I started as a mindset and leadership coach, accidentally became a digital marketing expert, and discovered something powerful along the way:
Lack of technical skills are rarely the true roadblock to success. The core issues are always mindset, communication, and leadership.
Transcript
And selling the concrete skills of marketing was so easy. Nobody was confused about the benefits of having more prospects and sales. And in the Wild West days of the early aughts, there were fortunes to be made simply by doing a few clever things well.
As we marketers say, I was selling dollars for dimes.
But here's the twist: Once my clients learned the concrete skills—analyzing markets, writing ads and landing pages, running split tests—they still struggled.
The real bottleneck wasn’t technical competence; it was mindset, communication, and leadership.
They would set up dashboards and not check them, because they didn't really want to know how they were doing.
They would buy keyword research tools and not use them, because they were so overwhelmed with daily crises that they never took the time to be strategic.
They would hire young guns to do their marketing for them, and fail to communicate expectations or implement consequences when accountability broke down.
Ironically, what I'd set out to do from the beginning—coaching people to master their mindset, improve communication, and lead effectively—was what they actually needed to take advantage of my technical expertise.
Today, almost 25 years later, I see history repeating itself. Organizations are scrambling to adapt to disruptions—AI, literal and geopolitical earthquakes, climate chaos—and rushing to equip their workforces with skills like AI collaboration, strategic scenario planning, and complexity navigation.
Yet without the human foundations—emotional intelligence, mindset mastery, effective communication, and productive conflict resolution—organizations inevitably hit the same roadblocks I observed decades ago.
So here’s something to ponder and share in the comments:
What's your organization's most critical strategic objective for the next 18–24 months, and what human skills must your people develop to achieve it?
Need a thought partner? Let’s talk about how to equip your organization with the foundational skills needed for sustained success in the decade of disruption.
You can schedule a discovery call at howiejacobson.com.
