The Sense of an Ending.
For the last post of 2024 as many of us look back, a combination of visuals and words on the conflation of time and memory…
“What you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.”
“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”
“It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.”
“We live in time - it holds us and molds us - but I never felt I understood it very well. And I'm not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing - until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.”
“I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.”
“How often do we write our own endings?”
Photography by Rishad Tobaccowala
Words by Julian Barnes from his book “The Sense of an Ending”
6 Keys to Career Success.
Image by Isabelle Watkins using Mid Journey
1) Align with emerging trends.
To succeed you have to ensure that the force is with you.
And to do so you must align with the force.
Often this force appears as a stream and not a gushing river. A weak signal versus an overwhelming pull of gravity.
It may like the Chicago River in that it may be going in the opposite direction of how it should flow in that it does make you question what you believe or what your company or your CEO believes.
In the case of aligning with the trend, try to find a force that will grow over the next 10-15 years.
My career was built on aligning with digital in 1996, the rise of media as the driving force of agencies in 2000, the importance of data driven algorithmic story telling in 2010, and now the rise of the Company of One powered with the rise of new scale of talent, ideas and marketplaces and the decreasing importance of the scale of resources, distribution and spending.
2) Who you work for is as if not more important than where you work.
Working for a successful company with momentum, name recognition and track record of success helps a career through a halo effect and also signaling that one is good enough to get in and to work at these well regarded and hot firms.
But, ask anybody who you believe has succeeded and most of them will signal the importance of the people they worked for.
The terms you will not hear are boss, manager, supervisor but rather leader, guide, mentor.
For mentorship and leadership the key is to find people who combine three elements:
a) Do they have a great reputation for excellence. Excellent work. Excellent Financial Results. Excellent People working for them. It is easier succeed when one is aligned with excellence and growth.
b) Do they have integrity. Do people use the words trust, candid, authentic, straight-shooter, transparent or similar words when describing them.
c) Do they have a coaching tree. Matt Gibbs who used to work with me and is now a successful leader after having sold the company he co-founded, recently shared a piece on The Coaching Tree of a Head Coach. This is exactly what it sounds like — a visual illustration of who head coaches have mentored and where those folks are now serving as successful head coaches. Those head coaches then have their own branches. And so on.
In the world of athletics, the coaches with a superlative Coaching Tree are considered the best of the best. Not only can they succeed with their own teams, but they can transfer their knowledge and skills to others. 20 of the 32 Coaches in the NFL today are related in some way to Bill Walsh of of the San Francisco 49ers.
Image by Diana Kozlova using Mid Journey
3) Maximize luck by seizing opportunities and thinking positively.
If aligning with a trend and finding a great person to work for are the first two keys, the third is about something that matters a lot in a career and that is somewhat uncontrollable which is luck.
While luck is not under our control we can maximize the opportunities for luck to tap us on our shoulder by saying yes to as many assignments and opportunities as possible even if some seem really questionable.
In 1992, I was offered a role in the Direct Marketing Department of Leo Burnett vs a role in Client Service as the only way to get promoted to an Account Director since there were few openings on the big accounts with too many talented people vying for them.
Direct at that time was not understood by the mainline agency. It was filled with outsiders who spoke of A/B testing, mailing lists and direct to consumer communication. In fact it was so looked down upon that people believed I had doomed my future or was being punished when they found I was on the 34th floor. I therefore answered my calls (lots of calls vs emails those days) with the greeting this is Rishad from the Leper Colony.
Once they finished laughing I also told everybody the future of the marketing and the advertising industry was on 34 ( we were on the 34th floor of the Leo Burnett Building).
Well because of learning about the benefits and challenges of direct, I got the idea of launching the Leo Burnett Interactive Marketing Group with the support of Tom Collinger who ran the Direct area . Then convinced the Leo Burnett Board to “take the name of the door” by closing the Leo Burnett Interactive Marketing Group and launching Giant Step with Adam and Eric Heneghan so we could compete with a digital firms like Modem, Agency.Com, Organic, Digitas and Razorfish vs Leo Burnett’s traditional competitors. A few years later luck came calling via a call from Jack Klues then the head of the lowly back caboose of the agency train (media), asking that I join him and others in the unbundling of Leo Burnett Media to Starcom and launch Starcom IP.
