The Obama campaign is one of the greatest examples of what is possible in the brave new world of 21st Century marketing. They did a masterful job of connecting with minds, personalizing messages, refining old and new media, sending clear messages, and providing the feedback that enabled them to respond to the messages they heard.
People ask my mother whether she had any idea that I'd be CEO of a company some day, and she would say, 'Absolutely not. Totally out of the realm of possibility.' There was certainly nothing that would have been very predictable in my upbringing.
What do you really believe makes a difference in the company? For me it's really clear. It's about customers and employees. Everything else follows. If you take care of your customers and you have motivated employees, everything else follows.
Not everybody is created equal, and it's important for companies to identify those high potentials and treat them differently, accelerate their development and pay them more. That process is so incredibly important to developing first-class leadership in a company.
I worked in sales. It was definable, it had a quantifiable approach to accomplishment that had a great deal of importance to me. It had a degree of clarity that I loved. And of course, it was core.