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Dear CMO:Rats are stubborn, gregarious, and adaptable. They are highly social animals that live in tightly controlled societies. They persevere and even thrive under difficult conditions. And yet rats get a bad rap. Apart from the fact that they’re highly destructive brutes and are almost always cast as antagonists in New Line Cinema features, they’re […]

Dear CMO: We are defined by the demands on our time. Our self-worth has become invariably connected to the number of emails and cell phone calls we receive, as long as they’re in public. Once, we collected coup; now we have vibrating Blackberries and knowing looks as we pick up incoming calls. “Sorry… I have […]

Dear CMO: I’ve got a question for you. You know all those trip reports you’ve been writing for the last ten or twenty years? Who exactly has been reading them? More importantly, what’s happened to all the insight, dealer feedback, first person observations, and mid-trip epiphanies that you’ve spontaneously created over the course of a […]

Dear CMO: The problem with work is that we’re really busy. Too busy, sometimes, to understand how the impact of a small thing relates to the success of a big thing. And sometimes, winning at small things is more important that anything else. Here’s a story that animates this point from a few years ago. […]

Dear CMO: We love High and To The Right. Nothing pumps the ego like premium positioning. There’s plenty to suggest that starting here and “moving down-market” is a winning game plan, all things considered. You can slum your way to success in a lot of markets. There’s another idea that appeals to me a lot, […]