Growth Insights for CEOs
Chris Wallner
Recent Posts

What Is Marketing, Really? Why Founders and CEOs Must Lead the Most Misunderstood Function in the Business
Executive Takeaways
- Marketing is a core enterprise capability, not a support function, and deserves the same CEO-level engagement as Finance and Operations.
- Without a unifying system, individually reasonable decisions accumulate into random acts of marketing.
- Modern tools make execution faster, but they don't create strategic clarity, so the gap between activity and alignment keeps widening.
- CEOs can't delegate marketing entirely. Leading it means ensuring insight, strategy, and execution stay connected.
This blog is part of Chief Outsiders’ Marketing Leadership for CEOs series, an ongoing examination of the critical dimensions of Marketing (the capital “M” is intentional, as you’ll see) that every CEO needs to understand.
Recent Posts

A More Perfect Union: Four Keys to Credit Union Profitability
Thu, May 16, 2019 — U.S. credit unions are in crisis. For years, buoyed by a “hometown banking” distinction and bolstered by government regulations allowing for the expansion of their membership ranks, credit unions enjoyed unprecedented growth. In fact, just two years after President Clinton signed the 1998 Credit Union Membership Access Act, more than 10,000 credit unions dotted the landscape. But then, the technological age arrived in its full fury, delivering tools and benefits that traditional banks used to restore their edge. Though credit unions enjoyed a higher level of customer satisfaction, they were not as keen to what their customers and members were needing. This allowed the traditional banks to use enhanced technologies to raise the customer expectations bar—and close the gap.

“Less is More”: Four Steps to Aligning Your Project Queue and Goals Today
Fri, Feb 16, 2018 — There was a time in our lives when “busywork” might have been a good idea. Back in school, it was the way many of us created that semblance of subterfuge when we had expeditiously completed the assigned work, and were now just interested in writing a note to the girl two seats over.