Lessons From an “Accidental Communicator”

Shahar: Welcome to ‘Always On’, the podcast about brand reputation and data-driven communications in today’s volatile world. I am your host, Shahar Silbershatz, here in Copenhagen. And today, our guest is Ben Boyd, the CCO of Chobani, a leading and much-loved American company in the yogurt and plant-based food industry. Great to have you with us today. Welcome, Ben. 

Ben: Shahar, thank you so much for the opportunity to chat with you today. 

Shahar: Thanks for joining us. Let’s start at the very beginning. Who is Ben Boyd?  

Ben: That is the beginning. Let’s see, I guess an accidental communicator, you know, at this stage in my career. I wish I could tell you that I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. You know, I went to a great liberal arts school here in the States after growing up in a small town in the South and I decided to be an English major. My father was like, what are you going to do with that? And I said, Dad, if you can’t communicate, nothing else matters. 

I have no idea why that, in hindsight, feels now so prescient in terms of, you know, what I became and what I do. Again, it was not a linear path. I don’t think a lot of careers, if we’re honest, are necessarily linear. And I tend to think about, you know, your career and certainly mine as a series of chapters, right? And those chapters are different in length. They’re different in intensity. They’re different in lessons learned. They’re different in characters. Sometimes we bring those chapters to an end. Sometimes they’re brought to an end for us. We probably go into each of those chapters… I certainly did… thinking that I knew how it was going to unfold and what the story would be. 

But I think the magic of a career is sort of leaning into the unexpected and letting it unfold for you. So, you know, I’ve been agency side, for the bulk of my career and then, for the past six years, I’ve been in-house. Lowe’s Home Improvement, a US-only operation in the home improvement space, a Fortune 34. So, a giant, giant company in that regard. Peloton, which I would think a lot of your folks would know about. I came in there to be a part of the turnaround. I think the turnaround is still happening. 

And then my phone rang to join Chobani. The commonality between the three, and I think where I’m incredibly lucky in my career, is all three are brands that I had a personal passion and interest in, for various reasons. So, I guess that in a nutshell is, is me and how I got here. 

Shahar: That sounds very fortunate to actually be associated with brands that you have a personal connection with. But let’s rewind to the very first chapter in this career that you’re talking about, the accidental communications career, which is a nice definition. So what got you into the first chapter, into the communications field? And how do you feel the field has changed since then?  

Ben: It’d probably be wrong, Shahar, to say that the first chapter was communications. I think that, what I did was, I took a job in our US Congress working for a member. And I was what was known as a special assistant. 

This was a real first job out of college, which basically meant you did everything from, you know, bring coffee to, you know, give tours of the capital to, you know, whatever the member needed. And as I was there, over time, my opportunity grew and I ultimately wrote a few speeches, having been an English major and at that point sort of crazy and confident and, you know, in my young career stage. And so sort of found myself doing what are comms things. It’s not uncommon in the States for that political background, where you’re talking about campaign and messaging, to then morph into a communications campaign. 

And that’s in essence what happened, more or less. I then found my first agency job at Hill & Knowlton. And so I think what excited me about communications, and I’m going to say the opposite of what you asked me… what I still think is the magic of what we do is how do we take the complex and simplify it and make it accessible to the audiences that matter most for whomever we’re working for, right? 

Be that a brand like Chobani, a member of a political party, right? A non-governmental organization, an issue advocacy organization. And how do we do that as simply and as effectively as possible? Now, what’s changed, I think, which was your question, is the complexity of making it simple, the challenge of making it resonant and more the challenge of reaching those audiences. 

Shahar: Yeah, and the complexity is part of what’s making it more and more challenging today to be in the communications field. We call this, you know, we call this podcast ‘Always On’ because we find that communicators and companies today have to continuously, constantly be on and be able to react and be able to perform in a very agile way because the world is moving fast and there’s a lot of expectations. How do you find that affecting your role, and how do you find that you and your company are “always on”? Are you “always on”? 

Ben: Yeah. I think, you know, as communicators, right, words… words really matter. So “always on”, and what that means to me may mean something different than you. That’s the starting point, I think. I’m forever paying attention, so I think I’m “always on” from a curiosity standpoint. I think I’m “always on” from a “data in” standpoint, right? My Instagram feed, my New York Times reading, right? My reading of the Economist, my reading of the FT, right?

