Kofi Amoo-Gottfried (DoorDash) | The DoorDash Super Bowl Bet That Changed Everything

21:23Or is there a, you know, I think about this time of year, for instance, like with snow storms and huge demand and disruption, like the supply side of the house on the DASHA side is always challenging in the first quarter. So I may end up spending more of my time there. You know, we did the deal to acquire Deliveroo the back end of last year. So I'm spending a lot of my time on with the Deliveroo team on like, how do we integrate the function across both companies and make sure that we're learning from each other. So I'm spending a bunch of time there. So that's sort of how it flexes, which is the like from quarter to quarter, I may have like slightly different areas of focus, depending what's happening in the business, but I'm accountable for all of it, which is, you know, at any given moment, if someone wants to know how we're doing on, you know, driver acquisition this week, or how many merchants we signed up, like I need to understand what we're doing and be able to react to that.

22:17Jim Stengel:It's tough to build a leadership team in such a dynamic company. 100%. Right? So your leadership team now, I suspect, looks a lot different from what it did three or four years ago. Any tips or advice or counsel for those listening who are also trying to build the capabilities and the people for preparing you for the future? So how do you think about that? Because you're obviously doing it, you've done it, you continue to do it. Yeah, I think one of the things that we talk a lot about is this notion of slope and hiring for slope. Because we think like most to the point of this place is entirely different than it was four years ago, certainly than it was seven years ago.

22:55Everyone's job is going to change probably every 18 months. So if you sort of start with that as like the premise, all of our roles are going to be more complex in some way every year. Then the thing you have to solve for is like, can I hire people who can adjust to that complexity? Can I have people who have the slope? Can I have people who are excited to build, who can deal with change, who can deal with ambiguity, who can deal with like all of those things? So a lot of what we try to do is try to identify talent that we think has that sort of like that hunger, that builder mindset, that entrepreneurial bent.

23:27Because if you're in a place like this and you get upset or frazzled by things changing, it's going to be painful because things will change all the time. You know, when I started in 2019, I was talking to one of our GMs and he said, look, everything was breaking and, you know, the site was going down every week and sort of all of these things. We're just dealing with hyper growth. And so I was complaining to him about it. And he was like, hey, man, if you wanted to work somewhere that grew 2 % year over year and was like super stable, you should go do that. But for what this is, this is the reality.

24:05Jim Stengel:Pressure is a privilege. Some athletes said that, right? The pressure is a privilege. Exactly right. Now, you're only a 13-year-old company, right? And you have a dominant market share. And I've seen it ranges from, I don't know, 60 to 70, depending on what you're looking at and so on. But that's big. That's big by P &G standards, right? That's kind of tied in Pampers level. So we like those kinds of brands back then. One day, one day, one day we'll be tied in practice. I don't think we're quite there yet. But you're the number one player by far. It's not a category you created. You were not the first mover.

24:37Jim Stengel:So how did you do it? You and your team and the colleagues that came before you, I mean, 13 years, market leader, big category, growing category. What was the playbook or what were the principles that gave to this amazing rise? Well, I think there's a couple of things. I think there's some strategic things, but a lot of it is, and I'll talk about those, but a lot of it is also just daily execution. I think DoorDash's superpower is that day in, day out, we are in the weeds. We're in the numbers. We are operating at a very, very high level. I think that's the sort of thing that's hard to explain outside and easy to underestimate if you don't understand it.

25:16But this is a company that runs, you know, a massive daily business in a daily way where we're focused on all sorts of like input metrics where every week we're meeting together as a leadership team and taking action. And so I think that sort of executional discipline and rigor matters a great deal. But I think strategically, there's probably a couple of principles that early on mattered. So we talk a lot about being customer obsessed, not competitive focused as one of our values. And the way that that shows up early on is, you know, we launched in Palo Alto. So this was a company that was built by students at Stanford called Palo Alto Delivery.

25:50And so the first place that we operated was Palo Alto. And once it became clear that this could be like a going concern, the next question then became, do you go to San Francisco or do you go to San Jose? And two things were in our favor. One was like, there was a constraint, which is that like delivery up until that point was an urban phenomenon. And so you had like, every big city had delivery companies. So we looked at San Francisco and sort of went, we don't have the money to compete in San Francisco. So the constraint was super helpful. But it's like, we should try San Jose. The prevailing industry wisdom at the time was that you could not make delivery work in the suburbs.

