Stop telling people what to do. Tell them why to do it.

One could have reflected and gone, okay, cool.

It's a different company now.

Let me peace out.

I've done my job.

Let's go on to the next one.

But you've been through that for an incredible period of time.

So it's an open question and one that I think you'll wince at slightly because we've already established that I'm not sure you're that keen on compliments, but what can aspiring CMOs learn from your career in terms of building a long sort of happy career in a CMO role?

Number one, choose the team that you work with very carefully.

The other leaders that you're going to be working with and the team that you build around you.

Absolutely that.

I suspect we'll touch on that more in different areas as we go along.

The other part is that In software, it's always changing.

And it's easy to look at a company and feel like they're epics.

I do this all the time.

As we set the context, we're about to do this.

And you'll remember that three years ago, we did this and then we did this.

And the interesting thing is that I don't think it really works that way.

It's not like there are some key moments where you pivot or there is a really big change, but so much of it happens week by week, month by month, quarter by quarter and so on.

And and so I think a lot of it is going back to the curiosity and adaptability that we talked about earlier.

But probably the most important thing is to understand, and this is gonna come up a lot, I'm guessing to the point of probably feeling very laborious, which is to understand the why.

As marketers, it can be really easy to get blinders on and be focused on a portion of the business or even a portion of marketing.

And I think it's beneficial, especially now, to try to understand the machine in its totality, understand why it works the way that it does.

And then as a marketer help diagnose, so how do we change that? and what what are the areas where if if we want lead generation to change one of the areas to change to drive that is by changing lead generation some of it though may be in working with product to change things in product that will make it so that lead generation can be more effective it's it's really the you think of marketing as a constant evolution that is going to shift very, very frequently.

And as a marketing leader, you're going to be so much better off if you understand the machine as deeply as you can, and not just your slice of the machine.

And