I’m not as regimented in some of those as I am in others. I think as a function, which is a different way to also look at your question, I have a team of 20 and my expectation is that they are similarly absorbing and processing and thinking about data and information. And I have a similar expectation, a bit more focused for my agency partner, relative to “always on” from a monitoring standpoint, specifically about the Chobani brand, right? 

A great example, because it’s not always as obvious, right, something that may or may not be relevant to the story, to the reputation that you’re managing, just… was it last week? I completely stumbled upon a long-form article. I’m not a big long-form person, by the way. I love Axios’s Smart Brevity. Shout-out to that team. I think what they’ve… how they’ve captured concise, accessible information is pretty unprecedented, and I think they’ve changed a lot of things. 

So longform is something that it takes a bit for me to get into, but there was an article that I stumbled upon last week in these wormholes that we find ourselves in, as we go from story to story, about mass deportation in the US and what that could mean for the dairy industry, specifically in southern Idaho. What you and, you know, your viewers may not know is the bulk of our milk, our raw milk, comes from southern Idaho dairy farms. And so I could tell you a lot about what I learned in that, right? Like, for example, if the herd is not milked, those cows become damaged. So you can’t just wait to milk them in order to keep the production [00:08:00] high. 

And so, you know, the threat of mass deportation and then certainly the follow-through in mass deportation becomes a significant business risk for Chobani, for the dairy… for any dairy manufacturer, right? And so that’s just an example of like… I wasn’t cited in the article, right? Yogurt wasn’t called out in the article. 

But I think in that sort of curiosity and connecting the dots and sort of the consciousness that, you know, being conscious as we move through the world, I think that’s just an example of, like, what became a really important story for me to share internally around, you know, a very well-researched piece of journalism… I think those are fewer and farther between these days… that, you know, just sort of explained what might happen, in ways and dimensions that I might not think about sitting here in Manhattan. 

Shahar: So, what are the tools that you use in order to be “always on” in that way, that you’re being alerted to things that matter to you and that you help build the reputation and the brand?  

Ben: I think, unfortunately… this is just my honest view… we’re drowning in tools right now. And I’m really struggling on how to sort them. Everybody says they can do everything and then that’s not what I find. And so it’s like, how do I put together the right pieces and parts? And that’s a part of what we’re going through here from a pure tech stack standpoint to your question around tools. But that’s been frustrating, right?

To just try to peel back the layers and the promises and the claims relative to what’s the real expertise. It’s also just not as efficient as I think it could be or really, from a tech standpoint, should be. But, you know, that’s one angle. I think my number one tool is my own curiosity and my expectation of my team to be curious. Of course, you know, I use Google Alerts and that, you know, is helpful and useful. 

I also think that, you know, at times the algorithms that sometimes drive us crazy can also sometimes feed us, you know, things that are helpful. So I wish I had a really elegant answer to your question about tools. But I think that, in this age of AI, you know, which is continuing to impact so much of what we do, so much of the tools, the tech tools that we’re talking about, you know, I tend to be… this could be a generational thing… I tend to just… I tend to rely on my human tools of my team. 

And I have an expectation that, from their vantage points, right? So I have folks who are first job out of college, to someone on my team who’s been here a decade and is a little bit older than myself. So my thesis is, across this team of 20, we’re all reading and consuming different outlets. We’re on different social platforms. We’re running in different circles. We have different beliefs. This is where diversity becomes so important, right? 

My job is not to question those perspectives or where they live. My job is to say, “Hey, when you’re on this team, I’m looking to you to constantly infuse what you’re hearing, what you’re learning, what you’re seeing, right, so that collectively we’re smarter than just what I’m seeing.”  

Shahar: But what data points do you use? Because I imagine when you have this overview that you need to keep track of the whole time, I imagine that you have certain data points that you say, “These are the data points we really want to keep our eyes on.” What are your key indicators or key data points that you look at?  

