Customer Obsessed

In this episode, we’re talking to Mike Begg, co-founder of the fast-growing startup AMZ Advisers. At AMZ Advisers, Mike and his team help companies translate customer obsession into e-commerce success on the Amazon platform. Mike shares his insight into the current opportunities and risks of selling on Amazon and how companies can use innovations like AR to bring their brand experience to life. We also chat about the current state of e-commerce and customer experience in the time of COVID and how businesses need to crank up their creativity on these digital selling platforms to keep up with customer demands and expectations.

Mike's Customer Obsessed Pick: The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand

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In this episode, we’re talking to Amy Radin, an award-winning author, innovator, and corporate strategist. She was the Chief Innovation Officer for Citibank and E-Trade and was responsible for their early digital transformation. In our interview, we talk about how to innovate successfully, whether you’re at a startup or Fortune 500 company. Amy shares the connection between successful innovation and understanding your customers’ emotions and motivations, how to spot opportunities for innovation in your company, and how to make sure your ideas don’t get stuck in the quagmire of corporate bureaucracy. 

Find Amy's book The Change Maker's Playbook and learn more about her innovation strategies at amyradin.com.

Amy's Customer Obsessed Pick: The Hill We Climb by Amanda Gorman

About Amy Radin

Amy is a highly experienced, down-to-earth, visionary, and pragmatic innovation expert. She was Citi’s first Global Chief Innovation Officer, and also held executive marketing positions at American Express and AXA. She now works with leaders faced with the imperative to innovate, helping them pursue new sources of growth and value while reducing the inevitable risks.

Amy has had the unique opportunity to lead or advise on digital, marketing, and innovation transformations at Fortune companies, privately-held middle-market businesses, early-stage startups and not-for-profits. She has produced results with a customer-focused, collaborative mindset and a willingness to question and depart from the status quo when what worked in the past constrains creating the future.

Through her diverse experiences, Amy has created and pressure-tested the Seek, Seed, and Scale framework.

What sets Amy apart is her understanding of the reality of organizational culture and complexity, and her realistic approach to what innovation success requires. She uniquely lays the path between market need and the internal mechanisms to deliver.

The Change Maker’s Playbook: How to Seek, Seed and Scale Innovation in Any Company is newly available in paperback, as well as hardcover, e-book and audio formats. In both the Playbook and as a keynote speaker, Amy shares her tremendous expertise and perspective, with her characteristically authentic voice, on what it takes to identify and create new sources of value and growth for any organization’s stakeholders.

Amy is a graduate of The Wharton School and Wesleyan University. She lives in the New York City metro area.

In this episode, we’re talking to Mark Makepeace, founder of the stock market index company FTSE Russell and current CEO of Wilshire. In our conversation, Mark shares the history of FTSE and how it changed how we invest in the stock market, the give-and-take relationship between private and public companies, and how and why companies around the world are beginning to invest more deeply in sustainability and stakeholder capitalism.

Hosted by: Erin Acevedo & Eric Berridge

Produced by: Erin Acevedo

About Mark Makepeace

Mark Makepeace is Chief Executive Officer of Wilshire. Prior to joining Wilshire, Mark was Group Director of Information Services of the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) and Chief Executive of FTSE Russell, the global index provider.

Mark started his career in financial services in 1985, when he joined the London Stock Exchange to coordinate “Big Bang” (the deregulation of securities trading in the City of London).

In 1995 he founded FTSE International (a joint venture between the Financial Times and LSEG) and grew the index business from a small UK start-up with nine staff to become one of the largest and most successful global index providers today. Mark has over 20 years’ experience in developing successful joint ventures. He has successfully forged alliances with stock exchanges, academics, and leading industry groups establishing substantial businesses around the world. He was a founding member of the Index Industry Association and its first chairman.

Mark has been a long-time supporter of the children’s charity UNICEF and currently serves as an honorary Vice President of UNICEF UK. Mark is a Distinguished Fellow at the Georgetown Centre for Financial Markets and Policy, Georgetown University, Washington DC, and also serves as a member of the Board of Directors of the Saudi Stock Exchange (Tadawul) and the Singapore Stock Exchange (SGX). He is the author of FTSE: The Inside Story.

