From Startups to Scale-Ups: A Human-Centric Approach to Brand Growth with Norman Guadagno

David Maffei: Hi, and welcome to a brand new Aspire to Inspire Podcast episode. My name is Dave  Maffei, and I’m the senior vice president and general manager in North America for Staffbase. Today, I have the pleasure of being joined by Norman Guadagno, who is not only a close friend but a seasoned marketer known for driving transformation and growth at some of the most recognizable organizations in tech, especially in the Boston area.

Norman [was] the chief marketing officer at Mimecast. He’s been instrumental in shaping brands and building scalable marketing programs and navigating high-stakes challenges like mergers and acquisitions. Norman has proven track record of crafting strategies that drive transformation and deliver results. In this episode, I’ll hope that we can uncover communication’s pivotal role in all of his success from leading a shift from B2C to B2B in partnership with me at Carbonite, to building a brand from scratch at Acoustic, to more. Norman, thanks so much for joining me today. Excited to see you and happy New Year.

Norman Guadagno: Happy New Year, Dave. It’s great to be here, and that was quite a buildup. I have a lot to live up to as we talk here, but it’s terrific to join the podcast and terrific to really get an opportunity to talk about just some of the work we’ve done together as well as some of the other things that I’ve done. And congratulations to you on your new role here at Staffbase. I know it’s been a few months. It’s exciting to see what you’re going to do for the company.

David Maffei: Thank you very much. I’m excited we got to team on this together. So we’ll dive right in. Obviously, I’ve had a front-row seat for your career, but everyone that’s watching at home, most of them maybe haven’t. So let’s start there. Your career really has been marked by leading transformative efforts across lots of organizations and really highly recognizable ones. At the highest level, can you talk to me about what the role communication has played in driving the changes that you’ve been able to enact at these organizations?

Norman Guadagno: Yeah, sure. And it’s a good starting place, right? Because I have been in transformational roles and I’ve done that willingly. At some point, many, many years ago, I realized that I really enjoyed the process of transformation, of being a catalyst for change in organizations. I’ve worked both in the CMO seat at multiple tech companies, as well as on the agency side. So I’ve had the perspective from both sides.

And one of the things that I learned early on was that most transformations don’t go well. It’s just reality, right? Business transformations tend not to go well. When you peel back the layers behind why they don’t go well, there’s a few things that emerge regularly. And amongst those things, the one that I personally found that I could impact was the communication around transformation. There are other reasons why they don’t go well. There’s misaligned goals, there’s unrealistic timelines, there’s all sorts of things that can slow down transformation.

But from the marketing seat, it really is about being able to use communication and clarity around what are the goals? What are we trying to do? How do we talk about ourselves? What does the brand mean? All of those things to help make transformation successful, or at least increase the likelihood that transformation will be successful. And as I went through this, in one situation after another, I found regularly that transformation is a thing that shows up at different places at different levels of acceptance or different levels of maturity in organizations.

Oftentimes companies are transforming and maybe marketing’s way up here, but sales is over here in their transformation journey. And if that’s the case, if you don’t bring them into alignment, it’s not going to work successfully. And you do that by driving that effective communication, making clear, what are we trying to do here? How are we trying to do it? Why are we doing these things?

David Maffei: It’s so funny that you say that. I think it’s so on point, especially when you talk about the separation between the different roles in these organizations. Maybe just talk, for a minute, about maybe a challenge that you found as a part of driving this. At least one of the things that I’ve found is that sometimes, as you’re trying to leverage communication to enact and be the catalyst behind this transformation, not everyone else that’s sitting next to you in the C-suite sees that communication can help with that. Maybe just talk, for a minute, about that.

Norman Guadagno: Yeah, it is true that it’s hard sometimes to get everyone aligned on exactly how you’re supposed to be doing these things. I’ll use an example without going into too many specifics because I want to protect the innocent here, or shield the guilty, whichever way you want to look at it. Going into a company which is introducing a new product, and the new product, for better or worse, competes with the existing product.

So imagine going into a company which was perhaps on a legacy platform and moved to the cloud and is trying to shift to a more cloud-based or self-serve model from a more traditional model. You can tell everyone in the company, “Hey, this is what we’re doing.” But if you don’t align the — well, let’s just say the sales incentives to that, the sellers will always sell what they make the most money on. 