26:23It was this idea that you needed dense urban environments, that the economics would never work. And so no one had actually gone and explored that and sort of gone and listened to the customers in that area. But we knew from operating in Palo Alto that that was just false. There were businesses that had unmet demand, that there were consumers that would be looking for this service. There were dashes, people that would want to work, gig work. And so that I think that pivot of sort of going into San Jose first sort of became what was then known as the suburban strategy, which is while everyone started in the cities, we started in the suburbs and built up Bracens from there before we moved into the city centers, which were like highly contested.

27:00So like, you know, even that 67 market share and food delivery, if you go into the suburbs, it'll be even higher. And if you go into like some very urban markets, it'll be a lot lower, right, depending on sort of how we built our business. And so I'd say that is one piece of it. I'd say the second piece of it is like a lot of what the industry was at the time. If you look at folks like Grubhub was lead gen. They were not doing the logistics side of the business because the logistics side is hard and it's expensive. And so like what you could do as Grubhub is you go, I will build a marketplace that highlights all the restaurants.

27:29I will then take a commission for driving your traffic, but I'm going to leave the delivery up to you. So that worked for restaurants that would do their own delivery. but over time you just realize that that TAM is much smaller than being able to enable delivery for everyone. And so I think both of those things, which all start with like really understanding sort of the customer and not taking the prevailing industry wisdom as gospel in a lot of ways mattered. And then you tie that with sort of like a relentless daily execution machine and you just keep going at it. And, you know, we have this notion of being 1 % better every day.

28:02And if you do that enough, it just compounds over time and you end up being sort of where we are today. But you know, we don't think we've won. You know what I mean? That is just not the mentality. The mentality is that like, we can always keep doing better for our customers on every side of the marketplace. And we have a lot of room to grow on everything from the core restaurants, to grocery, to convenience, to alcohol, to retail and beyond.

28:26Jim Stengel:Now you have a CEO who has got to be a CMO's dream, right? He's highly customer and employee centric. A hundred percent. He reads emails, comments for customers, employees, acts on them, gets inspired by them, keeps them in touch. So what's it like working with Tony, who's a founder as well? I mean, he is, I think Tony will go down as like a generational founder. I think he is, he has a few things that I think you want in a founder. And I think the leadership team at DoorDash, inclusive of, you know, the president and CEO, Premier, Adaka, who I report to all share this trait, which is the like, they're wildly ambitious.

29:03So the thing that they will do is push really hard on like, how hard are your goals? Like, are these goals truly ambitious? Are they actually a stretch? Are we actually solving a problem for the customer? Like what gets better in a customer's life as a result of us doing this? And like, really try to ground all of us in the work, in like the value that we're creating for people and that we're being ambitious is enough. And then they do an incredible job of like giving you a high degree of autonomy. So like once the goals are set and you're accountable for those goals, so, you know, across marketing, we have a wide variety of goals, you know, that we've talked about, like new customer acquisition or getting people onto a subscription product dash pass or getting Dasher to turn out this week.

29:45But once those goals are set, like I'm now on the hook for those goals. And then what ends up happening is that, but then you have the autonomy to operate in terms of what we think makes sense to go hit those goals. So long as we're respecting the budgets and the constraints and the payback periods and all of those things. And I find that like working certainly in a company that operates that way and being able to work for a founder, for me has been just like enormous because I can take full responsibility. I think we find that like most, not just in CMO roles, but I think in most jobs, you end up with this mismatch between like what you're accountable for and like the freedom with which you can go after the thing that you're supposed to hit.

30:21And like, one of the things that's kept me at DoorDash this long is that, you know, in the almost seven years I've been here, there's nothing that someone else has approved. Like ultimately it lives or dies by the calls that we make as a marketing organization. And we have full accountability and full autonomy and full responsibility. And if we get it wrong, which by the way, we have many times, we will go fix it. If we're behind plan, it's up to us to figure out how to get back on plan. If we do something that doesn't land in the way that we expected. It's incumbent on us to understand why that happened and get better the next time out.

30:53But that sort of recursive loop of clear goals, clear accountability, clear autonomy, the room to test, learn, experiment, fail, get better is super rare.

