Kris Safarova  01:18

Welcome to the Strategy Skills podcast. I’m your host, Kris Safarova, and our podcast sponsor today is StrategyTraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the Overall Approach Used in Well Managed Strategy Studies. It’s a free download we prepared for you, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. You can also get McKinsey and BCG-winning resume, which is a resume that got offers from both of those firms. And you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/resumePDF. And lastly, you can get a copy of a book we co-authored with some of our amazing clients and listeners. And you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/gift. And today, we have with us two very special guests, Katherine Melchior Ray, who lectures on international marketing and leadership at UC Berkeley. And she brings expertise from her time as a senior executive at Nike, Nordstrom, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Hyatt. And then we have Nataly Kelly, who is the Chief Marketing Officer at Zappi, and previously she served at Hotspot as Vice President of Marketing, Vice President of International Operations and Strategy, and Vice President of Localization. Welcome! So great to have you with us. So much to discuss. Let’s start briefly with what drew you brought to the intersection of culture and brand in your careers.

Katherine Melchior Ray  02:50

Well, I’ll start because I’m older only for that. You know, we talk about this in our book, and we put it in the introduction. Originally it had been at the end, but I thought it was so important. I grew up. We grew up in very two to very different American backgrounds, and yet we each had a very unique experience growing up and being exposed to culture. So in my experience, I grew up in San Francisco, in the city of San Francisco. My father is a German, Jewish refugee, and I went to a French, American bilingual school from age four to 13. So San Francisco, in those days, was a an extremely diverse town where Russian Hill and Russians living in it. Chinatown was populated by Chinese Little Italy. You could get the best cappuccino. And so I grew up in a very cosmopolitan and culturally diverse city, and that exposed me, I think, to lots of different cultures. So it never seemed so unusual to follow my interest in learning different languages and exploring different cultures.

Nataly Kelly  04:03

Yeah. And as for me, I had maybe in some ways, the opposite background of Katherine. I grew up in a very small rural community in the cornfields in the rural Midwest, and very little ethnic diversity, linguistic diversity in my small town, but when I started to learn about the world through National Geographic Magazine and articles in school, and then learning Spanish in school in the public school system, I began to realize I had a very acute interest in learning other languages and Connecting with people from other countries.

Kris Safarova  04:42

Can you each describe a defining moment that shaped your philosophy on global branding?

Katherine Melchior Ray  04:47

So I after college, I went straight to Japan, and I lived there for three years before the internet, so I couldn’t just reach out to family members I was working for. Japanese company, I knew very few foreigners, much less Americans. And after living there for several years and continuing to work then in New York with the same TV network from Japan, several years later, I found myself at Nike at the headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon, Portland, Oregon. And I was so surprised at how much more provincial seeming and somewhat misogynistic the culture was in my own home country, with a group of business leaders and athletes like me, where as I was running women’s footwear, and I had to fight for being treated equally and taking women as a consumer equally in an era when the common reframe was for women’s shoes, and I kid you not, shrink it and paint it.

Kris Safarova  05:59

And could you share with us one hard earning lesson from your global brand work that still impacts you today in some way?

Katherine Melchior Ray  06:08

There are lots of different learnings I’ve had. I mean, you listed most of the companies that I’ve worked for. I’ve worked across five different industries and in the US, Japan, Germany, France. So I’ve learned from so many different companies and leaders. I think that each culture I learn something from, and I borrow from those cultures. So it’s hard to say that the single most important thing I have learned is from a business perspective, I think, is to stay open minded and realize that we have lots of preconceived expectations and notions and that unless you’re marketing to a consumer who is exactly like You, chances are that consumer has very different needs, expectations, desires, and we need to really hold back our own judgment and really work doubly hard to listen. One of the things that I love is this notion that we have to two eyes and one mouth, you know, or two ears and one mouth. And I say eyes, because I often say, Listen with your eyes if you don’t speak a language. Because in many cultures, people communicate with non verbal forms of communication. English is an American English in particular, is one of the most transactional. People are constantly referring to what is or is not in a contract. But most other cultures, there’s so much more communication and relationship building that goes on all around them. And I think it’s really important to be able to read it and see it and understand it.

