect. I think it was pretty close to 15 years ago because I was just getting started with my consulting business and speaking and all that.

Drew: Just to ground us, where are you this fine day?

Steve: I am in Dallas, Texas. I don’t really have a good reason for why I’m still here, but I moved here 20 years ago from Chicago to join the Neiman Marcus group, and I haven’t left.

Drew: There you go. All right, so something was sticky anyway. All right, so one of the things we like to do, just in case our audience has to leave early or we need to convince them to stay—let’s provide, by the way, just so folks can see the book, “Leaders Leap”—let’s provide three things leaders, and maybe focus on CMOs, typically get wrong when it comes to leaping or not leaping.

Steve: I did give some thought to this, and I don’t know if I have the most compelling answer, but two of them, I would say, are broader. Maybe the third is a little bit more CMO-specific. The first is, what got you here isn’t likely to get you where you need to go. In other words, the things that we’ve relied on to be successful, whether it’s personally or for our particular corner of the world, relying on those is probably not going to be what’s going to propel you forward. We can probably talk a little bit more about why I think that. But also, in fact, relying on your very particular set of skills, as retail strategist Liam Neeson often says, may actually get in the way of what you need to do to be successful in the future. The second one—and this terminology I may have to explain a little bit—but a slightly better version of mediocre is not likely to be a winning strategy. In other words, if you have a product that is not remarkable, or a service, or whatever particular thing you might be doing, a slightly better version of it is not likely to be the key to your success. In fact, it might distract you from working on the things you actually need to do to leap. The third one is maybe a little vague, but what I see a lot is people say they’re customer-centric, say their organization is customer-centric. And usually that’s a bunch of nonsense. I’m sure everybody on this Zoom, that’s not true for, but that’s what I see.

Drew: Of course not, no. But so—our—let’s go through this one at a time. “What got you here may not get you here.” And again, group of CMOs, strong leaders, strong marketers, tough market right now. I mean, you know, rising tide, lowering tide—the lowering tide has made it really, really hard for a lot of CMOs, and it probably leads into your second point about remarkable. But when you say, “What got you here won’t get you ahead,” what specifically do you have in mind?

Steve: Well, the main thing, and I’ll state this at the risk of saying the obvious, but the pace of change has been incredible and is only accelerating. So the things that are likely to distinguish—you know, the things that worked 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago are either irrelevant or becoming less and less effective. And part of the—which I’m sure we’ll talk about a little bit—but part of the motivation for my book is you look at so many brands, so many companies that were incredibly powerful, in many cases dominant 20 years ago, that are either gone or gasping for air. So I think if you just look at what’s happened to many excellent companies, it just sort of stares you in the face. And if you look at what many of them did to try to address the problems in their companies, it was largely trying to do a better version of what they’ve done forever, not trying to really change in a profound way. So I think that’s the main thing. But some of it is also just an orientation of—you know, that cliché of if all you got is a hammer, you keep pounding the same particular set of nails. But if the customers moved on, or technology has moved on, or new competition has emerged, in many cases, trying to keep using those skills could actually just distract you from what you need to do.

Drew: Yeah, it’s interesting. I’m torn on this one because I know that certain things are universal—being a leader, and the tenets of leadership are ones that seem to apply 20 years ago, 10 years ago. The crux of this thing, I think, is your second point about being remarkable as a company and a brand and as an offering, and that mediocre is, as you put it, simply not going to get you there. And that one, to me, is really interesting because in a lot of cases in B2B, CMO doesn’t control product, and so they’re given what they’re given. And yet, that’s the problem, right? The product isn’t remarkable. So the request is, make your marketing remarkable. And sometimes that can work. But you know, remarkable marketing against a mediocre product is a formula for faster demise. So talk a little bit about this concept of remarkability and being remarkable, and why that is such a fundamental crux to everything in the book.