31:04Jim Stengel:Yeah. I mean, it's a great lesson. I mean, the companies that I talk to, work with, have worked with who get into trouble, there's just not clear accountability. It often comes down to that. 100%. And when there's not clear accountability, when P &G got into trouble at times during its, it's because accountability wasn't clear. It's a powerful principle. And, and, you know, by the way, not super easy to execute. Not easy to execute, no. And you have to be willing to sort of build a culture that like fosters that, that allows it to work in a way that's like we are competitive vis-a-vis the external environment and we're obsessed with like delivering for our customers.

31:44but that's at the end of the day if you're doing that well everything else kind of sorts itself out and you have enough instrumentation to get really clear on like who owns what goal um but enough collaboration for that like when it gets blurry to just go work through it because there's times when it will get blurry and so i think all of that has been like really helpful to making it work but yeah you're right it's not it's not easy to set up it's not easy to run a company like this

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33:15Jim Stengel:You said you love working with this company. You've been there seven years, which is a lot longer than other places, right? This job has been in this role. This company has been very sticky for you. And you've said why. Is there anything else you'd like to add to that? Why you've stayed so long and have had such a great time? Yeah, I think it's the things that we've talked about, but it's also the people, right? It's the people, it's the team that we've built, not just in marketing, but across the business. I think this place is also unique in the sense that this is a low ego company. It's a no bullshit company.

33:46Everyone's focused on getting the work done. There's very little politics. We grind, but everyone's bought into doing the work. And even though our ambitions and aspirations and goals are really high and we drive towards those with a lot of intensity, it never gets into the place where it's toxic. And so like when you find a place where all of those things are true and then as, you know, making a meaningful impact in the world in a real way, you know, we, we do this thing where we have a marketing offsite every year. And like, we try to do this more than that, but I try to pull out a bunch of user stories to just remind people like what we're actually doing here.

34:24But like behind the dashboards that we look at, there's like actual people's lives that are impacted. And we found this video last year, which was a woman who was like going dashing with her daughter in her car. And she was saying, hey, I'm just trying to make enough money every night because we're in a motel right now. And so my job is every night I go out and I make enough and that covers our motel rate. And I'm just like, this is what like a product is doing out in the world. And obviously we then went on and leaned in and did more than that to like help. And we've built this thing that we call the feel good engine, but we find these stories online and we just like lean in with them.

34:58You know, so we did this thing last year for back to school where everyone knows that like teachers never have enough resources. We said, hey, just tell us the 500 teachers on Twitter that you absolutely adore. And like, we're just going to take over and like hook them up for like that classroom going into the school year. And so like you just find that like our products play such a meaningful role in people's lives. And you can see, feel, hear that meaning. It's very real. It's very tangible. So I'd say that's the other thing that keeps me here.

35:25Jim Stengel:Let's stay on that. I've heard the metaphor used for your company. Your aspirations to be a 24-7 life assistant. That's right. Talk about ambitious, right? So could you tell us a bit about the power of that internally? And how did you arrive at that metaphor? I'm sure it just didn't fall out of the sky. It was a lot of discussion and customer work. But what does that mean to you and your team? Yeah. So I think this was, this is how we have described certainly like sort of what is the brand promise of DoorDash at its best. Right. And, and it came from this notion of like, you know, we started with, Hey, we deliver food.

36:01And again, as we talked about, most people think of DoorDash through the lens of the end consumer experience. But like, actually what we do is much broader than that in the first instance, without even getting into the categories, which is, you know, if you're a small business, that's looking to sort of balance the playing field. that's looking to figure out how do you survive and thrive in a world where foot traffic is no longer coming through your door, that's moving online. Like DoorDash can be a partner to help you figure that out. You know, if you're someone who's looking for a few more additional hours, additional ways to earn, like DoorDash can be the way that you do that.

36:34And certainly if you're someone who's looking to get a fix of canke and fried fish, which is like a much smaller problem in the scheme of all of this, like DoorDash can help you with that. So this was like first saying, let's actually broaden out like the role that we play. It's not just about the end delivery. It's about actually like meaningfully impacting these people's lives in some way. And then if you then go from that to also now, we're no longer just doing that for food. We're doing that for, in all sorts of ways. And again, you think about that through the lens of the end customer, but also through the lens of like, now all of a sudden, if you're a small bodega, you can also benefit from coming online.

