In today's fast-paced, hyper-connected world, the ground is constantly shifting under our feet. For companies and their employees, this means the skills needed to succeed are in a perpetual state of flux, creating a widening gap between the talent available and the talent required.
Any marketing team knows the pain of constant context-switching. New priorities pop up, interrupting the people doing the actual work, and everything grinds to a halt. The single best thing you can do for your team's productivity is to protect them from these interruptions.
We tend to think of courage as a grand, heroic trait reserved for history-makers and superheroes. But in reality, courage is quieter and far more common. It’s what you need to get out of bed when facing a mountain of problems. It’s what a high schooler needs to raise her hand in class, what your team needs to voice their concerns, and what you need to finally put up that dating profile.
If you’ve ever felt like your marketing team is juggling too many priorities, constantly switching tasks, and struggling to show real results, you’re not alone. The modern marketing landscape is a frantic mix of shifting customer needs, emerging channels, and endless requests from stakeholders. It’s easy to get caught running on a hamster wheel of activity without making any real forward progress.
Getting marketing teams on the same page can feel like an uphill battle. At a high level, everyone agrees that alignment is crucial, but when you dig into the day-to-day work, things get complicated. We ran into this exact problem when we started shifting our own team toward an Agile approach. While the marketing department was excited, the rest of the company was skeptical. They just didn't see how this new way of working would solve anything.
In many companies, the marketing department feels like it’s constantly playing catch-up. A quick-reaction team gets spun up to handle a PR crisis, then another team collaborates with product managers to bake marketing into the launch. The industry shifts, a new competitor emerges with a cheaper model, and marketing is again tasked with leading the response. While the company might thrive, the internal feeling is often one of chaotic reactivity, not proactive strategy.
Looking back, my biggest professional mistake was behaving like an ostrich when I should have been a lion. In business, and especially in a volatile , being an ostrich will get you killed. This is how to avoid that fate.
For most of my childhood, I was quietly terrified that my dad was going to die. When I was younger than ten, my siblings and I stumbled upon his secret: he was a smoker. He had probably hidden his miniature cigars from us so we wouldn’t pick up the habit ourselves, but once the cat was out of the bag, he started smoking in front of us.
There’s a fundamental rule of communication that, once you grasp it, can completely transform your ability to negotiate, resolve conflicts, and genuinely change people’s minds. It also shines a light on why so many of our arguments go nowhere. This principle is a game-changer for anyone running a or trying to get a off the ground.