How to Build a Future-Proof Marketing Operating System

Episode Transcript

Andrea: What if I told you that it doesn't matter how creative your marketing teams are, and it doesn't matter how cutting-edge your MarTech is, or how many channels you manage to master? None of that matters as much as one simple thing: how you work. Yep, your operating system is more important than any other single factor in your success. And yeah, you'd be forgiven for being a little skeptical if that was coming from me, since this podcast is all about the Agile marketing operating system.

But this is not just my idea. There are, in fact, two other primary sources making this case, and this week I am joined by my colleague, Ross Libby, to dissect their key points, collate their most valuable insights, and condense it all down into some very stringent calls to action for marketers eager to maximize their impact right now. So grab your fire extinguisher, people, it's time to talk about burning down your entire operating model.

Welcome to the Agile Marketing Edge, the first podcast dedicated to turning Agile theory into real-world marketing breakthroughs. I'm Andrea Fryrear, CEO of Agile Sherpas, and your guide on this climb to smarter, faster, outcome-driven marketing. Every week, we unpack the what, who, and how behind Agile marketing, from building high-velocity workflows and slashing waste to measuring what really matters and scaling success across teams. So lace up those virtual hiking boots, limit your WIP, and let's get going.

All right, so welcome to a very special episode of the Agile Marketing Edge. I am joined by Agile Sherpas' Chief Value Officer, Ross Libby, and we're doing something kind of fun and out of the ordinary today. So Ross and I were going back and forth in our Sherpa Slack, sharing some articles that we had both found about transformation and operations and organizational systems, and I thought, "You know, let's take the discussion out of Slack and onto the podcast," because Ross and I have worked together for nearly five years now, and over that time we have found some places where we very much agree about how organizational transformation should go, and then there are some places where we have different opinions, which is awesome. And so we wanted to surface that here on the podcast, and we don't know how this is gonna go, and welcome to our fun little experiment here on the podcast. So this is happening live in real time, and we'll just see how it goes. So hi, Ross. Welcome to the Agile Marketing Edge.

Ross: Oh, hello, pleasure to be here. And you know me, I'm always up for an experiment. I'll give anything a try once, twice, maybe three times, 'cause sometimes that's the charm, so let's have at it.

Andrea: Awesome. So we're gonna start by introducing our jumping-off points, the articles that Ross and I both found that sort of got us rabbeting down these little various holes, and then we've got some questions that we're gonna use to guide the conversation, but it will probably go in lots of directions that we're not anticipating, and that's the fun of it. So Ross, you wanna start and kind of share the interesting piece that you found, and why you thought it was worthy of further discussion?

Ross: Yeah. So the one I came across, I first saw it on a LinkedIn post from someone in my network that highlighted the title, "The Future of Marketing Operations" — or I should say, "The Future of Marketing is Operations: Why It's Time to Start Over." So like any good title, intriguing. Hmm, tell me more. And this was a Forbes article written by Cameron Partridge. So it caught my attention. I read the article, and it was hitting on these dynamics that I know have been swirling around my head, your head, right, the Agile Sherpas, you know, collective head, we'll call it, around operations being so business critical to marketing.

It's talking about dynamics that I know are near and dear to us in this podcast, right? Where we highlight the Agile marketing operating system, that's made up of several things, but importantly, process, people. In the article, I know we'll be talking about it more, but it really hit on some dynamics that I found interesting for quite some time, are these... You know, they call it zero-based, so zero-based budgeting or zero-based design, but to what the title is saying, you know, starting over, it's basically like walk it all back.

Forget about however many years you've been in business, you know, how long you've been in your role, all the MarTech stack that's been built up, all the budget you've had in the past. Like, forget about it all and start from: what do you really need? And some of the things we love, too: what if you stop doing things? What if you use ruthless prioritization to drive value? So yeah, I know we'll be talking about it more, but that's a little synopsis of the article, or again, why that headline originally caught my attention, caused me to read it, and caused me to, you know, be Slacking you and then talking to others. I wrote a LinkedIn post and all that good stuff, based on being inspired by it.