Kris Safarova  08:01

This is such a crucial advice, and I think even in America, it’s so important to listen with your eyes as well. I have never heard anyone saying, Listen with your eyes. That is beautiful.

Katherine Melchior Ray  08:10

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. You know Esther Perel, fantastic coach on relationships, and I quote her, actually in my book, even though my book is about business and growing business and brand value internationally. But she says she talks about listening, and I quote her, because who better to learn from than someone who’s a specialist on relationship building? And she says, Listen. The reason listening is so important, and this is a paraphrase, not her exact words, the reason listening is so important because it’s not just the listening, it’s what listening does to the person who speaks. The better you listen, the more someone will tell you, whereas they can sense if you’re not really listening, they don’t give you as much information. When they really feel listened to, which is a form of empowerment and empathy, they start to reveal much more. And I think that’s one of the key things for learning how to understand consumers all around the world.

Kris Safarova  09:20

That is very true. What belief about branding did you once hold but later came to completely reject?

Nataly Kelly  09:28

So I used to believe that branding required absolute consistency and very little flexibility, but when I began to work in global marketing, I realized that there is adaptability that’s required to really succeed in other markets. And I think it’s a common mistake that many, many marketing leaders make, is thinking that everything has to be the same and that the leverage is actually quite high. On some of the specific campaigns that you run. So there are many aspects that do need to remain consistent, but there are many ways that you need to adapt, not necessarily the brand itself, but how you show up as a brand in each market differently. Katjan,

Kris Safarova  10:19

What about you?

Katherine Melchior Ray  10:20

Yeah, I would say one thing I learned is my husband used to work for Landor Associates, which is one of the preeminent brand identity firms, and so that was when we were just a newly married couple. So I think I was heavily influenced at a young age by the visual identity of brands, and I saw enormous change when a company would reinvent themselves, like when Federal Express went to FedEx. You know, it really represented a step change for the business. And I think mistakenly, sometimes when I would come into a new business, I would realize their identity was not as good as it could be, and I think I wasted some political capital in in a business environment over emphasizing that, whereas that change, while extremely helpful, I think comes at the end of All the work that has to go on internally first to really understand how their business model is changing, how the environment is changing, and how to make it very consistent all the way through the organization and throughout all of its touch points with its consumers globally. And then the visual can kind of wrap it all up and serve to symbolize all of those changes that have gone on, going the other way around. It’s not, it’s not a good, a good way to go.

Kris Safarova  11:52

What have you done differently in your careers? You both have had very successful careers. Obviously, you have a long career to go. Both of you, do you feel that you have done certain things differently that allowed you to be more successful than average.

Katherine Melchior Ray  12:05

I think mine comes back to some of the topics that have talked about. One of them is staying open minded and realizing that I need to learn from the people that I’m working with and the market in which I’m working, having worked across five industries, you’ve got to come down, you’ve got to come in and learn quickly, right? So obviously, I bring various skills to the table, but I don’t pretend that I’m going to know everything that there is. So trying to learn from my teams, from the market, from competitors, from from partners. I think is was really important, so keeping that open mindset, and then also the second aspect is relationships. I mean, having worked for the number of companies and across the world that I have, my relationships still exist with some of the people I worked with in Tokyo right after college, and in a startup in back in the United States after that and Nike, like at every single company, I still maintain really good relationships with a lot of the people I work with.

Kris Safarova  13:17

And just to follow up on that, what is your advice on maintaining relationships, because this is an area where many people struggle?

Katherine Melchior Ray  13:24

Yeah, well, I mean, I can offer some advice on that is that at the end of the day, you are your values, that’s that’s the end, that’s all of it. It’s for branding, for business, for being an employee, a leader, you are your values. So think about those in all aspects of what you do, and make sure you are living those on a daily basis. For me, I have learned that integrity is one of my most important values. So how I show up, how I treat people. It’s also why I work for brands that have incredibly high quality products that they really believe in, because that’s I’m aligned with the brand and the business, and I can feel good in the work that I do, and demand that kind of integrity with my teams and in our relationship?

