From CMO to CEO - advice from The Marketing Academy founder Sherilyn Shackell

0:06Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Uncensored CMO. Now, in this episode, we're taking a different tack. We're going to be talking about your career. Yes, that's right, your career. We spend so much time as marketers thinking about what marketing we're doing. How can we be more effective? How can we deliver for our businesses? But do we spend time thinking about us? Where are we going? Why are we here? And what are we going to do with our lives? And that's why I've invited Sherilyn Shackle, who's the founder of the Marketing Academy, who spends all her time with the top 1 % of marketers globally figuring that out.

0:35This is a great conversation. You're going to love it and it's going to be relevant to everybody. So listen in, take lots of notes and I hope you enjoy it. Thank you. So Sharon and Shackle, welcome to Uncensored CMO. It's lovely to have you. It's wonderful to be here. Thank you for having me. Well, dying to get in to talk about the Marketing Academy and what you do and what you're up to and how it's all been. But tell us a bit about your journey to this point. How did you end up here? Oh, my God, because I'm the age I am, that could be a really long story. So I will cut it short. but what people don't know or it's not commonly known is that I'm not a marketer right never have been I think I might have made a good one I think it was a path not chosen but I spent most of my career the majority of my career as a headhunter and I did it for 25 years and I believed that that was going to be my path but if I'm honest it was a career in which I was very successful I owned my own executive search firm, which I think I bought in my early 30s.

1:32So it probably looked quite successful from outside looking in. But I never actually really liked the industry. And as well, as an owner of a business, I was working really hard. I've always been quite driven. And I was doing a job that I was good at making money at, but that I didn't love. And something was going on at a kind of a soul level that I wasn't 100 % aware of. and I suffered from absolute burnout. I suffered a complete and total physical crash and I got an illness that could have killed me overnight and I was 42. And so I realised at that time, it was a really big wake-up call, really, really big wake-up call.

2:13Now, I had always been interested in marketing, actually fascinated by it and I had always really understood the power of it, especially as the growth driver in business so as a headhunter I'm taught my clients are CEOs and I'm looking at finding their boards right so their direct reports some occasionally would be a CMO and I used to get really frustrated with CEOs who would be you know we're not we're not growing quick enough our revenues are down our customers aren't talking to us or they're not liking us and I'd be saying well where's the CMO in the boardroom then you know where's the person that's got all the answers to this and they go well the cmo no my cmo's not on the board and i'd be well like well you're an idiot then basically because that's the person that's gonna fix this for you so i i'd always been passionate about it and i was also at that time in my life a non-exec director on a leadership development program which i'd gone on and it changed my life and it had inspired the real passion around developing leadership talent so when i had this kind of like midlife crisis thing go on I literally had the opportunity through a little bit of trauma to look at what I was doing with my life and I didn't like it and I and I felt that if I continue to do that continue to be on this treadmill of commercial acquisition and you know material wealth and success in inverted commas that I was going to kill myself and I had three young daughters at the time and it was not my path.

3:50So I decided that I was going to change my life quite drastically and the recovery of what I'd gone through was the kind of instigator for what the Marketing Academy became. I wanted to be developing talent. I wanted it to be philanthropic. So I really felt the need to do something that was for good in the world. And I wanted if I was going to create something that was for good around leadership. I wanted to make sure that it would have the biggest ripple effect. And the biggest ripple effect in the world is caused by marketing media and advertising, you know, that can change the world. And so it became about two years.

4:28I think we launched about two years after my illness. I was about 44, 45 when we launched. And I changed my life completely. And I've been doing that ever since, 15 years now. Wow, what a story. That's amazing. It's incredible, isn't it, how these traumatic events, as terrible as they are at the time become catalysts don't they to make the change and make you reflect on what do you want in life and from your career and it's odd isn't i've been in similar positions where i've been fired or had houses burning down all sorts of weird things have happened it's incredible to look back and go as difficult as it was at the time it forced me to think what do i want and what do i want to who do i want to be as well and here's what i remember But there were two things that I remember when I was ill.