Andrea: Yeah, and I love, love, love the stopping piece, right? We had a whole moment last year at Agile Sherpas where we said we stopped everything, right? And then we did that for ourselves, of like stop starting new stuff and, like, really get serious about what we do that's adding value. So near and dear, near and dear to my heart, for sure.

And so then the reaction I had was, "Oh, my gosh, this sounds so much like a piece that I had just read," which was coming from a very different source in terms of the perspective, because it was from McKinsey, which is like the behemoth, right, in our space, where they are taking a very large view from very large organizations. And their piece was about an operating model — the new operating model for a new world, and they actually were writing it from the perspective of how CEOs needed to think about their operating model. But I think if you swap CEO for CMO, it works beautifully for how marketing organizations need to be thinking about how they're putting things together to be ready for the new world. And they're looking at it as, like, 12 elements, and kind of how do you put them together to deliver on strategy? And their thesis is that most of the time, we have these great strategies, and then our execution fails to deliver on that strategy, because our operating model is out of date, is out of sync with the world. So again, that's what we try to do, is help people create a model and an operating system that allows them to realize the great ideas that they have.

So whether it's kind of burn it all down and start over, or they're advocating for people to really, like, look critically at their operating model and decide, is it a burn-it-down situation? Is it an incremental kind of swapping out of things, or iterative improvement? But in both cases, it's a deliberate choosing of how we're gonna approach things, and so those are the maybe push-pull opportunities here of, when do you choose one, when do you choose the other? Is one always better than the other, or are there contraindications that say, "Never do this one in this situation"? And that is what we're here to discuss, because I think there are arguments to be made in many directions. So yeah, that's where we are.

Ross: Yeah, and when you shared then that one, I said, "Oh, this reminds me of the McKinsey article you're referencing." I know in reading through it, you know, those dynamics that hit me as well of, as you're describing, strategy, execution. Right, should be so simple, like they're not really that far apart, or are they? I know I've noticed that for some time now, whether it's organizations I've, you know, been at, you know, part of the delivering the value, or now here at Agile Sherpas, as we're really supporting those organizations and how they bring their value to life, there's a gap. And you can't take it for granted that your strategy connects to your execution beautifully, and I always used to... I like to use the idea of, it's a steel thread that has to connect them. And that steel thread has flex and give, but it's strong, especially when anchored.

But it's, you know, the modern engineering marvels of today are what connect steel threads together, braid them together to create a suspension bridge or something like that. And so that article is just bringing this picture to mind of these different dynamics and components, and there's not one way for them all to come together, or you can find many ways in which organizations are using aspects or components. But if they're not woven together with purpose, right, with a direction of like, "Well, this is what we do, and this is who we serve, and this is the value we deliver," what are you building towards, right?

Andrea: Yep, and so that led me to maybe start us off with what I think might be a question that I hadn't thought about, and maybe a lot of our listeners aren't thinking about, and it's a distinction that may be really important when people are thinking about these change-type initiatives and articulating what they're trying to accomplish. Which is, are you building an operating model, or are you building an operating system? Which of those are you building, or which of those are you trying to fix? Because they are different. They serve different purposes, and maybe let's try to unpack those a little bit, because they are serving different purposes, and sometimes one needs fixing versus the other.

Yeah. So for me, and again, this was a fun exercise for me. I had not really had to articulate this fully before I started thinking through this in preparation for this conversation. Because the operating model, as the name would imply, just like when you are gonna build a building, right, you start with a model of the building, it's the blueprint, the idea of how this is all supposed to work, and most of us stop here, right? We have the model, we have the blueprint, and we're like, "Yay, this is the idea of how this is supposed to work," and we assume that it's gonna play out that way in reality, and then we don't go any farther than that. But the operating system is the reality. It's the detail and the minutiae that you start to document as you're really doing the work, right? So, like, we thought it was gonna look like this. We thought we were gonna be able to put the plumbing over here, but as we started to dig the hole for the foundation of the building, it turns out that we couldn't do it 'cause there was a giant rock there or whatever, so we had to change it up. We thought we were gonna be able to run our quarterly planning this way, but it turns out that it interferes with the budgeting cycle, and we can't do it that way, so we have to change it in this way. So the operating system is the reality, the minutiae, the flex, and the give, and they sometimes match, but usually they don't. And so understanding the difference and which one is breaking and which one do you really need to fix is, I think, important.