Nataly Kelly  14:24

Yeah, I wanted to add relationships, and keeping consistency and holding those relationships over a long period and a long career across many companies, many decades, is something I really believe in as well, and the joy of seeing people want to follow you from company to company and or to just stay connected with you. And like, want to help you. You know, with the book, so far, we’re already seeing, you know, a lot of friends from prior companies who are coming out to help us and invite us to speak and do things with them. And it’s, it’s just a joy. And I think that the thing. That I was going to say in terms of one thing I did differently in my career, is I didn’t really care about having a linear career path. I was very interested in learning, and that’s what drove me to take new jobs. So, you know, I went from, you know, manager to a director, but then from a C level down to a VP, and then back and forth and around and because the title really wasn’t what interested me. It was always about, what can I learn? What am I How am I going to grow, but also who the people that I will work with? And I think keeping those relationships requires taking a genuine interest in people and not just networking for the sake of networking, like you scratch my back. I’ll scratch yours. It’s more about, how can I genuinely help that person with something I know someday it will come back to me. I believe in that professional karma, and I do think that that is part of what makes a great career, is those little micro moments where you’re adding value in people’s lives, they add up over the life of a career. I really believe that, and I feel like now that I’ve been around for a while, it’s starting to come back to me in many different ways.

Kris Safarova  16:14

That are unexpected.

Katherine Melchior Ray  16:16

That makes jump in here, because this is actually how we met. Yes, that’s right. So I found Nataly because I use one of her Harvard Business Review articles in my class. And I read and I use it because it’s an ease. It’s about a lot of the blind spots that companies making going global. And I thought, Gosh, I should have written this. Who is this woman? And I use it in my with my students. And so, you know, I always sort of curious who this woman It was is. And I think sometime on LinkedIn, she wrote something on one of my posts, and I thought, Oh, wow, this is the woman who wrote that HBR article. So I responded, and I said, you know, we I’d love to meet you sometime, and and so we met online, and she was asking, you know what I’m working on now, and this and that? And I said, I’m writing a book. And she said, Oh, let me know if you’d like any help with that. I love writing. And so that was the, really, the beginning of our developing a real relationship. And I thought, wow, here’s this person offering to write a book with me, and we hadn’t any formal relationship right prior to that. And here we are, over a year later now, and I think that we, we, we actually are extremely collaborative. And we work together quite well, and we provide we have a consistent viewpoint, but with different angles in that perspective.

Nataly Kelly  17:52

Yeah, and I’ll just add that, what was so fascinating about Katherine and I meeting is that once she, you know, we got in touch about the article that she was using in her course, I realized, Oh, this is the same person who was profiled in the Wall Street Journal many years ago, when I was first a VP of marketing, I saw an article about her, and it was a fascinating article about her global life as A marketing leader. And I remember thinking, wow, that is she’s one of my people. Like, I would love to live a life like that, like, you know, at the time, I was a VP of Marketing at a tech company based in New York, and I remember thinking, wow, who is this Dynamo? And so all those years later, to have that reconnection, it just goes to show all those little things add up over the life of a career.

Kris Safarova  18:43

And the study sounds like it just was meant to be, that you will work and do something together eventually.

Katherine Melchior Ray  18:50

I think, I mean, I think so, you know, this is this. This is the thing you never know. And I think that’s what Nataly is saying she, you know, maintains her relationships and pays it forward. And I think that when you get to a certain part, you know, when you’re young, it’s hard to do that, and you’re you’re really trying to build your career. And one of the things I tell young people all the time, including my children and my students, is someone does something for you, write them back. Don’t ignore it. And if they make an introduction for you, follow up with them, tell them, thank you. Check in with them again a couple weeks later or a month later, you never know what’s going to happen. And they took their time. They took time out of their busy career to do something nice for you. And that will come back around, and it changes actually, I think how you end up going through your business career and your life, that is very true.

Kris Safarova  19:43

So let’s talk about another very, very important topic, and I feel that we have to talk about it, given you two are here with us. So the topic is understanding consumer shifts post COVID and with AI. Now that AI became something that almost everyone uses. I want to start with, how have US consumer values, and I will focus on us mostly because if you talk global, it’s very hard to talk about this topic. But how have US consumer values you think shifted in the last 2, 3, 4 years in ways that most executives underestimate?