Few hang out in the strange and supposedly less important parts of an organization but it is often there that the future is being forged.
The future comes from the slime, from outsiders, and from the quixotic.
Take a gamble and try your luck on something new and different and it will make all the difference.
4) Never stop learning and never stop growing.
The day you stop being a student is the beginning of the end of your career.
Especially today when knowledge is heading towards being free and the half like of expertise is growing shorter and shorter.
The picture above is the gravestone of Arthur C Clarke who is the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey. I uploaded the picture with a question mark to ChatGPT and here is what I got:
This is the gravestone of Sir Arthur Charles Clarke (1917–2008), the renowned British science fiction author most famous for works like 2001: A Space Odyssey. The inscription—“He never grew up, but he never stopped growing”—plays on Clarke’s lifelong sense of curiosity and imagination. Despite aging in years, he retained a “childlike” wonder about science, technology, and the mysteries of the universe. The phrase suggests that he kept learning, exploring, and inventing new ideas throughout his life—never losing his inquisitive spirit.
It doesn’t matter how senior or how powerful we are. The world is changing so much that even at this stage I spend an hour-and-a-half a day learning. Invest in continuous learning and education, because otherwise we will find ourselves growing increasingly irrelevant.
I remind senior executives who say they have no time to learn not to worry. Since they are not learning in a time of transformational change soon they will lose their jobs and they will have plenty of time to learn.
This shakes everyone out of their stupor and inertia.
5) Success is driven by the people around us much more than us.
As and when you become truly successful, you will realize that your success has been built on a very benign form of a Ponzi scheme.
You will be successful because the people around you are successful. And you will basically be given some sort of credit for the people around you.
Therefore, make sure that you really, really invest in the people around you because that is investing in yourself in everything, from training to relationships to looking after them and helping them along with their careers.
You can’t succeed, especially as you get more responsibility, unless you do that.
Image by Feliperafaelgilson using Mid Journey
6) Never take yourself too seriously.
Take your work seriously.
Your Clients, Customers and Commitments seriously.
But never take yourself too seriously.
Be humble.
Be approachable.
Laugh at yourself and when people say you’re full of shit, you probably are.
Let them point out the turd on the table of your thinking (it’s not a Brownie, sir, this idea of yours but rather it is excrement!)
Humor is a key.
Another key maybe my new book which will prepare you and your firm for what is coming next! Lots of CEO’s, CTO’s and many more have said so.
Coming Feb 4, 2025 and available for pre-order is my new book. Take a look inside and more here: https://rishadtobaccowala.com/rethinking-work
Staying Human in the Age of Data.
A smart and worldly man, Tobaccowala has produced a deeply informed book about brand marketing, data science, and humanity that is a remarkably lively read. Name another book about business (or any other subject) that in one breath urges the reader to acknowledge “the turd on the table” in the boardroom and references François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Joan Didion in the next. - Marketing+Strategy Magazine Best Business Books 2020.
Next month it will be five years (Jan 28, 2020) since my first book was published just before the March 2020 Covid shutdowns. Despite the unfortunate timing and two years of not being able to travel to events to support the book, it ended up selling many tens of thousands of copies and continues to do well notching sales of hundreds of copies every month five years later.
The reason for its continued success is that the ideas and perspectives in every chapter in the book, each of which can be read as a free standing book ( I always wonder why most business books are just one chapter or idea repeated over a dozen chapters) not only have aged well but in many cases are even more relevant today than when the book was issued.