Ross: Yeah. In both of them, but I think specifically the article by McKinsey, that came to the forefront, or in my mind, even brought me back... I think it was a few years ago, I went to a conference, it was ODF, Organizational Design Forum. Someone in the actual Agile community had kind of crossed over in that space, and I was connected to her, and she was chatting about it, and so I was interested for a little while. But anyways, in going there, it was kind of a new community, a new experience. I met some amazing and wonderful people, but that was one thing that came to light while I was there, was what you just described, sort of the organizational model or org design, as oftentimes, you know, is referred to. It's valuable, it's important. That article called out structure as one of the 12 dynamics that, yeah, you need to think about it and understand it, and it needs to be further than that, right? And so when I was at that conference, it was some of the conversations I got in where some amazing things that people were doing, but hearing them talk about, too, how sometimes it fell flat because it didn't unfortunately move past the design of the work.

The thing that, you know, on the PowerPoint or whatever, looks great, but then what does it look like in practice, right? The idea of then the operating system, which brings a whole host of other things, right? People and process. You know, it talks about the talent dynamic and the 12 — mentions dollars, right? The spend of money and how things get funded, right? There's a whole host of things that actually have to bring it to life. And back to that kind of like strategy and execution, it's not a given that that design or that structure you create is going to play out as beautiful as it was on that, you know, piece of paper or screen.

And so yeah, it has always been a need, but the time is now more than ever to really critically look at and understand: am I fixated on the organizational model? Am I over-indexing on the design of the work, which again, is critical and important, at the cost of sometimes letting things be a little messy and try it out, give it a shot, see what happens? I can even think back to the one way I've gone about things or even how we've gone about things here at Agile Sherpas, and, you know, this is why you and I have conversations, are we gotta continue to push each other in our thinking to evolve. And thinking about how we've approached, you know, the problems of organizations and the things they brought to us, and how we need to do that now and in the future based on a whole host of things we're learning, great articles like these, and things playing out in the industry at large. Obviously, you know, the AI and all, like, things — it's not slowing down. So how much time are you spending on the design versus making something happen in the system itself?

Andrea: Yeah, and I think a lot of our clients really want the... it's like a security blanket, to have the perfect structure or the perfect model, and they want to invest a lot of time up there. But then from the Forbes piece that you shared, I love the emphasis on hiring operators now, who can be a systems thinker, who can really, like, fluidly move between strategy and data and execution, and they're not locked into, "I am the content person. I am the marketing strategist," and like, put their blinders on and say, "I have executed my piece, and, like, I will now pass the work downstream." Because that is what has gotten a lot of our clients tripped up in the past, is because they have a lot of people on their org chart who work that way, and so they get trapped in this round-and-round cycle of trying to construct teams based on people whose job descriptions and job roles look like that. But if you had a lot more of these fluid operators, it's a lot easier to kind of throw teams together and dynamically throw them into exploratory dynamic work, and like, "Go figure this out, and let us know how it goes." But when you haven't hired those kinds of people, or people are scared to step into those kinds of roles, then it's really kind of difficult to get past the need or the perceived need for the perfect org chart and the perfect model.