37:10If you're a Kroger, a large grocery chain, we can help you figure out How do you reach customers who are no longer coming into your store? So we just found that this notion of like, how do we show up and meaningfully like help people do the thing that is that they're trying to do juxtaposed against like this insight where we said like modern life is a minefield. Like it's really, really hard to be like a human today. Like there's a lot of things competing for your time, for your attention. The state of the world is in flux. It seems all the time, particularly this week. And so modern life is a minefield.

37:42What role can our brand play? And it's to be there, to be that 24-7 life assistant. Like, how do we help you with all the jobs that you need to do? Whether you're a consumer, whether you're a Dasher, whether you're a business or whether you're an advertiser. And over time, there's probably more audiences beyond that. And there's more services that we can offer. You know, one of the things we do on the Dasher side, for example, is that audience, because of their financial position and like what they're looking for, they tend to be underbanked. So like we actually have a card product, financial services product that says, hey, how do we help you actually start to solve that problem?

38:15So a lot of what we think about is just through the lens of like, as we serve all these audiences across all of these needs, how do we become the 24 life assistant, 24 seven life assistant?

38:24Jim Stengel:Kofi, what are the signals that you're making progress on that, fulfilling that mission? Yeah, it's a really good question. I don't know that we have sort of a dashboard for that specific mission, but the way we think about it is generally like, is our service getting better? Right. So the way we would think about it is over time, we want a bunch of things to be true. We want to be able to like deliver everything in your city to you. Right. So can I get you the entirety of the selection that is around you? And so we measure that. Like, are we making progress on getting you all the selection that you could possibly want?

38:57not just in terms of the stores, but in terms of everything that's in every store. Because just because you have a store doesn't mean you have the full capital. So can both of those things be true? Then we think about it through the lens of like, and over time, are our prices coming down? So are we able to get you all the selection, get it to you in a way that's more affordable? If you think about probably the number one barrier for a category like this is the fact that like using a service like this is more expensive than doing it yourself, right? So like over time, we want that to get more and more affordable.

39:24And we've done a lot on that and we've seen progress, you know, so that selection, that's pricing and then quality. Like, are we getting faster? Are we getting it to you as quickly as you want it? And on top of that, are we getting it to you as few errors as possible? So we measure all of those things from the consumer standpoint. But then from the DASHA standpoint, we want actually DASHA pay to go up. Like we want to be able to get you more orders in the same time frame so that you're earning more over an hour so that your utilization is higher. on the B2B side, we go merchant profitability. So are we not just growing the merchants, but are they getting more profitable over time?

39:58So a lot of the metrics that we look at through the lens of like, are we becoming that 24 life assistant, seven life assistant, but are we making progress on what we consider like the most important inputs for our business on each side? And can we look year over year and say, yeah, that is getting better. And like, it's one of the things that like, I'm really proudest of is that we can look at our business over the past 13 years and go, yeah, it's gotten more affordable with more selection. Dashes have gotten paid more. Businesses are doing better. And you're going like the flywheel is actually working.

40:28Jim Stengel:I think you have your dashboard. Yeah. No, it's great. A really beautiful story. Kofi, we can't not talk about this one topic in this interview, and that is what happened at the Cannes Lions Festival in the summer of 2024, fours about two years ago, you won the highest acknowledgement possible in Cannes. You won a Grand Prix titanium. And for those people who are not in the inside of this industry, it's like the Uber Academy Award for, it's beyond best picture. It's just something that has never been done before. It's a crazy achievement. And it was for that Super Bowl idea, DoorDash delivers all the ads where you essentially deliver to some consumer the products from every ad in the game, which is crazy.

41:10Jim Stengel:It is the most challenging and daring Super Bowl initiative in the 60 years of the Super Bowl. There's no doubt. And that's why you got that award. So of course, we could talk about that specific idea, which was so wild, but I'd love you to talk about the culture that allows that to happen. It's something that was outrageous, unprecedented, impossible to do, and you did it. So tell us about that. I love the question because I think way more interesting than the idea itself is like, what are the sets of conditions that would need to be true? I would say that for us, again, I think some of this comes from Tony.

