Lara Balazs (Adobe) | The Golden Age of Creativity

18:46Jim Stengel:One year into the job, you're proud of the work you've done in the mission. It sounds like it's caught. Anything else you're particularly proud of in this year as you look back on it? And the second part of that is, has anything been more challenging or difficult than you perhaps expected?

19:01Lara Balazs:Great questions. So very proud of that mission. Unveiled it at our company kickoff in December. And, you know, great response. People are loving it. You know, it's getting traction when people who you don't know are slacking you, emailing you saying how proud they are to be part of the company, that this is why they joined originally, whether that was 17 years ago or two years ago. So that's one piece of it. You know, it also gives you credibility as you're moving through the organization and having a point of view, but also respecting what the company's about. You know, I'm also proud of, this is a really interesting time for the world and for software.

19:42Lara Balazs:We have been able to maintain a steadfastness, a care about the customers and a conviction to do what's right while understanding, you know, with Gen AI and LLMs, the world is changing and we have to innovate. So we have been innovating at a rapid pace. And as I mentioned, my team, the whole marketing organization is Adobe on Adobe. We call it, we call it customer zero, which I guess is patient zero. for those of you who are watching Pitt these days, but it's very, you know, we are trying our software. We're co-creating the software. We are giving feedback to product, to the engineers in real time.

20:28Lara Balazs:I have engineers on my team. We have creative technologists and we're out inventing the future, innovating with LLM. So, you know, we've got a myriad of products from our brand concierge, which is agentic AI, where you can conversationally talk to a website effectively to find out which product is best for you. That's on adobe.com today. You know, we have our LLM optimizer, which is in a world of LLMs, you know, search is not just search. It's SEO and GEO. And you can wake up tomorrow and your search volume has dropped off and where did it go? And now we have LLM optimizer to help you understand where your customers are finding out about you.

21:13Lara Balazs:And increasingly, that isn't on necessarily your typical search. So our teams are co-creating that and giving feedback in real time. And that's just a gift. I've called it eating your own dog food in the past. Chanteneau likes to call it drinking your own champagne. I like that as well. So there's a lot to love about keeping a team energized while you're innovating in such a disruptive seismic shift time.

21:41Jim Stengel:This idea of trying things out first internally before you go to external clients, customer zero, it's such a good one.

21:49Lara Balazs:Yeah.

21:50Jim Stengel:And it kind of makes me wonder why I don't hear that more from other companies I talk to and other CMOs. So could you go a little bit deeper into what is it about your culture that makes that work? And you've already told a few stories about what you're doing there, but is there one that really stands out as especially powerful one that you've discovered?

22:11Lara Balazs:Yeah, there's definitely something in the Adobe culture of try the product, use it every surface we have, whether it's, you know, our digital screens throughout the offices or our intranet, it's always give me product feedback. There's it's everywhere. So it's in the DNA. And I think it speaks a lot for the company. The fact of the matter is, you know, our founders and our executive team, Shantanu Narayan, the CEO included, they're product enthusiastic folks at their heart. And they deeply care about the technology that powers it and the products that are offered. And, you know, when we started, it was all about power and precision.

22:54Lara Balazs:And that still is in the DNA. That just flows to the customer base. And it only makes us better. When I go and talk to customers in our customer experience center, as an example, I can tell them firsthand what it's like to use our products. And one great example, and one that I'm greatly proud about is we have our Gen Studio, which is effectively how we think about in a more automated fashion and using AI and now Gen AI from ideation to creating assets to the management of assets, to pushing them out in real time, optimizing in real time, and then feeding that back in to optimize, especially at the bottom of the funnel in the performance measure.

23:38Lara Balazs:We have Gen Studio for performance marketing with Meta, Snap, and so many others. We, using that against my customer audiences, I can give feedback right away on what part of that, what we call the content supply chain is working and not. So that is in the DNA. It is deeply embedded in everything we do. What I would say is that is a point of difference for us when we're talking to customers. So I can't stand up and talk about selling a product. If I have it, it's better if I've tried it. So that when you're very customer back, when you care about your customer problems, you fall in love with those problems, offer up solutions for me to say, I'm using this.