5:11I was in intensive care and I was conscious through most of it, although on morphine, which is fantastic. I love morphine. I had morphine once, actually. It's fantastic. They'd wean me off it. It's like floating, isn't it? I became hooked on fentanyl patches. It's not a good thing, actually. Not a good look. Just say no. But I remember hearing my doctor say to my husband, you know, we look at their symptoms with this on a scale of 1 to 10. And if there were a 1, give them a paracetamol, send them home. if there are 10, it's very quick and a very painful death and your wife is presenting at nine.

5:41And I literally thought, holy shit, that means I could die like today. And if I die today, how shit will that be? Because I'm not living my best life. I'm not being my best, the best parent. I'm not, I'm hardly ever there. I'm drinking too much. I'm working too hard. I'm not being the best wife. And I'm in an industry that, to be quite honest, is not going to make a big dent in the world. It's not leaving a legacy and changing people's lives. There's no impact. And I think I've probably got more, more to give. And I remember thinking, if I get through this, if I get through this, one, I'm going to change my life completely.

6:19And then two, I'm never going to let anybody that's in my sphere of influence have to experience something this traumatic before they take a look at some of the choices that have led to where they are in their lives and be really crystal clear about whether they're in a place that's filling them with joy and purpose and purpose and why we're on the planet and what we're going to do with our time on the planet is a cornerstone of our programs. So whilst we're in marketing, media and advertising, actually the programs are all about at your core, at a heart and soul level, what is it that you're here for and what are you going to do with this spectacular time you've got left and what are you going to do with a power that you've now got at your fingertips because you're in marketing media and advertising and you can change people's lives you can change the decisions they make you can change the behaviors you can you know you can put somebody in government who's a complete dictator or you can do something that's really going to influence some societal change in the world what are you going to do and our programs bed that deeply and it's because I've often spoken to people that have really done some exceptional things as a result of trauma a lot of the inspirational speakers we get to come and talk to our cohorts that that's what's happened and I just thought god so many people in my life have done something exceptional but if they could do something exceptional then that means everybody can do something exceptional let's just take away the need for this sort of horrible catalyst a bit of grief or a bit of trauma or you know a nightmarish situation let's let's let's enable people to understand that they can sit on a mountaintop and breathe and ask themselves some really probing questions and give themselves the space to step back and just think what is in my life that gives me joy how do I give joy to other people what can I do to make a difference in the world and and that's what the programs then became about so it is it is interesting a lot of entrepreneurs have come from trauma i i can really believe that i mean i love really biographies of you know successful entrepreneurs and and it's almost always it's 90 of the trauma failure you know things that went wrong and you know you forget because you only hear about the success you tend to just hear about the polished you know uh result that happens afterwards but it's incredible how many how many successful people have actually had incredibly difficult times.

8:54I know a lot of it will be based in childhood they'll have had really bad experiences through childhood a lot of parental death you know I saw a stat once about really successful entrepreneurs and how many of them had like lost a significant one parent or the other before they were 18 or before they were 15 or something and and that is the thing yeah and that happened to me although I would never describe myself as an entrepreneur other people do I don't know why I don't and I just don't see myself as an entrepreneur but I lost my father at 19 of a heart like out of nowhere of a heart attack and at the same time probably because we lost my dad my mum descended into the living hell that's mental illness so I kind of lost them both at 19 and I know that that's been a massive driver And one of the drivers for me to become a successful headhunter with my own search firm was my mum drummed into me from a very young age.

9:52She had this beautiful phrase and she'd go, you'll get to the top, you will. You will get to the top. So I didn't have a clue what she meant, but I believed her. So I had this massive self-belief and this subconscious driver to make her proud, to make her right, to make her proud. And it wasn't until I'm 42 and nearly dead that I realised that she knew I could get there, but it was her one, not mine. But she told me that so often. The one thing that gave me was I got innate self-confidence and self-belief. but I never needed to get to the top. She needed me to get to the top. I didn't. I needed to do something good with my life.