Ben: Well, we do have some social listening tools that’s a part of our customer care platform, right? So we want to understand if we have issues as it relates to quality or anything along that lines, being a consumer packaged-goods company. 

So, I think, in that sense, Sprinklr plays a role, just specifically on the platform that we use there from a listening standpoint. I’d say more than not we’re happy with what we get there. I think, you know, sometimes it’s also… You know, having been agency-side, right, it’s like, “Are we giving the right care and feeding?” Because these aren’t just “flip a switch” platforms. This is only a 20-year-old company that only started selling products 15 years ago, and while it feels like an older brand, and probably not to a lot of your European, you know, viewers, because we’re not in Europe, by and large. It continues to grow and it’s global scale. We’re in the US, we’re in Canada, we’re in Mexico, a little further south into LatAm, some exploratory markets. Australia, a manufacturing facility and a big market for us. And from that Australia facility, some, you know, test markets in Southeast Asia. 

But because… if I know the quality of the product is great, you know, I’m mostly looking at brand awareness, brand recall, household penetration, repeat purchase, right? And so I do that sort of in lockstep with our marketing team. And we look at those metrics probably on a quarterly basis, in the way that we field. I think, you know, certainly from my time at Peloton, you need longer lines to really understand the momentary blips. And so I think this business is probably a little less episodic than that. 

But that’s sort of the key measures that we track. I don’t… we’re currently not a heavy metric-based company. Building stronger global analytics will be a real important part of the remit of our next CMO. We’re currently filling that role and that’ll be done in partnership. I’m trying not to get out on my skis, if you will, of solving a problem that needs to be solved in an integrated fashion. 

Shahar: And what about the corporate reputation side? Do you look at other stakeholders beyond consumers and shoppers in terms of the data that you track?  

Ben: Not in terms of data. Again, I think we’re trying to build some baselines. I did not walk into a company that had strong reputation tracking. We certainly looked at that more at Lowe’s when I was there and certainly more at Peloton when I was there in terms of, you know, really metric-based and data-driven enterprises. That’s a rigor that I think we’re trying to… there’s a little bit of a 20-year-old company, right, of trying to grow up and do that in ways that is not learning the lessons. 

That’s part of why I’m here, right, as I’ve learned some lessons before, so now how do I bring those lessons to bear? I think that’s how you can go through a complete transformation in six months of a functional team, right? And so I think that, you know, we also have a pretty remarkable founder-CEO, and so there is the rhetorical question that we all have dealt with, right? Is the CEO the brand, you know, what’s the interplay between the two? I think his story, his reputation and his profile certainly, you know, creates and accrues value to the consumer brand in terms of reasons to believe and differentiation, right?  

Shahar: For sure. And on that point, it’s actually interesting because your brand and your company has a certain aura around it. A little bit, I guess, like some other brands out there that are very known for either being philanthropical or being very much connected to the community. Yeah, in today’s world, what would you say are the reputational risks or challenges for a company like Chobani, when you look ahead?  

Ben: Well, that’s an important and somewhat loaded question, right? I think it is increasingly difficult to be a company that operates in the consumer sphere and unabashedly is clear about your values, right? In an increasingly polarized world, not just the US, but, you know, we look at what’s happening across the globe in terms of elections in 2024, I think there’s such frustration with what has been perceived as an unfair status quo. 

And so there is a crave for change. We can get into, and we may, right, what is truth and misinformation? And so let’s just set that aside. I think, and again, I’m going to speak more from a US perspective in terms of these examples, but I think they’re globally large enough that they’ll resonate, right? What I call the move by brands in the post-George Floyd era, right? 

So we went through a pretty significant social reckoning in this country along racial lines in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death, murder. And a lot of companies, I think, found it easy to move into an embrace of diversity, equity, inclusion, right? I believe in hindsight, and we tend to talk about these things only in the current, I believe in hindsight that that was a market move. That that was viewed easier to do because the cultural zeitgeist was there, right? Because of the outrage around what had happened. 

And so companies, in some cases, rushed to say, “oh, you know, I’m for this, I’m going to have a chief diversity officer”, right? And again, I think those weren’t authentic, values-based moves. I believe that a lot of those were commercial moves. So I think that the question today in this country around the number of companies, the number of brands that have stepped, walked that back — “We’re no longer doing that. We’re not going to have this role. We’re not going to have these metrics. 