Ross: Hmm. Yeah, and I think we start to then hit on that ever-so-important mindset dynamic — the mindset in people, the mindset of the organization, and the ability to sort of kinda navigate between, "Well, this is what I was hired for, this is what I know, this is what I'm comfortable with," to that broader system perspective to say, "Yes, and this is what my teammate needs. This is what my department, my organization needs. This is what the customer, the industry needs." And to that idea of the operator, the system thinker — that's as worthwhile as ever. Again, to bring in the fold, you know, that mention of something like AI is going to elevate the operator. And not to be like — it's not diminishing other capabilities or skills in them by any means, but if we stay kind of stuck in how it's been or what I've been and what I've done, I think that's the risk, right? Any capability can be now elevated by AI, and very importantly, how you can integrate more fully through your own capabilities and obviously through, you know, others as well.

Andrea: Yeah. So then, I think let's start talking about the burn-it-down versus the rebuild-it kind of question here, right? Because the article that you shared was like, "Start over," right? Like, starting over is how we should do it. And then McKinsey is obviously thinking about more really large, complex organizations, where going to the CMO, who has a thousand marketing employees, and being like, "Good news, we're starting over," is difficult to stomach. So, like, let's talk about the push-pull there, and when do we start over versus talking about a more iterative — let's improve bit by bit.

Ross: Yes. I really, yeah, to what you called out, appreciated the takes that, you know, maybe you consider slightly different. Even though the McKinsey article did a nice job of saying it is a spectrum, and you can go all the way to more, you know, broad, sweeping transformation that impacts the whole organization. They gave some examples of, you know, different, like, financial institutions doing just that. But I'd like to pose at least... I think it's a healthy place to start to think, you know, almost greenfield. Identify what are the possibilities, to what was called out in the Forbes article about the marketing operations, or that starting from a place of zero, you know, whether it's the budget or tech stack or all those things, and kind of create from there.

I think it's a healthy place to start. But then, very quickly, or to that idea, too, of if you spend all this time then designing, you know, mapping, like, the organizational model of what this new, you know, amazing — there's no boundary, like, ooh, maybe pump the brakes before too long and start to then think about, "Okay, what's our current state?" And that was taking, like, kind of, with the McKinsey article, the organizational lay of the land, right? Do analysis around: "All right, what's our reality? What industry are we in? What's our culture like?" And those types of things, and those different dynamics, and doing that gut check. So I think that becomes a very helpful next step. And then from there, right, you start making decisions and then promoting. Even if you think it's gonna be a bit bigger and broader, ah, how can you start small, right? Learn quickly, iterate from there.

Andrea: Yeah. And even in the places where you might say, "We are gonna start small," like, we're not going to have everyone go down to zero, but maybe there is some place in the organization where we are gonna go down to zero and start over there. Because I think in every organization, there is some place where it's a dumpster fire right now. Like, everybody's got that team or that function or something where it's chaotic, right? And it's not necessarily anyone's fault, but it has happened over time, where, like, the system tends toward entropy, and it's just kind of decayed over time, and it's gonna be easier to start over than it is gonna be to try to unwind all of the things that have gotten to the point of no return, and the difficulty of trying to repair as opposed to restart. And there's probably some pocket in every organization that you could do that restart and see what that feels like, right? And that it's not as scary as we all thought it was gonna be. Just like how we talk about piloting with our clients, right? If you pilot this thing, as well, pilot the restart and see that it's not as terrifying as you thought it was gonna be, and maybe it doesn't come with as much operational overhead as we were all thinking that it might do. And there have to be guardrails, right? Like, they can't go run around and, like, abandon all the enterprise tools that we've all, you know, agreed on and just go, like, crazy, adopt 50 new pieces of MarTech that no one's ever tried before. Like, there have to be parameters, but there's probably a place.

And the more this last, like, 18 months goes, and the faster I feel like it's all moving, the more I'm like, "This is what you have to do!" Like, big-kid pants on, people. Like, this is how it's happening. It's time to go.