10:40So I was able to let it go. You know, once I realised where it came from, I was able to change it and let it go. Up until that point, I'd never considered that I was doing it for any other reason other than that I wanted to get to the top. And it just wasn't a truth. It was I had to look back. I had to analyse. I had to face into where those beliefs had come from. And we do we do that with our scholars and our fellows. We take them back there and we go, what part of who you are today is stuff that you've been holding on to since you were seven years old. And you now have a choice. You can still keep hold of it if it's useful for you.

11:19Or you can just choose to let it go because you're not that seven year old anymore. Oh, well. So that's where we take the programmes. Not all of the programmes go that deep. And for anyone listening that doesn't know much about it as well, describe what the Marketing Academy programmes are. Because also they're not about marketing per se, are they? Although the context is marketing. Yeah, there's a huge context. This is much more leadership and, as you described, finding your purpose. It is, it is. So there's two levels and the programmes are different, although the structure of how we deliver the learning is the same.

11:48So we have the scholarship programme, the Marketing Academy Scholarship programme. is for the emerging leaders in the breadth of the industry. So marketing, media, media owners, agencies, right across the board. Very small programmes. So a class size of 30. We run the scholarship in UK, Australia and the States. So we only take 90 scholars a year through our learning. Highly competitive to get in. I mean, we get thousands of nominations and applications, thousands and thousands. Any tips on how to get in? there's lots of podcasts out there with our with our alumni talking about how to get in and there's also a whole load of example showcases so one of the things they have to do is they have to do a two-minute showcase and some of them are phenomenal and a lot of them are on youtube so if you really want to get in there are ways to really get under the skimmer there's a podcast i did years ago that gets circulated every year which does give a few insider tips um so it's hard to get on it's totally free and that's the case with all of our programs so we're a not-for-profit and you know the way in which we deliver our learning is that we've got these phenomenal people all over the world who are the top of their game in our industry and they all gift their time to help us to develop the talent and then 30 will go on a nine-month part-time learning development journey it's not a training course people say we do training no we don't it's real development stuff the scholarship is actually probably 25 % of the curriculum is around marketing skills.

13:22But we don't really over-index on it because we take the top 1 % of talent in our industry, right? So they've got to be pretty good at stuff. The rest of the curriculum is aimed at leadership development, personal development, and the purpose piece. So we get them together for three boot camps a year. It's residential it's about nine days of learning at boot camp in between the boot camps they get to meet mentors so we've got 280 mentors around the world who are all either cmos or ceos or subject matter experts and then they're all matched with executive coaches so they get their and who are board level coaches who all give their time pro bono so they by the end of the nine months they've spent this very intensive time with a cohort of another 29 fabulous people they become friends for life and then they enroll they get immediately enrolled in our alumni program so when you get into the academy you might do the program and you'll be in an in-year program but our support is there for you for the rest of your career and we invest a shed ton of time and effort resources into the alumni program so that's the emerging leader level there isn't an age range on it but they do need to be in a leadership position because they've got to be able to practice what we're teaching them.

14:39So they have to be in a position of big influence or leadership. I guess if there were a sweet spot, it's probably mid-30s, it's probably the sweet spot. Any younger and you just, you'll forget most of it by the time you get into a role that you can really do something with it. And then the other programme that we do is, at the most senior level within the industry, it is exclusively for brands only, not the agencies, which I'm gutted about, but we haven't found a way to make it work for agencies yet. And it's called the Marketing Academy Fellowship Programme, and it is exclusively for brand side CMOs.