David Maffei: Sure.

Norman Guadagno: We all know that. So how do you use communication as a tool and a method to help bridge that gap? To say, “Look, we understand that you’re not making as much money selling this as you might be selling that. Okay. We’ll try to address that. That is a thing that has to be addressed.” And then you have to have discussions with your revenue counterpart to make that happen. But let’s also talk about the why. Why this reality is that this one delivers you less money in your pocket. Well because we sell it at a lower price point because it’s more of a self-serve product because we’re taking and we’re shifting more of the sales burden away from you having to carry so much of the load to a little bit more of the customer having to do the work.

And over time, that should pay off for you, right? It should increase volume. It should do all sorts of other things. So that’s a how do you communicate broadly. Then when you’re in the executive meeting room and you’re having discussions, you have to be clear and transparent. You can’t pretend, as we often do, unfortunately, that things that are, aren’t. What I mean is we all know when something’s happening, but we want to try to find a different reason because we don’t like the thing that’s happening.

And that’s when you have to have hard conversations around, “Look, I know that we all want to imagine it’s because of the weather, but the reality is it’s because of this other thing that’s right in front of us that we don’t want to talk about and that’s the reality.” And so you have to have those harder conversations. I actually believe that the fewer people in the room, the harder the conversations that take place. And the more people in the room, the more you have to repeat the conversations that take place again and again and again. So it’s this interesting dynamic that goes on. And you’ve seen this yourself.

David Maffei: Yeah. It’s interesting because there’s this intersection of simplification, which can drive complexity. And I think sometimes that can get lost, but your point rings very loudly and true in my head as I’m thinking about it, where those deeper, more complex conversations that lead to the deeper and more complex communications, tend to be born from the smaller scrum meetings of the big brains who are trying to figure out how to enact that transformation that we’re talking about.

I think that makes all the sense in the world. And the wider that group gets, and I don’t say this in a negative way, but the more dilutive the communication can become from a decision-making perspective, and iIf it’s already diluted at that level, once you start to communicate the message, you’re starting with something that’s already behind the ball. So I agree with you.

Norman Guadagno: Absolutely, right. And I think we know, as marketers, as revenue and business leaders, many companies will have a chief transformation officer or an office of transformation. There’s a lot of players in business transformation. And one of the things that I always come back to is the fact that business transformation is a very complex process. It involves everyone. It involves everyone doing lots of different things. It needs critical communication.

And you cannot assume that the average person in a business, who has a bunch of tasks that are their job, whatever that may be, necessarily always remembers that they have to do that with an overlay of transformation. It’s like, “Oh yes, I know that my job is to go sell X or to do field marketing Y or to build product Z, but how do I think about it through the fact of like, ‘Oh, we’re also on this journey where, let’s just imagine, we’re moving from an on-prem business to a cloud business, or we’re moving into a new market segment.’ How do I make sure that that overlay of transformation is clear, and that we communicate it?”

And I think companies sometimes trip themselves up by making transformation goals versus making transformation an overlay or an ingredient that has to be injected into all of the goals that people already have to do. Because most sellers, marketers, developers, whatever, wake up with a set of tasks that they have to do. And there’s no task typically associated with transforming a business. There’s, how do you do what you’re doing with an eye towards a different end?

David Maffei: Yes, it’s interesting. Every transformation is, in and of itself, change, but not every change is a transformation.

Norman Guadagno: Right, that’s well said.

David Maffei: Sometimes that can get lost. You know, it’s funny, you talk about different audiences, different types of people, the different way that people consume the information. When I think about all the great work you’ve done at Mimecast, and I think about Mimecast operating at this intersection between AI and cybersecurity and human risk management. Talk to me about how you think about communicating the complexity of these technical solutions to a very diverse audience.

Because you’re really talking to a fairly diverse audience that is trying to understand what these things can mean for them, not only professionally, but also personally as they’re operating in the world. 

Norman Guadagno: Yeah and I think you’ve hit on something really interesting. It’s a lesson I probably have had to learn too many times over, but we keep learning these lessons. So in my time at Mimecast, up until I left at the end of last year, I spent a lot of time dealing with this. In my time at Carbonite, we spent a lot of time dealing with this in a specific way. I dealt with this earlier in my career at Microsoft, where my audience were software developers because I was in the developer tools business, and there was complexity here.