We’re not going to have these employee resource groups.” — is exactly the same. And so I’ve worked for three brands now, very different in their view of their role in society, and you know, one of those brands was extremely clear on the prioritization of profit at all costs. So if you’re really… if your goal is to maximize the cash register, right, to maximize sales, then values, I don’t really think values has a big role to play in your commercial operation. Internally, maybe. I don’t know that I’ve seen it, because I don’t know how you live that with deep conviction internally and not have that resonate externally. 

So I think the answer to your question is, you know, without question, just living your values creates reputational risk, right? The belief in diversity, the belief in the value of refugees as, you know, employees who bring tremendous value to the enterprise, right? And the belief that once a refugee gets a job, they’re no longer a refugee, they’re a citizen who contribute and embed into the fabric of of their community. 

And so there can be, there can and probably will be a lot more said about this company and its commitment to those things that it believes in, and for some people that will be a dealbreaker in the same way that for Patagonia, certain people won’t buy their product. Certain people will. And I think that the companies that are moving inauthentically around these societal conversations, right, they’re going to struggle the most because they’re going to be pulled back and forth and back and forth, as opposed to going in their direction. 

And if you go in your direction, then I think you’re prepared for the blows that you will inevitably take, right? The things that are said about you, the potential boycotts, and you will go into those with resilience, believing, you know, that what you did was for good reason and with merit.  

Shahar: So, what you’re talking about is a little bit what we sometimes refer to here in Europe as the “woke backlash” in America, right? Because I guess a lot of people see you as a “woke brand”. I don’t know if you see it that way, but at the end of the day, as you say, there is an issue of a lot of movement against some of the things that have happened over the last few years, which puts you at the forefront and maybe exposes you as a company more than in the past. 

So you’re saying that one of the ways to handle that, if I hear you correctly, is that you’re basically staying true to your values and staying authentic and not veering left and right based on what people want. Are there other steps that you take in order to guard against those risks when it comes to the reputation of the company?  

Ben: I think you’re getting to what I think is a core responsibility of the chief communications officer, right? I think it is our job to ensure that, before the steps are taken, that we’re putting out there for the leadership team the possibility of what can happen, right? From a reputation standpoint, from a public reaction standpoint. You’re never right. You’re never 100 percent right. Sometimes you’re just not right. 

But I think I believe it is our job to be a little bit of the conscience of the organization. And I mean that more from the, you know, when I think about the decision, you know, think about some of the hardest decisions, ethical decisions that you’ve made in your life, not the easy ones, not the slam dunks, but the ones that were like, “Uh, really?” about your values, right? You had a little, you know, source of question and intrigue on this shoulder and a counterbalance on this shoulder.

 And, you know, I think the chief comms officer has to be both. It’d be really easy to say, “Oh, do this, look at how great this is”, right? That’s a part of it. “Here’s the upside. Let’s do that as agnostically as possible, devoid of emotion.” But also it is our responsibility to point out the downside, in terms of what, you know, what could be the ramification of that commitment, of that decision, of that proclamation, of that endorsement. 

I don’t think comms by and large, from a business strategy standpoint, is a decision-making function. I think comms is a decision-informing function, and I think strategic decisions taken without communications input and provocations is probably not the most informed decision that it could be.  

Shahar: So would you say in that context that the CCO role has evolved in the sense that the perspective of the CCO now is more integral to business decision-making than it was, let’s say 10, 20 years ago, because of all of these issues that are coming to the fore, which are issues of potential impact on the company’s reputation, social issues, political issues, geopolitical issues as well. Would you say in that sense that you see the CCO’s role being very different today from what it was in the past when you started out? 

Ben: You’re asking a CCO, right? So I absolutely do. I think the real question and how it manifests in the business environment is, does the CEO believe that? Does the CEO accept that greater complexity? Does the CEO embrace the CCO’s true horizontal perspective within the enterprise and the ability for it, for, I think, you know, the right CEO to bring those pieces together, connect the dots, sometimes in partnership with the general counsel, sometimes in partnership with the CFO, sometimes in partnership with the chief marketing officer, because those are different dimensions of risk. 