Steve: Well, first of all, I’m sure many people will be familiar with Seth Godin. Seth’s been a friend of mine since the age of 19, so I’ve stolen or borrowed many ideas from him, but it’s really what he first put forward in “Purple Cow” 20-plus years ago now. It’s this idea that in a world of abundant choice—but I think even particularly what we’ve seen over the last 15 or 20 years—this reduction in friction so customers just have incredible access 24/7 to products, to services. They have an incredible amount of information about comparing features and benefits pricing. It’s so easy, in many cases—not all—to go back and forth from different options. So we’re just in an incredibly different world, plus the noise and the distraction that most customers—you just think about text messaging and email and Slack messages and everything. So we’re in a very noisy world where it’s harder and harder to separate the signal from the noise. So if all you offer is very anodyne or even very good, you may not get noticed in the first place. And obviously, if you don’t get noticed, there’s no chance for engagement or making the sale or building loyalty, or high NPS scores, or what have you. So I think the bar in most industries continues to be raised. And so if you’re not aiming to be truly remarkable—and I mean it in the way that Seth uses it in “Purple Cow,” which is both probably the typical way we think about it, being unique, being differentiated, having a strong customer value proposition, those kinds of things—but also providing such value, and ideally a little bit harder in B2B than B2C, creating that emotional connection that causes your customers to share the story of your brand. So that’s obviously the highest order in many cases of getting that remarkability, getting those recommendations. So you know, it’s always been a good idea to have a unique value proposition, to be as differentiated as you can. But I think what’s really different, and probably only getting harder, is this sheer noise, the choice, the lack of friction. So if we don’t keep raising the bar, we’re likely not to get noticed in the first place and definitely not make the sale.

Drew: What I like about the term remarkable, and I’ve always sort of felt that that was such a great goal, is, you know, the second point is, what are you doing that people will remark on? Right? What makes it worth remarking about? And so it is a great word to use. And I also think, in a world where a lot of words have landmines for B2B CMOs, remarkable is a good one because people can sort of—they have a sense of what that means in their own mind. Yeah, all right, your third point was, people say they’re customer-centric, but they’re not. What should we be thinking about in that particular context?

Steve: Well, I actually have toyed with writing a whole book about this, which I think I’m going to call “What’s So Funny About Peace, Love and Customer Centricity,” because customer centricity has been around for a really long time. But if you study, as other people have and I have to a certain degree, which companies are truly customer-centric, what you often see are companies that are very product-centric, or channel-centric, or customer service-centric, or a whole host of other things that don’t really add up to having the enterprise having deep understanding of customers’ needs and wants, having actual customer insight, having a set of processes and metrics that assure that you’re tracking where you want to go. I just think there’s often—I mean, the number of consulting clients I’ve worked with where, and I’ll just back up a tiny bit, but there are two questions I often ask when I’m starting to work with a company, or if I’m doing a workshop or something: Is the culture wired to say yes or wired to say no? Which gets to aspects of transformation and innovation, which is a different topic. But also I try to get them to talk about where they are on customer centricity. And usually you get some sort of gobbledygook answer that sounds like a lunchroom poster, but if I start to ask any questions about “Tell me about your customers, tell me about how you’re doing acquiring, growing, retaining and driving remarkability,” most companies completely crap out on any semblance of a good answer. And if you don’t know how you’re doing and you don’t know the drivers of it, then how are you going to have plans that are going to make a difference? So I think it gets a lot of lip service. It sounds great—customer obsessed, blah, blah, blah—but I just don’t see a lot of companies (again, I’m sure everybody on the call is doing a great job) but out in the wild, I think most companies are woefully, woefully inadequate in this role.

Drew: Well, I mean, just look how money is spent. I mean, if you look at this—we happen to be in budgeting season right now—but you look at where the dollars are allocated. And this gets to another point, which is, it’s like 80% of the budget is, quote, “in the demand gen world,” 20% might be against customer research and customer service and engagement, and very little can be actually put in a bucket called brand or reputation building. So you’ve got everything that’s about micro and nothing that’s about remarkable. And so one of the points that Isabel made is, and I’m going to quote her: “I would argue that the reason that brands hurt themselves is because they stop focusing on brand.” I’ll use the word reputation for creativity and emotion to be remarkable and over-digitize the entire experience under the guise of demand gen. That’s exactly sort of what I just said. And it is a battle that CMOs face, because there’s this, I’m going to say, alternate reality of PE and VC firms, which are not necessarily building brands to last. They are building brands to sell. They have a short-term thing. They’re focused on EBITDA. They’re not thinking, “Gee, I’m going to build a great company.” They’re thinking, “I’m going to build a company that I can flip.” And I just don’t think that leads to great marketing or opportunities. But that’s just me. Maybe others have seen a different scenario. We’re in total agreement on remarkable. We’re talking about customer centricity. We talk a lot about in Huddles about how CMOs can play an active role in customers, whether it’s setting up and running the customer advisory board, whether it’s setting up or being part of an executive sponsorship program where each executive owns a large customer, and of course community building and all of those good things. So we talk a lot about that. It is a hard thing for CMOs to get budgeting for when the emphasis is on demand gen. All right, so which kind of gets into this other issue, which is—you and I were talking about before we started—all right, a CMO is not going to argue with you. They want to put a remarkable product in the marketplace. They want to build a remarkable brand, and they have to sell that to the CEO. And honestly, there are very few examples of B2B of remarkable brands. The only ones that are remarkable are sort of the B2B to C, whether—and those are the ones who sort of actually do interesting work. So what’s your advice to CMOs in terms of getting the CEO and the board to understand why being remarkable across the board is so fundamental to being successful?