And one of the things I’ve learned again and again and again is that you have to be able to tease apart when you talk about how a thing works versus why and what it does. And I’ll double-click on that for a moment here. If we look at Mimecast, we look at cybersecurity in general. Cybersecurity is an incredibly complex space. There is lots of stuff going on. There’s new technologies all the time. It’s also one of the spaces which is constantly in pursuit of or being against the folks out there, the bad guys, right?

And when you have to defend against enemies who are constantly coming up with new ways to try to penetrate, it’s a nonstop cycle. So the complexity of what you do is very, very high. The why is actually super simple. Don’t allow a breach. Don’t allow whatever it may be. And we found this at Mimecast where we did an amazing job, and the company is truly phenomenal at using all of its technology, AI, traditional detection, a whole mass of things, to stop bad emails from getting through to businesses.

That, you could spend a month of deep dive on explaining how it works. But the reality is only one bad email has to get through for the customer to say, “You failed me.” And that bad email, unfortunately, almost always gets through to a CEO or a CFO because they’re being attacked all the time. This is the reality of email attacks today with business email compromise, going after the most vulnerable and highest, most influential people in the business.

So you have to be able to talk about the complexity, but when you have a conversation with someone who says a bad email got through or something happened because of that, they actually don’t care about the complexity. They care about the problem. And when you then level that up, it turned out that rule applies in almost every industry. How do you make sure that you can not retreat to the, “Well, we have a B67 processor underlying all of this that absolutely is state-of-the-art.”

They’re like, “I don’t care if you have a B98 processor.” It doesn’t matter if something happens in a way that it shouldn’t happen. In Carbonite, nobody cared about anything until the point in time when they couldn’t get back their files. And that’s the moment where they didn’t care at all about the technology we used. They just cared about, “You said that my files were backed up, where are they?” And if you can’t answer that question — so this is the, how do you teach people in an organization to think in two parallel paths? The path of, yes, sometimes I have to have a complex discussion over what things do, and the path of, sometimes I have to ignore all that and have a discussion about the reality of why people buy our products in the first place. I’m sure that’s the case at Staffbase and at other companies you’ve been at.

David Maffei: For sure. And I think you’ve touched on something that’s really interesting because, as you think about the cross-section of where marketing and sales and business operations exist and how you educate internally, as well as educate externally, I’d love to hear from you, think about talking to revenue leaders, business operation leaders, other CMOs at other large tech companies like Mimecast or like Carbonite or Staffbase or others. What’s advice that you give to them that allows them to think about towing the line between being highly technically accurate, “The B68 processor, the B98 processor, this is how it works, this is what it does,” while at the same time, being able to tell an engaging story, right?
Because that’s all of our jobs. Our job is to tell this engaging story, to be able to communicate in a way that people can connect and understand and feel fulfilled. How do you balance those two things in a world where there is so much technical complexity?

Norman Guadagno: It’s an interesting question, Dave. And it’s one that I probably have wrestled with a lot. I’m sure you have as well and many folks who are watching today have probably wrestled with this again and again. I tend to err, and I tend to have my advice to others err on the side of, look, ultimately, people care about their experience. And if you can lean into putting yourself in the shoes of the person you’re talking to, or the group you’re talking to, and think about the experience you’re creating for them, or that they want you to create for them, you will probably move away from the deeply technical and more towards the, “What is the experience?” 

I often say, and I’m quoting others in this, and I believe it to be true, in today’s world, experience equals brand. And so when you want to think about the brand that you’re bringing to the world, what does Staffbase mean? Yes, it’s all of the things that you print up, and it’s all the stuff that you do, but that’s actually irrelevant to the experience that your customers and partners and employees have of Staffbase.

So when you’re having a conversation, that’s like, “Yeah, we really want to get into the technical details.” Cool. That’s something, but particularly, for sellers or for other executives, it ultimately comes down to what’s the experience that you want that person to walk away from the conversation with? What do you want them to remember? The reality is, in every conversation we have, whether it be with someone we know, or it be with someone we just met, we’re all going to only walk away with one, maybe two things that we’ll remember from that conversation.