But if the CEO doesn’t create that empowerment, doesn’t embrace that role, and that can be a really difficult role that requires a great deal of courage, and at times you’re like, “am I walking into a shredder?”, right, and “this is going to be my last meeting here”, and that’s where you have to know your CEO, because they may not have the appetite, and there are times where, okay, I’m not going to be heard. 

So then it’s a question of, can someone else be heard, right? If I feel passionately that this needs to be considered, can someone else be heard, right? Is there a counselor outside who would say exactly the same thing? And we’ve all had that, right? I had it when I was at the agency. “Ben, can you come in and talk about this?” I now have called some of my counselors and said, “Hey, Steven, can you come in and say this? If I say it, it’s not going to be heard in the same way.” And so that is a part of doing the job as well. It’s just, I think, understanding the dynamics. It’s not as simple as like, “Oh, wow, this is complicated. This is what I need to put on the table.” And then you go put it on the table. The “how” you put it on the table, the “when” you put it on the table, is probably more important or as important as the “what”. 

Shahar: And that also leads to another topic, which is a much talked about topic, “the seat at the table”, because if you don’t have a seat at the table, you’re less likely to be heard. You actually have that seat at the table, but a lot of people in the industry don’t. What is your advice to your peers when it comes to how to get the seat at the table? 

Ben: Spend less time worrying about not being there and spend more energy creating desire for you to be there. So that’s a nice little saying, right? What does that mean? I think communications, yeah, I think communications… this is what I say to my team. One thing that is the only commonality across every single place I’ve worked over my entire career is the somewhat dysfunctional nature of how processes don’t exist or aren’t followed or, you know, fill in the blank, right? So when you’re working on big, complex things, and a lot of things today are just more complex based on what we’re talking about in the way the world is moving. 

I think communications has that horizontal perspective. So I believe, and I expect my team to be what I call the convener. I don’t wait on someone to convene the cross-functional table. I convene the cross-functional table. Not to own it. Not to decide, but to be the facilitator. And if my motivations, if my colleagues know that my motivation is to facilitate thoughtful, honest collaboration and partnership for the best possible outcome, they’re going to come to that table. If they think it’s about ceding power and I want to be more important, they’re not. Right? 

So be clear and be honest about your ambitions for setting that table. But I have found that, over the course of my career, as I have calmed down, as I have, you know, become more thoughtful, as I have increased in my confidence and my ability to ask important questions, I have been at that table more often than not, because of how I’m experienced. I think when I was younger, I think I was intensely driven. I don’t apologize for that. It’s a part of my success. 

That was felt and experienced in an extremely different way. And it wasn’t always felt in the most partnering of ways. So I can still be intense, but I’ve certainly tried to embrace a more measured approach to conversation, to conflict and to collaboration. 

Shahar: So one of the tips is: be less competitive and more collaborative to get that seat at the table.  

Ben: Yeah, but also, in doing that, be confident that you have the right and I believe the responsibility. And those are different things, right? In some instances, if you work at an enterprise that doesn’t have that cross-functional, and everybody’s having these bilateral conversations, I guarantee you that will be a less effective outcome final decision. 

Everyone won’t be on the same page going into that final decision, right? And so I don’t want to boil this down, but just how do we navigate this issue, right? It was most recently here in the US the United Nations General Assembly week, you know, Climate Week. 

A big convening gathering that I’m sure a lot of your viewers will understand, and our CEO, being a global business leader, a global philanthropist, right, and a global entrepreneur, you know, could have a lot of different opportunities. You know, I convened a marketing team, a legal team, our impact team, our people team to come together on a weekly basis, driven, led by someone on my team to kind of chart the strategy for that week. 

We ended up with 21 different appearances. There was reason, rationale, around those. Internal communications was at that table, because how did we bring those stories inside? And how did they become sources of inspiration for, you know, for our people? And so I think it should become more of a best practice for how comms can help facilitate better programmatic execution within the enterprise where comms has a central role to play. 