24:26Lara Balazs:And here's what works incredibly well. And here's what's, hey, we're kind of tweaking. In fact, we'd love your feedback. You can co-create it with us. That is extremely, extremely powerful. The one also thing I would say is as we go through this LLM journey and conversational interfaces really take over, agentic AI takes over, there's nothing that tech is going to do without the change management. And that takes humans. So the number one question I get, we get in these customer experience sessions is how do I get my teams to pick this up? That getting the teams to pick it up and the change management that is involved, like I can talk to that.

25:09Lara Balazs:I have creatives that have been here so long because I love the company. And it's, I have the same opportunities and it's all about, you know, that's a whole nother discussion, but it's like getting the people who are psyched about the change, willing to try and using them as the catalysts and having them go on the journey and take others with them.

25:28Jim Stengel:Let's stay with that for a minute, Laura, because I think it's very powerful. Everybody having the show is talking about how to improve their organizations through, you know, smart use of AI. And we hear the range of people on the spectrum. Obviously, you're at the heart of that with your company.

25:45Lara Balazs:Yeah.

25:46Jim Stengel:And you're talking to other CMOs as your customers and clients. So you have a really interesting perspective on that. So could you talk a bit about from your personal experience and from your work with customers and clients? It is a change management process, but what have you learned from your experience? What have you learned from the best CMOs you talk to? I had Don on from Qualcomm a few months ago. So he talked beautifully about that change process at Qualcomm. And it was very easy to follow, very intuitive, very effective. So I'd just like to let you have the microphone for a minute to talk about what you learned about this change experience to really be agile, curious, and make this work to your advantage.

26:28Lara Balazs:I feel a personal commitment to be the consummate, most effective, world-class, modern marketing, agile organization in the world. That is paramount to us as Adobe to win and to showcase to our customers, especially on the enterprise side, that we can do this. So I take it very personally. Do I think we're perfect at it? No. Is it a journey? Yes. And are you always reinventing because things are changing so rapidly? Yes. It's interesting, though. I would argue we've been on this change for a long time because when we started talking about 360 marketing and not thinking about one channel on its own, we actually started to go this route and we thought about teams of teams.

27:24Lara Balazs:We thought about not being verticalized. You know, I could argue the CPG model from yesteryear that you remember, Jim, and lived is you had the brand manager was the hub of the wheel and they worked with all the spokes of the wheel to say, hey, I got to think about collectively how I show up in a customer's life and a consumer's life. All we're doing now is saying we still have to work in those teams of teams. And you have to have someone who's absolutely obsessed with the customer at the center. And if you're doing it well, like I have redesigned the group to have actually customer groups mapped back to customer sets so that somebody is, that's all they think about.

28:10Lara Balazs:And then we apply the product and the features that best meet their needs. And they work with experts, centers of excellence, including whether that's growth, whether that's media that's more above the line, upper funnel, whether that's comms, PR, partnerships, working in that fashion. I'm organized that way now while taking advantage sort of horizontally across of the technology that can speed everything up and have you be agile and moving in real time. And then again, And using our tools is almost the, if you look at the schematic of the tech stack, it's almost as if our org maps up to it, where you've got this Gen Studio engine that's creating assets all the time and pushing them out and optimizing.

29:03Lara Balazs:So that, you know, it's a simple way, but that reorganization and then using almost the tech stack to kind of model our org. The other thing I'll say in all of this is we have an in-house studio team, best in class. They're exceptional, as you might imagine. Most of them came to us after using our tools and trying other tools and still knowing what our points of difference are. But we have now creative technologists in those teams that then their whole job is to say, let me take the latest, plug it in, and then also ensure that through all of it, we always have the way to put brand standards in.

