Charlie Cossad:

[00:00:00] If you're going to do your website, inconsistencies are a mouse click away, and you've gotta be super concise with what you're saying to people to get their attention. You need someone out there who's gonna call you out on things. You need someone out there who's gonna challenge you, but they're also gonna provide a couple of gems along the way. But a good salesperson has a natural instinct for position in any given situation. They understand what differentiates.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:00:36] Charlie, welcome to Rethink Change. We're here today to talk about your experience with Navigating Change. I've known you for a long time and know there are a million stories that can go on and on, but I wanna focus on some of your greatest hits. But before we do that, if you could give me the Reader's Digest summation of your career.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:00:57] B orn and raised Upstate New York Family Farms. Pretty basic upbringing. Syracuse mechanical engineer, uh, was encouraged to continue. Went to Princeton Aerospace Engineering, worked there for a period of time, kind of had a decision to make. This is the late seventies. Do I want to. Be an engineer in the United States Aerospace. That was the home of it, really. Or I just had this, I just had this itch of sense of adventure. I just wanted to do more and see more and whatever. So I found a company called Schlumberger, uh, and Schlumberger Oil Field Services, who some may be familiar with, but basically the oil industry, the way it works in short oil companies decide where and how to drill, what to do.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:01:34] But they outsourced the construction of oil and gas wells that's outsourced. And so Schlumberger at the time. Was a down hole measurement company, so I joined them. Went out of, from university straight to Indonesia. I spent over the course of that time, and maybe I'll, I'll work in one comment on change here. I always wanted to do something different, so I did a 38 year career with Schlumberger, which encompassed. 15, 20 countries or so, added a French wife and two expat kids along the way. But I always changed into different things in my career. I moved into different business lines. I moved into different functions. I crossed over most of the whole company, including it and fact and, and then, uh, that took me up through kind of the sweet spot of the oil industry. If you were, if you will, post air boil embargo up through 2016 was when I left, got found by an AI company, which Ward was instrumental in. And I did another three years of work and I've been consulting ever since. So along the way with the two expat kids who decided to stay in Europe, I'm now a sim, almost retired in France, living the dream. It's pretty good.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:02:37] You've had many, many exciting change driven jobs. Let's start with some that you think are the most. Interesting and impactful.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:02:46] The very, very specialized part of the oil industry I started in and spent my first eight years in. It became boring to me, quite frankly. You know, measuring the earth and the subsurface, eh, after a while it's a bunch of squiggly lines and I like the technology and everything, but there's more out there. And as luck would have it, uh, some competitors came along that really threatened some of that business, and I got picked to head up. The response to that competitive threat in Southeast Asia in the Far East, and that pivoted my career in a way that affected it. Decades later. So I went from making the measurements in the earth part of the company, to the plumbing part of the company to bring oil and gas to surface. So all of a sudden I moved across and I went back in my career to actually be in more of an operational mode and hands-on mode on rigs, you know, doing things in the field out there, you know, uh, where the sharp end is.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:03:43] Then I can fast forward for you a bit. So that suddenly gave me an expertise that was somewhat unique in the company. So then my next assignments were to have responsibility where that new business they had gone into was either floundering or a new opportunity to grow. And that put me in the Middle East for five years. And so after 11 years in the Far East, five years in the Middle East, centered on this activity of testing wells, completing wells, bringing hydrocarbon to surface in a controlled way so that suddenly in the early 1990s, a lot of the oil companies recognized there were certain things that were not their core business. So they really should have the service sector take these things on. And I think that's a general trend in every industry there is out there. At some point, large companies realize, you know, I don't really need to be doing that. I should outsource that. And so that in the early nineties when the. Attitudes of certain large oil companies, specifically in this case, BP and Shell was, you know, we really think the project management of this, we think the supply chain management of this, this whole activity that really belongs in the service sector. And when they sort of came forward and. Took that position. The company was somewhat caught flat footed. They thought we did see this coming. I mean, what, what? I mean, we don't do that. And so they looked around and as luck would have it, the president of the Europe, part of the company was my old boss in the far East. And, and those, those wonderful famous four words, I know a guy. So I suddenly got plucked and shipped to Aberdeen, Scotland. In 1992, and that was really the start of when the Service sec, the classic service sector of the oil industry, began to do things that were traditionally an operator responsibility. Because of the combination of my own background and my embrace of that, my curiosity for everything. If there was about constructing oil and gas wells, we had great success with that as a company. We went from, you know, nothing to dominating the whole market for integrated services and took our lessons in one work in Venezuela.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:05:47] We wanna work in Canada, we wanna work, you know, pretty much everywhere with that sort of model of how the service sector can suddenly start to take on this expanded scope in an effective way and deliver. Then I ended up in, uh, in, in an oil, in an oil field. Service role, but then seconded to vp. So I worked as an operator, and then you get a real education, you know, you, you end up with a very, very different responsibility. I was one of the people that understood what it was to have the responsibility and the duty of care that goes with being in an oil and gas company in the extreme, because I was in a drilling manager, you know, where they're out there making the holes in the ground. You're putting people out there in, uh, situations where it's, you know, it can be dangerous. So I ended up with, uh, six years experience roughly. That world. And so when I came out of it, uh, naturally they were looking at me as someone that, you know, you just have a certain unique knowledge base now that doesn't really exist in a widespread factor of the company at all. And then I ended up in a position to where the rest of my career was kind of charted out as kind of a strategy guy and, and expand the scope of the company guy.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:06:56] And so that takes us to. 1998 when, when the company, basically, we had acquired a company that had a large portfolio in a whole new area that was completely new to the management team. And so I was one of the ones that kind of knew that intimately and ended up in that. And then if you jump ahead Ward, when we worked together, we got to know each other well beyond the few odd interactions. At the time, but that sort of jumps in to 2010 when the company yet again had a very large acquisition that took it from not only am I doing the measurements of the earth, not only am I doing the plumbing to get the oil and gas out of the ground, but now I'm gonna make the holes in the earth. I'm gonna actually construct the oil and gas well complete, which was the Smith acquisition for drilling a drilling portfolio.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:07:41] That was 2010. And then, so for me, every five to seven years, I seemed to step into something that was new to the company that they were trying to figure out how do we integrate? This into the portfolio. That was sort of how I transitioned to marketing and how you and I worked together and had some of our better successes because, okay. There's the practical side of it is how does all this technology fit together? What goes where in the company portfolio such that it makes logical sense in terms of delivering to clients, in terms of developing and enhancing technology. But then there's also, how do you tell the story? How do you explain to companies the logic of what you did here as a corporation and why it's good for investors?