Nataly Kelly  20:19

Yeah, I think consumers are becoming a lot more discerning, and they care more than ever about brand values, especially younger generations. And a lot of people in business that I’m surrounded by complain about millennials and Gen Z and say, Oh, they don’t want to work. Oh, they, you know, they complain that their work ethic is different, and actually their values are different, and they want to work for something that met for company that matters and stands for something, and they want to put their money behind brands that stand for something. So with everything that’s happening with AI, you know, I do worry sometimes. I’m a huge fan of technology, obviously working in tech for most of my career, but at the same time, I worry about distance being even bigger between brands and consumers, because consumers want that proximity to a brand that matters and stands for something that they align with. And so I do think that is really changing. And I think with AI, brands run the risk of, okay, if you’re creating all this content and it’s mostly AI and it’s not as human as it maybe should be, do they run that risk of more distance between what really matters and their values and how they come across and how they communicate, that can get lost very easily. I think if we lean too hard, too fast, into AI tools to like generate content, and we lose that authentic voice, I think there are very real risks there. But the good thing is, the consumer is more choosy than ever, and they’re also more saturated than ever with messages, with channels with so much communication being thrown at them. Every little advertising space is, you know, taking up mind share. They don’t have much mental availability to absorb messages, because it’s being things are hitting them from everywhere, every side on their phone when they’re driving, you know, audio visual everywhere. So I do think that’s changing the dynamic, and it means brands need to show up even more, lean into their values, even more, and really stay true to who they are more than ever, because it’s not as easy to break through the noise.

Kris Safarova  22:37

Nataly, and there’s a follow up to this, and of course, to both of you, if you want to share something. But you mentioned younger consumers really care about brands standing for something. What are some of the key things they care about that they want brands to stand for?

Nataly Kelly  22:54

It depends on the individual, of course, but I think they care about alignment with environmental sustainability, you know, health, you know, the values that I think, depending on what country you’re in, can be seen as more kind of liberal values. But then, if they do Lean in a more conservative direction, maybe they care about other things, like, you know, fiscal conservatism, or, you know, other other aspects, but younger generations do seem to care more about a lot of the values that, frankly, a lot of European governments also are espousing. You know, the EU has a lot of positive policies to protect people’s health and to do, you know what’s good for humanity, and you know, the collective society, I think there is more of a collectivist vein in a lot of what I’m seeing in younger generations, which is inspiring as an American, because we tend to be very individualistic. It’s part of our history, part of our legacy, part of our you know, people coming as immigrants from other countries often seeking out a better life for themselves and their families, and so I think that’s part of our history and woven into our culture. But I do think things are changing, and I think the younger generations are really pushing that change, and it’s a positive change, but it’s one that brands need to react to, and it’s happening quickly, and they’re not always prepared for the that change, because they have a lot of legacy ways of thinking. And even the people in the ranks, you know, we all have our biases. We all have our ways of doing things, and we tend to fall back into our comfort zone of, oh, this is the way we’ve always run this campaign. Of, we’ve always planned it this way. Well, maybe we need to do it a little differently, because the demographics are changing, the values are changing, and our brand needs to evolve with the times.

Kris Safarova  24:45

And other than wanting to see brands standing for something, do you feel there are other things that US consumers now expect that wasn’t true. Let’s say in 2019.

Katherine Melchior Ray  24:56

Well, I think that people expect responsiveness. Yes, you know, they expect fast communication and responsiveness, and I think that that goes a long way for creating brand trust, right. Loyalty is harder than to create with consumers, because we have so many choices. The power is in the person now with social media and the democratization from the internet. But the ultimate at the end of the day, you know, a brand is all about a promise. That’s what a brand stands for. So brands, and I think consumers, young consumers today, recognize this, and they are distrustful, understandably, because promises have been broken so many times, and if you look at it over generations, people used to have the same job right for 1020, 30 years their whole career, many people were well taken care of, if you will, either by their company or by the state or their community, and over the generations, that’s completely disappeared. So everyone has to protect themselves. And a brand is is kind of a place to be able to put your money where you are going to expect the kind of product or service to deliver against that promise. And so I think that that kind of reassurance is something that brands can offer, and people support brands that they trust. But trust is really hard to to create, especially when you’re relegating a lot of your marketing to AI, because all of a sudden you’re putting a four theoretically objective, and yet we know it’s not objective, a subjective, large language learning model that is in between now your brand and your consumer. I mean, we’ve spent so long to try to bring ourselves closer together, and now we are voluntarily delegating this to an outside algorithm. It’s kind of, it’s kind of scary.