Steve: I’ll be a little bit of a politician and dodge the question a little bit. I mean, I do think it’s a huge challenge. I mean, this book is much more pointed, I would say, at whoever’s setting overall business strategy, which is typically the CEO and maybe a couple of other people. But what I try to get at is what I would call both the left brain and right brain approach to this problem. So on the left brain side, I would say you definitely want to bring as many facts to bear as you possibly can. And I think you can do that if you’re a CMO or anybody kind of in the C-Suite, from a pretty bottoms-up way, which is as many kind of state-of-the-customer facts as you can bring external environment, probably a lot of things that everybody is doing. So I don’t know that I’ve got anything really breakthrough there in terms of how to tell those stories, but I think another way to tell the story is to make some broader comments about—and I’m sure some people are doing this—but what is really going on with the pace of change on the part of customers, what’s really going on in the external environment, what’s really going on with technology? And I think if you’re—and this gets a little bit to the right brain—which is people aren’t afraid enough. And I hate to use fear as a motivation, but one of the quotes I have in the book is from Len Goodman from Dancing with the Stars, which is, “It’s never too early to panic,” and I’m not, you know, I don’t love being so fear-based in the approach here. But another quote from Miles Davis is, “If you’re not nervous, you’re not paying attention.” When you see—and this is part of what I try to set up in the beginning—when you see, and I’ll just use my retail example, but how many retailers have failed or are failing when you see the massive shift in market value? Here’s just a stat, which I hope some people can relate to: If you look at—so I started my career at Sears in the department store industry in the ’90s, been gone from there quite a long time. Also worked at Neiman Marcus. So I spent a lot of time in the department store industry earlier in my career. If you look at the top five department stores in the US, first of all, they have lost about 80% of their revenue over the last 20 years. And so, this is the Macy’s, this is Sears, JC Penney—iconic brands have lost 80% of their sales and something like 95% of their market value at the same time. You can look at a company like Ulta, people might be familiar. It’s an off-the-mall specialty cosmetics brand. Ulta is only in product categories that represent about 10% of the department store mix. Ulta is more valuable, quite easily actually, than all five department stores. So even though they’re only in one category, they’ve accumulated tens of billions of dollars in market value, while these five incredibly famous brands have lost it. So we see this happening in industry after industry. So this disruption is real. It’s often accelerating. Not everybody—the subtitle of the book is “Transforming Your Company at the Speed of Disruption,” which kind of begs the question, what is the speed of disruption? And that definitely varies quite a lot by industry. So I’m not suggesting every industry needs some sort of massive reinvention in the next three years, or they’re going to be gone. But you don’t have to look very far, whether it’s the advent of e-commerce and distribution changes, whether it’s cloud computing, smart devices, social media—now you just go down the line of massive, massive shifts that are only picking up. So I think you can use—that’s a very long answer, I’m sorry—but I think you can start a little bit of, and I suggest some questions in the book to help people frame this, but what forces could radically shift the playing field over the next several years? Do you really understand them? Do you understand what’s coming? Are you doing enough? And the doing enough might be standing up more proof of concepts. It might be a relatively modest experimentation program. But it might be more profound, but if you aren’t talking about it, and you’re not kind of breaking through your denial, and you aren’t feeling a little bit nervous, then you’ve got a great job because your company’s not changing very much, and then you just keep collecting the cash and retire happily in 20 or 30 years. But that’s not generally the case throughout most industries.

Drew: There’s a couple of things that came up here. One I just want to make—so the CMO-CEO relationship. You know, in this ideal world, we did a lunch huddle in London, and a couple of the CEOs and the CMO present there talked about how they love it when their CMO is their sort of strategy person, the sort of Deputy CEO. I love that aspiration. I’m not sure that it’s going to work everywhere for every CMO, but being able to be really close to strategy, obviously, is important to the CMO in one way or another. They have to be able to touch it, because that’s what’s going to determine what they have to market. But then the next point you start—you talked about Ulta, it’s functioning in your book. You mentioned also Trader Joe’s. And I think that that’s in the third leap, which is “special, not big,” right? And I think this is a really important one. I talk about it in my book, and I think it’s chapter one “Focus Is Your Friend,” or something like that. But the quote that I have is “trying to go after everyone can amount to going after no one.” I underline that, but it’s—this is something that CMOs are being told, “Hey, grow the business 25% next year.” And so that doesn’t reconcile with being special, not big. Talk a little bit about how being special doesn’t mean you can’t grow.

