Kellyn Smith Kenny (AT&T) | Reinventing and Redefining Trust in Telecom

26:09I don't want you to refer to yourself as a marketer. You're a business person. And I thought, well, that's interesting. And I know he meant it as a compliment. So I took it as such, but I thought, why is there a stigma in certain industries that a marketing person isn't a business person. And so I reflected quite a bit on that. And certainly from industry to industry, it changes, but you have to know whatever company you go into. And I've, I've been inside a handful of companies and I've worked inside different industries. There always is an artisan class. And what he was signaling to me is you can fit in with the artisan class, even though people historically inside this company might actually be thinking of marketing as more of the pretty picture group or as the communications group than not actually fully appreciating how fulsome you need to be as a marketer.

27:03And so it was probably before then, but that really was sort of a wake up call of people don't always associate marketers with having a mindset of caring for the total business, the total customer base. And I knew that how I approached the role could impact how I was perceived and that it would be very important in terms of the ultimate success of the company and the individuals that worked for me, for me to position myself in that way. You work with a lot of partners, right? Every CMO does. How did you get all of them on board that this is the way that we're going to work together? Because if your media agencies, your design agencies, your ad agencies, on and on and on, they have to be with you on this, right?

27:44That's right. How did you do that? How did you role model that? Great question. One of the things that we've done that has been very effective is we've brought people in as far upstream as possible and painted the vision. When people see the vision and the ambition of what we're trying to accomplish, it is extremely motivating. And we've seen that they are delivering idea after idea after idea. And it's almost as if it's become contagious. instead of it being this thing that is sitting in pockets or cul-de-sacs, it's actually been extraordinarily motivating across the board as we're leveling up, as we're really aspiring to greatness and excellence.

28:27People want to be a part of that. So bringing them in early, keeping them updated along the way, and then sharing the wins. One of the things that I probably need to get better at as a leader is celebrating the small wins because we have had so many moments throughout the past five years, especially in this last year, where we have done extraordinary things that people maybe didn't think were possible 10 years ago or five years ago or even three years ago. And so actually leaning into those moments and having people feel as though this wouldn't have happened without me, we've seen that that really sustains the motivation.

29:02Now, a frequently asked question I get is how to think about the organization of the future with all the things that are changing in our work, especially AI. You've been in the job now five years. I bet your approach to work and organization is different now than it was when you walked in the door. So could you talk about some of your learning, your insights, maybe successes and failures as you've thought about evolving your organization to win going forward with the right capabilities as well as all the right attitudes, which you've been talking about? Since you mentioned AI, I'll start there.

29:35This was actually something I discovered after I had joined AT &T. but AT &T was really at the forefront of artificial intelligence back in 1955. One of AT &T's R &D researchers from Bell Labs, a very famous inventor by the name of Claude Shannon, was one of the four individuals that actually coined the phrase. So we take AI very seriously inside this company. At the time, he was already famous for creating information theory, which still today is the mathematical foundation for modern digital communication, computing, and ultimately AI. But we've taken this to heart and we are applying AI across the customer experiences and definitely marketing strategy and execution.

30:18We have really been encouraging all of the marketers, all of the growth managers inside the company to embrace it with enthusiasm, to improve the customer experience and ensure that they always have the best connectivity available. Because if a customer has an exceptional experience with us, they are going to advocate for the brand. They're going to be more satisfied and they're going to stay longer. And so today we're using AI and synthetic models to predict storm impacts. We can literally dynamically reroute traffic across the network. We can adjust antennas on the top of cell phone towers and manage power to protect the performance that our customers have.

30:58So much of how a customer views your brand and your company is based on the experience they have with your products and services. So that has been hugely impactful. And then we relate that to how we communicate with customers and notify them, hey, a store may be coming in in your area. Here's what we are doing to ensure you always stay connected. We've also integrated AI into our advanced data and analytics to improve customer experience in terms of diagnosing network repairs. So making sure that we send the right experts to the right jobs, making sure that we're using AI in the field to help guide how our technicians promptly and accurately resolve issues.

31:36We've been able to cut down on the amount of time it takes to get repairs complete thanks to the use of AI. And then, of course, we use it with customer support, whether it's digital self-service and they're engaging with an agent, or if they're interacting with us when they make a call in. What we've seen is a 50 % reduction in the number of people that a customer needs to talk to, to get their issue resolved, which as you can imagine, makes customer satisfaction increase significantly and a 33 % reduction in the time to actually resolve their issues. None of that would have been possible without AI.

