Podcast: Wendy White, Egencia, Part 1

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Transcript

Edward: My guest is Wendy White. Today, we cover Wendy's career and path to CMO—Berkeley, the US military, Intel, Microsoft, Tier 3, Surge. Wendy is now the chief marketing executive at Egencia, Expedia's corporate travel arm. We are lucky to have her here today.

Wendy, in 2011, you were running marketing operations at Microsoft when you moved to tier three to be their chief marketing executive. How did you get that role? How did you move from running marketing operations to running all of the marketing?

Wendy: That's a great question. How does anyone make that upward leap in their career? And maybe I should say leap like off a cliff because I was at Microsoft—an amazing company, great job, and I loved what I was doing. Funny enough, I got a DM on Twitter from somebody in my network that said, “Hey, would you consider having a conversation with the CEO of this company?” Who knew a DM on Twitter could change your life? But for me it did.

I feel like I actually stood on the edge of a cliff and jumped off because going from helping run advertising operations for—probably at the time—a company that had the largest advertising budget in the world, to a small Series A startup and being the chief marketing executive there was a massive change.

Edward: Why would they hire you? I'm sure you are great at marketing operations, but why did they consider you to run everything?

Wendy: Well, I wasn't really a marketing operations person. The advertising operations at Microsoft were negotiating the advertising strategy across all the business units, running advertising, and execution everywhere outside of the core US ad development. So it was a pretty traditional marketing job, not technically an operations job. But what I had at that point was a career where I had executed across a variety of marketing skill sets.

I think to be a chief marketing officer of any size company, you really got to understand the dynamics of all areas of marketing, and I had done that over my career. I had just enough expertise to be dangerous at everything, and I guess maybe enough humility to say, okay, I'm going to come in and figure this out and write out, no, I'm going to ask for help. That was attractive.

Edward: How did you get those skills? Was that a serial? Did you switch from job to job and do each division, or is it a matter of you sitting next to people who knew those skills and you got it through osmosis?

Wendy: It was a little bit of both. Mostly to that point, I'd worked at big companies at Intel and Motorola. But doing a variety of things is also working. At Intel, I worked in a division that was a brand-new division, and because of that, we had to grow the marketing as we grew that division. I had to do everything for a while. I was Jack-of-all-trades. I just think I had enough Jack-of-all-trades jobs over the years where I just picked up enough.

But also, when you become the VP of marketing, head of marketing, CMO at a startup company, even if you don't know it all when you start, I guarantee by the end of the six months, you've figured it all out. You've tapped into your VC network to ask for best practices from other companies in that VC network. Or you've reached out to friends of yours and your network and said, please give me a crash course in Marketo overnight, so I know what the hell I'm doing. That's exactly what I did.

Edward: I want to go back and talk about the path that got you there. You went to college at Berkeley. How did you come out of Berkeley different from the way you went in?

Wendy: Life-changing. Absolute life-changing. I remember the first time I walked onto Sproul Plaza, which is like the big Plaza. If you've ever seen pictures of Berkeley with the beautiful iron gates—the scrollwork iron gate—you walk through that gate and you're in the Sproul Plaza.

I remember the first time I walked into Sproul Plaza, and I was a very innocent young woman from Minnesota. I had just come off of a couple of years of active duty in the army, was now in college at Berkeley, walked straight into my first protest on something that was happening in China. Probably something around Tiananmen Square at that time. And I just thought, I don't even know what's going on. I didn't really have a worldview to understand what was happening in China.

I think like many young people that go to university, your worldview expands. I think going to a place like Berkeley, that is true like on steroids. My worldview really expanded there. I went from always being a young democrat in Minnesota and really interested in Minnesota politics, to just having maybe a way deeper understanding of progressive politics and social justice. Also, just the realities of life lived in Berkeley, a lot of homelessness at that time. So I just went from being very protected to way better understanding of my place in the world.

Edward: Do you think you would have got that at a different school? If you had gone to a regional school instead of Berkeley, would you have come out similar, or do you think that Berkeley itself changed you?

Wendy: Berkeley—especially those periods, maybe even today—is a unique place. I feel really lucky to have experienced it. I think there are many other schools and universities that would have given me something similar, but there's this little secret something that is Berkeley that I'm not quite sure I'm tangibly explaining, that is indelibly part of who I am now.

Edward: You started your career with the US Army. Tell me about the decision-making process that got you there.