15:11Now, that program has no marketing at all because they are the top CMOs. So they already know all that stuff. We're not going to teach them any of that. What that program is designed to do is to enable the CMO impact to be felt much, much more strongly in the center of the board. So what we're really looking for are CMOs that really want to grow the breadth of their board impact. ultimately to become successors to the CEOs that the cornerstone of the program is aimed at that desire not all of our sit or not all of our fellows and CMOs end up wanting to be a CEO some actually find out what the CEO role is all about while they go on the program and go nah nah nah not up for that but they what we're doing is we're raising their awareness of what is happening in the main boardrooms and we do that in partnership with McKinsey so McKinsey provide all of the like the head stuff and that is stuff like corporate finance mna strategy transformational change organizational efficacy organizational health all the things that sit out of the cmo domain at board but then in between and we get them together for these residentials but between that learning which mckinsey provide we do us house thomas barter who you might if you haven't had him on you should uh thomas barter sil salah katherine tolp who runs our coaching we're responsible for the leadership journey as we call it and that's modeled very similar on on the scholarship so you know really understanding who they are their purpose in life what they really want what their vision for the future is how they're going to get there very deep dives on leadership impact and also mentoring and coaching so they also get mentored but they get mentored by chairman and you know global ceos or portfolio non-execs and they also get an executive coach so it's extremely holistic which is why it's not training it really is intensive development and you know the reputation that we have is that that is quite transformational so we've now got almost 400 alumni of the fellowship program around the world we run that in emia apac and the states and 900 alumni of the scholarship programs.

17:24This year, by the end of this year, we'll have 1 ,500. That's quite a force. Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, it is. And all for free. It does make a lot of sense when you talk about not being about marketing. So I know when I had my first board position as a marketer, it was a real wake-up call because I suddenly realized the conversation is not about marketing. I know it sounds obvious, right? No, I don't get it. But I sat there talking about industrial disputes or the lease on the factory or, you know, firing somebody or, you know, how are we going to pay back the loan from the bank? I mean, I was in a private equity situation.

17:56But they all have that. They all have something like that. But again, being an exec and a bigger company I went to after that, again, it scales up and it's like, as the most senior marketing in an organisation, you really aren't doing much marketing. You know, it's people, it's politics, it's, you know, persuasion, it's planning, it's a whole different skill set. I think it's something, this is why I think what you do is so impressive because people don't realise this, that when you get to the most senior marketing role or you join a board, you really aren't doing marketing in the traditional sense that you might have grown up working on how to do a good poster or how to do a great social media campaign.

18:30And it's a completely different conversation. The language is different. The priorities are different. And it's all the other thing as well, which I think connects to what you do. I found it incredibly lonely because what I realised is at the level below, you have a peer group who do what you do and you kind of bond together because you're all building a campaign or launching a product right and you kind of like celebrate yay we've got you know our product launch has gone well or whatever and then you're in the cmo position your peer group have come up through a completely different background whether it's operations or finance or sales whatever completely different objectives and they just don't understand some of the stuff you're talking about they're also talking a different language yeah the language different And then you sat there talking about balance sheet or the update to shareholders or, you know, and or the finance and debts and stuff like this.

19:19And it's weirdly I did a finance and economics degree. And it's been quite bizarre because I've then done a career in marketing. It's only now or only then when I got into those positions, oh, I know this stuff. Oh, put my hand up. All right. I can talk about it now. And it's vital. And that's where there's a real mismatch, I think, between the skills that get you to there and the skills that then get you to the next bit. is just this big switch. It's huge. And also, you know, there's so many frustrations I hold about it because so when we launched the fellowship, it would have been 10 years ago, no, 11, we're in our 11th year of the fellowship programme.

19:53And at the time, we had so many big CMOs involved as mentors for the scholars. And it was those CMOs that were saying, I wish this was, you know, there's nothing around for, there's nothing like this for me. And at the time, so we have to go back 10 years and it is different now. At the time, the FTSE 100 had three board level CMOs at real board levels. Gavin Patterson, who was a BT at the time, Amanda McKenzie and one other. It might have been Andy Fennell at Diageo. It might have been Diageo, I can't remember. But there were three out of 100 that even had a really senior marketer on their board.

20:34And no CEOs with marketing backgrounds. Now, that fortunately has changed over the last decade and it's getting much, much better. But at the time I was thinking, why is that? Why aren't they making that move? Because you get a CEO with the breadth of skill set that a CMO has. And my God, you have gold dust. Totally. As long as that CEO also understands all the financial levers, the operational stuff, how to create shareholder value, how to manage the stakeholders. and that's where the disconnect is right so what tends to happen still happens but happened a lot then the CFO would be the successor to the CEO nobody would take the CMO applicant seriously my argument right from back then was you have no idea what you are missing the CMOs are the best communicators in your business and being a CEO is about storytelling right they are usually really good people people and leadership is one of the main key cornerstones of being a CEO they may not have been in the finance function but a good CMO that's growth and revenue driven will understand those levers if even if it hasn't been taught to them on paper so they're bright they understand data and they understand creativity they understand impact of people on culture They've got it all.

