Radical Transparency in Business - Kevin Akeroyd

0:26Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. a veteran tech CEO with a career that spans Fortune 500 giants, private equity powerhouses, and venture-backed disruptors. He's currently leading Sovos, a PE-backed tax and compliance AI SaaS platform. Now, before that, Kevin was CEO of Magnet Global, the world's largest contingent workforce technology provider. And prior to that, he took Cision Public on the New York Stock Exchange in 2017 as its CEO. Early in his career, he held president-level roles at both Oracle and Salesforce, and before that drove four successful exits at BC-backed startups. Outside of the boardroom, he's a father of five and a sports, music, wine, and travel enthusiast.

1:13And finally, Kevin studied at both Stanford Graduate School of Business and the University of Washington. And before I bring him on, he's also a dear friend. He's a mentor. He's a fellow sports nut. I had the pleasure of working with him and for him at Oracle. Kevin, welcome to the show. Thanks, Steve. I appreciate it. Gosh, I guess you explained all this gray hair. What little is left of it pretty well. Thanks, bud. What are friends for? I got big time therapy bills to prove that everything you just said is true. Well, maybe we'll save that for part two. Listen, I can't wait. For those who don't know Kevin, I've known him for, I don't know, gosh, 15 years now.

1:57Yeah. We were part of Oracle Marketing Cloud launch back in the day. Yep. And everything was going to the cloud. And I learned so much from you. But enough about that. A lot of what I want to dig in today is about leadership. Yep. Because if anyone's had to lead through chaos, reinvention, and everything in between, it's you. So I want to start right up front. This might be, and you and I talked off air about this, the craziest stretch of change leaders have ever faced. Tech is blowing up everything we know. Geopolitics on fire. Climate hanging over. Social divides everywhere. Doing, quote, business as usual is a joke.

2:32First question, what do leaders absolutely have to unlearn? Operative work. Unlearn if they want to survive. I think, boy, Steve, the answer to that is pretty much everything. Hey, make it to the audience. The better question is what do they not need to unlearn? I mean, whether it is the kind of just the accepted generational societal norms, right? Broken, gone, doesn't work. Communication norms, methodologies, broken, gone, doesn't work. Technology, right? And what they're fluent with, what we're not filled with, gone. I'm going to call it the power balance, right? There was an inherent power structure when you and I, right?

3:16We didn't question management, right? We certainly didn't. right? We didn't chafe it, right? Whether we got told to work in the office or work at home, right? Like on and on and on. And then the, hey, is it a buyer market, right? When you and I came out of school, for instance, right? All of the employees were just very grateful and hopeful to get a job, right? Now I think that is fundamentally shifted and employers are having to fight, right? For the war of talent. And, you know, we as employers are a bit more of the, we're the buyer and the employees are the talents, the seller now, right? So, and then I won't waste a bunch of the time here, but to answer that question at a foundational level, I would tell the people that are in leadership, whether it's functional leadership, right?

3:58Or general management or all the way to, you know, the C-suite. The answer to that question is look at all of it. Don't think you have the luxury to cherry pick. Oh, I just need to change this or I just need to change that. Nope. This is a holistic. If you want to be very, very effective, think about it holistically. don't think about it in these component parts. Yeah. And you and I both know that a lot of leaders that are still in place, I'm not naming names, of course, but they're very set in their ways. Very. Right. And old school, pick a term. So the next, to me, the most logical next question is, what if these same leaders don't unlearn everything you just said?

4:35What do you think happens? Are they just gone? Yeah. I think we're seeing that. Whether you look at it at a company level, I mean, gosh, you go back and pick a 20-year period. Let's go ahead and pick 2005 versus 2025. Over half the largest thousand companies in the world ain't on that list anymore, right? And 10 % of them don't even exist anymore. So whether you want to look at it as, oh my gosh, is the enterprise that I'm running even going to survive? You look at the overhaul in leadership, Right. Whether that is executives at leaders, whether that is at the board member. Right. And translate this into nonprofit and into academic and into health care, et cetera.