Wendy: When you ask this question, I always want to sound like I have a really great answer like I was so smart at 17, and I made all these great life choices. But really, what happened is I got in a fight with my parents. My older brother, who I blamed to this day for this. He was one year ahead of me in school, had made the decision to stay at home and commute to the University of Minnesota. We were about 20 miles away, and he moved into my parents' basement and that was his college experience.

It was probably perfect for him, but to me, it sounded like the absolute worst college experience possible. My parents' proposal was you stay home, live in your childhood bedroom, and get in the car with your brother every day and drive to the University of Minnesota and go to school. I have an adventurous spirit. And I think being in travel now is a perfect place for me because it reflects my desire to see the world and experience and be a part of the world. Which is also ties into that Berkeley experience.

So I think my parents were quite shocked when right around this time, I got a call from a recruiter and I said, hey, no way. I'm practically a 4.0 student, I'm going someplace amazing. And they talked me into, would you consider language school? Would you consider the army and living in California for a year? And I'm like, wait a minute. I would consider that. And I did, and I don't regret it for a moment.

Edward: You worked in psychological operations. Is that the Army's word for marketing?

Wendy: If marketing equals propaganda, then you bet. Yes. Psychological operations—for those who are not familiar—are the folks that take the loudspeakers and surround somebody's home, like the Noriega example, drop leaflets from airplanes, or take over radio stations or TV stations in a given [...] with the local populace. There are all kinds of things that psychological operations do, probably in this day and age, and I haven't stayed as close to it.

Social media is one of the ways that maybe some of our competitors do it, but for us back in the day, it was very much governed by a set of ideas and principles. But it was very much psychological preparation of the battlefield, which was audience analysis, and then what do you want that audience to do? What behaviors do you want them to do? And how do you get them to do that with the channels that we had? So very much marketing.

Edward: Did that skill set help when you moved into business? Do you still use it today?

Wendy: Yeah. I got my first really cool marketing job at Intel because the chief communications officer heard about that. Called me up and asked me to come into a meeting with her in a small conference room. Challenged me to tell her about it, and then said, “Okay, I want you to work for me.” That's how I ended up in my first marketing job at Intel after I'd been at Intel for about six or eight months working on a business project. That's how I ended up in PR.

Edward: That’s where I was going to go to next because after your MBA, you did join Intel and you focus on B2B marketing. Was B2B marketing a thing you were shooting for, or it just happened?

Wendy: Interestingly, my mother was an executive Control Data back in the day. I don't know if anybody remembers that company, but it was one of the original computer server companies. My brother and his best friend was the grandson of the founder of that company. I grew up with computers in my house from the time I was very small.

My brother and I saved up, bought our first computer—TRS-80—when it first came out, and we always were upgrading computers. I was very into technology, grew up in that environment, and loved tech. When I got done with grad school and had the opportunity to go to Intel, I jumped at it because there was no company more than Intel (at the time) that was shaping the world as it relates to technology. I loved that experience, and I was really happy to go there.

Edward: If 20 years ago, someone from the future went back in time and said in 2020, the US will be initiating antitrust action against four of the five largest tech companies and Microsoft is not one of those companies, I think most people would assume that the Redmond company had stumbled out of the top five. But they were actually number two at the time, and yet they avoided antitrust action.

When you were at Microsoft, you led the global initiative to position Microsoft against antitrust risk. Talk a little bit about how marketing deregulators in governments are different from normal B2B marketing.

Wendy: That’s the most left-field job I've ever had in my career, and also another one that was super engaging and fun. During my first year at Microsoft, I had the opportunity to work in the antitrust division. They had, of course, just come through pretty significant actions with both the US regulators and the European regulators, and had some obligations under those decrees that they had to enforce. Which was around proving the interoperability of their products so they wouldn't get further fine for antitrust for combining things like Windows and Office.

I did the marketing around the compliance issues. How do we promote the interoperability protocols to developers around the world? But more importantly, I had to work in some really fascinating, fun stuff like Microsoft support for Linux. Who would have guessed back in those days that was a big initiative at Microsoft? But it was. It was building bridges to open-source products, working with the open-source ecosystem, and promoting the open-source ecosystem. And then also donating a bunch of IP into what turned into the Microsoft foundation and a spin-off that they did.