41:45Some of this is in the DNA of the company, but like, we are very risk forward company. Like we believe in that, like you have, if you have the chance, you should swing. If you think about some of the stories we've even talked about on the show, a lot of it has been like, Hey, you know, Palo Alto or San Francisco, or do you do the deliveries or do you not? All of those things were calculated risks that paid off. So it's very, core to us to sort of say like the job is to take a risk. And then the second thing is from marketing perspective, I think most people are trying to ignore your work. Like that is their job.

42:19So like the big risk is actually like no one's going to care. So you actually actively have to like overcorrect against that. And I think in the context of the Superbowl, it's so noisy and there's so much attention being paid that like really standing out on that night is an impossibility. Like I think most marketers and ad people think you want a Superbowl brief, But like the level of pressure involved in the Super Bowl is unlike like your day to day work in every single way, because like, you know, everyone's going to be paying attention. So I think for us, when you sort of pull all those elements together, the thesis was like, we know what we want to say, which is the like DoorDash delivers everything.

42:57But what is the most compelling, most interesting way to do that? And so we had like a bunch of other ideas that we looked at that were like fine. And then this idea came up from Widen and our internal team. And all of us went, this is the right idea. Now, we don't understand anything about what the mechanics would even be. Like, we just know that it's a great idea, which is we're going to deliver everything from the Super Bowl to one ad. No clue how we would actually do it. So then it was like, OK, is it a sweepstakes? Is it not? Is it a game of chances? And now I had to get the lawyers in early.

43:26Can we get every brand around the game to like participate with us? having like a legal team that was like down the clown. Like our legal team's brief from Tony is that like, it's very easy as a lawyer to say no. And so his explicit brief to the legal team is figure out how to get the teams to yes. And ultimately the teams own the decision, whether it's the marketing team or the BD team or the product team or insert whatever team here. But like having that partner that like really leaned in with us, having Widen and Kennedy really leaned in with us, having our internal teams, creative teams, really leaned in and then like working with all of these brands because i think once we had the mechanics then selling other brands in and getting them like getting all the legal paperwork done because you know with two weeks to go we got a cease and desist from the nfl saying that we couldn't do this and we sort of went why not they said you're trying to hijack we said we're not we we literally have 60 signed legal documents from every brand advertising saying that like they're absolutely happy to participate.

44:28But I think it got infectious. Like as we started talking to people, people were like, oh, this feels big. This feels like something we want to be part of. So, you know, we would go to like Hellman's and said, you know, we want to give away a tub of mayonnaise. And they go, how about a 60 pound? How about a 60 pound pound? Good for them. That's ridiculous, but sure. You know, and we had, you know, everyone would like lean in and make the thing bigger than even what we had dreamt it could be. So it ended up being like really fun, but like insanely hard. But I think it was sort of like this risk tolerance and this being in a risk-forward culture and being in a problem-solving culture because it also created like a bunch of like things we had to go figure out which is we knew we're going to drive a lot of traffic but we didn't want to bring that traffic to the site because we could bring the site down so we had to work with engineering to sort of stand up like a virtual velvet rope and then we built like a microsite to buffer the site like we had to solve all of these problems wow but it was like being in a company where everyone like got excited about what it was that we were trying to do and leaned in and all the brands around us got excited by it.

45:30But the most critical ingredient is probably risk tolerance and daily problem solving, both of which are present here. So did it work? It absolutely worked. So the numbers were crazy.

45:41Jim Stengel:Yeah. The level of engagement that that thing got, it was designed for like earned and PR, like all the news anchors, like no one would stop talking about it. It's like talking about all these things you could win. We built online cart so that whenever everyone dropped their teaser, we would just add them to the cart and go, BMW is now in the cart. And you could, like everyone's announcement became a piece of news for our campaign. So we just built all these hooks. We had like influences in all the different categories. Cause you find out Jim, that there are people that are like snacks influences, you know?

46:13So like we went and got all those people, like talk about snacks. And then it was the car people and like the fashion people, like whatever everything dropped would create a little mini conversation around it, drive all this attention around the fact that you could win all of this. And you know, the engagement, we had like 8 million entries. It was just astonishing of people sort of like entering this code. We saw this crazy thing, like people were like complaining that they missed the end of the game because they were like obsessed with like trying to figure out how to like win this DoorDash thing.

