Brand Week Istanbul took place last week (6-8 November), bringing together thousands of marketers from around the world. Sophie Devonshire, CEO of The Marketing Society, was one of the industry leaders who took the stage on 7 November, holding a session titled ‘How to lead in the age of super speed’.
MediaCat Magazine’s Content and Social Media Editor, Svilena Keane, sat down with Devonshire following her session to discuss the key takeaways from her talk and her book, Superfast: Lead at speed.
Hi, Sophie. Could you please tell us a little bit about yourself and your journey to where you are today?
Hello, I’m Sophie Devonshire. I’m the CEO of the Marketing Society, which is a global community of change leaders in marketing. We bring together the best and brightest marketing change leaders to help them do well in their careers and help them do good inside their businesses to lead the conversation, driving the economy, and doing good in society overall. I am a marketer at heart, so I started my career at Procter & Gamble and Coca-Cola. I’ve also been an entrepreneur and worked a lot with leaders who are interested in getting the pace right in business. I’m also an author; I’ve written two books, LoveWork: The seven steps to thrive at work and Superfast: Lead at speed, which was a number one Amazon bestseller.
We’re at Brand Week Istanbul today, where you held a talk on how to lead in the age of super speed. You opened your session with a brilliant networking exercise for the audience. What was the exercise and what did you aim to achieve with it?
I’m glad you enjoyed it because it was a bit different. Before I shared stories and some ideas today with the audience, I did want to make sure everyone was awake, and I wanted to have a bit of fun. I asked everyone to do a speed challenge. The audience were asked to stand up and meet a stranger, and I set them a bit of a challenge. It is a very quick exercise. It only takes two minutes. But I asked people to share their life story with a stranger. It’s a brilliant opportunity to show what can happen very fast when you have a clear direction and framework.
It’s also a great way to give people at an event the opportunity to meet another person because so many of us come to conferences like Brand Week Istanbul to learn, but also to connect with other people. And it’s quite hard, especially if you’re shy and you’re busy. So, if nothing else, I wanted to give everybody in the room an opportunity to meet one more brilliant person.
I also do that exercise because it makes an important point about energy. And one of the things I firmly believe is that great marketers, great leaders in a high-pressured world, need to make sure they are thinking about energy, how to energise themselves and how to energise the people around them, because energy is something that is essential for creativity, for commercial success, for resilience and survival.
In your session, you mentioned a few of the challenges CMOs are facing today, referring to them as ‘pandemics’. What are these challenges?
One of the biggest challenges is, and I say it a little tongue in cheek, the pandemic of ‘overwhelmitis’. We all have too much on our to-do lists. We have things going on in our personal lives. Sometimes that gets to feel overwhelming and exhausting, which is a shame because actually this is an exciting world in which we operate. There are lots of positives despite some moments of darkness and if we feel overwhelmed, we won’t enjoy and love our work enough. We spend 90,000 hours of our one precious life at work. It’s great to enjoy what you do. But if you’re overwhelmed, if you have overwhelmitis, you need to deal with that.
The other pressure and challenge is, of course, the pandemic, the epidemic, the global phenomenon, that is constant impatience. So, this is the hot breath of the shareholder who sees companies like Uber that can go from nothing to a 58-billion-dollar valuation in 58 countries in just five years. They say, ‘Why is our company not moving faster?’ It is the impatience of your boss who wants you to do well. It is the impatience of your customer or your consumer; they want everything superfast. They want it now. They’ve learned to get prime delivery, and they want it fast. And of course, the impatience that you feel if you are ambitious because you want to go faster, you want to go further.
You touch on this in your book, Superfast: Lead at speed, which was shortlisted for Best Leadership Book at the Business Book Awards. What does it mean to lead at speed, and how can that help with these challenges?
When you see the title of the book, one of the biggest misconceptions is, of course, that I’m suggesting everybody should move superfast. It’s not what I’m saying. What I’m saying is the world is superfast, and we need to lead with the right pace. So variable pace setting is really important; it’s a skill for us as marketeers or anybody who wants to be a leader to get right, working out when to slow down to think, to connect, and to reflect when we need more time. But of course, we do need to be ready to act fast. There are opportunities we miss if we are too slow. Too slow is stupid, too fast is foolhardy. There is something about the right pace setting that we need to look at in order for us to thrive rather than just survive in a world that is not slowing down. Everything that’s happening with technology is only going to give us another round of exponential fast-moving speed.
In your talk today, you shared that there are three Es that can help us figure out the right pace and lead at speed. Can you summarise these?
One of the challenges with the session at Brand Week Istanbul is, of course, that we only have a short period of time. I’ve done an awful lot of interviews with a variety of successful leaders. The book is 349 pages long, and to condense that into a short session, I pulled out just three of the themes.
ENERGY. The importance of understanding how to manage your energy is an absolute game changer. To work out what you do when you work at your best and what energises you, which is a very personal thing for many people. There are some fundamental and obvious things we all need: sleep, hydration, exercise, and diet. We should never underestimate how important those things are to get right. Once you’ve got the energy, you can then really deliver great things.
But exceptional leaders also aren’t just great when it comes to energy, they are fantastic at EMPATHY. Now, of course, their technological understanding is also essential. You have to look at what’s going on because technology is the ultimate acceleration. But the point of difference is not the technological understanding, it’s the human understanding, how to influence and how to impact. The marketeers are particularly good at that if they get it right. They know that understanding your customer speeds things up. The more insights you have, the more decisions you can make fast. They know that managing a team and understanding different people can be a real point of difference. But also the bit of having empathy for yourself, understanding how you work, really helps.
Then the last E, which I will talk about only very briefly is about EDITING. What you cut out and what you choose to do has incredible impact. Writing a book is actually very hard; harder than I thought it would be. But the really difficult bit is editing what you take out. And the same is true in life and at work. What do you choose to leave in? The more you purge, the more you prioritise the focus. By doing less, you achieve more.
Speaking of superfast, we’re very quickly approaching the new year. If you could give one piece of advice to senior leaders for the coming year, what would that be?
The number one piece of advice would be to appreciate that you don’t have to do this alone. When we come together as marketers, as people who are interested in business as a force for good, as ambitious people, when we share our ideas and our stories, when we support each other, when we celebrate success and what marketing can do, then we discover that together we can achieve more than alone.
There is an incredible global community of great marketers out there connecting with each other, at events like Brand Week Istanbul, and by being part of organisations like The Marketing Society. It gives you a network that will speed things up. In technology, most people know, networks speed things up, and the same is true in life. But ‘network’ feels like a sort of taking word. Actually, community is where you give your stories, and you also get a lot from being part of a great profession and celebrating it together. So, remember that it is about you and what you can achieve, but it’s not just about you. There are other people around who can help lift you up, uplift you, and help you go faster.
Featured image: Svilena Keane (L) and Sophie Devonshire (R) at Brand Week Istanbul