Ross: Mm-hmm. Yeah, when you talk about, like, the proliferation, the Forbes article references, I know one of our favorite, the MarTech landscape map, that has now been done year over year for, I think, over a decade, right? Or maybe well over that. But it calls out the tremendous amount of growth since, you know, you look 15 or so years back, like, it's mind-boggling. But especially if you start to hone in on the recent past, the last few years, year-over-year growth is like... Can it keep up at this rate? I guess, who knows? I think it probably will continue to exceed it. Of course, you have some come and some fall off every year and all that good stuff, but that should emphasize this, you know, conversation here, especially from your tech dynamic. The answer isn't just add more and more and more. To what — you add more to that dumpster fire, what's gonna happen? It's gonna burn up. Those dollars are gonna burn up. How are you thinking about — maybe you can't start over everywhere, but maybe in some places you gotta go, "Whew, we gotta do a hard reset." We gotta take that look at what we have now and what is it driving, again, that value lens, and go, "Do we stay the course? Do we add on top? Do we subtract? Do we subtract two and add one?" Like, again, there's no answer. There's no cheat sheet to tell you. Wouldn't that be great? It doesn't exist, right? It burned up in the dumpster fire if it ever existed.

But yeah, to your point, that's the reality, and it takes the courageous leader, the leader of service, who's willing to say, "You know what? I maybe had a part in this. Maybe I've led us in this direction, and now I have to say, like, fire extinguisher out, I'm putting out the fire. We're gonna survey." But the good news is, sometimes from that burn-it-down, especially in the world of nature, new growth happens. So lean into that, right?

Andrea: Yeah. So I think this is a great segue because, like you said, there's no playbook, like there's no checklist, cheat sheet. Sorry, right? Like, a lot of people will ask you to, like, comment for the playbook on their LinkedIn posts. Like, they don't have it. They don't know. You can comment, and you can try to follow it, but what worked last week or last quarter for that person probably isn't gonna work for you right now, 'cause everything changes all the time. So who's gonna decide? Like, who decides where we start and how big the change is gonna be? 'Cause I think you and I talk to people in these organizations periodically who are maybe at the individual contributor level or manager level. They don't have the fire extinguisher. They don't have, like, the pen to sign an SOW. They see the need, but they can't necessarily drive the change. So, you know, who's deciding this? Who can drive the change? Who's got the responsibility to drive the change? What if you see the need, but you can't drive the change? Like, who needs to handle this problem?

Ross: One of the things that I go to is a framing we'll use often in our Agile marketing leadership courses, cohorts, discussions, and that's framing the thinking of the leader as an individual, the leader of a team, a leader within the organization. And so of course, you know, I said "leader" in that. "So what if I'm not a leader? What if I'm an individual contributor?" You know, I say, "Well, you're a leader in your own right, for one." But that applies to any person within the organization, from what my experience has been. You are an individual, first and foremost, you know, and there's great value in that. You know, make sure you're starting from that standpoint. But guess what? In one way, shape, or form, you're either part of a team, you're maybe leading a team, maybe you have informal direction you provide to the team, or maybe it's formed, right? There's a team dynamic, and then guess what, too? You are part of the larger organization, so never consider your abilities, your impact, you know, too minimal to make a difference, to contribute to what matters. So that's what I'd maybe say first and foremost, and then from there, start to think about that kind of dynamic. And it's a system dynamic, honestly, too — talking about system — of start at the individual level. Look into yourself, whether you're a leader or individual contributor. What can you do? What could you carve out? Maybe there's a little back-burning to keep the fire from coming your way or whatever, whatever you need to think about with the analogy, but there is some smaller piece that you can do something about or you can control, so start there. And then, is there a way you could bring it to a few others, right? Bring it to the team. And from there, how can you highlight that at a minimum at a more organizational level? Or how can you offer... You know, not just, "I see this issue, this issue is no good," but, "What might we do about it? What have I done about it? What have I tried?" And those are the small things that really start to build into a broader impact, you know. That's what I'd offer.