And we’ll always walk away with a feeling. And that feeling plus that one or two things, the facts that people remember, that’s frankly the experience. And how do we craft and cultivate that? And the other thing that is important here is to remember that if somebody wants to know something, they will usually ask a question. Don’t force-feed them the, “Let me explain why the B98 processor is fabulous.” If they accept the reality that that magical B98 processor does what it needs to do, if they have questions, they will ask. And we often fill space and time with more words in an attempt to somehow convince others of whatever truth we’re trying to peddle. It’s not always effective.

David Maffei: Yeah. I think you hit the nail on the head. And I think it’s a problem that exists not just in this sort of tech world that we operate in or this communication world that we operate in, but across the board. Whether you’re looking at how the world is operating all the way down to the way that little league organizations are run and everything in between, it’s actually fascinating.

One of the things that fascinates me about communication is the complexity of it and the different angles that communication can take on. If we think about — we go back in the “Wayback Machine” to the fun at Carbonite. Your journey at Carbonite was super interesting. You first started thinking about how to help Carbonite, on the agency side, best storytelling communicate to their customers. Then you came into the kimono, if you will, and had to think through the lens of continuing that, how do we continue to think about how we communicate to our customers?

But there was a transformation in the mix there, where the business transformed from being the, “We want to back up grandma and grandpa’s pictures,” to, “We want to save your business from going out of business.” So this B2B transformation, while at the same time, now that you’re in the kimono and in the business, now you’re thinking about not just communicating to customers, but now you’re communicating the vision of the business to employees.

So there’s a lot of moving parts there. I’d love to just hear from you: What was the biggest challenge in transitioning from thinking about how to communicate for a large tech company like Carbonite, from the outside, to then doing it from the inside with the different challenges and the business transformation that happened along the way? 

Norman Guadagno: Yes, it was a lot of transformation. You also forgot to mention the shifting from a founder CEO to an external CEO being brought in along the way as well. So there was a lot going on. It was absolutely one of the best jobs and companies I’ve ever worked for and with, and great group of people, terrific learning experience for me, because as you said, I started on the agency side where we were hired by Carbonite, and by, in fact, the interim CMO, to help transform how the story was told.

So I came in and I had to learn about business early on and help craft a story that would resonate in the market. And as we were doing that, eventually I ended up, of course, coming in and running marketing myself and having to continue that even as we went through this transformation. Let me dig into a couple of things that I learned along the way and that made that communication journey interesting and fun and challenging. And I’m sure you had your perspective on it, I think, having been there and having seen that transformation taking place. So on the agency side, and as we started working with the company, you mentioned a business that was trying to protect grandma’s photos. And I was like, “Okay, turns out — “ and I think you’re aware of this, everyone inside the company accepted as truth that grandma was actually the customer.

But we did research very early on, both when I was on the agency and then when I got there, that demonstrated that, in fact, grandma wasn’t the customer. In fact, the typical consumer customer for Carbonite was a male with at least a college degree who was making a six-figure income. And that literal truth flew in the face of that belief that the company had that the target was grandma, and therefore you should have ads that had kittens and cups of coffee spilling.

Ask yourself, “Why were those college-educated, six-figure-income people, the actual customers?” Well, because they had something to protect. Backup is actually less about the fear of losing those photos than it is about believing that the things you have warrant spending $100 a year or $200 a year to protect them. So you start to see that shift away from, “We’re going to help grandma.”

And then by the way, that was probably true when the company started originally and for the first decade or ever long of backup that was primarily in a PC-based world, but in a cloud-based world, that was slowly changing. We had to rest a little bit of the, “Hey, it’s not just grandma. In fact, it’s Dave Maffei who has things he has to protect on his computer,” and start to shift messaging away from that, “Oh, coffee might spill,” et cetera, to, “Hey, there’s valuable things to protect along the way.” 

Then as I came into the business and we started moving upmarket, did a set of acquisitions, we’re trying to really rethink how we positioned ourselves, it turns out that we began to see really that we were going to downplay more and more what the products did and spend more and more time focusing on what might precipitate your needing the products in the first place.

And you were there and you recall this. We were one of the very first data protection companies to go big and heavy on helping people understand ransomware and helping them understand that ransomware was a real threat. It still is today. It’s going to lock up all your data that you won’t have access to and your choices are either pay, start from scratch, or have backed everything up, and be able to recover from a backup.