22:03And I could never, and as a headhunter, it's driving me nuts. Because we do a CEO search and they go, you've got to have finance experience. I go, really? Just explore that a bit. Because, you know, their biggest problem is their customers. And they want to see it. They want a finance guy. Well, a finance guy is going to come in and, yeah, they're going to save you money because they're going to cut a whole lot. They're going to make a whole lot of cuts. Certainly, I'm not convinced they're going to be on investing for long-term brand growth. So it used to really, really wind me up. And that's why we set up the fellowship.

22:37That's why we launched it. You're so right. My argument in that situation, I totally agree with you, is because no role on the C-suite has a bigger impact on the bottom line than the CMOs. And it's underrepresented also in the long term. And this is where I think we go wrong. I saw this data the other day. I think Ian Whittaker shared it on LinkedIn. in and it was looking at from an investor level what they value yeah number one brand but then chris burgrave had on last year was looking at what skill set does cma ceos are looked for in ceos financial acumen number one bottom marketing yeah so we've got this really weird disconnect where actually people that are taking a long-term view of investing in your business really really care about your brand the people making the day-to-day decisions or running the business want safety want finance right and but as you say no one shapes the financial outcome particularly in the long term more than the marketer so we've got to try and get over this kind of this disconnect between what the business needs in the long term and what marketers are doing so here was here was my my here was the principle of how we even develop the curriculum where my frustration was sitting was you can't if a cmo is not allowed into the board it's not even invited in or if they are, it's to present the deck on brand or the most recent stats on performance marketing, whatever the bloody hell they do.

24:01But if they're not in the boardroom, how can they learn that stuff? Whereas the CFO will always be in the boardroom. So the CFO by the very nature is going to have a little bit of exposure to marketing, right? Because they're sitting in the room when the marketer comes in and presents the marketer stuff. So why do you not have the CMO sitting in your boardroom so that the CMO can get exposure to all of the other functions? That's how you you develop your bench of succession for the CEO, right? And so we were thinking, well, they've got not got hope in hell. If a CMO hasn't already got board experience, then how on earth is that CMO supposed to understand the kind of language that they're going to speak?

24:38And they literally don't know what is keeping their CEO awake at night and neither kind of should they because their job is to be the CMO. So I remember when one of our fellows was promoted to a CEO role and his whole background, absolute blue chip marketer. And I got him to come back and talk to a new class of fellows about making that move, the CMO to CEO move. And he said, when I was a CMO, I believed that the CEO was thinking about my part of the business like 60 % of the time. When I became a CEO, I realized that I think about marketing maybe 2 % of my time. And until he got that job, he didn't know that, didn't understand that.

25:30So the whole of the curriculum that we wrap around the fellows is aimed at bridging that gap, right? It's aimed at just shortening the journey of knowledge and awareness from, you know, domain that they've currently got to what all of these different levers are to ready them at the very least they are a little more ready and then we're exposing them to mentors who aren't marketers they're chairman so those chairs are in decision making responsibility so we like also to think that we're also influencing the CEO decision making community that there's a lot more capability and credibility and skill and you know capacity within a cmo to become your ceo and we're starting to see those shifts happening that's exciting yeah and i i mean the whole industry i think has shifted as the cmo's functional role i mean it's so different now to what it was 10 years ago totally you know when we know because you know we're getting 500 to a thousand applications from cmos every year, year in, year out, we can see the difference in their roles over the last decade that the CEOs are bloody having to take them seriously now because now they're owning, all right, so they've got R &D and they've got products and they've got the really good ones and they've got data.

26:53And haven't they also got technology now? And so they've got such a wide remit now that the CEOs are going, Christ, that's a massive piece under that person. We need to get them on the board. The interesting dynamic I've spotted over the last few years, actually partly because I do this podcast and talk to so many CMOs, is in a crisis, interestingly, the CMO's opportunity increases. So I noticed this in COVID because when everything's going well, it's a bit like the old saying, success has many fathers and failures and orphan. When things are going well, sales team, you know, patted on the back and the CEO is great and everything else.

