What is the best piece of career advice you’ve ever received?

Don’t let other people’s lack of imagination hold you back.

Which has led to working four days a week as a serial CMO to high-growth companies, leaving the fifth for board bits, formal mentoring and family – a combination I love.

What future opportunities do you think marketing and communications will create over the next five years?

Some of the most interesting marketing of our times comes from the world of… politics.

Cambridge Analytica helped swing the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US Presidential election with its data-gathering, micro-targeting and rapid testing – a game regular companies are just starting to play.

In 2016, Dominic Cummings also captured the popular mood diabolically well with ‘Take back control’ – and he did it again with ‘Get Brexit done’ in 2019. British tech companies, who favour jargon and obfuscation (count the products calling themselves a ‘platform’…) will similarly learn to harness the power of a few well-crafted words.

Because Marketing – whether it’s used by the bad guys or the good – can be incredibly powerful.

What is your most trusted news source?

Can I have three? The contradictory chaos of Twitter, a weekly blog post from spiky sage & marketer Scott Galloway, and the FT.

What has had the most influential impact on your leadership career and why?

The things that have gone most unexpectedly right – or horribly wrong.

Horribly wrong: a few months after I landed what I hoped would be a dream role as COO & CMO of a then-hot fintech startup I fall asleep, exhausted, in a traffic jam – and drove the front of my car into the back of the next one. Suffice to say that I overhauled my work habits pretty conclusively after that all-too-literal car crash moment.

Unexpectedly right: I launched into a major home renovation, working alongside a wonderful architect and a motley crew of several dozen subcontractors. After two years of ongoing angst and occasional delight, the end result somehow ended up shortlisted for an award in the Architect’s Journal.

I learned an incredible amount, while running a large project for myself with my own money, about the creative process (which can take time and should become more explicitly iterative) and vendor management (useful when so much of marketing is done with third parties).

What is your biggest takeaway from covid19?

Senior execs lack imagination.

Which is why so few of us would have had the same attitude to remote working before covid as after – and begging the question, where else are we getting it wrong?

How are you planning for 2021 and beyond?

Preparing to be surprised.

What career advice would you now give to yourself 10 years ago?

Sweat the decades, not the months.

What’s the toughest interview question you’ve ever asked or been asked?

“What do you know about marketing?” – from Lorraine Twohill, then VP Marketing EMEA at Google, now their CMO.

It was 2007 and I was a management consultant who, of course, knew nothing. But I had the gall to assert that marketing and strategy (where I did have a clue) were – as I held two tightly crossed fingers up to my face – ‘this close’.

To my ongoing amazement, she hired me.

Who is your business hero and why?

In a world where it’s all too easy to sell products that cause harm and ignore what economists drily call externalities, the B Corp movement’s a uniquely scalable attempt to meld purpose and profit. Making its founders – Jay Coen Gilbert, Bart Houlahan, and Andrew Kassoy – the people that might just save capitalism.