29:47Lara Balazs:So if you zoom out from all of this, if you've been in marketing for a while, the big thing, usually you have some, you have a heart for brand and value props and points of difference and all the things you learn when you're writing that perfect positioning statement. It's usually how we got into the craft. We love that carve out of that brand that stands for something. That still matters, even in an agentic world. we have built tools that you put the brand standards and guidelines in so that you do not lose that. Okay. And that is the thing that gives, you know, no matter where you sit in the organization, the, especially the marketing organization, our teams can rest easier because they know no matter what technology is involved, we've got those standards plugged in.

30:30Lara Balazs:Right. And that is, that's ultimately what is your long-term growth driver is who you stand for as a brand. And we've talked a lot about the pieces of the funnel and how you can't just live at the bottom of the funnel, even in this agentic world, that ultimately all of it is important and brand is important. And so that piece really matters.

30:58Lara Balazs:Hey, everybody. This is Andrea Sullivan, the CEO of Vive. And we produce the CMO podcast and are so excited to have partnered with Jim Stengel for so many years. Wanted to tell you a little bit about something that could be right for you. Vive is a program for entrepreneurs and business leaders who want to get more out of their life and become their best and happiest selves, both personally and professionally. We have a 12-month program that allows people to meet up with some of the best business leaders out there and additionally experts in the wellness sector so that you can learn how to nurture yourself.

31:33Lara Balazs:So we teach things around sleep optimization, meditation, all those good things as well. Please reach out to us at podcasts at five.co to get more information. That's P-O-D-C-A-S-T-S at V-Y-V-E dot co. Thanks for listening to the CMO podcast and hope to talk to you more about Vibe.

31:57Jim Stengel:I've heard you say that you believe we're entering the golden age of creativity. I do. And that's a very optimistic view of the world that we're in right now. And I like that. Tell us more about why you feel that way.

32:11Lara Balazs:There's going to be more and more AI that develops things, right? You know, we're seeing what we call AI slop out there. I actually think in that environment, what has craft and intention and taking what's in your mind's eye and bringing it to life, even if you've used Gen AI to help that accelerate that process or play with it. So Firefly, we have this ideation feature called boards and you can play with it. it still is what I want. It still is what was in my mind's eye and I'm just seeing it come to life. That human ingenuity and that human creativity paired with, if you want to use AI, great.

32:56Lara Balazs:If you don't, that's fine too. You're going to know what is authentic and unique and not AI slop. I believe that. I believe authenticity is going to be your brand and trust is going to be your brand, you know, that is going to fuel a whole democratization to have creativity. People who felt like they couldn't be creative now can be, you know, using our products or believing that we can do anything. So I do believe we're entering a golden age of creativity. And you look at countries like India, who have always have rich cultural histories, and they have this entire creative class coming. And, you know, we see our products doing extremely well there because they're just excited to be part of this economy and the economy just to keep pulling on the thread.

33:47Lara Balazs:It's like creators are running the economy. We know what we're seeing on YouTube and these channels. So I do believe we're entering the golden age of creativity.

33:57Jim Stengel:Now let's go back to your year one. You've talked about a lot of things that you're proud of that are going well, that you're learning about. What's been tougher than you had imagined?

34:06Lara Balazs:Oh, well, having LLMs, you know, sort of come in and this belief that, you know, software is going to be eaten by AI, you know, which I don't believe. And I believe that AI is an absolute tailwind for software. And, you know, these times exist in our marketplace. You know, I do think that question of everything surrounding LLMs, the energy capacity being taken, the what is of the future of websites, you know, what is, how do we show up in that? That is hard, right? Because what you are doing as a leader during that is, you know, you have a great strategy. I mean, we have a wonderful, now we have a new mission.

34:53Lara Balazs:We have a corporate strategy with must wins that we're banking against. You know that, but your teams, you know, they look out to their friends who are also running around with, you know, this frenzy. And we call it on the enterprise side, we say going from AI frenzy to impact to driving outcomes. that I wouldn't have realized what a fever pitch that would hit this year. And keeping the teams, and less about that, but keeping the teams focused and energized as we get through it, as which we will. For those of us who've lived the pinkslip.com era, that was hard. We got through it. We were better for it.