Nataly Kelly  27:08

Yeah, and I think it relates to the question that you asked previously about, you know, building your career over time, because it’s the same with your personal brand. You know, you the reason that you can have those relationships that last is because you have a personal brand and you’ve built trust with someone over a long period of time. And I think the same thing that Katherine mentions here is true on both personal brands and any brand relationship. I think it really is. You know, I see AI as both an opportunity and a risk for brands. If you leverage these tools, and you really lean into training them on your brand voice, and you can scale your brand voice through these types of technologies. And you know, I’m a huge fan of technology. I’ve used my machine translation background for many years. I know the pros the cons. You know, back when Google Translate first came out, people were making fun of how bad the translations were. But now people use it all the time to, like, engage with a website or, you know, and it helps so many people. You know, these types of technologies can be so helpful to society when they’re used properly. I think the danger is when people just lean into them too quickly, without thinking, and that’s part of this experimentation curve that we’re on now with AI, but what they do have to remember is it’s all about, at the end of the day, establishing that trust, but not breaking that trust, because you invest so much time in building it, and one bad moment can break that trust, just as Katherine mentioned, so many brands have just fallen down and broken that trust with consumers by pivoting too quickly, reacting to a new government mandate, or, you know, doing something that is just off brand for them and shows that actually they don’t really stand for those values after all, you know? So that’s the real risk, I think, with both personal brand and how we show up every day and a consumer brand that shows up every day for consumers.

Kris Safarova  29:03

Apart from what we already discussed so far, they feel there are any other biggest blind spots. So to say, yes, business leaders have when it comes to post pandemic, AI era consumer behavior.

Katherine Melchior Ray  29:17

Well, I think I you know, we talked about trust. We talked about going too fast. Part of the problem is this notion of going too fast, because AI has accelerated so much so quickly. Everyone’s jumping into it because, one, it helps us actually do many tasks faster. One of the challenge is that as we rush head first, we think it’s going to create more personalization and tailoring the experience for the user, but and making them more loyal. But actually in the race to optimize every single interaction to mirror the user, brands actually risk becoming reflections of their audience, rather than. Distinct voices in the market, and I think that’s what Nataly is referring to, in that people really need to lean into their own values and make sure that they are creating the AI guidance that reflects their brand. And then imagine trying to do this across cultures and languages and all of those unspoken expectations of forms of communication. I mean, it gets really hard since right now so much of the AI is coming out of the United States.

Nataly Kelly  30:33

Yes, and that’s a real risk, because with anything language based, there tends to be an initial bias toward the country and language that are training the tools. And so, you know, we’re already seeing a bias toward content. You know, these are largely trained on content that was written by men, and often white men. And so there is a very real risk in often English speaking white men. So you start to look at how these tools are trained, and it becomes, you can see there are very real risks of bias. I would also say that, as Katherine mentioned, the speed aspect is a big thing to consider here. And I think it’s the speed of reaction. And you know, Katherine mentioned before the importance of being reactive and being, you know, responsive is the word that you used. But I think there’s a difference between being responsive and reactive. And what I’m seeing a lot of is people being overly reactive without thinking. And one of the things that will happen as AI evolves and our dependency on a evolves is people will start to see that you can’t outsource your strategy just as often you shouldn’t be outsourcing your strategy to, say, an agency, and your strategy should really come from within. Same thing with AI. You don’t want to outsource your strategy and leave that to AI. You need the thought that informs the work to come from within, and that’s something I see happening all the time, where people are just getting lazy, and they’re kind of like, oh, let me ask the AI tool what I should do about this thing, instead of thinking, what’s actually right for our business, what really supports our values, because there is a level of judgment that is very human that will not be taken away by any AI tool. Anytime soon, judgment and strategy are the two things that I think humans will start to realize. Oh, you know that grunt work that we used to have to do, we can now outsource that piece, but the strategy and the thinking and the human judgment about who we are, why we’re unique, what our values are, that’s going to need to remain with humans, and we’ll, we’ll need to kind of lean into that and maybe take a more mature approach than just like, oh, let’s react and react and react all day. Because that’s tempting in this fast changing world. It’s very tempting to just run with a campaign, you know, do the next thing, and not think, how does that tie to our overall strategy? How does that help us with showing up as a brand consistently? So I think there’s a lot we will continue to learn as AI adoption evolves.