32:14And so we as marketers are very inspired by those improvements to the customer service experience. And then from, of course, a marketing and strategy and execution perspective, it's changed how we spend our time, how we manage our meetings, how we manage our inboxes, how we actually prioritize the initiatives that we're going to deploy and invest our resources in. We use AI to analyze and synthesize our data and research to diagnose market opportunities. Hey, is there a pocket of customers over here where we're under penetrated? And by shifting our message to this population of customers and reaching them when they give us a signal that they're in the market, could that actually improve acquisition effectiveness?

32:53And then of course, how we communicate with them. We did an experiment earlier this year, where we were using AI to personalize and optimize the content that went in front of every single perspective. And we saw a massive improvement in effectiveness of those ads. How did you get your organization to really become super users? I mean, I loved how you said you started with the customer experience, we can make it better. And let's use that as our rallying cry or focus. Obviously, there's lots of applications for AI. But when you can make the customer more delighted, you know, that's wonderful and it leads to great brands and great companies.

33:28So how did you really get your company, the organization to lean into the platforms you were experimenting with and the use cases that you were piloting? This is a great question and one that I'm still frankly spending quite a bit of my time on because as you would expect with most technology adoption cycles, we had our early adopters who race toward this. They saw that it was part of the future and they were energized about how they could use this tool to make themselves more efficient, more effective. Then you had the fast followers on the heels of the early adopters. And what we're seeing from employees and team members is this really is saving me time.

34:07This is making me better at what I do. It's helping me collaborate more effectively. I understand the customers better, but honestly, Jim, I've still got a population within the organization that we're trying to bring along. And so we have an individual on our team who is incredible at change management, and he is tasked with making sure that the AT &T Marketing and Growth Organization is adopting all of the tools and making use of it. And that's from trainings to he runs contests, he has opportunities for them to get involved and win prizes, and we're starting to see things take off. But as with anything, and we're marketers, so we know this, you almost need to have a campaign because it's not everybody's natural instinct to jump in.

34:47Even when they see some of their colleagues experiencing impressive results, they're still reticent. They're still nervous. Maybe they're even a little bit in fear. And so we actually needed to have an absolute pro at change management. And he's, he's been in the role for a couple of months. He is so fired up and we're starting to see the traction.

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35:48You talked about differentiation, and I really wanted to talk about that because I love the era of accountability. That's a great summation. It's a great mantra. But as I was doing my home, and I knew your brand pretty well, but I did a lot of homework getting ready for this. I would say another summation of the last five years has been breaking through and differentiating. So I'm glad you took us there, but I want to go there a bit more deeply because if I look at your background, you worked for Hilton, Capital One, Accenture early in your career. Those are tough brands to set apart. For sure.

36:22And then you also worked for Microsoft and Uber, which have set themselves apart very well over a long period of time. That's right. So I'd like you to talk about this. I mean, if you can't differentiate yourself, if you can't be distinctive, if you can't be relevant, you don't have a brand. And you've had a lot of experiences. in trying to do that. So if you had to boil it down to how you approach a challenge like this, which you've done at AT &T over the last five years, how do you approach building a differentiated, distinctive, meaningful brand? What have you learned about that with all the experiences that you have had?

36:55Well, first of all, thank you for the incredible compliment because for Jim Stengel to say that we've done a great job differentiating, that really lands on my heart. In a tough category, by the way. That is the ultimate compliment. Thank you. Honestly, Kellyn, it's about the toughest category I can imagine. It is tough. It is really tough. But you hit on it. What we started by doing was stripping away all of the device promotions, stripping away all of the flash, all of the competitive advertising. And we tried to get really to the core, the simplest component parts of what customers want and need from a communications provider.

37:36And it really isn't a big mystery. They've said it for years. What I want is a network connectivity I can depend on. I want prompt and friendly service if there's ever an issue. And I want the deals to be fair. And by that, in our category, our category was plagued with existing customers feeling resentful, almost a level of righteous indignation of why does the new customer get the free phone? Why doesn't the customer who's been loyal to you for decades, why don't I get a free phone? And we really changed the game. And we brought that all to life at the beginning of this year with the AT &T guarantee.

38:16And we remain not just the first, but now the only connectivity provider that says we will guarantee the network, the deals and the service. And if we ever let you down, we're going to make it right. And we're going to make it right proactively. And that proactivity piece is so important because customers don't want to have to harass you and call you to get you to make it right for them. And when we, again, you asked, how did we actually get to the analysis, the diagnosis of what was needed? That part was easy. Figuring out what we were going to do about it was hard. And over the course of the past five years, no one has invested more in connectivity infrastructure in the United States than AT &T.