35:33Lara Balazs:You do have to disrupt yourself. I truly believe in that. Not just the company you're in, but yourself to get to the next side. And there are people who will like love to do that and people who may not. And it's okay if you don't want to, you know, we're here to help our customers. And so we are going to disrupt ourselves and disrupt, you know, everything that is good to support our customers.

35:56Jim Stengel:As a CMO, as a person, how has AI helped you be a more effective or more creative or a smarter leader? What counsel do you have from your personal habits?

36:08Lara Balazs:This is a really hard question for me to answer because I'm using our tools. And, you know, I would say one of the things that I love is with Firefly, it's a one-stop application. It has all of the models with the best value you can ideate, create, and then, you know, I can do an Instagram post with my friends that is really unique and creative because I've applied some of the features and effects that Firefly allows me to do. But the idea that I can do that in rapid time and time is money today for people. The amount of information that people are getting is mind blowing. You know, it's every day your feed is filled and you can be overwhelmed.

36:51Lara Balazs:And so for me, it's all about productivity. And, you know, I mentioned the creativity that goes without saying, but the productivity is how I've used it. And again, this is I would be using this if I was here or not. but just PDFs. There's 3 trillion PDFs in circulation today. Okay. Acrobat, Adobe Acrobat, great product. Now we have AI assistant and I use that all the time. Summarize. I'll get a PDF from anybody in the company and I'll summarize it and it saves me so much time and it's really good. And I can have it do it in a professor voice or understanding it in a fifth grader voice. That's how I'm using it.

37:33Lara Balazs:And in doing so, I'm also dogfooding our material, which is great. But it's all about productivity for me based on the time starvation that we have today as people.

37:44Jim Stengel:You talked about your career path earlier in the show and the companies brands you work with are incredible, right? Nike, Visa, Amazon, Intuit, now Adobe. All of those companies have their leaders, their market leading companies, and they've stayed relevant over time. That's hard. It's really, really hard to stay relevant over decades and decades and decades. So having experienced all of those companies, some have bumps, but they're here. Yeah. So what's the key to that?

38:18Lara Balazs:Just reinvention. Every single one of those brands hit periods where they needed to reinvent. Stay true to the DNA of the company, because if you do a knee-jerk pivot, then it's not true, and you'll lose people like that. Reinvention, you have to disrupt yourself. And every single one of those brands has done it, whether it's Amazon saying we got to do Prime because we have to penetrate more households and actually offer more value to Nike saying, look, we're going to go into more categories. I was there when we went into women like we hadn't done before. And it was originally called Nike Goddess.

39:00Lara Balazs:Then we changed it to Nike Women. And so there's, you reinvent based on the signals you're getting from customers, but also while staying true to your DNA. That is across all of these brands.

39:13Jim Stengel:You said early in your career, and you referenced this in our discussion today, be disrupted or be the one who disrupts. Correct. So you said you had learned that lesson early in your career. Can you talk about that lesson? What was that early in your career that was the wake up call for you?

39:28Lara Balazs:You know, I think it's a theme for my life. You know, I graduated from undergrad in Seattle. There were no jobs. And I, you know, was magna cum lata, Phi Beta Kappa, couldn't find a job. So I volunteered to get marketing experience, which I thought I wanted to do because I was a pre-law major. and there weren't, you know, I had no background in marketing, but everything I knew about my pre-law classes was that human psyche and what makes people do, you know, end up in jail versus not was so interesting and what affected them to think, do, and feel differently, which is what marketing is about.

40:11Lara Balazs:And so I wanted to do marketing. I had no experience. So I volunteered time, my time for free at Pike Place Market, which is a tourist attraction just to get experience and bring during the recession local families in. And so I came up with an idea to draw in a local audience. I did that while working a night shift at a hospital to pay my rent. But I say this because that's disrupting yourself. Like here I am, pre-law major, don't want to go to law school, but hey, I'm going to get this experience. What are you going to do? You're going to disrupt yourself. Start to get career experience. It starts feeling like I'm not getting anywhere.