Katherine Melchior Ray  33:09

I might add, I’m on the board of EDHEC MBA school. Here it’s they actually have three campuses, and friends lives the headquarters of Paris and nice friends where we live, and in our meeting on how to teach the future business leaders about AI, two things came out. One of them is we have to learn, to constantly learn, you know. And I think that we see this now with people who are on the older side of the digital divide. You know, they’re constantly having to work much harder to learn how to use new technologies. But the second thing is that we said, the more we rely on technology, the more we must double down on our humanity. And I think that refers to what Nataly is talking about in that judgment and strategy. And if we’re not studying this in universities and in schools and in high schools, if we’re not reading philosophy and psychology and history and trying to really understand what drives culture and evolution in culture, then we’re going to end up spinning our wheels much, much more looking for AI to answer questions that it doesn’t have the capability to begin to begin to understand.

Nataly Kelly  34:36

That’s right, I would just add the other piece is creativity. You know, I think a lot of people want AI tools to create something almost like magically, like creativity requires not only logic, which you can train and code a machine to do, and you can provide inputs to increase the quality. Of the output. But what you can’t easily train a machine to do is understand human feelings and emotions, and creativity captures a lot of that and relays a message in a way that people feel something and AI will never be sent. You know, have human senses and emotions, no matter how well we train it, it can guess, and it can take its best guess, but only humans can really feel those things. And already there’s data showing that people can detect when it’s it’s a real you know, it’s not authentic. It will get better and better and better until it sounds until even videos that are AI generated and human models, you know, models that are AI driven look better and better, but there’s always going to be something different about human authenticity and human emotion. And I do do believe, with the adoption of AI, human creativity will flourish because the dependency on it will get even higher. Because when you can outsource the coding and the logic and all the things that machines can do rapidly, much faster than humans can do, we’ll want to lean into the things that make us human and that taps into emotions and human communication and all of those things in the higher level thinking and strategy and judgment. So I’m actually excited for that that time to come.

Kris Safarova  36:25

Kathleen, you mentioned having to learn, to constantly learn. So a question for both of you, for our listeners, what do you think they should do to stay up to date, and what skills should they focus on strengthening or developing, to remain relevant in a world where more and more tasks will be completed by AI?

Katherine Melchior Ray  36:50

Yeah, I think challenging yourself, you know, challenging yourself in small and large things. I once read this and I and I tried to encourage it in my teams read something from a source that you never read once a week, if you you know whether it’s about aerospace and how the jet propulsions reverse when they’re landing on it without gravity, or something in detailed finance that you would have never thought about or about trees in a tropical geography, but challenge yourself, because it keeps your brain alert and active. It’s kind of like exercise for the mind. So once a week, try to really read something from a different source, I think is really, is really helpful. And try to develop that, maintain that curiosity. Why is this hard for me to understand? Or what can I possibly learn here? And trying to see the, I think the connections between disparate topics, where you might learn something that has relevance in a different domain.

Nataly Kelly  38:08

Yeah, I would add also related to the curiosity, which I think is a big one. I think it’s a the most important thing of all is to remain curious and ask questions. And you know that example of looking for sources that are not ones you typically use is great. I also think just leaning in and asking people questions about, well, how did you do that? Like, how are you using this tool? What are you doing? Show me, you know, we’re in a world now where it’s so easy to screen share, it’s so easy to just quickly, you know, log in and show somebody. Here’s how I’m using this in my day to day life, I think the more examples I learned from other people, the better. What I worry sometimes is we won’t be sharing those as quickly, because, you know, post pandemic, most of us have gone remote. And, you know, many people worked in offices before, and I love remote, async work. That’s a huge part of my background. Since 1996 I’ve been working remotely at least part time, if not full time, and that connects us to a global world. But the downside is you don’t have the ability as easily to just walk by and see what somebody’s doing and learn from them. That way, it has to be more intentional and in some ways more prescribed. And so there’s pros and cons of that, you know, kind of hybrid world that we’re living in. And I think it can be a little harder sometimes to share learnings and examples that way, without having it be kind of more intentional. So I think that’s going to be a challenge, but I think it’s also an opportunity for us to continue to remember there’s a lot I can learn from every person out there. They’re all doing something different that I don’t know about from their experience. Like, what can I learn from them? And most people are happy to share. It’s amazing to me how generous people are that they’ll be like, yeah, sure, I’ll show you what I’m doing. It’s a great way for us to learn specifics about. These tools are being applied.