46:41And you know, coming out of that quarter, we reached all time highs for a percent of monthly actives transacting a new vertical. So like we saw all the things happen. It's like we drove awareness. We drove adoption. We drove a massive like sort of cultural moment. It was a fun one.

46:55Jim Stengel:Well, good for you. I mean, and it's, and the key part of it, fantastic idea, but it was your strategy. You wanted to let people know that you're playing in all these different categories and spaces. There's not a better way to do that. No. Yeah. No. And that's, and that's widening Kennedy at its best too. They take a strategy and think of something outrageous to bring it to life.

47:24Jim Stengel:Okay, let's get on to the creative brief. This is so fun. I love this first one question I have for you. I'm going into the Hall of Fame this year, the Advertising Hall of Fame in April. Well earned. I have to make a video of my life, right? So last weekend, we had a film crew come to my house and I invited a bunch of my childhood friends for the weekend. So I'm really close to the kids I've known since I was four or five and we stayed lifelong friends. I think you're the same way, right? I've heard you stay grounded because of these friends from home who could care less what you do. Don't care.

47:55Jim Stengel:Same with me. So talk about that a bit, Kofi. How have you done it? How have you kept connected? What kinds of stuff do you talk about? How has it helped your life? Well, I think for me, like I met, you know, my close friends, there's probably five or six of us that are, you know, tied at the hip. And we all went to, you know, boarding school together. And, you know, the Ghanaian tradition at the time was that everyone went away to boarding school. And these were like pretty harrowing sort of environments. It was not like a fancy English boarding school type situation. These are hard places. But as a result, you build these relationships that just stand the test of time because you were in it together.

48:30And so, you know, my buddy John lives in San Diego. Kwamena lives in Pasadena. Big John, the other John lives in Ghana. Augustine, who we call Bombay, he actually lives like an hour away from me. Yeah, but like we get together all the time. We get together at least once a year. But even more than that, we're in each other's lives for like everything that happens. Like if someone loses a parent or someone's going through a hard time or someone, like we will show up for each other, you know, weddings, like whatever it is. You always know that there's going to be a crew there that will have you and will be there for And so like, for me, that's been such an important force.

49:10And also like when you lose your way, there are people that are going to tell you like, hey, I don't I don't think you should be I don't think you should be walking down that path. Like, come back over here, you know, and like when you get too big for your britches, like you're going to find out like they don't they just don't care. None of this stuff matters to them because we've known each other for so long. And so that, I think of them as another set of siblings, frankly, because that's what the relationship is.

49:36Jim Stengel:It's so important and so rare. And I think you have to want to do it. You have to be intentional about it. We have formed, we sort of make the Super Bowl weekend a reunion weekend, and that gives us something. We don't do it every year, but we see each other at least once a year. But as you say, we're in each other's lives. But we kind of use this one thing. We don't go to the Super Bowl. We just find some place to come together. Yeah. Yeah. At someone's house or whatever it might be. But it gives us sort of a Thursday to Monday time to just sit around and reconnect and do fun things and exercise together and watch the game.

50:10And, you know, but it's a ritual.

50:13Jim Stengel:I think you have to set up your own rituals. I fully agree with that. And I try to also build that around like work and where the opportunities make sense. Like I was just in LA for All Star where, you know, we were activating as a partner of the NBA. So I brought both John and Kwamina who are local to that area and we got to hang out all weekend while I was working. It was fantastic being able to like be with my guys, but also like, you know, getting stuff done. Staying kind of close to this topic, you have a big job, but you're also really active outside the company, right? You're on the board of Stitch Fix, Vital Farms, your undergraduate alma mater, McAllister, and you have two sons and a marriage and so on.

50:50Jim Stengel:And so you're really successful. You're really engaged. You're a wonderful guy. I mean, how do you make it work? How do you be sure in this life where you have so many roles that you're successful in all of them? I know it goes, it ebbs and flows, but how do you do it? I don't know, man. I don't think anyone has a good answer to this one. I think part of it is working out the objective and then the things that feed that objective. So for me, the objective is always going to be the family. This is all in service of that. So trying to be clear about that and trying to figure out how to structure things around it.

