SPEAKER: You have to create a culture and environment that allows people, gives them the space, empowers them, that gives them permission to create, to innovate, to think. Then you need to have an organization that supports and enables that. So I grew up in a small village in the northern part of Portugal, and my parents were small business owners. They both ran a local restaurant, a cafe, and a grocery store, and they were very entrepreneurial at heart. So having an entrepreneurial mindset were things that I learned at a very young age and really were ingrained in me. It really shaped me and defined who I am today, my ways of working, and my ways of thinking, and really the kind of leader I have become. And with this experience that taught me how to be creative, scrappy, how to be bold, how to be focused, and really how to take risks. So when I look back at my career journey, I always gravitated to opportunities and roles that were about building and creating something new or to reinventing something. My focus the past three years has been on repositioning our business and creating a brand that is purpose-driven. And this is really important because in order to help our clients transform and reinvent themselves, we also needed to evolve our business. And to do this, we needed to build a marketing organization and function that is fit for the modern world and also aligned to where we are moving as a company and aligned to our purpose. And that meant that we needed to be agile, to be data-centric, but also to adapt a growth and entrepreneurial mindset. See, marketers today, they really need to be comfortable with change and to be comfortable with the uncomfortable and be able to learn, unlearn, and relearn. And this means that they need to adopt what I call a product mindset versus a campaign mindset, meaning they need to think of the campaign as a product, which is in a constant state of beta, meaning constantly evolving and adapting. Because I personally am a huge believer in progress over perfection and speed over process. I wanted to build a marketing organization that was fit for purpose and fit for the modern world. And to do that, you needed to do, in my opinion, three things. One is to have the right talent. The talent had to be not just the right skills, but have diversity of thinking, diversity of thought, and diversity of experience. The second thing is once you have the right talent, that you have to create a culture and environment that allows people, gives them the space, empowers them, that gives them permission to create, to innovate, to think, to experiment. When you have those two things, then you need to have an organization construct that facilitates that. So we created something called the pod model. And our pod model became really our operating model and our construct of work. And what it is, is that we have teams, individuals from different parts of the marketing organization, from different functions and disciplines that come together inside the pod to ideate, to solution, and to create together. It transformed the way we work in a marketing organization. It brought that sort of new way of thinking into the entire team. My advice to my younger self would be, and to anybody who's young today, to coming into marketing or to any other profession, is to be yourself, to bring your whole self to work. Not just your work side, but all of you, because this is where we are. My experience of growing up in a small town where I, at a very, very young age, start working my father's business, those experiences shaped me. So you bring all of that, bring all of yourself to work. It helps you be an authentic leader, but also helps the company and helps the product or the service or the company you're working for.