39:01And I'm about to share a staggering number, $145 billion in the past five years. That is staggering. That is staggering, right? Yeah, that is staggering. And that still wasn't enough because that was only one of the three pillars. The second thing we did was we had to make sure that the customer care experience, the service experience was bulletproof. So we invested nearly a billion dollars in the past few years improving that. And then we said, we're going to acknowledge that customers feel this righteous indignation around the deals. And we're going to say, everybody gets our best deals, whether you're a new or an existing customer.

39:40So you never need to feel as an existing customer, an obligation to shop around. We're going to take care of you. And again, the insight around those three pillars was not new. My competitors know that. We just decided as AT &T, we're going to step up and meet customers where they are. And the reason it's so important that I point out these things happened over years is because the AT &T guarantee was something we had planned and worked to deliver literally years in the making. And when we launched it, we wanted to be in that rarefied air. We wanted people to think about the AT &T guarantee the way they think about Nordstrom's return policy or the way Patagonia handles any bag, any jacket, any piece of equipment that you've had where they will repair or replace it.

40:30And we thought the one thing we can do that Nordstrom and Patagonia can't do is we can know if you've had a network challenge. We can know if you had to wait more than five minutes to talk to somebody from customer service. We can know if it took us longer than 24 hours to fix and repair your issue. And based on that, we will proactively credit people. And our policy became, even Jim, if you experience a 20 minute interruption, we know that that could impact your whole day. And so we're going to credit you for a full day of service. That I even get chills as I'm telling you that that was hugely differentiating and our customers have loved it.

41:07It's such a good story. And congratulations to you and your team. I mean, that's heavy lifting and you've done it and you've done it with conviction and you've done it with working on the things that matter to the customer. You know what the story reminds me of? We had George Felix from Chili's on our show recently. I listened to that podcast. He blew me away. I actually was nervous to come on after I listened to George. No, it's the same story. And Chili's is crushing it. Their last quarter, like 20 % growth on top line. And that's also a pretty competitive category. But it was getting down to what do customers really care about in a fast, casual restaurant.

41:45It's like four things. He outlined them. We're going to do them super well. We're going to get the entire organization excited by that. We're going to communicate just that and look at what's happening to the business and the organization. It was so invigorating to hear him speak because I also noticed the similarities. And when we look at AT &T's performance over the past five years, and even over the past year, since we've launched the guarantee, Customer MPS scores are up. Customer satisfaction scores are up. We have lower churn. We actually see our customers recommending to friends and family and adding line at a faster clip than they've done before.

42:21They're more confident in our product services and customer experience, which is an interesting point. And they have higher LTV. People were worried. If you tell them proactively, hey, we noticed that you experienced an interruption in service. But what if they wouldn't have noticed that the service was interrupted? it. And now we told them, are they going to feel less confident? It turns out they're more confident. They think AT &T is on top of it. And, you know, we'd like to say that the stock price, not maybe day to day, but over a period of years is a pretty good scorecard. And if you look at how our stock has done in the past five years, we're up 71%.

42:56And even in the first eight months of launching the guarantee, it was up 32%. It's working. Yeah, it's working. Your leadership style. I've heard you talk about it as equal parts head and heart. And I love that. And I think this whole discussion has been full of that. I would like you to talk a bit about what happens when it gets out of tilt. What happens when you get too much head or too much heart? And I think about this in my own experience because it sometimes does. And sometimes others have to sort of say to me, think about the emotions a bit more in what we're doing here or analyze this a little bit more deeply.

43:31So how do you keep that equal in how you manage day to day? That is such a great question. And it's one I try to challenge myself to consider. One of the things that I'm so fortunate to have is I am surrounded by a very diverse set of leaders within the marketing and growth organization. They are deep subject matter experts, but their skills allow them to also balance me out. So we've got a head of marketing planning who also is very analytical, but also very heart driven and, and, and focuses on customer emotion. We've got a head of advertising and retail experiences. We've got a head of media and sponsorships who's very analytical, but also wanting to make sure that we leverage the media and the sponsorships in a way that pull on the heartstrings.

44:17We've got a head of brand strategy, again, both very analytical, but wanting to produce brand elements that really move you and speak to the heart and strike an emotional chord. Then we've got our head of marketing technology. We've got our head of digital. And because each one of them has such unique strengths and differences, that right there is almost an automatic, instant way to just rebalance. And then as a team, as a leadership team, not even just with my direct reports, but how we talk to our directors and our associate vice presidents in the company or in the organization, we talk about, are you a thermometer or are you a thermostat?