51:28But it's not easy. My job at DoorDash is demanding. And then some of these other things that I do also have their own demands. I think the helpful thing about boards is it's on a predictable cadence as to when that is going to spike up. It's not every day. So you know leading up into the quarterly meetings, there's going to be a few days of your time that's required. But yeah, a lot of it is just trying to be as thoughtful about it as possible and to build some structure around it. Like I used to, for a long time, you know, as someone who grew up in a world where things were largely unplanned, which meant that like your superpower was like how you were going to react versus how you were going to plan.

52:07I had to learn that like actually planning and structuring things can also save you a lot of pain, right? So a lot of what I think about is like even with my family, like I try to be there every evening for bedtime, right? So that doesn't work obviously when I'm on the road, but when I'm at home, there's probably a window where I'm like tools down on the work front, you know, it's seven o 'clock on the East Coast, four o 'clock on the West Coast and go do bedtime and bad time and books and all of that stuff. And then if I need to like hop back on and sort of check a few things, I can do that afterwards.

52:38But I think it's just try to be as deliberate as you can possibly be in sort of slotting all the things and making sure that all the priorities are being looked after. But I definitely don't get it right all the time.

52:49Jim Stengel:None of us do. Hey, you spent 12 years of your career at ad agencies. Could you talk about what client in those 12 years most influenced your views on marketing and branding? That's a terrific question. I'd say there's probably a few different folks, all at sort of different stages. I started at Leo Burnett and all of our business was on Kellogg's. Essentially, that's the business that I worked on. And I'd say that like the CMO at the time was this guy named Mark Baines. And I think the thing that was great about growing up on Kellogg's, which, you know, you might agree with this, Jim from Procto, is that like, you just got schooled on the fundamentals, right?

53:28They were just like really good at like the basics of marketing. I mean, really thinking about the entire sort of experience, thinking about distribution, thinking about price. So I felt like I got to do things that frankly, other people at other ad agencies didn't get to do because our job, at least as it was described to us by Clive Serkin and John Sheehy, who ran the Kellogg's account, Aliyah Burnett was like, if your client gets hit by a bus, you should be able to do their job. So we had to get like deep into the weeds of like how that business actually worked. And so like I would say from Baines and from Kellogg's, I got like just a deep understanding of like the fundamentals, consumer understanding, positioning, pricing, go to market, like all of these things.

54:09and then i would say you know like at wyden when i worked on nike it was like adam roth and you know jabari hern and julian duncan and all those people and nike could not have been more different than kellogg's because where like kellogg's and brunette was all about the fundamentals nike and was like throw all of that shit out like this is about what's going to like really capture the imagination and it's okay if it's actually divorced from like functional emotional sort of all of these things, but like, how do we show up in a way that captures attention and makes a splash and makes Nike the center of conversation?

54:44So that was just an entirely different way of thinking about sort of the same problem. And then I would say like, when I went to Ghana to build the agency for publicist, there was two clients, Martin Garretts, who run the food business for them. He ran Maggie. He was the first one that believed in us. So like I owe Martin Garretts, like I learned from him that like sometimes you just have to trust blindly. Like he had no reason to trust. He just decided that he was going to buy the proposition and that he would help us. And then John Thompson, who came in later and ran all of communications for Nestle, was then our lead client and the key interface for the agency.

55:21And from him, it was really about like, and I knew this before, but in that part of the world, it's so important, just getting under the skin of everything. Right? So like with JT, we would do things like Like when we were building the brand proposition for Maggie, historically, it had all been grounded in like functional taste and all of these things. But when we actually went and spent three days with our client in the market, with the market woman, like so going home with them, setting up, waking up with them, coming to the market at four in the morning, setting everything up, being there all day, seeing them go back home at 10 p.m.

55:57and do it all over again and get their kids ready for school. And like, and you just sort of like, it's actually not possible. Like if you think my life sounds complicated, like you spend one day with these people, you realize that this is actually insane. And we came up with this proposition of like, actually, it's not about the product. The woman is the star because the woman is whom the entire world of like West Africa revolves around them. And like without them, like nothing actually works. So that led to like an entire campaign about heroing the woman, not the product, which ended up like doing incredibly well.