So this interesting arc over time of really changing how the narrative existed in the world and then getting people inside the business to rethink how the narrative existed, and to embrace a new narrative, that’s really hard because people like their comfortable narratives, and the sellers liked the narratives that they had. So you had to get them to think in a broader fashion. You had them also get them to think about how partners played in that and other things along the way.

And I’m semi-proud of and sometimes laugh about the fact that I went through almost two years with Carbonite as my client and then four years leading marketing at Carbonite. And I never once had to give a demonstration of the product, and I was one of the primary spokespeople for the company. You didn’t have to demo. What you had to do is talk about the threats and the reality that good data protection would help you recover from those threats.

And that’s a cool thing when you think about a narrative in tech particularly. I never had to demo a product, I just had to tell stories. To get everyone in the business to do that was really hard.

David Maffei: It’s fascinating because the telling stories part is so powerful because, as marketers, as businesses, as sales teams, those who can tell stories the best tend to have a leg up. They tend to be the companies that are out in front, and the consumers want to hear the stories that sound the best and that are backed by the best products.

To your point a minute ago, I remember a time where one of the sellers at Carbonite actually wasn’t using the tool, even though everyone had a free license to use the tool, and ended up losing every digital picture that they had taken in college. And that ended up becoming the most powerful sales tool for that seller and for the rest of the sales team for the better part of my last year there, because it was real, it was tangible, it was authentic.

And it became this communication avenue of, “Look, forget everything you read on the billboards and everything you hear on the radios and everything you see in the emails. Let me tell you that everything I know about college is now here because I lost it all because I didn’t do it. And by the way, for me, it was free and I still didn’t do it.” And when you tell that type of a story, the connection that you can make with someone on the other side and understanding the importance of hearing and consuming the criticality of that communication is so important.

Norman Guadagno: Well said. You hit on something so important there too, which is, in every role, whether you are in marketing or HR or sales or finance, most of what you do when you’re with others is you tell stories. You may sit at your desk working on spreadsheets or writing code or doing performance reviews, but then you engage with other humans and we tell stories.

And I can’t tell you the number of times people have said, “I’m not really good at storytelling,” or, “I just need a script.” I was like, “Oh, okay.” And yet most of us actually, particularly nowadays, we tell stories every day. We post stories on Instagram or TikTok, or we craft a narrative of our life that we want others to see. And yet we somehow shy away from craft a narrative of the offer that you’re making in your company that you want others to see, and frankly, like.

And as sellers, as marketers, whatever role you’re in, move beyond the reality of the thing, whatever the thing is at Staffbase or Mimecast or Carbonite or any other company, to the value and the experience that it creates in the world. Particularly nowadays in an AI-driven world, all the things can be duplicated by someone else for the most part. There are very few truly unique proprietary things and they’re getting fewer every day.

You can take an AI and you can go write an app, have it write the app for you to duplicate the function of this thing that someone may have spent years building. So what’s the story? What’s the narrative? What’s the reason that yours should be interesting to someone? How do you get someone to see that? And going back to what we talked about at the beginning, when you talk about transformation journeys, every company right now is going through, whether they know it or not, a transformation journey of, what’s their place in a world where AI is a reality?

And those tools are going to change how people have to do their jobs. And I know I talk and write about this a lot from the marketing side, many marketers are fearful AI is going to replace them. And what I’m trying to do is help people understand that AI can be something that can augment what you do, that can accelerate what you do, that can give you the ability to zoom in and focus faster. And if you’re not thinking about it through that lens, then you’re missing the transformation journey going on, whether you like it or not.

David Maffei: It’s funny, I read something on LinkedIn just last night, and it said, as you probably know, and perhaps the viewers at home do, that ChatGPT offers a plus subscription offering.

Norman Guadagno: Yes, I saw that.

David Maffei: I think it’s $19.99 in a month. And there was a belief from Sam Altman, the CEO, that if he charged $19.99 a month for the paid service, that they would definitively make money.

The sheer amount of people, I’m one of them, that subscribe to the $20 a month service is astronomical. The reason you pay for the service versus not paying for the service is you get faster results, you get access to the latest algorithms and models, and you don’t get blocked out when the system is overloaded. Not the point of where I’m going here, but what he said was it turns out ChatGPT with their plus subscription model is losing over $200 million per month.