Kris Safarova  40:02

And as you were speaking now, I thought that came to my mind when I was a management consultant. For example, you’ve done so much as by observing senior partners and how they handling themselves, how they manage their day. And with remote work, you don’t get to see it as a junior employee.

Katherine Melchior Ray  40:21

Yeah, I didn’t realize, Nataly, that you too, had done remote work since the 90s. That’s another thing we we share in common, and it’s not a surprise, since we both did global work, and that was the way you could do global work. I remember when it was Skype. Was when that first came out. Otherwise it was a telephone.

Nataly Kelly  40:44

Yes, well, that’s that’s why I mentioned it, because I worked my first job out of college was actually at att. I was a Spanish interpreter, and I interpreted over the phone, and they trained us remotely. This was before most internet. So we had an intranet where we would share information with each other, and we had phone bridges, so we would call in and do training over the phone. But one thing A and T ATT was very good about was training people and giving people on site training. So they would fly us all into Monterey, California, and we would spend weeks there absorbing live training. I went through the management training at att, and it was the best training I ever got. I still rely to this day on conflict management basics. You know, how to run a good meeting. You know, little things like that that they invested in us and trained us on back then, but we were working remotely 99.9% of the time. But they would invest in training a lot, and it was very important in that remote environment. You know, my my first after I was working independently with AT and T, you know, remotely from home, back in 1996 I was managing a team of 36 interpreters all over the country via telephone and via email and things like that. And it was very early days for the internet. You know, I was a blogger who, like, wrote my own code, and everything was just so different back then, but also still the same as Katherine mentioned, we had Skype, we had ICQ was, you know what we used back then, and remote work is pretty much the same. I think where we’re falling short is on the training piece, and I do think that’s more important than ever. I would love to see more companies invest in training programs. I think it’s going to be even more important in this hybrid world is people, still, I feel, are finding their feet on how to do this the best way. It’s like a pendulum swing. It’s like, oh, we’re all remote. Oh, return to office. It can’t be that way. We have to find that happy medium. And I think AT and T kind of nailed it back in the 90s with the happy medium, they kind of knew what worked. There were pioneers in it, and so I’d love to see more. companies lean that way.

Katherine Melchior Ray  43:07

I actually think that those two topics are kind of consistent. One is this notion of her training at which was in a different era, and what we were talking about with AI and the risk of not training a team, you have employees that are geo located all over the place, using chat, GPT, without any kind of consistent brand voice, that are using their best ability, we Hope, and maybe not, but they’re all subjectively asking questions. And if a company, the company that figures out how to train on this so that it is consistently teaching its employees to infuse the same kind of branded strategy into it, will start to stand out in a way that will be consistently delivering the kind of brand promise through all those interactions that its employees are doing with its consumers all over the world, because they will have been they will have a culture that is stronger and reflects the values of the brand. It’s kind of interesting how those two thoughts came together.

Kris Safarova  44:25

Very true. I want to wrap up our discussion today with my favorite question over the last few years: what were two, three aha moments, realizations that you feel comfortable sharing that really changed the way you look at life or the way you look at the business?

Katherine Melchior Ray  44:41

Well, maybe I will jump in. One of them is, I think there are. One of them is working for a startup in the United States that was run by a Swedish founder. So I. I had worked for a Japanese company, I’d worked for American companies, and now I was working on a startup, and she was creating high quality children’s clothing in the style that she knew back home. And she created a corporate culture that was reflective of Swedish national cultures, of taking care of its employees. So in this particular case, our business and our brand were completely aligned. And it made me realize, coming from very structured American businesses or Japanese businesses, that you can create the business and the brand that you like that reflects the values that you believe in, and as long as you’re authentic to yourself and to the brand, and again, you show up living those those values, then you can define the rules of The game to that extent, and you have to do you know, you have to do well to do good. So a business can’t just do good to the environment and its community and its employees without actually making money. And if people really learn to understand that you have to actually make some money in order to to deliver all the things that you want to deliver to your consumer, to your employees, to your shareholders, then you know people do recognize that you have to give to get.