Andrea: Yeah. And you know, I think that's super important, and I agree that there is opportunity across the org chart to make an impact here. And I would also push on every single leader — like, legit, you know, higher-on-the-org-chart leader — if you are in a senior role, you cannot put your head in the sand and not have this be high on your agenda, especially in marketing. Like, muscle up, buttercup. Like, if you are a senior marketing leader, this is your problem, and it's your problem right now. You need to figure out how to operationalize evolution, adoption of these modern ways of working. Adaptation needs to be built into your team's DNA right now. Right now. Best-case scenario, last year, right? Like, when was the best time to plant a tree? Like, 30 years ago. Second best time is right now. Right now. You need to do it right now, and this is not someone else's problem. This is not your boss's problem. If you're not the CMO, this is not the CMO's problem. This is your problem. If you are the CMO, this is definitely your problem also.

But this — we can't keep passing the buck. Like, I feel like everyone's like, "Oh, well, it's the creative director, because the creative team is always, like, the bottleneck," and then they wanna pass the buck to the stakeholders, "Because they're always interrupting us, and we can't get anything done, and so we just don't have time to improve our process." Like, I've talked to multiple marketing leaders already this year, and I'm like: you guys are at risk. Like, your role is at risk, your teams are at risk if you cannot figure this out. Like, that is what's at stake. I mean, you read the news every day that there are layoffs, there are reductions in force. Like, this is happening, and if you wanna protect you and your teams... I love the line from the Forbes article, like, "Time is the new margin." You need to create time. You need to show that you are generating time for innovation, time for productivity improvements, and it's AI, it's automation, it's technological efficiency. Like, come on. I just— You can tell that I get all worked up about this, because I can't believe that people are putting their heads in the sand. Like, what are you waiting for, leaders? Get after it.

Ross: Yeah, you make just great points there, where I kinda, in some ways, you know, I was describing no matter where you are in the organization, don't consider yourself, right, too small, too insignificant. And certain levels, right, certain levels of leadership have responsibility to be the one who can really make the change. I mentioned that idea of servant leadership, and we actually recently had a LinkedIn Live on that exact topic. But a good part of the conversation was about the idea of servant leadership doesn't give, like, a free pass to, you know, "Oh, I just empower the team, and I kinda step back. Poof! I can take it ea—" Servant leadership is as much effort as any other form of leadership, if not more, because it requires you to take this onus, to have an understanding, and also then engage at that level that, you know, the idea of empowerment does happen. But empowerment doesn't just happen magically, right? You, the leader, have to create the conditions for it. You have to maybe create the capabilities in the team for it, and yes, you need to still lead and guide and provide the direction of where you're headed and sometimes the tough calls that involves, which could be what these articles are talking about. Burn it all down or some combination of, you know, in certain pockets, or... These are tough decisions, but come on, leaders, these are your decisions.

Andrea: Right. All right, so I think then this is a great place for us to wrap up with our final question, because we see this from our prospects a lot. You know, we talk to people who — we go through a lot of conversations, and they ask us a lot of questions, and we always joke that our biggest competitor is doing nothing, right? Like, most of the people that we talk to, if they don't end up working with us, they end up doing nothing. So I think it's really important, we're gonna close with, okay, why not? Why not just wait it out? Because there's this sense that this is just another cycle, right? It's the hype cycle. It's gonna go round. It's gonna, you know, pass us by, and we will just kind of sit by the wayside. We'll do the bare minimum to show that we are, you know, just doing our part, right? But we're not fully engaging, and then it'll go away, and we will not have had to burn up a lot of budget or political capital. Why shouldn't we just do that? Why shouldn't we just kind of sit by and wait for it to pass?

Ross: Yeah. Well, we should, right? I maybe will jokingly call it, ah, take the bell-bottom mentality. But... right? It'll come back in style. I had a pair that actually my dad wore that I wore one time in high school. These beautiful... They were Coca-Cola print and everything. I don't know why they would ever have gone out of style, but...

Andrea: They sound amazing.