But I also got to work on standards, and how do you talk to regulatory bodies and regulators about standards to ensure openness of products? How do you influence governments around the world? Again, a really great foundational thing for marketers to understand is the environment in which you're marketing, including the regulatory environment and how to think about audiences and their perceptions at all levels. I learned a lot about research through that job. I learned a lot about influence models either direct through lobbying efforts or indirectly through software ecosystem efforts. It was a great role.

Edward: It seems like a lot of the stuff you do is product-based. Do these things and that's going to help you against the regulators or reduce your risk against regulators. And then part of it is figuring out what actually does influence a regulator. I imagine that it's a different country by country.

Wendy: It's a very different country by country, and I think you can even see it today. Fast forward where we are today and you can look at the Nordic countries versus Germany versus even France. They all have different personalities for those countries.

Germany is all about privacy. France is all about the social protection of its citizens. The Nordic’s halfway in between both. So yes, every country has a different personality. If you're going to be a global marketer, you should really understand the environment that you're operating in. How to think about marketing, not only to your buyers but to the governments that influence how your products are bought and sold.

Edward: How do you get in front of those regulators? How do you influence them? Is it mass marketing? It's almost like sales where you have individual people? You're giving them marketing sales tools to go and talk to the regulators the way you’d sell to enterprise sales?

Wendy: Yeah. Microsoft, they had a body of folks called National Technology Officers. You could think of them as super sophisticated, smart, pseudo-salespeople that call the regulators to explain to them technology, to influence their technology decisions, and to influence the regulations. A company like Microsoft clearly needed that.

I think all large companies need folks that help explain policy and technology to the regulators. I mean, you've seen that. You've watched probably one or two of the regulatory issues happening here where you have executives testifying in front of Congress and the questions that get asked. A lot of regulators and legislators need to understand technology better.

Edward: Wendy, what were your biggest failure points in your career? Where did things not go as expected?

Wendy: Over the years, I really learned that in any business, the people that work with you and for you at the heart of how you lead and manage, how you get work done, how you create a culture in a company. And any time I think back to where I think I failed, it's always fundamentally about making sure that I was putting people first versus mission first, or understanding motivations or the right collaboration points.

I could come up with any number of times that a project has failed because we took the wrong hypothesis or bet, but I liked those. I liked both failing and learning. It's when you've failed to really engage in and bring your employees along, that's where I consider that a true failure. For me, that's a leadership failure, and that's what I really learn from.

Edward: Let's go back and see when one of those events did not happen. How would things have been different? What did you learn from those events that caused you to change?

Wendy: I look now at my interactions with my current staff and the teams that work for me. The things that I've learned from those who have really impacted the way that I lead teams now. I can't say I wish they wouldn't have happened or that things would have been different because each one of us is a combination of all of our experiences. I'm hoping that all of those things have led me to be a much better leader today and a more empathetic leader.

Edward: Wendy, you've had an amazingly successful career. What do you attribute to your productivity? Is there anything that you do that most people don't?

Wendy: I'm an Energizer bunny, which I think is hilarious and maybe too much of a workaholic. I try not to role model that. I think for me being intellectually curious is important. One of the other things that have led me to be at the right moment at the right time or make the right decision is how much I read and stay on top of what's happening in the markets that I operate in. Reading my competitors, reading the industry news, and reading the influencers. That's one of the levers that makes an executive successful is having the right context in which to make decisions. That for me is one of the points I feel that's really helped me be successful.

Edward: So it's a combination of both reading a lot and also just working a lot. How do you get the energy to actually do that? Is it just genetic? Or do you have any techniques that you've used to keep yourself going?

Wendy: Well, they must be a little genetic because I look at my mom and I think I'm a real chip off the old block when it comes to my mom. My mom is 75 and she's still a senior vice president of a company, sales and marketing, and works four days a week. There you go. There must be some genetics there.

If you work in an area that you love, if you really love the work, you love the content of the work, you love the team, the culture, and seeing the outcomes, I think, it's really easy to be passionate about it and to work hard at it. You've got that real integration of work and life. Of course, I have things outside of work I'm interested in. Believe it or not, like defining one that I'm super interested in the last six months is painting. I've become obsessed with paint by numbers. I have art all over my house now that I painted myself. It's paint by numbers, but it's still fun and I love it. So who knows?

Edward: I'm going to leave it at that. Wendy, thank you so much. We'll continue this tomorrow when we dive into Egencia. Thank you.