Customer Obsessed Pick: Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray

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Sustainability must become more than a buzzword. Jolene Chan, Chief Impact Officer at Traction on Demand, shares how she is using her new role to promote and scale sustainability efforts inside and outside the company. She also shares how she and her team are creating new opportunities to participate in the growing knowledge economy to increase diversity and create more inclusive communities. If you want to help your company make a positive impact—environmental, social, or otherwise—Jolene’s stories will inspire you to take action and give you some helpful ideas and frameworks to get started. 

About Jolene

Jolene is the Chief Impact Officer at Traction on Demand. She brings 15 years of global management experience in professional services, recruiting, talent management, sales, and customer support to the role. She is a passionate entrepreneur with a keen focus on strategic execution, helping to grow organizations from $3M - $200M+. She is the co-founder of the Women Innovators Network and throughout the course of her career has mentored over 200 consultants, technologists, and innovators who are continuing to drive positive change in their industries and throughout the Salesforce ecosystem.

Jolene's Customer Obsessed Pick

Play Bigger: How Rebels and Innovators Create New Categories and Dominate Markets

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In this episode, we’re talking to Susie Zachman. She is the founder of the nonprofit Better Beginnings, which focuses on early childhood nutrition to help parents and kids establish lifelong healthy eating habits. During our interview, Susie shares her unexpected journey from corporate law and finance to the world of nutrition and nonprofits, and shows how pursuing your passion and deviating from what’s expected can lead to greater happiness and fulfillment. We also dive into the relationship between physical health and wellness and mental performance at work and in your personal life.

About Susie

Susie Zachman, MS, RDN, is the founder of Better Beginnings. Susie was a global business leader with 16 years of experience in legal, finance, and HR functions and operational management. Traveling for work, she became increasingly disturbed by the growing number of young children she saw with weight problems and decided to try and do something about it. Susie returned to school and as a part of her master’s degree, she researched and designed a nutrition education program for parents of young children. This program was the foundation for Better Beginnings. Susie has a Master of Science with a concentration in Nutrition Education from Teachers College, Columbia University. She completed her dietetic internship through Columbia and became a registered dietitian nutritionist. She also has a BA in Economics / Business from the University of California, Los Angeles, a JD from the University of California, Berkeley, and completed the Advanced Management Program of Harvard Business School.

Susie’s Customer Obsessed Pick

The Century Trilogy by Ken Follett

In this episode, we’re talking to Vaibhav Nalwaya, Managing Partner and Co-founder of Wave Crest Growth partners, a private equity firm in the B2B tech market. During our interview, Vaibhav shares his unexpected journey from engineering to finance and how he and his team at Wavecrest are helping the next generation of tech entrepreneurs achieve success. We also dive deep into how to translate your company vision and strategy into an actionable, achievable plan and the common missteps made during this crucial execution phase that can determine your fate as an entrepreneur.

About Vaibhav

Vaibhav (“V”) Nalwaya is a co-founder and Managing Partner at Wavecrest Growth Partners. Prior to launching Wavecrest, Vaibhav’s experience included both private equity and growth investing as well as operating roles in two high-growth, founder-led B2B technology companies.

Vaibhav served as CFO of Bluewolf, the leading independent Salesforce.com consulting and advisory firm where he played an instrumental role in the company’s highly successful acquisition by IBM in early 2016. Prior to Bluewolf, Vaibhav served as CFO of Bullhorn, a cloud CRM software company that was backed by Vista Equity Partners and was ultimately acquired by Insight Partners. Both firms were led by their respective founders while being institutionally backed by private equity firms.

Prior to taking on these operating roles, Vaibhav was an investor at Vista Equity Partners’ Foundation Fund I and previously was a Principal at Key Venture Partners, a B2B tech-focused expansion stage capital firm backed by KeyCorp (NYSE: KEY).  He started his career at Deloitte, where he advised multinational clients on software/ERP strategies.