Shahar: That’s interesting. And, to me, that also touches on the multi-stakeholder dimension of corporate communications today. And you obviously work in a B2C industry. You’re in the food industry and talking and listening, probably most to consumers, but also your role encompasses a lot of other stakeholders that have an impact on your company and that’s also what makes your voice different inside the company because, as you said, you represent a lot of different dimensions. How do you see that multi-stakeholder environment in your case? What are the stakeholders that you care about beyond the consumers? And how do you engage them? 

Ben: Strengthening the way that we think about and talk about stakeholders here is sort of front and center for me right now, strategically as a function, right? I think that, you know, what folks may not realize is, and I’m not sure if there’s a parallel in European markets, in the US, we have a profession called registered dietitians, RDs, right? They work within the healthcare environment, within the healthcare industry, but they’re the most trusted source of information about nutrition. They’re also the most quoted source of insights by media, right? 

So, over the past three months, we’ve started an initiative to really engage those registered dietitians, to just share the insights that we have around the food science that we use every single day, which enables us to have, you know, no preservatives, no artificial colors, flavors, right? Less sugar, higher fiber, in the product that we put on the shelf. And so there’s commercial interest in that, right? But again, I think it’s based… first and foremost, you know, there’s a legitimacy to our claim. There’s science behind that. 

And so I think mapping stakeholders is really, really critical. Our public affairs team, which is a part of our impact function, very clear on a couple of different things, right? Our local communities, where we’re deeply entrenched and committed, right? So that’s upstate, sort of near the Canadian border, in upstate New York, is where our original plant was. 

Then we have a plant in the western part of the US and in southern Idaho, called Twin Falls. We have our La Colombe brand, which we purchased about a year ago, which is a boutique coffee brand here in the States. That’s based out of Philadelphia and their manufacturing facility is in Michigan. And so, you know, those city, county, state and national elected officials become very, very important from a stakeholder engagement standpoint, right? 

And how we engage them is really important, especially at times like this, right? Our election is a week from tomorrow, so it is a very heated time. And so, you know, sometimes those stakeholders want to engage us and be visible. We need to think about that in both directions. I certainly think of media as an important stakeholder set. I think I’ve spent a lot of wasted hours in my career debating is media channel or a stakeholder? I think anybody that has…  

Shahar: Both, no?  

Ben: Yeah, exactly. And I think of anybody that has a pen and an opinion, you know, I think of them as a stakeholder. And so I try not to think of it as a transactional relationship. I tend to think of it as, who is that handful of folks that I need to stay in touch with around, you know, both happenings, but also just day in day out, what are you hearing? What’s interesting you, you know, what’s of interest to you, et cetera? 

And so those are more conversational in nature. I don’t think currently we have… I think that, again, this was a belief when I was agency-side, and certainly some companies probably do, right? A very thoughtful stakeholder map with, you know, matrix and, you know, who’s responsible. I haven’t seen that with the rigor in-house that I assumed existed when I was agency-side, meaning holistically. I certainly think what we’re doing right now with registered dietitians is strategic, is purposeful, is intentional and is planned. 

I think then we need to lay on that physical fitness trainers because they’re another source of information, et cetera. So I think you can build this out over time. So I think that’s sort of where we are on this learning curve and this engagement curve around building and deepening our stakeholder relationships. 

Shahar: And I guess alongside that, probably you’ll also be accumulating more data points on all of these stakeholders so you can have a broader view?  

Ben: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think our first… you know, we went to a trade show, a gathering of these registered dietitians, and that was the first conversation we’d had, you know, with them, and so we had a booth, we had product giveaway. We were available. We were clear on our desire to build a network of them. We had a way for them to hear from us. 

You know, I don’t think… we didn’t go into that first engagement without a plan, right? So now we’ll have a quarterly communication. We will research. We’ll ask them their opinions and some structured research. We’ll share that back to them, freely, on this is what we heard from you and this is the dissonance with what we’re hearing, you know, with the American consumer. It can’t be transactional to be effective.  

Shahar: What about this trend of companies and CEOs being vocal on social and political issues? You mentioned that obviously you have a company brand that’s tightly associated with the CEO brand. How do you decide, in terms of giving advice to your CEO, for example, how do you decide what topics you should weigh in on and what not and how and when?  