Steve: Right. Yeah, well, I think—and I’ll try to be, and I’m happy to answer any questions about this to the extent I can—but one of the things we’ve seen broadly, certainly in retail but in many other sectors, is what I’ve been referring to for a while as the collapse of the middle. And by that, I don’t mean there aren’t price points across the spectrum, or kind of good, better, best, but we’ve tended to see models that are very much focused on value and convenience, scale and scope. So in the retail environment, Walmart, Amazon, Costco, etc., or you see more kind of specialty versions, where you pick a narrower—you know, focus is your friend, like you focus on a set of customers, and you try to meet their needs in a more impactful way. And generally speaking, these are premium price products, but being in between has been increasingly untenable in a lot of sectors, because you’re not the fastest, you’re not the most convenient. And trying to become—you know, out-Walmart Walmart, out-Amazon Amazon, out-Granger Granger, you know, whatever—IBM, IBM is often a fool’s errand because the businesses have become so scale, scope-based. And you just can’t invest the dollars to keep up. And, you know, just to quote Seth again, you may just end up in a race to the bottom. And the problem with a race to the bottom is you might win or worse end up second. So I think it’s very important to really not get stuck in this middle ground, but really pick a lane, and for most companies and most leaders, if you don’t work at Amazon or Walmart or one of the humongous scale companies, Microsoft, something—you know, is to try to find, not necessarily a niche in that it has to be really small, but try to find a set of customers and meet those needs more profoundly, and hopefully in a way that takes you away from competing all on price or competing on this massive scale or incredible convenience. So I like the special, not big kind of idea. I like the idea of going narrow and deep. One of the things I talk about, which is taken from Nike, is this idea of editing to amplify. You know, can you eliminate some of the customers perhaps that don’t have any potential for loyalty and profitability, or can you simplify your product line or your service line, and you add things to just be that much more powerful?

Drew: Yeah, it’s interesting. You mentioned Nike. They got rid of a bunch of retailers they were distributing, and the sales went up as they focused on their experiences and controlling experience. I did a podcast with the CMO of Sada. They used to be cloud support for everybody. They decided to be only Google Cloud. Their business doubled. So there are really good examples of that.

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Drew: We had a couple questions, sort of going back to this notion of customer centricity. Are you sort of tracking any companies that are doing that are particularly customer-centric, and how they do it at scale? Thanks for that question, EJ.

Steve: Well, it’s probably an overly used example, but I think Amazon is actually really, really good at this, and they do talk about their customer obsession. They’re in a good position because they have, just as probably everybody would know, just so much data and so many touch points and flywheels. So they’re, you know, it’s hard maybe to learn anything from them because it’s so hard to replicate.

I’m working with one retailer. Unfortunately, it’s confidential, but I can tell you some of the things. They’ve really built out, and you touch on some of these things, but they’ve really gone deep on customer segmentation. They’ve really gone deep on customer journey mapping, much more a suite of customer metrics, part of their strategy. Customer strategy is really anchored on having kind of visualized a matrix, because I never met a matrix I didn’t like of customer segments down one side and then across are how they’re doing on acquisition growth, which is both frequency and a number of items per transaction, those sorts of things, retention and NPS.

Their customer insight map is really trying to—they can’t do everything. And I very much take the point that it’s hard to fund. You have this ideal list of things that you’d love to do, and it’s very hard to get to all of them, but they’ve prioritized, and they’ve helped the entire leadership team understand through this kind of simple visual and just being able to click down onto certain aspects, how these customer metrics buy to sales and profits and ultimately market their publicly traded company. I wouldn’t say look at that exactly worked out, but they’ve been working with some outside consultants on that customer valuation time. So I think it’s the good suite, but it’s taking both a framework for thinking about customer growth, kind of picking out the pieces, saying to ourselves, how well do we understand this? Do we really know what’s going on? What are the drivers? And then standing up ways to try to get either better hypotheses about or some actual data to inform their strategies, which ultimately ties to branding and ties to media plans and all that good stuff.

