Death to ego

Navigating one of organizational change's biggest stumbling blocks

Why do good companies stumble? I’m talking about the organizations that were once on top. The ones that seemed to lead their category. Today, we’d call them legacy brands or some euphemism that acknowledges the significance they once had and their staying power to stick around. However, somehow or another, they lost the plot along the way, and if only they had fixed this, changed that, or done this one thing, they would have continued winning. It’s an if-then proposition straight out of an MBA case study. A clear villain with an easy fix.

As satisfying as that framing might be, it’s almost always never that simple. Instead, it’s typically a litany of factors at play that undermine an organization’s intentions and, ultimately, their outcomes and subsequent standing. And these factors are mainstay characters of change. So, the real question isn’t, “Why do good companies stumble,” but why do companies stumble navigating change?

So, we invited Nick Tran on this week’s episode of the From the Culture podcast to talk about change—how organizations endure it, maneuver around it, and occasionally turn it into something useful. Tran is the kind of marketer CMOs name when asked what CMOs they admire. That’s not surprising considering the brands he’s led (i.e., Taco Bell, Samsung, Hulu, and TikTok) and the changes he’s helped them navigate. Every one of those companies, he’ll cheerfully admit, was either a dumpster fire when he arrived or about to become one. Now, as President and CMO of First Round Collective, he no longer thinks the pattern is a coincidence; he thinks it’s a calling, which makes him the perfect person to talk to if we are to interrogate navigating change.

What Tran said early in our conversation, almost as a throwaway, is the line I haven’t been able to forget. Most companies have good instincts. The leaders have experience that enables them to make good choices. Their understanding of who they are and who they serve was, at one point, at least, hard-won and clear. The reason they end up in trouble is rarely because their instincts disappeared but typically because the noise grew too loud and drowned out their instincts.

The noise is familiar. Board demands. Shareholder pressure that prioritizes the next twelve weeks instead of the next twelve years. Executives incentivized to prioritize their career over the sustainability of their stakeholders. The cacophony of these inputs’ cumulative effect doesn’t destroy a leader’s good instincts; it just makes them increasingly less audible and harder to flow.

This is where our conversation with Tran throws its hardest punch, and it’s the move I’d recommend any leader navigating change steal immediately. You have to remove self. Death to ego. You aren’t running the company; you’re a steward of it. It’s the spine of what Robert Greenleaf called servant leadership, and it remains countercultural for the same reason it always has: The C-suite is shaped by incentives that reward the opposite posture. For instance, by any measure, Tran has won the awards game. However, the stat that matters most on his scorecard is how many people who once worked for him have gone on to become CMOs themselves—at the time of our conversation, the number was seven. Ego counts what a leader led. Stewards count who they grew. One focuses on self, and others focus on others, which inherently quiets the noise and makes a leader’s instinct more pronounced.

In a sound recording, like a song, for example, its steward is thinking about the listener, the performances of the musicians and vocalists who contributed to it, as well as the broader industry murmurs that will evaluate the song’s performance in the market. The steward (i.e., the music producers, the Quincy Joneses of the world) is balancing all the sounds of all the stakeholders to create the best song possible. Their focus is the song, not themselves. The same goes with organizational stewards; they are custodians of the music, bringing out the most important parts and softening the sounds that are a part of the composition but need only be atmospheric and less pronounced. It’s not about them; it’s about the organization.

Boards, shareholders, and quarter-watchers aren’t going anywhere. That’s just the nature of the beast. It’s the room noise that will always be present in a sound recording, but not its focus. And the song’s steward knows this, just as much as they know to add more volume to the vocals and less to the cowbell. The same thing goes with organizational stewards; they must balance all the sounds to ensure that their instincts are pronounced.

Death to ego, it turns out, is mostly about clearing space. For the instinct to come back. For the people you lead to outgrow you. For the company to be handed off to whoever’s next in better shape than you found it. Most companies already know what to do. The leader’s job is to get out of the way long enough to let them remember.

Check out our full conversation with Nick Tran on the latest episode of From the Culture here.