The lines blurred sometime in the last 10 years, but I don't know exactly when it happened.

 

Having started my first business at 25 years of age, specializing in technology marketing, I thought I had it all. A marketer who understood technology marketing and who could talk the talk which at that time seemed to be, the height of the dot com boom, the most lucrative marketing position one could hold.

 

Then of course, someone came along and started talking about company culture, and marketers took a turn to start embellishing the on-boarding process of new recruits, with a mixture of "people marketing" with "technology marketing" - and for a time, that was all the rage. It seemed to be the only thing people were talking about and marketers starting play a role in human resources, giving recruiters and in-house HR managers the tools to "sell their brands" like they were a front line sales executive needing to close the deal in order to reach their quotas.

It’s happened to all of us at some point, where we are at a meeting and have lost our train of thought, forgotten the name of our colleague or the person we are meeting with, or just forgotten important details that we really need to remember.

Whether you are a small company or a large one, you and your team can do better. If you look at the best companies in the world, they always invest in training their staff and in particular, their managers.