Drew: Interesting. As you talked about Amazon, I’m actually listening to a book right now called “The Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos and The Washington Post” by the editor of The Washington Post. As Bezos became the owner, what was fascinating is he explains in detail how Bezos brings this customer-centric mindset to The Washington Post, and it’s like he didn’t want to talk to advertising—he only wants to talk to the editors and the people responsible for putting information in front of quote “customers.” And so it’s probably a better case history than Amazon in terms of understanding how he thinks about it and what it looks like, and how that transformation—I mean, for several years, you talk about if retail is dead, talk about print and that challenge. It’s really, yeah, they’re parallel and painful, but at least for a certain period of time, it was transformative for the Post. I can’t speak to their current results, but anyway, that it offers some surprising lessons on customer centricity in the industry.

Okay, so that was one. I want to go and let’s see. We’ve got one other thing about customers and customer centricity, which is tricky. And B2B, what can B2C—it’s like, I go to Ulta, I buy my face makeup, whatever it is. And it’s a one-to-brand individual. But we’ve got cases where we’ve got a buying group, we’ve got an individual department that may want to use the tool. We’ve got end users, we’ve got probably anywhere from 10 to 15 different people. So defining customer is really hard in that context. So, and I’m just making the point that that’s a challenge of B2B. I don’t know if you have a response to that?

Steve: Well, yes and no. So I actually did run a B2B division of a company, about $800 million business earlier in my career. So I do have some experience. I’m not super recent. I mean, to me, the thing about B2B, which—there’s a lot of leakage in B2C businesses in terms of really understanding customer data. I know I happened to work at Neiman Marcus, where it was more like a B2B business because we tended to have fewer customers that were very important to us, and we could talk to them, and we could understand their needs more specifically. Then we had a bunch of people that were anonymous.

B2C, in some ways, is easier to understand, but you also don’t have nearly the opportunity to have as much insight as is often possible in B2B. So I mean, I think you just have to avail yourself—I mean, it’s probably more conversational in many cases than massive data sets. And so you have to develop, if you don’t have it, good listening skills and good different kinds of ways to segment customers, perhaps, than would be more typical in a CPG or retail sort of world.

But the thing that has always struck me, and I do work with a number of B2B, mostly retail, technology companies—I do work with a lot of B2B companies. I think the thing is that maybe it’s obvious, but when you think about lifetime value, when you’re in B2C kind of businesses, you get a lot of customers, and very few of them represent a tremendous amount of lifetime value. Oftentimes, in B2B, you got fewer customers that have that potential. So I think part of the way I would think about it, and I say this with my B2B, is it’s actually more worthwhile in some respects to invest in customer insight and to be playing around with different proofs of concepts, because if you can get it right, you’ve got the potential to lock in a customer and do a land and expand kind of thing. So, but I know there’s a lot of different kinds of B2B businesses, so I don’t want to—yeah, no on that point.

Drew: All those points are good. I want to step back, because I think there was a point we leapt over mine, leap number two, which is wake up. And I think this is really important and really relevant right now. And at the end of that chapter, you asked a series of questions, including, what percentage of your time and other resources are invested in learning about and exploring nascent or emerging trends that may have an impact beyond a three-year horizon? I don’t know what the answer is among this group, but I suspect given all the things that they’re trying to do, it’s probably fairly low where there’s a will, there’s a way, but these are time-constrained individuals. How do leapers find the time to do this? And is this an everyday thing, or is this a planning thing?

Steve: Well, there’s a couple of ways I think about this. I mean, first of all, and I admit this is hard to do, but part of what I try to point to with the book, and you know, we’ve talked about a little bit, is creating this paranoia. And some of that is around, frankly, you might get blindsided. You might get left over in a way that you cannot recover from. And I try to make that argument to a certain degree by just pointing out to people, because I think we all sort of know it. In fact, I did a speech on the book a little while back where I started. I don’t actually have this phrase in the book, but I started out saying that this question, because this is true, even though it’s not exactly in the book: The thing that has been gnawing at me when I work with clients or I write or speak is, when I see companies that are struggling to transform for this new era, if the world has changed so much, why have you changed so little?

Everybody will agree pretty much that the world, maybe their little corner of the world, hasn’t changed that much. I always use my dry cleaner as an example – like I go to the dry cleaner, I don’t know that her world has changed that much. Seems like a pretty stable business, but you know, you’re out in the wild here. Most businesses have seen just these massive changes over the last few years. And you know, if you just think about AI, a lot that’s changing, and is going to change quite a bit. So, everybody goes, “Yeah, my God, the world’s changing so much. It’s volatile. It’s complex. Who knows what’s going to happen?” You know, macro worlds, but also technology, competition, customers, etc. But most people haven’t changed so much, so you have to create that tension, or I try to create that tension, so that hopefully it gets you to the point of saying, well, if all I’m doing is looking at a one or two year time horizon from a planning perspective, or I’m only defining my competitive set in the way I’ve always defined it – are there things that are happening or could happen that could really change things?