Ben: In a way, I think, Shahar, you asked two questions, right? Which is what the brand should weigh in on, and what the CEO should weigh in on, if the CEO is of the mindset that their brand and voice is different and distinct. Now, that’s a third question. 

Do we believe in today’s world that it can be? My job, first and foremost, is the brand voice. So I have developed a process. I actually believe process is not a bad word. And so we have a scorecard. We have a small team of half a dozen people, including our chief people officer, our chief legal officer, and a few… myself is the quarterback, as the, you know, the facilitator of this process. When an issue arises and we ask our employee resource groups to sort of be on the front lines of, like, flagging things that may happen that, you know, that engage and concern their communities, that’s a great safety net. 

It’s not their responsibility to find it, but it’s just a way to bring employees into the process. When that instance, when we have that instance, we deploy that scorecard and get a baseline of folks’ perspective across nine questions as it relates to the issue at hand. And for me, on a scale of one to 10, which is “we absolutely should say nothing” to “we absolutely must be as vocal externally as humanly possible”, and I’ve never gotten a one and I’ve never gotten a 10, it gives me a center of gravity for how these senior leaders from very different perspectives are leaning into, you know, this question. 

If you have a diverse leadership team, you probably also have diversity of representation. So it’s not just a legal opinion, but it could be the legal opinion of a Latina woman, right, by way of example. So all of that comes into… there’s not rocket science. There’s not great wizardry behind these nine questions. They’re more directional in nature. 

If my average is a seven, which would lean towards engagement, and I have a couple of twos and threes, my job is to call them and understand the dissonance, right? Then we bring that group together and that group ultimately convenes around a recommendation to the CEO as it relates to the brand voice.  

Shahar: That’s quite structured, by the way, I mean in terms of what I hear. That’s a good process.  

Ben: Yeah, I think it’s not meant to… it’s meant to be directional, not diagnostic, right? And so it’s…  

Shahar: I guess it’s meant to tap into a certain collective wisdom, right? Because as you say, there’s a lot of this diversity of voices that you need to hear before you make a judgment on that.  

Ben: Yeah, quickly as well, right? So the scorecard has to be completed within 12 hours of getting it and if you’re not here, we know who your designee is, right? So we try to make sure that that table is consistent every time.  

Shahar: And does the CEO follow your advice?  

Ben: In every one of my instances, and this applies to the agency, the CEO is the decider, right? And that’s an audience of one. And they may have a particular passion and point of view that is different or disconnected or aligned. And so I think that what I’m ultimately trying to do is bring a collective perspective from a group of individuals that the CEO already knows and respects relative to their areas of expertise. 

So, again, I think it is a decision-informing process, not a decision-making process. The CEO for the brand voice and the CEO for their own voice, I think ultimately are going to decide, and those debates are different every single time. I mean, I think the level of intensity, the level of belief, the level of nuance, every single time is different.  

Shahar: And I’m sure they’re also more and more frequent. 

Ben: Yeah, and I think it’s rare that you get it a hundred percent right, meaning you’re probably going to disappoint someone, right, either because you said something and they wish you hadn’t, and they don’t understand why you did, or you opt to not say something and then that is, “Well, why? Why did you need to weigh in on this matter?” 

Shahar: My last question to you is… so we covered a lot of grounds and talked about being “always on” — and by the way, this process also sounds like a component of the “always on” nature of your function — how do you switch off?  

Ben: My husband and I are extremely fortunate. We have a farm, I guess you would call it, about two hours due north of the city. And so I go and put my hands in the dirt and I ride on my tractor and I do a lot of things that you probably wouldn’t think that a guy who lives in Manhattan does, and I find that, you know, just being out in nature and in the ground, quite literally, to be extremely cathartic, and to be the most important way that I can personally, both emotionally, physically, you know, and to a degree spiritually, like, find a break, right? And so I really protect that. I really protect that time. 

Shahar: That sounds great. Ben, it’s been a real pleasure having you. Thank you so much for sharing your time with us and your wisdom. Very happy to have your perspective on all these issues, so thanks again.  

Ben: Thank you so much, Shahar. I really enjoyed it.