For instance the book had a chapter on AI, Blockchain and Immersive Computing (AR/VR) though it was published five years ago ! The book had a chapter on how to manage cultures and lead when people are working in distributed places staring at screens long before the Covid lockdown. The book makes the case for continuous learning with a chapter on how to upgrade one’s operating system, a chapter on how to manage change so it sucks less and a chapter on why companies that do not have cultures that allow one to call out the turd on the table end up failing and defeating themselves.
Every prediction and perspective from five years ago have come true and people believe the book was written last month! Often I hear how the book has been a competitive edge for many leaders and companies and among the best investment they made for themselves or their teams.
Here is what the Economist Magazine when reviewing a number of business books wrote:
Perhaps the best of the books is Mr Tobaccowala’s. That is because the author, a senior adviser at Publicis Groupe, an advertising and communications firm, has a clear focus: how to ensure you can hire, then inspire, the right workers in the knowledge economy. “Employees who find work meaningful are highly productive, agile and committed,” he writes, adding that talented workers are in a more powerful bargaining position in the current economy. He also argues that companies can be too obsessed with data, and not enough with employee motivation: “The best businesses find ways to marry the math and the magic.”
The book is clearly written and full of sensible and practical suggestions. They include assessing all meetings to eliminate those that waste time and suggesting that all employees spend 20% of each month trying to enhance their skills.
Many people also buy it today because they believe the subtitle of staying human in the age of data is no different than how to stay human in the age of AI.
If the book was a bottle of Japanese or Scotch whisky it should cost more due to its wonderful aging and vintage but instead it is available for just over $8 including shipping on Amazon and Walmart this week.
Here is the Amazon Link. This is the Walmart Link.
I wrote an essay on why people should allocate some of their most valuable resource which is time (rather than a few dollars) reading my book which I have republished below.
So if you are looking for a gift for yourself or your team for this Christmas or want to see how some things never change despite all the hype and swirl of change you might want to read about the issues that were key 5 years ago which seem to be the same today.
Often to succeed in a world of change maybe we should focus on what does not.
Here is the beginning of essay from five years ago. You can read the entire essay and what dozens of leaders wrote about the book and all the places you can get it here
Why Should You Read My Book?
Time is all we have.
So why should you allocate a part of your most precious asset on engaging with this book?
Because my hope is that it will leave you seeing, thinking, and feeling differently about how to grow and remain relevant in transformative times.
How to grow yourself, grow those around you, and grow your practice, passion, or company.
How to remain relevant by understanding what it takes to make sense and thrive in a world of rapid technological, demographic, and global upheaval.
And it will do so by questioning much of what business takes for granted:
• Why data is often not the way forward and we may have too much of it;
• Why change sucks;
• Why having more—rather than fewer—meetings is better; and
• Why it is essential to have a culture and courage that calls out “the turd on the table.”
You not only will learn what makes great leaders but also how to deal with, or not become, a bad boss.
You’ll discover how to extract meaning from data and see poetry in the plumbing.
This book recognizes that while our world is increasingly filled with digital, silicon-based, computing objects, it is populated by people who remain analog, carbon-based, feeling creatures.
People like you.
And me.
Companies can choose to upgrade the skills of their people and reimagine the way they work or swap out their people and acquire new ways of working.
Often both are necessary.
This book is about upgrading the operating systems of people and companies by remembering the thinking-and-feeling component of the operating system.
A central premise is that successful individuals and firms can never forget the importance of people, their emotions, the culture of the organization, and what cannot be measured. I refer to this as the Soul of a Company.
This Soul is critical even as individuals and firms reinvent themselves for an increasingly AI-augmented, data-driven, networked and distributed, screen-based future.
As the world becomes more data driven and real-time twitchy, and as financial markets punish companies for failing to meet their goals, I worry that our short-term focus on numbers is destroying the long-term health of business, countries, and people. I worry we are losing our humanity in a world where modern, data-driven economies and cutting-edge technologies are seeping into all of life.
Yes, results, data, speed, and technology are keys for businesses to remain relevant and thrive. But while they’re necessary, they’re insufficient for long-term success.