5:19The leaders themselves, they can't adapt. Right. And do some of the changes we're going to talk about. There's been a huge overhaul. Right. From that aspect, too. And then the customer, which might be the biggest of all, whether I'm whether my customer is a consumer and B2C or my customer is the government and B2G, my customers are business and B2B. The companies that have been unwilling to change have flat out won or lost customer basis, right? And the people that have been unwilling to adapt to their customers have lost big time in the eyes of the customer. And then right back to the thing we were just talking about, people that have been unwilling to change have won or lost the talent war, right?

5:57With employees. And again, stuck in my ways, I'm going to do it the same way I was doing it 20 years ago. 99 % of the time means they lost that talent war. They didn't win the talent war. So I think you should look at it from all four of those angles, Steve. And the ramifications point to the same thing. You don't change, you don't win. I've been on the losing side of that across all four of those aspects if I've been set in my ways. I just had this vision of, as you were talking about, and we both, because we've talked about this book, the infamous Jim Collins, Good to Great. And I could see an updated or doing a version now and going back those 20 years you just talked about, and a common denominator among the great leaders will be those who adapted to change.

6:39And I know that might sound obvious, right? But it's the kind of change as opposed to the previous 20 years. There's always change, right? 100%. It would be fascinating to look at that. Yeah. And this is right. Innovators dilemma, right? Good to great. What got you here doesn't get you there. I think this is a pretty widely accepted concept, Steve. I'm sure you agree with that, we as leaders have kind of nodded our head that, yep, I agree with that concept. Now, putting into practice, proactively, aggressively, and being on the fore end of that, rather than reading a book about it, nodding my head and going back and making a 10 % change, that's the big difference, is do I embrace it?

7:18Do I get ahead of it? Do I lead with it? Do I really, really, really buy off and go do? Or do I read the book? I could just pick one thing I'm going to change and stay, stay about my ways. That's, and that's a pretty fundamental difference because it's a well, well-documented issue. I don't think it's been one that's been put into practice very well. Now, and you and I both know the ego gets in the way, right? Of a lot of leaders. And look, even to segue into a world that you and I share, talk a lot about is sports world. Yeah. And the coaches and managers and general managers, those in the executive level, if you well as opposed to the players you see coaches who don't adapt to the game the world in front of them they're not long that's right exactly right i think i think that turnover is every bit as aggressive as is in the corporate world not more yeah yeah and there's there's so many similarities yeah for the for the and it's for all the same reasons right exactly like you're either reluctant to change your ego gets in the way you know it's not broken don't fix it all of the above it doesn't matter.

8:21But what's interesting over the past 20 years, and you know that what I'm about to say, the next 20, the speed we're dealing with change right now will pair in comparison. That's right. And, you know, whether it's business leaders or sports leaders, and again, I think this translates again into everything, right? Put this in healthcare, put this at academia, put this at higher education, put this, right, whatever. I mean, right, it used to be, I've got a plan, execute, right? We kind of need to build resilience, adaptability, nimbleness, flexibility, right? I use that term resilience because if I have a plan, and in sports, right?

8:59What do you do in boxing? Everybody has a plan until the first punch lands, right? Everybody has a plan until somebody passes 80 yards right over my guy and gets in the end zone in the first play. Everybody has a plan until the competition steps up and crests them. Resilience, you know, not plans, I think is really key across the board. I think the good leaders in sports, there's got to be a communication with radical transparency, whether it's the CEO sitting in their ivory tower, thou shalt, communicating down, and I'll tell you what you need to know. And you don't need to know that much. Just do your job.

9:32In sports or in corporate. No, no, no. I use the term radical transparency. Again, with your customer, with your partner, with your employee, with your stakeholder. these days, right? And again, whatever that term means, communication with radical transparency, you know, and again, it's about people now, right? The player has almost as much power, if not more power than the coach, which is, boy, don't get me started on that. But the employee has more power vis-a-vis the CEO than ever before too. Again, it's across the board. So leading with empathy, right? Is just massively critical. Leading with an acknowledgement to the gap from experience, a change, a social, right, to technological communication style norms.

10:19So that empathy has got to be there. That psychological safety has got to be there. And I've really kind of got to build my leadership underneath me, right? Again, whether it's in sports or whether it's in them, I kind of have those leaders at every right level. I don't just get to have my little 10 direct reports around the CEOs, right? The Knights of the Roundtable or the ELT. Right. You're CEO. No. Who are my, who are my leaders at level three? Who are my leaders at level four? Who are my leaders at level five? In sports. Right. And in business. So those are just some things that, you know, you and I are good examples.

