What you need to know:

• Lion Chief Growth Officer Anubha Sahasrabuddhe has taken on the CIO, CTO, CDO remit, as well as responsibility for strategy, innovation and marketing.
• She says marketers that want to make the top level – and maybe step beyond marketing – need to go as broad as possible in capability and thinking. Not narrow.
• Sahasrabuddhe suggests Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World by David Epstein is essential reading for every marketing and business leader.
• But for agencies, she said the opposite is true: Stop trying to do everything because it doesn’t work. Certainly not for Lion’s roster.
• “Specialise and stick to it,” suggests Sahasrabuddhe. “I haven't yet seen an example where anyone that promised me the A to Z of everything is delivering on that.”
• Meanwhile, Lion has put a ban on hiring any more consultants. For now.
• This is the second of a three-part series based on this week’s podcast. Read part one here. Get the full download download here.

Why A-grade CMOs need Range

Given the sprawling territory CMOs must now cover, what capabilities, skill sets and thinking do ‘classically trained’ marketers need to develop to thrive at the top in the next few years. Do they go broad or stay in specialist swim lanes? For those that want to make the A-team, Sahasrabuddhe thinks it’s broad or bust.

“Are there any swim lanes? Really? I think that's the truth of it,” she says. “When I was given this remit was I got told to read a book called Range. (Range: How Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, by David Epstein. Bill Gates is a fan: “If you're a generalist who has ever felt overshadowed by your specialist colleagues, this book is for you,” per the Microsoft founder.)

“So my answer to your question is essentially that book. What Range says is that our world is becoming hyper-specialised. Every single day, there's a skill that you don't have, either as a marketer or anything else. Range is saying that the differentiator in leadership over the next horizon is the ability to orchestrate and connect in a hyper specialised world,” says Sahasrabuddhe.

“I'm not going to sit here going ‘Oh my God, I can't do IT, I can't code and I don't understand SAP’. It's not the point. Can I orchestrate across functions, across capabilities, in order to drive a business outcome?”

She says the definition of a ‘classical marketer’ is redundant anyway, because it means one thing in CPG and another in B2B.

“So agnostic of ‘what is a marketer’, because it's so variable by industry, it's this Range thinking that takes us away from the hyperbolic conversations about the skills we lack – because we'll never keep pace with emergent capabilities. But what we need to be is across them, and making sure that all those capabilities and skills are actually meaningful, because a bunch of them aren't,” says Sahasrabuddhe.

“So that's where you have to be able to curate what is actually fit for purpose for your organisation versus trying to keep up with the arms race that is the latest in technology or the latest performance marketing metric or the latest whatever. It's insane. So I switch off to a lot of that noise. Because at the end of the day, what is right for industry A or company B has nothing to do with what I'm doing at the moment.”

Cue sales of Range booming in Australia and the start of Mi3’s affiliate empire.

Agencies: Specialise or die?

While Sahasrabuddhe suggests senior marketers need to go broad – effectively becoming high-octane Jacks of all trades in order to climb the corporate tree – she warns agencies attempting the same approach will likely fail. At least the ones gunning for a place on Lion’s roster.

“I see agencies struggling with identity in terms of 'but we can do this and we do purpose and we also do technology, and we do this too'. The ones that I'm certainly gravitating towards actually understand what their differentiating capability is and stick to it. Because I haven't yet seen an example where anyone that promised me the A to Z of everything is delivering on that,” she said, before channelling Tolkien.

“I think that's a dangerous thing in a market as small as Australia. I understand the efficiency of wanting to provide the one-stop-shop, but I'm yet to see it yield meaningful reasons for organisations to tie themselves to the agency that promises the ‘one ring to rule them all’. I'm not seeing it.”

Chief of agency tribes

On joining Lion two years ago from Mars, where she ran global marketing, Sahasrabuddhe brought “highly specialised” capability into the marketing function.

“Whether it's creative strategists, media connection planners, [these are] very, very specific skill-sets, because a 'classic brand manager' just simply doesn't have the bandwidth to do them all at the level needed to produce outstanding work. So if you follow that logic through, then the partners are a reflection of the capabilities you have as extensions of your team,” she said.

It’s up to senior execs to effectively manage those teams, including agencies, she said, “whether you call them a tribe or a village … they have to be clear enough on what role they play for the bigger outcome.”

Otherwise, it becomes a “hot mess … no-one knows what their role is, everyone’s straying into other lanes and everybody’s unhappy,” per Sahasrabuddhe.

“So we've been very, very purposeful about trying to keep that very simple right now, certainly in Australia, in terms of creative agency, media agency, and then bespoke digital capabilities as needed.”

That puts the onus squarely on Lion to properly manage those agency workstreams and fiefdoms. Sahasrabuddhe thinks that’s exactly as it should be.

“I strongly believe that you can never abdicate or delegate orchestration of capabilities for outcomes. How can you abdicate that responsibility? That's your job as the enterprise. Curating and orchestrating is an art. This idea that you just toss it to the agency and let them work it out… I just don't buy into it at all.”

No more consultants

Sahasrabuddhe said the same applies to business strategy – and expresses incredulity at the fact that per capita, Australia spends more than any other country globally on consulting. Lion, she suggests, won’t be hiring more suits any time soon.

“I just don't think you can abdicate your business strategy. I understand every organisation is different, they may not have those capabilities in house. I’m very lucky to have an incredibly talented strategy team that comes from those backgrounds. So the idea of then paying another consultant on top of what we have already is … different,” she said.

“You have to identify the problem, the lack of capability, before you go shopping. So at the moment, I've got a full moratorium on any consultants, because we have so many partners. I'm just trying to sense-make all those partnerships and make sure we're extracting the right value before we bring on more.”

This is the second of a three-part series based on this week’s podcast. Read part one here. Get the full download download here.