Vaibhav graduated with a Master’s Degree in Chemical Engineering from The University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Chemical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi. He has lived in multiple cities and countries across the globe, and continues to travel to many more with his wife and two young daughters. He enjoys golfing and skiing, is passionate about global cuisine, and is constantly on the hunt to prove to skeptics that Boston is indeed a foodie’s paradise.

V's Customer-Obsessed Pick: Siddartha by Hermann Hesse

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In this episode, Kim Morrow shares why emotional intelligence is the foundation of effective leadership, how business leaders can inspire employees to embrace their company vision, and the essential qualities of good stories and storytellers. 

About Kim Morrow

Kim Morrow is an executive coach, consultant, facilitator and public speaker, as well as the co-founder of Forté Consulting and Inside Journey podcast.

For 15 years, Kim has coached and consulted with leaders at Fortune 500 organizations in a variety of roles, from C-suite executives to sales teams, financial analysts to creative directors, engineers to Olympic athletes, and many others. She helps clients prepare for high-stakes events such as pitches and presentations, conferences, strategic planning meetings, and media interviews. She also partners with leaders to address critical internal issues related to employee engagement, professional development, and performance management. Additionally, Kim delivers keynote presentations at conferences and off-sites across the United States on topics related to communication and mindset.

Fueled by an inimitable optimism and love of people, Kim partners with her clients to understand their business needs and then delivers tailored solutions focused on developing their most valued asset – their people. By focusing on the critical skills, strategies, and beliefs, Kim sets a roadmap for organizations to achieve and then maintain extraordinary performance.

Before founding Forté Consulting, Kim was a principal consultant at rogenSi, a global sales and leadership consultancy, where she built and managed the company’s west coast operations. 

Kim's Customer Obsessed Pick: Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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We’re talking to Kate Visconti, CEO and Founder of Five to Flow, a global collective that builds integrative organizational wellness solutions to help individuals and companies achieve and sustain peak performance. Kate shares the five key areas of organizational wellness and why they’re crucial for employee and customer obsession, what a flow state is and how to tap into it to improve performance and productivity, and the ties between physical and mental fitness and their importance for a balanced, fearless life.

About Kate 

As the Founder and CEO of Five to Flow, Kate focuses on fostering executive and organizational alignment on business strategies, streamlining processes, and designing solutions to help businesses achieve and sustain peak performance. Prior to founding Five to Flow, Kate was a Partner in Technology Consulting at PwC New Zealand, an enterprise Managing Director at Acumen Solutions, and Senior Director at Bluewolf—all Global Strategic Salesforce partners. For the last decade, Kate has overseen Salesforce and executive and business strategy practices as well as creating organizational change management practices and developing sales strategy & effectiveness solutions as part of Global Services teams. 

During her tenure in the Salesforce ecosystem, she also developed effective business advisory, executive alignment and visioning workshops, specific solutions for financial services and other vertical areas of expertise, and has expanded strategic offerings across all verticals and geographies due to her focus on customer outcomes and end-customer satisfaction. In addition to delivering on business strategy and Salesforce ROI, she has consulted at an enterprise and individual coaching level on change management, organizational wellness, communications, training, process optimization, and sales effectiveness best practices for hundreds of prospects and customers around the world.

Kate's Customer Obsessed Pick: On the Beach by Nevil Shute

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Stan Slap is a NY Times best-selling author and president of the international consulting company SLAP, renowned for achieving maximum commitment in manager, employee, and customer cultures.  Stan has been helping business leaders understand and get commitment from these three groups for thirty years and shares with us how leaders can reframe the pandemic to move beyond survival, what an employee culture is, how it operates, and what it needs from its leaders, and why going to market based on value is ultimately a losing proposition.

SLAP Whitepaper: Tough Times, Tougher Teams

Stan's Customer Obsessed Picks: 

Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin

The Roaches Have No King by Daniel Evan Weiss

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Lindsey Armstrong is a powerhouse leader in the world of sales, business strategy, and international development whose career includes executive leadership roles at Oracle, Veritas, Salesforce, and XANT (formerly InsideSales), and who is also Eric’s longtime friend and mentor. In our interview, we talk about what customers really care about (hint, it’s not their NPS score), the history of “customer success” as an organizing principle, and how sales could transform from a “bro culture” into an inclusive one.