Making An Impact, Regardless of Title

Well, then, so how did that change you, that whole experience of being laid off from your CMO job? Did you reprioritize things? Were there mistakes you realized you had made and you no longer make them? What were the tangible lessons out of that?

You know, for the first seven years of my career, I thought being a CMO would be the pinnacle of my career. I had to be a young, Asian CMO. Not a ton out there. And I wanted to do it in a way that—again, I thought the CMO role would give me the platform, would give me the voice, to make changes for my community and for the business world at large so that more people that look like us have a better route. Losing that job…

Can I ask what company this was at? Or you don’t want to say?

This was at Gap Inc.

At Gap Inc, okay.

Yeah, losing that job made me take a step back and say, “Am I still who I am? And if I am still who I am, do I still have the power to make change for the community.? And when I left Gap Inc. and I came to Facebook, I obviously wasn’t the CMO of Facebook. But I realized through that unfortunate event, and then going into Facebook, I realized I didn’t need the CMO role to make changes for my community, I realized I didn’t need the CMO role to make an impact for my community.

I didn’t need any of that. All I needed to do was understand that all of my experience, especially the failures, in aggregate, had given me a platform to make change for my community. And it wasn’t one title, it wasn’t one role, it wasn’t any of that stuff. It’s all the things that happened in aggregate. That’s what’s allowed me to speak on behalf of the industry, on behalf of my job, on behalf of the people that look like me that are in the industry to help make change. So, I think that’s what the biggest learning was for me, is that it’s not a title. It’s the people that make the title, always.