44:56That famous line from Martin Luther King's letter from a Birmingham jail. Are you going to walk into a room and just be the same temperature as the people who are being all analytical? Or when people are going really deep on the math camp, can you bring them out of that and share a customer insight that really evokes critical thinking, strategic problem solving? Can you be the thermostat that regulates? Same thing if you're in a room filled with creative masterminds. Can you introduce a salient piece of data that helps people reorient around the thing that we need to do that's going to be most effective for the business?

45:32So I constantly try to think about, am I a thermostat in the room for others? Am I bringing balance? And then when I find myself off-center, I will actually try to go and have a conversation. You know, maybe it's my head of research, analytics and insight, and he's giving me more information to just ground me when I get too excited about an idea that's creative. You've done something a lot of CMOs would like to do, and that's join a public board. And you've done that in the last year. So I was on two public boards when I was CMO, one when I was at P &G and one after I left. They were both incredible experiences.

46:07But I get this question a lot. How do I join a board? And what process should I go through? How should I start? How should I think about it? Would I like it? So talk a bit about your journey to being appointed on the board of a public company. Is it something that was very intentional? Did it happen serendipitously? Talk about that. It was something that I had spent a lot of time thinking about. I wanted to make sure that if I joined a board, that I could truly be additive, that I could contribute in a way and bring a unique perspective that they would value, but also that I would be in a position to learn a tremendous amount.

46:44And so I had been approached to join boards many times over the past, I don't know, five to seven years. And what made Invitation Homes the right fit for me was it really is a company that deeply cares about their residents. They have 110 ,000 homes around the U.S. where they have residents, and they wanted to improve the customer experience, I thought I definitely know a thing or two about that. They wanted to make sure that they had a very healthy brand that could be reinvigorated. I thought I knew a thing or two about that. But above all, the CEO is actually a friend of mine. He's somebody that I'm a fellow with as part of our Henry Crown Fellowship in part of the Aspen Institute.

47:28And so I knew he was an individual who had tremendous integrity and that he would run his company in a manner that number one would be well run. Number two, involve the highest values and standards. And number three, that he was hungry to have somebody who could be a real partner to him. So it's still fairly early days for me on this board. It's not even been a full year yet, but I have been so blown away by the caliber of the other board members. I'm learning from them and the quality of his management team is really top-notch. The other thing that's nice when you're at a big 135 ,000-employee, 150-year-old company is it's nice to be with a company that's a little bit scrappier, that doesn't have$145 billion to deploy in their network.

48:16And because of that, I'm also really enjoying the pace and the entrepreneurial nature of that company.

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49:28Kellen, let's flip into the creative brief. Now, the first question is, I look at your education, I look at your career, and it's clear, and also from this interview, you're motivated, you're creative, you're inspiring, you're successful. Have you had any major missteps? And if you did, how did you handle those? Oh, definitely. I've had some missteps, definitely along the way. So I started my career as a technology consultant, literally hands on a keyboard coding. And what I loved about it was how intellectually rigorous it was, how challenging it was. But Jim, I'm, I'm not embarrassed to admit this now, but despite being a team athlete, I had, I had played softball for even in college.

50:11In addition to skiing, I did not approach that job as being part of a team. I thought I was this hired gun to go out there and code. And I wanted to have the best code. I wanted to have the most bug-free code, but I was approaching everything like an individual contributor. I didn't fully recognize that I could be part of something grander. And I remember I was working on a project for a bank and I had been asked to help convert these emerging market debt instruments in their new system. And I, I called a professor at NYU who happened to be the one person I could find that knew anything about these dead instruments.

50:52I got in his coaching, I built the code and I rolled it out and I thought, everyone's going to love it. Everyone's going to be so blown away by me. And it was, again, it was early in my career. It was such an important lesson. People were not blown away. They were underwhelmed to say the least, like congratulations. You just, you know, accomplish the freckle on the backside of a gnat. You know that this is part of an entire initiative, right? And I really had missed the point. I thought that looking good meant that I had to do it by myself. And that has been one of the most galvanizing learning lessons throughout my whole career.

51:32Now my entire MO is how do we harness the collective expertise of everyone we have the good fortune of working with? How do we make sure that as a team, we have full end-to-end visibility into what people are doing so that we're contributing to something truly masterful? We're painting a Picasso, not just a bunch of random shapes on various different pages. And so, I mean, I could give you failure after failure, but that's probably the most seminal one for me where I realized, man, you just didn't get it. You missed it. And I did miss it. Luckily, I picked up the clue phone and figured it out.