10:56We came up when that wasn't the case, right? We kind of came up from the 50, 60 style. What was, that didn't exist. We're now where we are now. And that's front and center. And we're going to just struggle to be effective leaders. We don't really not just not just acknowledge it, but embrace it and lead with it rather than just accept it. Right. That's I know I'm going to make that comment a couple more times in the cast, but it's one thing to read about it. It's a second thing to acknowledge it. The lift is to do right to do and actually and actually modify. Yeah. The old adage of there's words and then there's actions.

11:30That's right. Yep. And if you keep it in that simple form, which you and I do, we keep things very simple. for a point they go, no, don't overcomplicate it. And that kind of radical transparency and that resilience, I think there's a mindset shift there, I think, as well. If I am kind of scenario planning all the time versus, hey, here's my forecast. Or, right, here's my forecast. How are we doing against it? Month one, month through month 12, right? Okay, okay. Of course we need forecasts. Of course we need long-term plans. Of course we need product roadmaps. Of course, we need, right? You need that.

12:07But if you are constantly scenario planning, you know, to say, well, something's going to go wrong against that product roadmap or that sales forecast or that marketing pipeline or whatever it is, right? If I am in a constant scenario mode with an adaptive, right, mindset, I'm going to bob weave, right, and be really, really, really, you know, reactive. And I think, you know, lead better when the inevitable happens, I'll have my contingency plan. So I think that mindset of scenario planning instead of just forecasting, then experimenting constantly, right? And that doesn't mean, you know, A-B testing the way we've been doing it for 40 years to use a market.

12:49No, that's the word. That's the word of it. That is an experiment. But no, no, no. Small pilots before major rollouts, right? Building in, well, you're supposed to fail 10 % of the time. Otherwise, you're not trying hard enough. Right. You know, mentality, you know, all that stuff. And then I think, you know, literally creating those adaptability and change champions. Hey, it's kind of my job to be out there on the frontier, to run those scenarios, to look at those contingencies, to fail, learn from it, fail fast, you know, iterate, you know, get better. And again, that's that's non-trivial to do.

13:22But if you do that, you know, you're going to you're going to be one, you'll be in a better change culture. you know, and two, you're, you're gonna, you're gonna get better results out of your team. You're going to get better results in whatever the venture is, whether it's a clinic or a sports team or a business or a nonprofit or a, right. A university, you're, you're, you're, you're gonna lead and, and, and just get better outcomes from your people. And whatever your P and L or right, whatever the charter is, it's going to work better if you take that mindset. Exactly. Exactly. I want to pivot.

13:50You've run some companies through really wild swings, right yes when the world is like it's in chaos how do you how do you message put out a message without sounding like sounding like every other company you know doing like a we care press release right how do you make it authentic which i know sounds like to you and i it's like well no shit but yeah we all know we've seen so many companies who don't get it i do and i think that authenticity authenticity, you just nailed the word, Steve, our stakeholder. Again, that stakeholder could be millions of consumers if I'm a big B2C brand. It could be my fans if I'm a sports club.

14:29It could be a bunch of SMBs if I'm an SMB provider. It could be large enterprises if I'm an enterprise provider. It could be whoever. It could be my patients if I'm a healthcare. It doesn't matter. Every constituent that matters to you if you're going to be successful, not just craves authenticity, but more and more demanding, right? Authenticity. And I think budgets are won or lost. Brands are won or lost. P &Ls are won or lost based on whether you can deliver said authenticity. Because again, one of the changes that we have to deal with, right? Is this massive proliferation of everybody's got all the information all the time, right?

15:04Even if you didn't want to embrace transparency, too bad. It's there anyway, right? I can find out anything about your brand, your company, your product, your solution, your people, if I want to, right? And that was exasperated enough when all the information in the world, right, was made public and searchable in the web. And now holy smokes, I've got unlimited compute power with some pretty smart algorithms that can enhance that even more, right, with AI now. So assume that everything is transparent. And then if you message with lack of authenticity, assume that will hurt you. That's number one.