40:55Lara Balazs:What do you do? Disrupt yourself. Go to business school. So you just, you got to, disrupting yourself is part of my DNA. It's wrapped up in tenacity and grit, which I always say, anybody who comes into a meeting with me, you may be the smartest person in the room, But if you're not tenacious and have grit and have resilience, it doesn't matter. You're not going to necessarily go to the heights you want to achieve because it's not easy all the time. It's just not. It's not a linear career path by any stretch of the means. Life isn't linear.

41:27Jim Stengel:Tell us about that moment where you said, I don't want to be a lawyer. By the way, I kind of thought I was going to be a lawyer and then I didn't. And so what was it that you said, I'm going to go into marketing instead? What happened to your life? I mean, did you meet someone? Did you read something? Did you all of a sudden say, I don't want to be... When I really thought about what a lawyer does, I said, I want more action. I want to be moving with culture. And that, to me, I think would be kind of boring for me. Not that it's not important. I'm from a family of lawyers, but I made that decision.

42:03Jim Stengel:You know, I'm going a different way. So tell me about yours.

42:07Lara Balazs:I'd love to tell you it was a really conscious, thoughtful process. I'll zoom out and say the reason I thought I wanted to be a lawyer was because growing up, there was a show on television called LA Law.

42:21Jim Stengel:Yeah, sure.

42:22Lara Balazs:And there was a woman in it, Susan Day. And it was very rare at that time to see females in a television show. Mind you, there were, you know, three major networks. This was not in a streaming area today where you could, you know, see a myriad of law shows, which I love them all. But, you know, but this was one where you had a woman in a courtroom. She was in the room where it was happening. Harkin Hamilton, you know, want to be in the room where it happens. And so I just thought, OK, well, then that's got to be it. You know, I want to do that. I want to be in the room. I want to be in the conversations.

43:03Lara Balazs:And so from there, I thought, okay, then I have to go to law school. And while I loved the law classes, the pre-law classes that I took, they were the ones that fired me up were the ones about why people commit crimes, which is, you know, might sound a little twisted, but it's, you know, there's a psychology of that. what environment, what learnings, what affected them. And then you start to get into human behavior. And that's when you start to think about marketing. So it wasn't that I, it was more, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I wanted to be in the room where it happened. I saw a show, therefore pre-law, but from there it was, okay, I think it's marketing.

43:50Lara Balazs:Let me go get experience and let me push through a recession, which is something I'm good at is graduating and recessions. I did the same thing in business school and just go for it. Right.

44:12Jim Stengel:Let's flip into the creative brief. I want to talk about sports a bit. I know it's a, we talked about the NFL to open the show, but I know this is a real passion point for yours. What's the story there? We talked about just a second ago, your transition from law into marketing. Why are you passionate about sports? What is it? What was the catalyst? What was the experience?

44:29Lara Balazs:Well, for me personally, I'm a fan of sports. I've always been a runner and I've always been a skier and a hiker. So my entire sort of growth throughout life has been outdoors and getting outdoors, skiing, running, hiking has been part of it, mountain biking. And so I have a respect for the commitment that it takes to be really good at a sport, no matter what that sport is. So you put that personally and you realize also just the passion verticals, as we would say, you know, that exist within that. And then, you know, you then for me, you work at companies like a Nike and you see the community that sports builds and the fan base and and that you can coalesce around something that is exciting, is community building.

45:28Lara Balazs:that that that's the spirit of sports. And what I love about sports too, is now it's, you know, women's sports, every kind of sport, the Olympics are happening right now. You just, the vast array of sports that existed, there's something for everybody. For us then, you know, at Adobe, and I've seen this in my career is you tap into that and find your space in it. You know, With Adobe, it's an incredible brand. We can play in any space. Biggest movie producers in the world calling us to create films. I mean, we were just at Sundance. We had an incredible activation where we have filmmakers who, you know, lines around the corner to get to see our products and offerings.