56:30And so like from John, it was more about like, let's like all of us. He was very big, even as an outsider, as a foreigner, he's Canadian, being like, hey, even though all of you guys are Ghanaian, like you're not close enough. Like you are middle to upper class Ghanaians working in an agency with air conditioning and a generator. Like you're not you're not in the shit. And so like, you know, really encouraging to like get to that next level deeper. I'd say those are probably the key lessons.

56:58Jim Stengel:Kofi, what's the first brand you remember having an impact on you as a young boy? There's probably two answers to that. So I'd say Coca-Cola and it's like ubiquity. It was just like everywhere. Everywhere in Ghana. And this was the thing I'd say Maggie, which is the Martin Garretts product I was talking about now, which was like this bouillon cube that is literally every West African dish. it finds its way in there somewhere. It's just like at the heart of all the cooking and cooking is so central to like life. And then as far as like local brands, like this is like a really odd one, but like the first ad I was ever captivated by was for like a nail, actual like hammering a nail, like a nail company.

57:36But they had done this thing that had never been done before, which was like, it was a guy rapping actually in Fante about how good these nails were. And it was like the first time I had heard before like Afrobeat was a thing. This was before Hippolyte was a thing. This was like, we're talking, you know, 1992 maybe. And this dude is like rapping about nails and all of us knew it, you know, cause it was so cool. And so like that always sticks out as another one, but I'd say like all of what all of those brands had in common was like, they felt very tactile and very woven into the fabric. Like the high degree of certainly like emotional resonance, but like also utilitarian.

58:17Like Coca-Cola was the cold chain. You know, it's like wherever in West Africa you would go, you could get a cold Coke, which is insane, given that you could not get electricity in a lot of these places. It's like, how are they doing this? Right. So that's good. Yeah. You know, but I think like those are probably the ones that stick out.

58:36Jim Stengel:Who's been the most inspiring person in your life? My uncle. Yeah. Kofi Annan, without question. As you think about your relationship with him now that he's passed, what, about eight years? Yeah, that's right. How do you think of him? I mean, just as this, just one of the best humans I've had the privilege of being, because for me, it wasn't about like the UN of it all. It was just like seeing him in sort of the quiet moments and, you know, trying to figure out how to be like a good person in the world. You know, he didn't always get it right. I don't always get it right, but I think it's like an aspiration.

59:13It's like seeing someone who's as close to that as you can get and trying to learn from how that person shows up and sort of how they make their way through life and how they create space, you know, as we talked about for other people, for different perspectives, for people that may be in sort of a different stage of life than they are.

59:30Jim Stengel:And my impression sort of reinforced by this last hour is that he was the same person no matter who he was with or where he was or where he went in his life. And I think about the leaders that I admire and have an impact on me. They show up the same way. They knew who they are and the skin they're in and what's important to them. It doesn't matter if they're in a taxi cab chatting or sitting in front of the General Assembly. That's right. That's exactly right. Kofi, thank you for this. This was amazing. Fantastic chat. Yeah. In every way. A great way to start my week. Thank you. Thank you. It's a great gift and our audience is going to love it.

1:00:08Thank you for having me and congratulations again on the Hall of Fame induction. It's incredible and so well earned.

1:00:14Jim Stengel:That was my conversation with Kofi. Three lessons from this one for your business brand and life. The first one, build a culture of clear autonomy, accountability, and freedom. I love that thought. And Kofi went deep on this. He loves his job because he goal sets with his leadership team and his boss. And then once they goal set, his team is given the freedom and the accountability to deliver. Second takeaway, what a story about leaning into risk. The whole discussion about the Super Bowl, DoorDash delivers all the ads. What an amazing idea. What risk involved. They leaned into it. It paid off.

1:00:49Jim Stengel:And the important thing was it was a clear strategy and the strategy was one where they wanted to differentiate themselves on. So lean into risk, but make sure it's on strategy. Third takeaway, career choices. Kofi and I talked about lessons from our career where we went into a job which may kind of change the way our mind work, change the way we think about our role because they were assignments that were challenging, they were stretching, they were different. So as you think about your career and the choices you make throughout your life, think about that as a criteria. And the last bonus takeaway, I love the discussion we had about his uncle and his friends.

1:01:28Jim Stengel:And the lesson really is know who you are and be who you are, no matter where you are, with what audience and what stage you're on. Know yourself and be yourself. That'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 Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. The CMO Podcast is a Vive original production.