15:40Number two, Be careful with authenticity, though, right? Because, gosh, get that wrong and the punishment is pretty severe now, right? And a lot of people would like to be authentic, but they have too much of a specific customer base or stakeholder group that would actually be offended if you were too authentic, right? I hate to say it, but the art of saying it straight and saying it authentic, but being careful and putting some rubber walls around those sharp edges. Be careful because, again, for the same reason everything is transparent, social media being able to say, hey, have a board member call you and say, well, gosh, overnight, I see 9 ,000 hits, all of which have negative sentiment and 2 ,700 negative comments on LinkedIn.

16:26And, you know, there's a pretty almost real time price to pay. Right. If you get it wrong. So I think that's the second part. And unfortunately, I think that you've got to make your authenticity still compelling because our stakeholders have more choice than ever. Their attention spans are less than ever. Right, Steve, remember back in the day, we used to think, hey, you know, if that headline or that HTML block or that right tagline, we got like 10 seconds and we don't get them right, they're gone. I think that's two seconds now. Right. You know, if that. So we have more we have more messaging coming at the same finite set of stakeholders or customers.

17:10We have more authenticity. We have more choice. Right. We have more self-selection about what I want to hear. Right. So we do need to be authentic, but we need to do it in a safe way. But we still have to be in a compelling way. So how do I be authentic, but protect my back and still be more compelling than the other guy? Oh, my gosh. That means that people do what you and I do, which is still focus on messaging the voice, the message, the positioning, the branding. That might be more important than it has ever been. Not because big ad budgets with big brand budgets are more impactful. but to nail what you and I just talked about is way tougher than just spending a big ad budget.

17:51It's way more sophisticated. It's way more nuanced. It's way more segmented. And, you know, the stakes are higher, so it ain't easy, but you kind of have to, yeah, you kind of have to pull it off if you want to, if you want to be successful. It's a good segue into what I wanted to ask about next. Let's talk about next was, you're talking about there's so many eyeballs, so much competition, which we know will never change, but it's a great segue into customer experience, right? Which I know you're passionate about. I'm very passionate about back to when you and I worked together at Oracle. Yeah.

18:19But Nick, give us your, I'm going to get almost like your 30 ,000 foot and then we'll get granular. It's almost like I want to do the word association. If I say customer experience, what comes to mind for Kevin Eckwood? Impression and sentiment. Yeah. It's not a CSAT score. It's not an NPS score. It's not a survey result. Although those are helpful tools, right? It is at the early stage of a customer. I say, what impression are you giving me? Because they haven't had a chance to really experience your product, your service, your people, your deliverable or whatever it is. So I am in an impression game, which means I have to give you the impression that you can trust me.

19:01I have to give you an impression that I'm authentic. I have to give you the impression that you can trust me. They'll give you the impression that I'm high quality, that I'm safe to work with, on and on and on and on and on and on. Right. So impression doesn't mean an ad impression, right? Impression means what impression am I making on Steve who's a sophisticated, right? Well-educated, scrutinist, high standards recipient of my message, and hopefully someday recipient of my product or service. What impression? And that's not one impression. That's every single one. Right. And then once you've been in the impression game, the way I just defined it.

19:41So you can actually earn the right to have some customer experience because Steve is now finally a customer. Now, right, what sentiment, right? Because I may be disappointed, right, with a particular tech support phone call that was really frustrating, right? Or a website that crashed or a phone call that got disconnected or, right, a wire that was wrong and that consumer electronic, right? There's millions of ways where a customer, right, could get dissatisfied. but if the sentiment is always okay, even when there's a problem, I get resolution, right? I get great. It's satisfactory. It's honest.

20:17They have the relationship with me in mind. And that means again, just like an impression is this big aggregated thing that isn't just one point in time, but it's every single time they interact with you. Kind of the same thing, whether it's a return, whether it's the product quality, whether it's the packaging, whether it's that tech support call, whether it's the experience on the website, whether it's the live chat, whether it's an in-store experience, The every touch either debits or credits the sentiment, right? That I have about your product, your company, your brand. And just like with everything, it's hard to earn the point balance up.