Over the past five years, I have seen a significant tilt to the numeric, to the algorithmic, and to the measurable. This causes organizations to think short term, prize individualism, and adopt a mercenary mindset rather than think long term, prize teams, and adopt a meaningful mindset.
Increasingly there is a premium and a dominance on the quantitative, or what I call the spreadsheet, and a diminishment of the importance of the culture, humanity, emotion, and complexity of people, or what I refer to as the story.
Successful people and companies combine the story and the spreadsheet and by doing so restore the soul of business.
Here is the Amazon Link. This is the Walmart Link.
And coming on Feb 4 is my next book which is available for pre-order at all these places: https://rishadtobaccowala.com/rethinking-work
Rishad Tobaccowala has spent four decades rethinking and reinventing and now works across the globe helping leaders, teams and companies thrive in transformational times. More here: https://rishadtobaccowala.com/
Transformation, Leadership & Talent: A Conversation with David Kenny.
David Kenny is the Chairman of Nielsen, Best Buy and Teach For America.
He was the CEO of Digitas when it was bought by the Publicis Groupe where he served as a member of the Directoire, before joining Akamai as its President. David then became the Chairman and CEO of Weather Channel which was bought by IBM, where he served as SVP of Watson and Cognitive Solutions before joining Nielsen as its CEO. David began his career at Bain Consulting.
David joined me in person for a live audio and video taping of a special episode of What Next? the twice monthly global podcast I host, to share his distilled learnings on transformation, leadership and talent.
It is a 45 minute masterclass that everyone should watch or listen to.
In the following weeks some other amazing leaders from Jack Klues the driving force behind the creation of Starcom, Starcom Mediavest and what would with the merger of Zenith Optimedia, Digitas and Razorfish become Vivaki and Publicis Media, Ann Mukherjee who most recently was the CEO of Pernod Ricard USA and before that held major posts at SC Johnson and Pepsico, Seth Green the Dean of the University of Chicago Graham School, will be just a few of the extra-ordinary leaders sharing their thoughts about modern leadership. If you do not subscribe to What Next? you may want to. It is totally free like this Substack with no subscription fees and no advertising. Just amazing people in conversation with world class production and editing to help you grow and transform and see the light vs heat you up with enragement.
Today we have David Kenny.
The links so you can here the entire conversation are at the end of this post but here are the one dozen takeaways that will hopefully make you listen to David in his own voice and entirety.
Transformation.
Know where you are going: Transformation is not just about speed but also direction. It is important to know what one is transforming to. What matters is velocity of change which is a combination of speed and direction. Speed alone can kill if one does not know direction.
Roots and Wings: Transformation is successful if one remembers what we wish to retain from the existing business. If there is little or nothing we wish to keep then one should start with a blank sheet of paper but that is not the case for most businesses. In fact in many businesses the existing businesses while declining are very profitable and help fund the change. Also in successful transformations everyone and every part of the businesses is given an opportunity to transform. One cannot leave the past behind if legacy businesses are making money and it is very dispiriting to folks to believe they belong to the past while others are the future.
The importance of aligning with technology curves: Successful transformation requires a company and leaders to align with technology curves. Too early or too late one results often in failure. Sometimes the customer, the technology and the eco-system takes time to develop so it can scale and be cost effective.
A focus on Clients is not enough: Transformation must keep Clients front and center but in order to deliver for Clients many non Client facing parts of our organizations will have to transform including IT, Legal and Finance. New wiring, new contracts and new measurement are are part and parcel of transformation. The voice and inclusion of so called “support” functions is critical.
Leadership.
Leadership is balancing innovation and trust: Trust is key and driven by integrity. Integrity is when there is alignment between what a leader believes, says and does.
Both leadership and management are important but different: Leadership is about pioneering and deciding where to go. It is about making hard calls and is both future oriented and lonely. Management is ensuring one gets there. Many leaders are great managers but neither by themselves are enough.
Three keys to trust: Data, Intention and Transparency. Follow the data and share the data and adapt to the data. Be clear with intention and be transparent about decision making.