They arbitrarily selected a number to charge and it doesn’t cover the sheer amount that it’s being used by people. And so when you think about it on one hand, as AI affects the entire world of communication, I ask people all the time in my day job and in my life, “How do you think about AI?” and I’ll hear what you just said, which is, “Oh, I’m afraid it’s going to take my job.”

And I’ll turn that around and I’ll say, “Well, how do you think AI can help you do your job better?” And they’ll say, “Well, I don’t know, I haven’t really thought about that,” is a primary answer. Every once in a while, you’ll catch someone who’s more into tech or more into gadgets, maybe like myself and you, but most of the time, it’s, “I’m not sure.” And you see fear. You see people who are unsure.

And so I guess my question for you is, as you think about this new AI-driven landscape, as you think about how that relates to communication, talk to me about what advice you would give to today’s marketers, today’s internal communications professionals who are afraid of AI. What advice would you give them to embrace AI and how can they use that to actually do their jobs better, more efficient, more effectively? How can they become better internal communicators by embracing AI versus running away from it out of fear it’s going to replace them?

Norman Guadagno: It’s the issue on the table for us in every profession right now, certainly for marketers. My advice has been the following, and I have been emphasizing it again and again and consistently emphasizing. As long as you’re ignorant of AI, you will not only be afraid of it, you will end up losing. So first is: Move past that. And I’m going to flashback to, let’s say 20 or 30 years ago. “The internet is scary. I don’t want to go on the internet. I don’t know how to do this. I type W-W-W, dot, where’s the dot key?”

People have to just move past that. And I know it’s easier to say than to do. You have to get your hands on the tools. There are free tools, Chat GPT, Microsoft Copilot, Claude, there’s tons of great free tools. Get your hands on the tools and be a novice. Now here’s the second element of this. This is true, not just for marketers or anyone else. It’s okay to acknowledge and to be a novice. We’re all novices in this, except for the few hundred people who are truly experts in doing prompts or doing other things, a few thousand, but whatever the number is. The bulk of the world are novices.

This is a new technology happening incredibly fast. Move past novice as quickly as possible. And again, I use an example of, do you remember the first time you used Uber? “A stranger is going to get me in their car and take me somewhere. How do I use this thing? How do I know which stranger — How do I try?” Then by the third or fourth time, you’re like, “Okay, I’m in my Uber, I’m gone.” It’s like, “I think I saw that guy on serial killers for the month last night, whatever.” You just move past that.

You have to embrace playing with the tools right now. And then you have to start to think about where can the tools fit into what you do as a marketer, as a seller, as a finance person, as a business executive, and get things faster, easier, augmented quickly. Currently, I’m working as a consultant for a few companies right now, having left Mimecast last year. We’ll see what comes next. And I use AI all the time. I use it endlessly. One of the things that just recently it did for me was, I got an agreement back from one of my clients. It was a long, complex agreement over the terms and conditions and just standard SOWs and on all of those things. Then a bunch of NDAs, et cetera, et cetera. I’ve been reading and signing these things for 20-plus years, I usually know them.

But what I did was, I took that, I gave it to Claude, I happen to use Claude as my general AI, and I said, “Claude, you’re a business attorney, please review these documents and tell me the things that I should pay attention to, are unusual, or that I should ask for more clarity on.”

I didn’t ask it to solve the problem, I asked it to augment me behaving like an attorney. I know it can make mistakes, it warns you every single time you do something, it might make mistakes. It came back and it said, boom, boom, boom, “Here are the three things you should ask about.” I was like, “Oh, I didn’t catch that, I’m absolutely going to ask about those things.”

I asked about them, I got clarity. And that was a prime example of I could have spent the $400 an hour that my attorney charges me to send them the agreement, have them review it, and would they have come back with the same few things? Probably, but I didn’t need to do that, so I saved myself time and money. Everyone has to think about, “My job is changing.” And let’s roll back.

I’m reading a really fascinating book right now, just give a plug for a book, about the Challenger disaster, it’s on the New York Times bestseller list right now. Amazing, deep, deep history of everything that led up to and came after the Challenger disaster. But one of the things that I was reading about, and I was just reading this the other day, and about three-quarters of the way through the book, was the fact that the teams that were at the contractors had to prepare material, and they were hand drawing view graphs.