Nataly Kelly  46:29

Yeah, I think my aha moment was a surprising one. So for my prior book, which is also about global business, but not global branding. Per se, I interviewed a company called Dashlane, and they had a French founder, and they are highly global startup, Password Manager startup, and they actually decided at one point to get rid of the notion of company headquarters. So I thought this was so interesting, because what they realized is, when they talked about HQ and France being their HQ, the message they were sending to employees in other countries was one of status, and this idea of, well, we’re visiting HQ, you know, or they’re located in HQ, in our headquarter country. And the reality is that when you build a brand, and with each employee you hire, they are a brand ambassador, and every message that they speak to a customer is you showing up as a brand. And so who you hire is very foundational to the culture that you build as a company. And by them saying, You know what, we’re no longer a French company. We’re a global company. Our headquarters is everywhere, and our employees have equal status. That, to me, is a really unusual and strong statement about how to build a globally equitable organization, and not just a global business or a global brand, because you can be a global business or global brand. You know, by some definitions, if you operate in multiple countries, or you have revenue streams in multiple currencies, or however you want to define it, but what really makes you truly global, I think, is recognizing those local differences, but also building your business in a way and building your culture in a way that allows you to show up in locally relevant ways. And you can’t do that if there are hierarchies between countries and differences in status, and it takes a lot of intentionality to make choices like that that are kind of unconventional, to really drive a global business in a way that’s more equitable. So I love that. I love that example.

Kris Safarova  48:50

Nathalie, Katherine, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for everything you shared. We mentioned your book, Brand Global, Adapt Local. Where can our listeners learn more about you, buy your book, anything else you want to share?

Katherine Melchior Ray  49:04

I would like to thank you for asking really lovely questions. As I mentioned before we started recording, I’ve been listening to your podcast, and I think they’re I think it’s great. I encourage your listeners to go back and look at lots of the other ones in the archives, because there are you get really great speakers, and you ask very interesting and provocative questions that I think help everybody reflect on their own business journeys.

Kris Safarova  49:30

Thank you so much Katherine.

Nataly Kelly  49:31

Really appreciate your kind words. Yes, I too appreciate the thought provoking questions. Today, if you want to learn more about our book, you can get it on most booksellers online, and you can order it through your local bookseller if you have the ISBN. I often tell people that because you don’t need to always purchase through the largest online retailers, you can actually go to your local little independent bookseller or your local library with the ISBN and get a copy of the book. Book. My website is born to beglobal.com I have a blog there, and I have a newsletter. I know Katherine has a sub stack that’s fantastic, and a website as well. And we’d love to stay connected with your listeners. And thank you very much for having us.

Kris Safarova  50:15

Thank you again. Really appreciate you both being here, and I feel we could speak for a very long time on this topic, and it felt like we didn’t have enough time. But we also covered a lot.

Katherine Melchior Ray  50:26

We sure did well. The book is coming out in English first, so it’s a Brand Global, Adapt Local. So there are two versions. There’s a UK version and a US version. But we already have interest. It hasn’t come out yet, but there’s already interest. Some very international, different markets overseas. So maybe we’ll do a follow up when it’s in a foreign language.

Kris Safarova  50:50

And I would love to do a follow up. Our guests today again, have been Katherine Melchior Ray and Nataly Kelly. Check out their book. It’s called Brand Global, Adapt Local. And our podcast sponsor today is StrategyTraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies. It’s a free download we prepared for you, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. You can also get McKinsey and BCG-winning resume, which is a resume that got offers from both of those firms. And it will be a great example to take a look at regardless of your seniority level. And you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/resumePDF. And then the last gift I have for you today is a copy of a book we co-authored with some of our listeners, some of our amazing clients, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/gift. It’s called Nine Leaders in Action. Thank you everyone for tuning in, and I’m looking forward to connect with you all next time.