52:10But thank you. I guess it was Accenture you're working at. Accenture. That's right. Thank you, Accenture. Right. Thank you, Accenture. Those are pivotal lessons. Absolutely. I then went to business school. And while I was in business school, again, I had the incredible good fortune. I was assigned to a case team. We had an entrepreneur, investment banker. I was the software consultant. We had somebody who worked at Disney. We had somebody who'd been a brand manager. and I remember thinking, okay, we have to crack this case and we had all these questions we need to answer. And so I came to the first meeting and I had all of my answers sketched out on, on the page.

52:45And I thought I had it all figured out. And within the first, I had written paragraphs and paragraphs within the first five minutes, I folded up my paper and I pushed it off to the side because the perspectives that I had the opportunity to listen and learn from in that environment helped me realize I can get maybe 50 % of the way there on my own. My job is to be an incredible facilitator and to, and to make sure that the very best that everyone has to offer in this case study team is being brought to the fore. Is your spirit animal really a bluebird? Gosh, I love the bluebird. Part of it is AT &T is blue.

53:22Hilton was blue. I had, I've had a lot of blue in my career, but I love the notion of you have done your homework. I love the notion of spreading your wings and flying and getting higher and higher. And I try to aspirationally be that for myself and also encourage my daughters, my 10 and 13-year-old daughters to spread their wings and reach new heights every year. I went to a session with my wife, it was with another company, and they did a whole analysis of what's our spirit animal is. So they did like a personality test and then it popped out what's spirit animal. And mine's a hummingbird. Yours is a bluebird.

53:58So, and there's, we can go on and on. And then my wife's is an owl. Oh, she's wise. She's a sage. We have the owl and the hummingbird. So it's a good match. So the hummingbird, right? Isn't that the one bird that can fly backwards? Yes. And it, and it just, it moves around a lot. It tries a lot of different things. That's such a great compliment. Yeah. It's good. And I think it's accurate. It's accurate. And it can go deep, right? It exports the nature, which is a, which is a big part of what you're doing on this podcast. Oh, I love it. I love it. Thanks, Kelly. I'm the hummingbird. And you're the bluebird.

54:32Okay. What's the first brand you remember as a child, as a young girl making an impact on you? Okay. I knew you were going to ask me this, and I'm like, he's going to say BS, but I swear, hand over my heart, this is true. AT &T. It was AT &T. And you've done so much research, you probably know what I'm about to say. Do you know what I'm about to say? I just predicted it. So as a little kid, my family was super into the holidays. And one of my favorite stories at Christmas time was the night before Christmas. And when I was young, probably six or eight years old, AT &T had this commercial where the grandparent was on one end of the phone and the grandchild was on the other end of the phone in the lap of their parent.

55:12And the grandfather is reading twas the night before Christmas. And at the very end, of course, it's the AT &T jingle, reach out and touch someone. And you're going to think I'm crazy for saying this. I am the daughter of a mathematician, so this is not going to compute. But I genuinely think if it wasn't for that commercial, I would not be in this job. I genuinely believe it. I don't think I would have moved from the Northeast to Dallas. There was something about that that left this truly indelible mark on me. And when I got the phone call about this, this role in this opportunity, I didn't hesitate.

55:47And if any other brand, and there's amazing brands in Dallas, if any other brand had reached out and said, we've got this opportunity in Dallas, I really think I would have said, thanks for considering me, but no thanks. So I think that commercial is literally why I'm here today. I remember that commercial. Yes. It beautiful. So beautiful. Beautiful. So think about bringing that back somehow. I know the spirit of it. Every, every Thanksgiving, I'm like, do we have a spot? was the night before Christmas. Maybe my team will listen to this and do something about it. Very sweet. Very, very, very powerful insight under it.

56:20If Jim Stengel recommends it, it seems like something we should do. Who has been the most inspiring person in your life? So we talked about my dad. I'm now going to talk about my mom. She is a force. Her passion for excellence in everything she does, even as a retiree, she pursues excellence. But she was a registered nurse. She then moved on up at the hospital that she worked at and became a hospital administrator. And she ran the second largest outpatient services division for the entire state of New York. She was in Southern Westchester County. She served the Bronx and Harlem and Westchester.