27:29But what I noticed is, and there was a bit of research done on this just after COVID, is that when the crisis happens, suddenly everyone looks to the CMO going, how do we get out of this? Where's the growth coming from? What supports innovation? Tell us about the customer. You know, what are our competitors doing? And weirdly, although it's uncomfortable going back to the beginning of our conversation, actually, oddly, the challenges that we see globally, where's growth going to come from next? Or how do we deal with the crisis? Like, you know, financial crisis, those kind of things. that is an opportunity for the real cmos to step up and actually show their metal and if you think i mean you put it perfectly earlier about you know you own the customer relationship you own the long-term strategy you own the implementation through the business you own the hearts and minds you own the communication of it externally right all those skill sets that cmo has to sorry ceo needs can be proven in a you know in a big crisis moment or not you have to have a crisis But a crisis kind of accelerates the visibility of that and pushes you to do that.

28:29Yeah, and those crisis points, those fires, they are happening all of the time. But here's the challenge still, though, is that you're absolutely right, and the CMO is the one that's going to get them out of it. But if their relationship with the CEO isn't strong enough, if the CEO doesn't have a perception of real credibility from that CMO, And then if that CMO doesn't back themselves, put their head above the parapet and start taking control and start speaking a language that the rest of the board are going to understand, then they're still not going to get there. And I, yeah, I've struggled a little bit with this personally, because I think with if you're like the CFO or you're the chief operations officer or sometimes the chief customer officer, you've got data, you've got real time data, you've got facts, you've got figures, you know what I mean?

29:19And the CMO is talking about brand equity, which seems like this slightly loose, you know, idea. And I think that's where marketers have to bridge the gap between the art and science and become a little bit more hard nosed about. This is the bottom line impact of what I'm doing and what we're doing together. Absolutely. We're driving that message all of the time because in reality, that's probably the only. Well, it's the biggest disconnect. Right. And if you can bridge that gap and that's not hard. But, you know, just getting curious about understanding what it is about that data that those particular decision makers need to know.

29:54You are a consummate storyteller as a CMO. You should be able to translate all of that stuff into that stuff. Job done. Yeah. Job done. So I do hold. So this is partly to do with the perceptions of the CEOs. And of course, if a CEO has not come up the marketing route, or maybe not even in a very brand driven, you know, it's even harder in B2B, right? It's really hard. Because that's even more ruthlessly just about numbers and performance and quarter by quarter. So less on the long term brand vision, which the B2C guys have. So you get this negative perception of the CEO. So I hold the CEOs responsible for that.

30:39But I'm saying to our CMOs all the time, the way out of this sits with you. You do not wait to get invited into the boardroom. You demonstrate every step of the way that you deserve to be in the boardroom because you know just as much about the levers across the business and you are speaking in their language all of the time. And if you don't do that, that's on you. Do not expect to be promoted to the board. You've reminded me of something. There's a slight irony with this is that as marketers, we are very good at understanding our audience, designing communication to meet them where they're at, providing answers to their solutions, speaking in their language, right?

31:22So, hello. I know. You just flipped that internally. I know. I discovered this weirdly on LucasAid. We went through this incredible moment of crisis. It was awful. I mean, it was like scary. It was difficult. We lost lots of revenue overnight. There was a big consumer backlash. It was awful. And as the marketing director, I was on the hook for it. And I remember I got a team together to, you know, agency group together and internal people together. And we just like almost locked ourselves down for eight weeks. It's like a lockdown situation. And it was actually advice from my PR, my corporate PR agency that just made me, the framing was interesting.

31:58They said to me, John, how would you approach this if you were running for president inside this organization? And you thought about it like, who do I need to talk to? What's the message? When do I need to do it by? What's my hundred days? What are they going to feel when it happens? And I was so fixated with the external result. Like, can I win my consumers back? You know, how do we change perception? And I'm good at that. I knew I was good at that. That was my skill set, right? I hadn't thought about the internal equivalence. And it's a bit like the gladiator thing where you win the crowd, you buy your freedom sort of thing.

