Interview with Perry Hewitt

What’s your golden rule?

Define and deliver the last mile. Your C-Suite, marketing leadership, and agency partners may excel at innovative ideas but your ability to define what top-tier execution looks like (from staff to technology to measurement) is often what wins the day.

What is your most hated business expression?

Not going to be able to deliver the low-hanging fruit here -- I focus more on skating to where the puck is going, so I have minimal bandwidth to get my ducks in a row here. Instead, I’m going to pushback on your request, and ask that you run that up the flagpole?  

How can marketers be braver?

By working more effectively with product management teams. We need to educate ourselves and become a trusted partners to product, because there's no longer a clean handoff from product to marketing push. There is tremendous opportunity to achieve more together through collaboration -- but it requires hard work!

What’s the biggest risk you’ve taken in your career?

I’ve alternated roles across private sector (start-ups and enterprise), education, and not-for-profit which leads to a less linear career narrative. There are different challenges in serving revenue than mission, but ultimately modern organizations need to deliver on both.

Which leader do you admire most and why?

Fred Rogers is right up there. We tend to define leadership as explicit control over organizations, their resources, and their people. Rogers was a leader through his creativity as an educator and influencer -- and he shaped history with his testimony before a Senate Subcommittee to avoid a ruinous cut to public broadcasting.

What’s your favourite word?

Gratitude. As painfully sentimental and self-helpish as that seems, I find gratitude in the small and big things shapes how you perceive the world, and fundamentally affects what you can put back into it.

What excites you most about the Society?

I am excited and inspired by the global nature of our membership -- it offers fresh perspectives which travel across continents to inform our event series. What works in Dubai may not work in New York or Singapore -- but learning about different marketing management, creative, and analytics practices provides fantastic context.

Tell us a secret?

Shamefully, I never learned to cook. Like, anything at all. So if I am pulling something out of the oven when you come to my home, my talented sister or a caterer dropped it off 20 minutes beforehand.

Read more interviews in our Clubhouse.