57:03And she had a massive staff. There was at least a thousand people that worked for her. And she think is actually one of the main driving forces why I get so focused and obsessed with the customers, her focus on patient outcomes. When you think about really the difference between life and death, that was what she worked on. And she tried to extend people's life. She tried to make sure that when they were exiting the hospital, they had good days, weeks, months, years ahead. And her passion for her people, her work ethic was just second to none. I used to call her when I was growing up that she was a workaholic.

57:40And the other day, the word workaholic was in a book that my 10 year old was reading. And I said, do you know what that word is? And she goes, yeah, you are one. And I thought, but you know, if you can inherit workaholism, I have inherited that from my mom. She also sounds like she was head and heart. Oh, absolutely. The level of empathy and compassion that she has for people is second to none. She also is truly an expert. Even though she's been retired for many, many years, she is still the first phone call that not just me, my husband, my kids, my in-laws make, all of her friends. Today, she's still the first phone call because she is so calm in the eye of chaos as well.

58:25So my mom, for sure, composure up the wazoo. Yeah. I have a daughter who's an ICU nurse at UCSD, cardio ICU. You must be so proud. Yeah, she's amazing. And as are her colleagues. I mean, it's the best group of people. They're just incredible. Well, thank her from me. I will. And she'll know she'll love this story, by the way. Okay, let's get back to Christmas. We're deep in the holiday season, you know, as this is released. So do you have a Christmas wish you want to share with our audience? So I would say I know we've just had Thanksgiving. My favorite, favorite holiday of the year is Thanksgiving.

59:01I love taking time to give gratitude, to really extend deep thanks and appreciation to everybody in your life that has made an impact. I try to do that here at AT &T. I try to do that in my personal life with my friends and family. But one of the things, I guess, if I sort of blend my Christmas wish and my reflection around the Thanksgiving holiday is really reject apathy, reject complacency, find a charitable organization that you want to donate your time to or donate your money to. When my 13 year old, like she's currently 13, when she was 10 years old, she said she didn't want any holiday gifts.

59:43She wanted everything to go to donations. That really touched my heart. And I thought, man, the generosity of a 10 year old girl, I wish all of us had that, had that mindset. And so I guess for the holiday, I just hope that everybody reflects on what they're grateful for and gives back. I love that. That's a beautiful place to end, Kellen. This was so good. By the way, you're a great CMO. You don't need to hear that from me, but you are a great CMO. This is full of lessons. Your spirit's wonderful. No mystery why the company and brand is doing so well. So it's been a great conversation. Congratulations and the best to your team and the best for you for Christmas and the new year.

1:00:19Thank you so much. Thanks to you. I'm so honored to have been included on your podcast. How many hundreds of these do you have now? We're coming up on 400. So yeah. Yeah. And they're all different and they're all wonderful. Oh my gosh. That's why I love doing it. Talking to people like yourself, it's just endlessly fun and interesting. Thank you. You have done such a service for the entire sector. As marketers, as brand leaders, we are incredibly lucky to have an icon. Speaking of icons, to have an icon like Jim Stengel ushering in the next great wave of growth and marketing insight. So thank you so much.

1:00:56It was a pleasure to be here. I'm blushing. We better end it. Thank you, Kellen. Thank you. That was my conversation with Kellen. Three takeaways from this one for your business, brand, and life. The first one is be coachable. We started and we kind of ended on that. She says one of her strengths and one of her dad's strengths was to be coachable. And that means being flexible, being agile, and being open to others' points of view. The second takeaway, lead with your head and your heart. Kellen obviously does that. It was evident in the interview, but I loved her stories about when she gets a bit off track, how she builds her team to be sure that the entire team approaches their work, their customer, their organization with head and heart.

1:01:37And the third takeaway, this was a beautiful case of how to build a differentiated, distinctive brand. She has done that with her team at AT &T. It's tough to do in a category like this, but she talked about thinking about, in a simple way, the things that set you apart that are meaningful to your customers. Double down on that and bring that to life. It's actually that simple. And I think the last bonus lesson is I loved her thoughts about generosity and gratitude in the holiday season. I echo that. Let's all be a bit more grateful, a bit more generous, and let's all have a wonderful holiday season.

1:02:15that's it for this week's episode of the CMO podcast as always I would be grateful if you shared our show with your friends along with subscribing and leaving a review on apple podcast spotify or wherever you listen the CMO podcast is a vive original production the views and opinions expressed by podcast speakers and guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinions of our sponsors or its personnel nor do our sponsors advocate or endorse any individuals or entities featured on the episodes.