46:11Lara Balazs:to, you know, whether it's fashion week, you've got fashion designers who are using our software to create ideas, create their next line, then all the way to, for example, you were saying NFL. And with us, we've got knowing that passion of sports and knowing we can not only help the companies who are, you know, whether it's Real Madrid or Premier League or NFL who have to connect with their fans and need the software to do that. Or it's a fan who just wants to connect with their friends who are fans or even fans of the other team by showing their own colors and using the team colors. There's something magical in that.

46:51Lara Balazs:And we've always said marketing and creativity equals Adobe magic. Now we're saying, hey, it's marketing, creativity, and AI is Adobe magic. And it is true. Like there's, we're only bringing these fan experiences and how to customize through express or use Firefly or even, you know, listen to a Kelsey podcast and then get excited to see their, their, what we call a PDF space and all the things that they're looking at as part of Acrobat, you know, that's the power of sports and the connection personally that people have to it. So I think that's really what it is in a nutshell. The other thing I would just say is when we think about ingesting media, live sports has got to be, you know, that and live, you know, it's harder to get those live moments where people still come together.

47:43Lara Balazs:And that's the beauty of sports as well.

47:45Jim Stengel:What are you still active in, in sports? Are you still mountain biking, skiing?

47:49Lara Balazs:I am. I'm going a little slower than I used to, but I'm still doing it and enjoying it. I don't do it as much as I'd like. As I age, I'm doing more weights because bone density and we have to think about those things. Yeah.

48:05Jim Stengel:I did Pilates this morning, so I'm with you.

48:07Lara Balazs:Good. A little core strength. That's great.

48:10Jim Stengel:Yeah. Yeah. It's great. And I enjoy it. It's very relaxing too. Who has been the most influential business mentor in your life since you started this great career?

48:19Lara Balazs:Not a business mentor, but my aunt was in Congress for 24 years and she was a very, she was a first mover. She helped pass the Family Medical Leave Act. And she did things that were really rare for a female to do in Congress during the time she was there. So she's always been an archetype for me of a, you know, she's, she's a relative and she also showed fearless leadership while keeping a sense of humor. So she's, without a doubt, someone I've always thought of as a mentor.

48:52Jim Stengel:She was in what state?

48:54Lara Balazs:Colorado. And she's since passed, but she did phenomenal things. So she's always been someone I've wanted to consider as I think about those times where you really have to have a voice and speak on behalf of, in her case, it was her constituents. In my case, it's my consumers and my customers.

49:16Jim Stengel:What was it about your aunt that made her so special?

49:19Lara Balazs:You know, she was fearless, but she also kept a sense of humor. She never didn't laugh at the end of the day. You got to have fun. These jobs are not, you know, easy. At the same time, we're not doing brain surgery, back to patient zero. So we should have fun. Our teams want to have fun. We need to remember that. She did that in spades. She had a quick wit.

49:43Jim Stengel:Yeah, if we're not having fun creating something for our customers, how are they expected to have fun with it or make use of it when it reaches them? So I think we undervalue that.

49:52Lara Balazs:I really think we undervalue it often in technology too. I think we can get really serious about our own seriousness and we can't do that. We need to remember that our customers want to have fun. They're looking for light. They're looking for joy. How do we bring that to them? And optimism, that's, again, talking about the Adobe brand and coming here. And an element I never want to lose is the optimism. And there's a human side of that that is so critical to the DNA.

50:25Jim Stengel:Laura, what's the first brand you remember making an impact on you as a young girl?

50:28Lara Balazs:You know, we did a podcast a long time ago and I said tab, okay, which I still love tab.

50:36Jim Stengel:You're staying with that answer?

50:37Lara Balazs:No. You know what? Because I said that, I thought, you know, he may ask me that. And actually, I was thinking about this because it's also winter and it's ski season is K2 is a ski brand. And growing up skiing and being a big skier, K2 is a brand, you know, it's Bainbridge, Washington. I'm from Washington state. It was sort of part of that whole getting into that sport for me. There was also a ski called pre skis. So those two, I will say one brand that I thought of, which is not a brand, but to me, it's a brand and having grown up in the Pacific Northwest in the nineties, Nirvana and Pearl Jam.