For those in the audience who may not know what a view graph is, like transparencies where you drew charts, because this was back before everyone had a tool like PowerPoint or Excel at their desktop where they could just generate these things right up. This is the prime example of, once we all started using Excel and PowerPoint to generate charts and graphs, we went crazy with it, and we probably generated too many, but we made that transformation.

And yes, you’re like, “You know what? I can do this and it’s perfect.” “No, it’s so much faster to do it this way.” AI is very much the way to do that, like, “These things can get done faster. Where can I apply my brain power now?” And for communication, my final point, I know I’ve gone on too much on this, but I’m very passionate about the fact that for communication, I use it all the time.

I happen to think, you can disagree if you want, that I’m a decent writer. I write a lot. I’m a crappy editor of my own material. I have my AI help me edit. It’s like, “Just take a look at this, clean it up, make sure everything makes sense.” And those simple things make me better.

David Maffei: Yes. It’s fascinating, there’s so many parallels to what I’m seeing, to what you’re saying in terms of me personally and how I’m using these tools and what I’m seeing. I was speaking with a prospective customer at the end of 2024, and they were going to do some things, and they put some things on hold, and they’re doing a big Microsoft Copilot rollout. And they said they were very, this was the CIO, and he said, “I’m very scared about this.” And I said, “Why?” He said, “Well, I think the thing that scares me the most is that I think that our people are going to — they’re supposed to be working 40 hours a week. We’re supposed to get 40 hours of efficiency out of them. And when we roll this out, I think that people are going to now start using AI, and AI is going to be working 12 hours a week, and everyone else is going to be only working 28 hours a week.”

And I said, “If you go into this mindset and this rollout, that that’s the number 1 thing on your mind, then that probably won’t ever be the thing that plays out here. But you won’t actually get any value from what you’re rolling out. But if you go into this through the lens of, think about the key areas. How can AI help internal communications accelerate communications? How can AI help external communications accelerate the editing process?” as a very tactical example.

If you think about it through that lens, you start to flip the script on, it’s not, “How do I enable someone to nor work — you know, to do 40 hours of work in 28,” it’s, “How do I enable someone to do 52 hours of work in 40?” And that’s a mindset shift, and we were just batting this around on the phone, and it was the most fun conversation I had at the end of the year. But yes, this is such a hot topic, and it’s going to continue to be. 

We’re coming up on time. I want one more question from me. Our journeys professionally, and even personally, have been very parallel, both operating in the Microsoft world for so long, entering the Carbonite world, but as an established business post-IPO, then you going to Acoustic and starting to build that from nothing, me going and starting my own business, then finding our way now on a journey back to much more established businesses.

I guess if there’s one communication lesson that you can leave the audience with, one stage piece of advice that you would say, “Hey,” if there’s one thing you put a stake in the ground and say, “This is one thing that I wish I knew 15 years ago that I know today,” what would you leave the audience with today?

Norman Guadagno: It is a great question. And we have had parallel journeys, and it’s been interesting, and I’m sure the journey ahead will continue to be interesting as well. The thing that I’ve come around to in the past few years, and that I wish that I’d known a decade ago or two decades ago, and that I continue to lean into even more is the importance of the following two concepts; one of which is transparency.

I think we all under-index on transparency for any number of different reasons, for fear, for not thinking it’s necessary. I have pulled myself further and further into the realm of I’m going to be as transparent in my communication as possible. And I try to do that in every possible way so that I believe ultimately in trusting others, and that’s the second thing, which is trust.

Creating communications that are based on trust always seems to work better than those that are not. And so thinking about trust as a real element in the entire scope of everything we do, and not just saying it, but actually saying, “Look, do I trust this other party? Do I trust this individual? Do I trust this process?” And it gets buried. Because you’ve seen this. What happens when a company goes through M&A?

Company 1 acquires company 2. That is a place where every element of success is going to come down to: Do the employees at company 2 trust what company 1 is saying to them? Do the employees at company 1 trust what company 1 has said to them? Is there a shared and transparent knowledge base that they can tap into? So trust and transparency are incredibly powerful tools to make communication at every level on an organization better.

David Maffei: Awesome. Norman, great to see you. Thank you so much for your time. A pleasure as always. I’m Dave Maffei. I hope you enjoyed this episode of Aspire to Inspire, and be sure to join us again. Thank you so much.

Norman Guadagno: Thank you, Dave.