Ross: Yeah, like, it'll all come back in style. Keep it all. Don't get rid of anything. Just hang on for a while, right? But I guess maybe jokes aside, or maybe if I take that farther, what's the cost of that? Do you have the closet space for it, right? Because, yeah, it'll come back in style, but how long, in what way? And if fashion's any indication, well, not in the same way. You know, vintage, maybe vintage will probably be something, but there's always some new take and all that, and not so dissimilar in business. No, nothing ever comes back in the same format that it was, and doing nothing, you know, the status quo, goes out of fashion pretty quickly. Now, that doesn't mean there's very important relevance in things that have been part of our past, that are part of our current, that we shouldn't still, you know, maybe hold to from a value perspective, bring forward to build upon. You know, with the talk of Agile, you know, Agile didn't create a bunch of newness out of nothing, like Lean is the influence, right? The Kanban that came from that, or that's, you know, associated with the idea of the Kanban board. But guess what? We're in a state where, you know, whatever Agile looked like when it was first, you know, built in the early 2000s to how it's built into business agility, marketing agility, there's not just some now — even if you've embraced that, even if you've brought that into your organization, you're not set. Doing nothing isn't an option to what these articles propose.

Organizational design, not unimportant. What is your operating system? What does that look like, and when is the last time, you know, as the McKinsey article is saying, that those up to 12 dynamics have had the appropriate look at them, care, and feeding? I bet it's been a while. So no, you can't do nothing. You have to, at a minimum, assess. You have to, at a minimum, consider what it might look like to burn it all down, and then from there, based on that assessment and that look of what it could be, make decisions. Again, leaders, time is now.

Andrea: Yeah. You know, that status quo fallacy is really alluring. It looks so nice and safe and comfy, but to your point about the adoption of Agile, those folks who saw the potential early on and adopted it quickly, huge first-mover advantage. Same thing in marketing. Early days of SEO, early days of email marketing, the folks who jumped on those channels right away, the massive advantage that they accrued, and they were almost unassailable. If you got on those channels early on, you were almost untouchable for years, if not decades. If you owned a keyword or if you owned the inbox right away, think of the opportunity that exists right now in marketing if you will just get out there and take hold of some of these emerging channels and emerging capabilities. You wanna sit back and be the person who did not do SEO in 2001? You wanna be the one who says that? Like, "I could have been there, but I decided to wait it out." Like, that is not the story you wanna tell at a cocktail party. Like, that's not a good look. So status quo fallacy is... it's a bias, right? It's a cognitive bias. Acknowledge it, look it in the eye, and say, "Not today," right? That is not how we roll. Certainly not if you're a listener to this podcast. That is not how we roll here, right?

All right, so don't do it. Jump on it now. This is the time. First-mover advantage, people. This is what we're doing. All right. Those bell-bottoms may come back in style, but don't sit on them in your closet necessarily. Keep up with the trends. Keep up. Keep up. Keep up. We'll try to get Ross to wear the bell-bottoms — but they're not the same ones. If he comes back on the podcast, we'll try to get him.

Ross: If I come back on the podcast, maybe I'll don those Coca-Cola ones, 'cause I still have them. I still do.

Andrea: Well, Ross, this has been a fantastic conversation. We definitely have to do this again. So the next time we collect some articles that we are discussing in Slack, we'll just bring it out. We'll bring it out to the podcast, 'cause I think—

Ross: All right, and I guess my outfit for next time is already picked out, so that makes that easy.

Andrea: I'll take it. Perfect. So yeah, we will continue to push the envelope on how we've got to adapt and evolve in the world of marketing to stay current in the crazy environment we're all working in. Of course, if any of what Ross and I talked about today sparked an idea, sparked a, "Holy crap, that sounds like a mistake that I am making," and you'd like some help to overcome those challenges, you can find us at agilesherpas.com, and we are here to climb beside you and to help you on the journey of continuous adaptation. We are here to help. We would love to help because, of course, the struggle is real, but so is Agile marketing. Until next time, I'm your host, Andrea Fryrear, and we will see you on that next episode of the Agile Marketing Edge.