So I’ll use some examples that people will probably be familiar with. If you were in the taxi business and you were focused on the definition of the taxi business as it’s been historically constructed, or you were in the hotel business and you focused on it in the way it was historically constructed, you totally missed Airbnb and Uber that solved the customer’s problem. You know, essentially the same problem, but in a completely different way that has completely changed your business.

Actually, we just had on my podcast, the Remarkable Retail podcast, the former head of transformation from Nike talking about how he believes that companies need to be spending 50% on optimizing their current business model and 50% on new stuff. I don’t know – I mean, it’s provocative, and I think for some companies that’s probably true. I don’t know that I would go that far, but you have to decide for yourself. If you’re spending 99.9% of your time optimizing your current business model, do you really believe that is the right call? That’s what many companies are doing.

So I’m not saying it’s got to be 50/50, but it’s probably got to be more than you’re currently doing. Ways of doing that are everything from creating an R&D budget, creating departments and processes that are focused on things that may not generate significant EBITDA for five years. And there are a lot of different ways of doing it. When I was working with Nike a long time ago, one of the things they did was they basically took two weeks every year to focus exclusively on the future with the leadership team. They basically said, clear your calendars – we’re going out around the world to see innovation and meet with people that are going to challenge our thinking.

So there are lots of different ways. But again, the point is, you’re almost certainly not doing enough. But I realize it’s hard. I mean, I’ve been the head of strategy at two Fortune 500 companies, and every day struggled with getting leadership to change. I worked for the CEO. In one case, I ran the executive leadership team meeting. So it’s not like I didn’t have a seat at the table. I mean, I think I have more knowledge today than I had when I was sitting in those chairs. But it’s not trivial, so I don’t have any pithy way of describing it, but I think the more you can create a sense of urgency and panic, honestly, in some cases, then just decide to start moving in the direction of more experimentation and opening the aperture to look at things that could come from the outside and really change things.

Drew: So there’s a through line here of things that we’ve been talking about that I just want to posit, which is, I think every CMO certainly that I engage with wants to be remarkable at their job, to be associated with, if not build, a remarkable brand/company. In order to do that, they may be lucky in that the remarkableness is already there, but let’s assume it isn’t, because in most B2B companies, it isn’t. They had the opportunity to, and I’m going to use Save Drive Strategy, but to be an impact player, to use the Liz Weisman term – they don’t have to be the person sitting in the strategic seat, but they can be the sort of orchestrator and behind the scenes, pushing and enabling. And one of the things that I like about your book is that you help sort of create a path and a way for – and I think a CMO who read the book would think about this – equips me to help move the conversation forward. So anyway, I wanted to add that little editorial bit. And there’s one other that I wanted to get to, which is – let’s see, oh, this is a good one – safe is risky. And this is, you know, I love this, but explain it. And let’s talk about it in the context of marketing.

Steve: Well, this is really, in some respects, the core premise of the book that our conservatism, our reluctance to leap, both personally as well as from a business strategy standpoint, some of the things we do is ultimately the thing that’s going to put us into the zone of irrelevance. What I’m trying to get at is really to rethink our relationship to risk. And I think a lot of people know this at their core. But when you look at how we spend most of our time, you know the slightly better version of mediocre I talked about – it’s a lot about polishing, making a little bit better what we already do.

And I think if you just stop to think about it for a second, if the world – and I got a little bit of a graphic in the book to try to illustrate this, but I’ll kind of pantomime it here – but you know, if you buy into this idea of remarkability, and that the bar for performance continues to be raised, and so you have to leap higher in the value you provide, if that’s the world you’re living in, or you soon think you’ll be living in and the pace of change is accelerating – if you don’t aim higher and move faster, you’re actually falling behind.

And so this incrementalism, what I refer to as kind of infinite incrementalism, which is so characteristic of a lot of companies – you know, that you’re just constantly trying to optimize, if that’s your primary thing. Now, by the way, as a caveat, you have to do that. Like, I’m not at all suggesting stop everything, create some bold new strategy and just throw everything in that direction. Your mileage may vary. People find themselves in difficult situations, but if you are in a world where it’s getting harder and harder to be the signal amid the noise, and you are seeing the pace of change accelerate, if you’re moving at this more linear pace, you in fact are falling further and further behind, and the odds that that is raising potentially causing an existential crisis become ever higher.

