The Road to CMO

This issue is a little different, you’ll have to click on the link below to see the infographic and full article.

Years ago I had the privilege of working for Vala Afshar when he took over as Chief Marketing Officer for our company at the time, Enterasys Networks. Shortly after that, we were acquired by Extreme Networks, and our team was given 90 days to rebrand the company. It was quite the trial-by-fire for the new CMO (oh, and our new CEO had previously been the CMO of a little company called Apple. No pressure).

Vala had a unique path to becoming a CMO. In this article on ZDNet, we detail that journey, as well as 20 other CMOs who had their own journies to the top marketing job.


Read: Where Do Successful Chief Marketing Officers Come From on ZDNet to view this week’s infographic.


This article was inspired by a tweet from Syed Ali’s tweet asking if there is a straight shot from social media manager to CMO. It turns out there are a lot of ways to get to the CMO position.

If you’re new here, thanks for stopping by. I hope you check out the archive and subscribe to get future issues delivered each week.

Thanks for reading,

-Jim

P.S. before designing the infographic, I drew each of these CMOs using Adobe Illustrator on the iPad.

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