51:18Lara Balazs:Those are brands for me, right? So I do think of those almost as brands because they represent something timeless. They represent a unique carve out, a value prop, you know, the way that a marketer thinks about it, maybe not necessarily what the classic sort of brand, like the tab would be, but that's another thing to think about.

51:45Jim Stengel:They've stood the test of time.

51:46Lara Balazs:They have, both of them.

51:48Jim Stengel:Clear what they stood for.

51:49Lara Balazs:100 % great definition of a brand.

51:52Jim Stengel:So Laura, what are you looking forward to the balance of the year, either personally, professionally, and we'll end on that note?

51:57Lara Balazs:Yeah, I think personally, I'm looking forward to continuing to make this brand stand for what it's always stood for, but be more relevant than ever and not lose the human connection. So I think professionally, having my teams continue to embrace where Gen AI is taking us to take some of the things that we don't love and removing them, automating what is right to automate while staying on brand, using our tools like Firefly. Like that is exciting stuff. I can get energized getting out of bed every day doing that. I think, you know, personally, travel for me is the spark that keeps me alive and gives me energy and fuels my work.

52:42Lara Balazs:Because when you're experiencing different cultures, you think about how to solve complex problems in different ways. So for me, I think this next year, I have a lot of travel planned that will help me be better at my job while still getting fuel personally. So whether it's work travel, I'll be visiting some offices that we have in Japan and Tokyo and Sydney, India. Those are the trips that really energize me and bring me back with new energy fueled to keep growing.

53:16Jim Stengel:When you're not doing business trips, and I always love that too, do you like vacations that are active or more quiet?

53:22Lara Balazs:I like a mix, Jim. I like a mix. I'd like a little of beach time and a little of a little get out there. I lately I've, you know, I'm really into going somewhere and learning about the history, if I can reading a historically relevant fiction. So yeah, always have a bucket list that I'm trying to knock off for a vacation, whether it's, we did Namibia a couple of years ago where we've done Canadian Rockies, Banff, you know, we always have something that we're looking to do. It's also as a family, you know, I have two boys in college now. So it's how you get everybody back in the same zone and get out.

54:07Lara Balazs:It works when they know they're getting a trip on mom and dad.

54:10Jim Stengel:Well, enjoy it now because we did that with our kids a lot. They now have kids and it gets a little more complicated. So enjoy it now.

54:17Lara Balazs:Yeah, I appreciate that. And I will definitely keep that in mind.

54:22Jim Stengel:Well, Laura, thank you for this conversation. I so appreciate it. I think you and your company are, are just remarkable. I've loved following both of you over the years. Thank you for coming back on the show. But what a great call. I think you went from Intuit to Adobe, disrupting yourself sort of again, but having, you're in your zone is what I'm feeling from this conversation. And when I met you personally when you're, after you've made the decision, I think you're in the place that you want to be and need to be.

54:50Lara Balazs:Yeah. Thank you for that. I appreciate it. It means a lot coming from you, Jim, and thanks for taking the time.

54:56Jim Stengel:That was my conversation with Laura. Three takeaways from this one for your business brand and life. First, this concept of customer zero. I love the principle, the longstanding principle of Adobe where employees need to use the products, enjoy using the products, test the products before they take them to customers. It's a concept we all ought to think about applying more in our own organizations. Second takeaway, I love this thought about disrupting yourself. And Laura has done that in her career several times. She did it coming out of college. She keeps it top of mind. If you don't disrupt yourself as a company, you will be obsolete.

55:32Jim Stengel:If you don't disrupt yourself as an individual, your skills will also be obsolete. And third takeaway, Laura talked about her ambition at Adobe Marketing, and I love this. She just, it rolled off her tongue. They want to be the best marketing organization in the world, the most creative, and the one that leverages AI to its full potential. Simple, ambitious, aspirational, and something that who wouldn't want to be a part of that? 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.

56:13Jim Stengel:The CMO Podcast is a Vive Original Production.