So part of – and you know, this is hopefully what gets people, the leadership team, to say, “You know what, we have to spend more time on the long term. We have to spend more time on riskier things.” Because if we don’t, we are actually putting ourselves in a more risky situation. I would recommend Stephen Pressfield’s work on fighting resistance if people are familiar with – he’s not a business strategy guy, he’s a writer, but he talks a lot about how hard it is for us to confront the dragon of fear and how difficult it is to put ourselves out there.

So I think that’s part of the human condition. I say in the close of the book that when I was writing the book, despite my giving all this advice about safe being risky and all these leaps people need to make, I often myself wasn’t doing that. And so I think it is hard to do, but it’s impossible to do if you don’t sign up for the challenge, if you’re not willing to be more courageous in your leadership. So yeah, I think it’s quite obvious that safe has been very risky for lots of these companies that we’ve seen fail. What I’m trying to do is to say, don’t be the Sears, don’t be the Blockbuster, don’t be the Blackberry. Don’t be all these companies that were once fantastic companies, but because they couldn’t see the future and mostly watched the last 20 years happen to them, they are either gone or on their way to being gone.

Drew: Well, and yeah, and you know, you mentioned Netflix, and that’s a great case of a company that reinvented itself twice, and no doubt will continue to do so, having seen their initial industry disappear. One of the terms I just have to – you had a subhead, which was “The Confederacy of Meh.” And that’s not the place you want to be, folks. That is not it. You get there by avoiding risk. So let’s go to the last leap. And this one I struggle with, because I understand it potentially. And we had – I mean, I know Jay Baer would bring, you know, time to time to win. He talks about go, go, go and speed. But so your chapter is “Go Faster, Go, Go, Go.” And it will resonate a lot with new CMOs, who feel the pressure to show results quickly. But how do you reconcile the need to move fast and the need to drive transformation? I mean, transformation is not something that happens day one, day two, day 30, right? Yeah. So where’s the “Go, go, go faster,” and the plan smartly and change in a significant way, because all the quick changes are often cosmetic.

Steve: Well, I think the first thing is, you know, in my book, I talk about these mind leaps. I think the LEAP here is to understand that speed is increasingly important in what we do, and that’s just because the world is moving so fast, and in many cases, moving faster and faster. So some of that is just seeing that as the reality and trying to navigate in that direction. What I try to do in the chapter is point out some ways to make that happen. I mean, you definitely oftentimes have to go slow to go fast. So I think there are definitely times where careful study, testing, etc., are very smart to position you to step on the gas when it becomes more clear that something’s working. Another key thing, and this is one thing – this book is not an innovation process book. I mean, I touch on some of those things, but there’s plenty of good books on this. But I think one of the key things to focus on or to understand is companies that consistently innovate and that are actually transforming for the future. It is not the case that they have come up with some magical process to innovate. The most distinguishing characteristic of companies that consistently innovate is they try more stuff, you know, more swings at the bat or pick your tired sports cliche, right? But they try more stuff, and they sort through the stuff. They try fast. So, you know, this is the fail fast sort of idea. And so, you know, kill your darlings. You know, take what you can glean from a proof of concept or a pilot or whatever, and reshape it. But, you know, it’s working through and one of the companies that I mention that I can’t name who they are, they’ve really done a good job of standing up way more proof of concepts and pilots, but they’ve also really cycled through them very quickly. They, you know, this idea that winners never quit, that’s nonsense. Quitting is underrated. There’s lots of things you should quit, and the reason is because it opens you up to do other stuff, because capacity is limited. So I think there are some things that I try to tease out in a chapter to accelerate, but I would say trying more things, adopting a culture of experimentation. I alluded to this wired to say yes versus wired to say no attitude, I think, are very important. But you also, to our earlier conversation, have to make sure you appropriately resource whatever these experimentations look like, because otherwise they’re just random experiments or not. That’s not something that’s really a program that sustains innovation.