20:52It's easy to take that point balance down. But if you build it, right? And you put those sentiment points in the bank, then when you do have that inevitable, you know, credit back out, the customer still thinks they have a good experience with your brand, right? So it's not a point in time, right? And it's not a fancy web package that I buy from a web content management person. And it's not read a survey. And it's literally every single touchpoint. Not that I just close the case or solve the problem or reship the return. It's did I put credit in that sentiment bank? Because if so, I got a customer for life.

21:33If I did not, I run the risk of somebody out-sentimenting me. right? Better. And I might not have even done something wrong, but it doesn't matter. I lost the customer and, you know, they went somewhere else that did that better. So that's kind of my opinion of the topic, Steve. Yeah. It's a, we could have a whole episode devoted to CX for sure. But one last question for you, because I know you've had a front row seat to tech and how it's reshaped CX, right? And I want to get your thoughts on, do you see any big shift coming in CX tech that marketers should maybe aren't ready for yet or should be?

22:04Or what are your thoughts on what's coming? I have an opinion, Steve, if I may. Go go shucking that KA has an opinion. I know the fact that I have an opinion, just a strong opinion surprises you immensely, right? I'm not familiar with this. That's right. My first answer to that question, though, I'll elaborate on it, is unfortunately, I think that tech, CX tech, is being used as a cost reduction rate model way too much versus actually improving CX. So, right, hey, I got my support call center right down from 2 ,000 people to 200 with all this amazing tech, right? That sentiment I am destroying, right?

22:41Because when that customer has to sit there through 17, and if this, then that, if this, go down this tree, right? It looks good on my cost numbers. It's horrible customer experience, right? And it's horrible customer sentiment and it does long-term damage. So this false positive that, hey, look at this, right? Because it's all AI, it's all automated, it's all chatbot. I'm going to celebrate, oh, my first time to response, right? Went to under 60 seconds. It's like, well, yeah, but it was a terrible customer experience and it degraded that sentiment bank. So don't applaud yourself for applying cutting edge technology because it sure looked good in your cost to serve.

23:20It did you big time damage in customer experience and customer sentiment, right? And you look at that across the board. And we are at, I think we are at the, how do I make this veneer of customers experience happen at scale with lower and lower price points, right? Again, whether that's an existing customer or even cost to acquire, we're too focused on making CX more efficient and my cost per look better on the balance sheet. And I'm not saying you don't have to do that because I'm somebody that's been running P &Ls that have been hundreds of millions or billions for a long time. And is the cost associated with CX an important factor?

24:01Yes. But in my mind, the technology has been used 90 % to drive cost to deliver a minimum viable customer experience down rather than the technology to actually drive the definition of customer experience and make it better and improve it. Does that make sense, Steve? Totally. It's being too much. The line is drawn too low. Now, how do I get my cost to deliver that low customer experience bar, lower, lower, lower, lower? Technology has the opportunity to say, never mind. I want to take that bar up and then up again and up again and radically improve customer experience. Most of the technologies out there and most of the applications about them are not about making customer experience better.

24:40They're about making customer experience more cost effective. And while that works in the short term, I think it hurts you in the long term. I really do. It's definitely a fine line. Yeah. It's a balance from the P &L line all the way down to the customer facing. Yeah. Right. And everywhere in between. But to me, you're right. The best leaders will not necessarily just look at, oh, we saved a shitload of money. That's right. What about our NPS? What about our scores? That's right. Look at all of those and weigh those against that last two quarters of cost reduction. Right. Maybe that math ain't so good after all.

25:16And I think the one bright spot, I think, are where companies are not just paying lip service, but are truly harnessing that notion that we've been dealing with my entire career, which is, hey, have the discipline to gather all the data that a customer is willing to give you holistically. right? Harness it, right? In a way that will allow you to drive real value, right? Whether that's recommendations, whether that's assistance, whether that's offers, right? Whether that, hey, okay, you really are paying attention, you know, right? Like the hotel companies, for instance, have actually gotten pretty good at this, right?

25:53That's an industry that has done a good job of investing billions and harnessing data and really trying to go create value add right through experiences or offers or right whenever. That's the one bright spot, I think, are the companies that are taking the technology around data aggregation and then putting it into way more real-time, right, engagement channels. Again, whether that's at the hotel guest or at the check-in, at the website, in the e-commerce store, right, in the email, on the phone. I think that's the one bright spot out there is the people that are doing that really, really well.