The best leaders are willing to admit they are wrong and are okay changing their mind: People trust people who say they are not sure or when new data comes in accept that they were wrong.
Talent.
To lead talent one must realize the importance of emotion and heart: People choose with their hearts and use numbers to justify what they do. Software is not just code but the soft skills of engaging, connecting and inspiring people.
Talent will be even more important in the future but talent will have to learn new technologies, be curious, be creative: There are so many ways to learn and those who do not will be left behind. If one is not upgrading oneself one is falling behind.
Diversity is critical to win in the marketplace: For AI to be trained right one needs diverse inputs. To compete one needs the best talent and they can come from everywhere. David made himself the Chief Diversity Officer for a year because he believes ensuring belonging, ensuring access to the best talent and ensuring the best talent is everybody’s job including the CEO’s and is the way to win in business.
Talent wants access to leadership : Leadership that is accessible to talent learn fast and see patterns and better understand what the opportunities and challenges are. An involved leader is a learning leader.
Here is the Spotify Link which includes video:
Here is the Apple Link:
Besides this Substack (free), and the podcast (free), I am also a published author and my next (second) book while not free is very reasonable ( about $20 in the US and will be available also on launch day much cheaper in my birth country of India in both print, audible and electronic). If you can please do pre-order between now and Feb 4 for yourself or your company ( huge discounts for 25 or more) . More about Rethinking Work here.
On Work.
Image by Joe Latimer using Midjourney.
Work is central to the human experience.
Along with our physical health and our family relationships, work is the other significant factor that impacts the quality of our lives.
Work is critical not only in that it provides us with a) income but also b) identity (what do you do? is one of the first questions any one new we meet asks), c) community ( many of our social connections are built around our work and industry), d) purpose and meaning and e) growth ( the challenges and connections of our job help grow us).
Work not only drives GDP but factors such as the unemployment rate, the age of retirement, and the opportunities for youth are central to all politics.
In 2020 Covid-19 created a major shock to the structure of work in myriad ways from our inability to work in the ways we were used to, the importance of certain kinds of work, where we worked and much more which many companies and countries are still grappling with.
Many knowledge industries are fixated today on the right combination of in person and distributed work to ensure they can manage the quality of their service, their cultures and the imparting and growth of skills.
While this is an important factor to consider, smart companies, and visionary leaders understand that fixating on where someone works is like moving shells on a beach when waves of change are about to crash onto the shore. It is not only the wrong question to ask (the question should not be how to get people back x days in the office but how to maximize the benefits of in person interaction while enjoying the flexibility and freedom distribute work affords) but even this question is trivial compared to what is coming…
Work will change more this decade than it has in the past five decades due to a combination of significant demographic shifts (aging and declining populations and multiple generations at work ), technology (AI, XR, Blockchain, Biotech), marketplaces (anyone can now access scaled technology and marketplaces to compete with large companies using a mobile device), atomized work (task vs jobs, the rise of gig work) where a majority of the US population in 2025 will be doing freelance work either full time or as a side gig to their main job, and completely new mindsets about the place of work in one’s life ( A majority of Gen-Z do not want to grow up like their parents , or become like their bosses and ask the question should we find time for life in a world of work or find time for work in a world of living a life? )
After a 43-year working career that I hope to keep going for another decade or two I have never been as excited about how extra-ordinarily amazing the future of work is going to be.
It is going to unleash, unfurl and unhook both individuals and companies from the way it was to the way it can be and let everyone re-imagine their firms and their careers.
Over the past five and a half years I have met with, advised, spoken with or for, over 150 companies in over a dozen countries from companies with 20 employees to those with hundreds of thousands across all industries.
Almost everybody I meet asks the same three questions.
Business Model Relevance: Is my business model still relevant and how do I future proof it?
Structural Relevance? Is my organizational design, existing partners, data and other skill sets still relevant and if not how can they be upgraded?