32:33To be a success, you have to win the internal crowd as well as the external one. And thinking about it, it's just weird somehow things get framed in a way that works with you. The fact that he said to me, you have to think about, even down to the fact, he said, what's your three-word slogan? What's the slogan that appears everywhere in the organisation that tells everybody in three words what you are going to do. I was like, man, that's good. You know what I mean? But it's a bit like a doctor not taking their own advice, isn't it, with marketers? Well, it is. And you want to brattle their heads together.

33:04Yeah, well, I kind of do. But then there's a big part of me that thinks, well, you know, it is on you and that is your job. And you are, they are, the good CEOs will be externally focused for all of the right reasons. But, I mean, it's interesting. this might lead to something I think we've discussed in the past is is that um very often time in that situation you would you would find that a CMO will almost subvert their own internal credibility to make sure that they're delivering in their business for their people and yet if you want to make an impact you know real impact at board you've got to be doing that whole internal thing as well and i think that humans tend to be uncomfortable with that brits really uncomfortable with that oh my god no is that just not but that's about me well yeah it is about you because it's you that can make the difference here i think this is a really really important point particularly for british listeners i have to say i agree with you years and years ago i working at britvic and i was um shortlisted for the it was called the hypo program i mean every big company has their high potential thing and you know in three years gets director level or whatever and um i failed the assessment center and i was really gutted i mean is it that formative year where you're sort of starting to take leadership roles and i put my heart and soul into it and i thought i'd done well i really thought i'd nailed it and i was so disappointed with the feedback and it was this horrible i remember getting this particular bit of feedback it slightly annoyed me actually it was like i hadn't managed my stakeholders well enough and And it's almost like it's like being told there are rules of the game that you never realized there were before, because I thought it was about performance.

34:47I was going in going, I've done this. I've done that. I'm great in this situation, great in that situation. And then the mentor I was given or the coach I was given at the time said, OK, you need to be thinking about who is influential in this decision. You know, have you have you built up a relationship with them? Have you had a chance to show them what you're good at? Have you made sure that you've merchandised the project that you did? Because actually what you said is true, but it's not very visible to people. And all those kind of things. I thought, oh, yes. In that sense, I'd failed to manage my personal brand.

35:18I might have aced the test. I might have done a brilliant job on the field in terms of the team building thing and thought, great. I hadn't thought about how I'd managed my personal brand in that process. And it's a weird thing, isn't it? Because a bit like you, particularly British people, you think my job is to serve. you know and and and actually selfishly you've got to like they are they are the absolute worst i find it really fascinating because to really be able to make an impact at board level you have to be able to influence you can't influence without credibility gravitas and the skill required to you can't get gravitas without your profile creating a perception that you're worthy to be there right so um and i'm working with cmos all over the world and there are some cultural things around this right it's hard to do in asia it's really the brits find it really hard not so hard in the states not so hard in the states they have the converse challenge in that they're all superb at the at the gravitas building they're all superb at the communication and pretty good at the credibility it's them working out who can actually deliver so it's a different challenge but with that but but with Brits and and Europeans I'm like you need to be this is about you and they say no it's not about me it's about my job and my people and I go no it is about you you need to be out on the public circuit you need to be at conferences you need to be saying yes to all of these panels that you always ask for and you always ignore you've got to be doing articles you've got to be being a voice piece and they go I just can't like I just can't do it we've even got in our application form for the fellowship we ask them to list what we call external endorsements and we say articles podcasts interviews conferences blah blah blah and I swear to god the Brits they'll write like three things and then they'll go I do realize that this is an area that I have to work on in the US pages pages and pages and so what I will always say to any of our fellows who go oh I just can't bear the thought of it is I go but you owe this to your company and they go what do you mean you know you're saying that I've got to promote brand me and I go yeah but brand you directly translates to that brand your brand your teams who do your teams want to work for somebody that nobody in the world has ever heard of or somebody that's being lauded all over the place.