Drew: Right. And so it’s interesting, because I talked about this in my book, about the last chapter is, you know, trying to get 10% of your marketing dollars into things that are experiments, that are not things that you could, that could become big bets, that are small bets. Now I think is important to it. I’m going back to that book that I’m listening to right now about Bezos and the Washington Post, and how he would throw out a bunch of ideas at these folks, and they said, “Oh, that’s stupid,” and “that’s stupid,” and they would respond to it, but everyone, and his point was, “I know, but I’m hoping that you’ll come up with a better one, and we’ll come up with it fast.” And so that was sort of an interesting insight into him. Again, that book is “Collision of Power,” and it’s not a marketing book, but it’s a fascinating case history on transformation and an inside look at it that you often don’t get. All right. So what advice would you give to CMOs about, you know this, you could be pulling your hair out because, I mean, Gen AI alone – keeping up with Gen AI is really, really hard, but that’s one of those transformations that feels like it’s going really slow in some ways, but it’s going to be all of a sudden that everything that you do is going to be impacted by it. So what is your advice to CMOs when it comes to just managing that, and then the same sense of not working 24 hours a day to try to keep up right balance, if there is such a…

Steve: Yeah, yeah. Well, I again, I wish I had some really compelling, pithy advice on this, because I think it’s a challenge. I mean, I struggle, particularly since I try to cover a really wide range of topics, to stay on top of things and feel like I’m not just an inch deep. So I don’t think it’s easy. I mean, you know, the kind of obvious things are, or what, you know, what can you give up that’s not really helping or do less of – I mean, I’ve been able to unlock some time by looking hard at that. But also, how do you get leverage? You know, are there people that you need to be speaking with that are sources of inspiration or can help you work through these topics? You know, get creative about kind of short burst things or low intensity things that are keeping you up to date and sharp on some of these topics. But there’s going to be a point where – and Gen AI is a good example. You know, I’ve got one client now that is doing some experimentation, which I think is appropriate, and it’s quite low level. They’re getting some encouraging results, but there’s going to be probably a time where they need to 10x that effort, maybe more, and they don’t necessarily have the dollars or the people to do it. So, I mean, I understand that this is a real issue. I don’t – I wish I had more of an unlock there, other than, you know, just keep perspective. Try to look at the balance. Force yourself as best you can. I mean, I look at it frankly, like getting in physical shape, like when I decided I wanted to be in better shape, then I just said, you know, my priority is to work out before I do a bunch of other things. And there are lots of times where I’m like, “Oh crap, I gotta get this, you know, got all these emails, or I gotta get this project done,” where I didn’t do it. But longer term, that’s been a good decision. But, yeah, it’s hard to do it, but if you don’t force yourself, for lack of a better term, to devote a certain amount of energy to it and schedule it. And that’s why I like the Nike – I mean, I’m not specifically recommending this for every company, but the fact that in this one division, they take two weeks every year that is about the future, and they’re going to do it together, and that time is blocked off. It’s a forcing mechanism. So I’m a big fan of forcing mechanisms, to try to force you to do things that are not necessarily urgent, but are important.

Drew: Great stuff. And of course, one of my answers would be, well, be an active member of the CMO Huddles community, where we – that’s right, that goes without saying. Of course, it goes without saying. All right. Finally, offer two do’s and one don’t for every CMO and things that you want them to take away from Leaders Leap.

Steve: Oh gosh. I mean, this is so high level, maybe, but be willing to explore the perimeters of your ignorance. This is the term I use in the book. But you know, what are those things? What are your edges? What are those things that you either are afraid to go explore around. You know, talking about your job is maybe useful in your personal life as well, but I’m not going to give any unlicensed psychological advice. But you know what? Where are the go into the places that scare you? You know what are those things where you’re uncomfortable and wade in in some ways, whether that’s going to a conference or bringing a couple people in, or getting your team to talk about, I mean, depends on what the topic is. So exploring perimeters of your ignorance would be one. And I guess related to that is, you know, do a few things that scare you. You know, what experiments could you stand up? What conversations could you have with your team or your boss or whatever, where you are more vulnerable and you expose those places. I mean, I know that’s a hard thing to say in certain cultures, or just, you know, however you happen to be wired, but I’ve just found when I take on uncomfortable topics with – I mean, this is true of friends, my girlfriend, whatever. But you know, in the business world that there’s often some really great stuff there. The don’t would be, don’t over-invest in incrementality, in your product or service offering. It’s probably going to be unproductive time or diminishing returns.

Drew: I love it. Well. Thank you. Steve Dennis, author of Leaders Leap. Where can listeners find you?

Steve: I’m always doing the shameless self-promotion on LinkedIn and other places, but my website is StevenPDennis.com and I’m on LinkedIn and all over social media.

Drew: Alright. Well, thank you all for sticking around, for this conversation. I’m Drew Neisser, your host of Renegade Marketers Unite, peace out.

If you’re a B2B CMO, and you want to hear more conversations like this one, find out if you qualify to join our community of sharing, caring, and daring CMOs at cmohuddles.com.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that’s me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I’m your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!