Personal Relevance: Am I still relevant? Do I have the right skill sets and the right leadership mindset to lead a new generation into a new era? (this last question usually requires some alcoholic libation before it is asked and maybe the most important)
Over the years it became clear that in addition to upgrading one’s own mental operating system, investing and partnering with the right people in areas from data to content, to technology, investing in and upgrading talent, rethinking category definitions, dealing with change and restructuring the organization for more agility and lower costs there was something even deeper and broader and more central that had to be addressed.
The very nature of work, what a worker is, and why should a company exist?
With everything we know now if we started with a blank sheet of paper and only some legal, scientific and economic constraints (need income and or must run a viable business) what factors should we consider and what frameworks should we use as each of us design our firms and or manage our careers to thrive and win in the future?
After many years of thinking and researching these topics, a year and a half writing and a year of fact checking, updating and editing by a team of professionals at HarperCollins my distilled learnings of everything I have discovered on how to thrive in the future of work is in production and available for pre-order. It is called Rethinking Work.
This book is for everybody who works, whether you are a longtime senior leader or a brand-new employee, whether you work in a large company or for yourself, and whether you work in a developed or developing market.
This book identifies the key trends and issues, suggests ways for each individual and leader to interrogate their beliefs, their structures and much more. It has a chapter for CEO’s and Strategists that build the case that most existing strategies will be challenged, a chapter for Finance professionals identifying how financials will need to be recalculated, a chapter for anyone working in talent, HR or People Development to show how the entire training and incentive systems of the present are not going to work and what to do about it and much more.
Most importantly it is for everyone of us that works and wants to seize the future and thrive.
Work is central to our lives and as it gets redefined, nothing is as important as being informed and provided with tools to thrive in the coming transformation.
To help you judge if this book is any good after my request below you will see a link to the entire opening section of the book. You can read what CEO’s, Chief Talent Officers, Deans of Universities, and even other authors of books about the future of work and the workplace from whom I learned while working on this book have to say. You will see the table of contents and the introduction. This should help you determine if the book is any good and worth spending twenty dollars on.
A Request.
The sales of a book are determined by many factors including quality of the book, whether the topic is in vogue, how well it is reviewed and the success of the marketing efforts.
A huge factor driving these is something that occurs before the book is published which are pre-orders. Pre-orders determine the size of the print run, how many books are ordered, the merchandising support and the marketing support.
My first book Restoring the Soul of Business: Staying Human in the Age of Data was successful because it had many thousands of pre-orders. It also anticipated distributed work before Covid, had a chapter on AI three years before ChatGPT, spoke of the importance of Blockchain when crypto was in a deep winter and Augmented reality before the Metaverse hype and sells hundreds of copies a month because it seems to have been written a few days ago and not five years ago!
It is why I am hoping you will pre-order today for a book that will be available for another two months (Feb 4, 2025). You do not have to pay till then and for those buying individual copies the actual price is likely to be closer to 22 US dollars vs 30 US dollars which will be reflected in the price guarantee that the various folks like Amazon and others offer. Please check your local retailer or Amazon for outside the US for options on how to order and time of delivery.
This LINK or this site : https://rishadtobaccowala.com/rethinking-work shows you all the places you can order including if you are in a position or interested in ordering more than 25 books for nearly half off. Many leaders have bulk ordered books for their teams and companies realizing it’s the best 20 dollars they can spend per employee.
This is a book that can help you as an individual or a leader.
Here is a link to the opening of the book (first 20 pages) that you can read or download.
It’s time for a rethinking for something so central to every person, firm and leader.
Rethinking Work.
Outside of our health and families, work is the most important thing we have.
It is going to be amazing believe me…
Rishad Tobaccowala spent 37 years in a spectrum of roles including being the Chief Strategist and Growth Officer of the Publicis Groupe a 106,000 person marketing and business transformation company before beginning a new career over five years ago as a company of one. Rishad helps people see, think and feel differently about how to grow themselves, their teams and their business through a combination of content creation, speaking and advising. More at https://rishadtobaccowala.com/