Finding the number of marketing metrics that is “just right” isn’t an exact science, but there are guardrails that can guide marketers closer to that sweet spot.

Relevance, like beauty, is in the brain of the beholder. It takes time and work to make your messages relevant, but the payoff is worth it.

In 1739, a mechanical duck amazed people by ingesting grain and – well, pooping. Even today, many executives still believe that complex systems can be machines – maybe not ducks, but how about marketing?

Organizations with no bosses – brilliance or nonsense? Examples of how self-management can scale.

Constant change requires quick response. Marketers have benefitted from agile methods, but most are unaware of emerging organizational innovations available.

Five outstanding recommendations from Bain for developing a strategy under uncertain conditions (and what industry isn’t uncertain). Innovative, practical, wise, proven, and almost certainly not what you are doing now.

Marketing won’t deliver on artificial intelligence’s (AI) promise unless the human side of the equation is given equal attention.

In a fast-changing, uncertain environment, leaders and their organizations can build resilience by practicing equanimity, the ability to stay balanced no matter what happens.

Today sales is lucky to get 5% of customer attention. It’s time to ditch the first-digital-then-sales process and truly integrate.

Marketing behaves more like stock markets or weather than predictable machines. By working with marketing’s complexity instead of ignoring it, companies will realize more value.

“Emergence is what happens when a multitude of things – neurons, bacteria, people – exhibit properties beyond the ability of any individual.” Knowledge of emergence gives leaders a powerful new tool for change.

What do markets have in common with slime mold, beehives, and traffic? Science calls these complex adaptive systems. They share defining characteristics.

Organizational silos create barriers to great customer experience and agility. The first step to change is admitting you’ve got a problem

Six of the Agile Manifesto’s principles highlight how human superpowers are the key to success in the complexity and uncertainty of marketing.

Effective marketing operations in a complex world requires balancing efficiency with enough slack for agility, innovation, and customer experience.

The butterfly effect, the whimsical term for non-linearity, adds mystery to marketing. A human- machine intelligence partnership offers an effective way to surf the enigma.

Like healthy food, good research nourishes your decisions. But many studies are more like cheap fast food. After nine years as an IDC analyst, I learned a lot about how to source and interpret data - skills I would have found useful in my earlier marketing career.

Marketing’s “soft” goals compete for resources with “hard” efficiency goals. To avoid essential, but difficult to quantify investments repeatedly losing this battle, enterprises must reframe strategic immeasurables into useful terms.

Content alone, regardless of its quality, rarely results in significant change. Expand your persuasion repertoire to include everyone’s “go-to” decision tool.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a great proxy metric but isn’t a surrogate for all that encompasses customer loyalty. Revenue is a great proxy metric but isn’t a surrogate for all of marketing. It’s like saying a street map is the equivalent of a city. You can forget that there is so much more to pay attention to.