Charlie Cossad:

[00:08:24] And so that pivot for me into marketing took a big step right around in 2010 or so, where I started to be lessen the side of the business and the operations, the integration there, and more on the side of telling the story.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:08:38] That must have been a big challenge, honestly, to get from engineer mindset into a communication mindset. What, what were some of the challenges with that?

Charlie Cossad:

[00:08:47] Some of the biggest ones were really simplifying things down in your communications to be, to ruthlessly simplify things in a way that in the first 30 seconds of starting a conversation, you, you have someone who wants to make that conversation, lasts 10 or 15 minutes. How do you do that? And I would say another very big challenge is that a little bit that he, who's good with a hammer, thinks everything is a nail. People like to talk about what they're an expert in. People like to think what they're expert in is the most significant thing in a given situation, which is simply, you know, we all, we know that's not true, but that doesn't.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:09:25] Changed the behavior of a lot of people in terms of how they think about these things. And, and of course ultimately the biggest challenge is human behavior because when you buy a company, yes, you buy a company and, and everything I said so far spoke to the technology and the hardware and the systems that you bought, but in fact, you bought a brand, you acquired an organization and made up of individuals that have a lot of their own behaviors and loyalties and attitudes. And so I very quickly. Learn, I, this is where I think my international experience of being with so many different cultures and situations over the years stood me in good steed to walk into a situation where you've got, you know, a, a totally different group of people with a very different culture than the one.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:10:09] Of the acquiring company, and that's where myself, having worked in different parts of the company and having been out with an operator as a drilling manager as well, that gave me credibility in the room when I would go in to talk to these acquired companies and talk to the employees and have round tables and things like that.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:10:27] Let's talk about, for example, the Smith acquisition. From what you'd learned over the years, there's, you were developing an internal playbook of how do I attack solving this? 'cause it's, you have all the brands, all the people, all the offices. You have all the naming of each of the products. There's just a complexity that you have to address. What's your playbook? Had you learned a handful of things converged at the same time?

Charlie Cossad:

[00:10:49] I've always felt I was pretty good. Thinking in the abstract about things, distilling things down into what looks like a reasonable way forward, but taking decisions that I know if they won't be right, they're damn sure gonna inform the way forward. And so I'll give you the answer to that in the most very simple way, which was the aha moment, which was, it's about the website. It's all about the website. That's what it is. Because if you think about the executives going around, they can have a, every executive can have their own slide deck. They can go into every different room and every different client globally, and they can go in and have a session with somebody and walk out of it and say, that went really well.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:11:35] That was good, but the fact is, if you're going to do your website, inconsistencies are a mouse click away, and you've gotta be super concise with what you're saying to people to get their attention. And you've gotta really be focused on what's in it for them. Because they're like these going into a big cluster of flowers when they go to a website, randomly go to different pages and bounce, right? It was, you know something, here's what we're gonna do. We are going to make a pivot in the market. So I became the director of marketing communications when the company made its most significant acquisition, and you you'd call 20 23, 20 5,000 people in 10 billion year business. Significant, right? So I said, you know something, we're gonna make a pivot here because it's been about.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:12:19] Printed ads, trade journals, trade shows, executive speeches. We are going heavy on the internet, online engagement, email marketing, and a website that reflects the power of what we are bringing together with this much more complete company when it comes to constructing oil and gas wells. And that was it. It's that simple. So we went from a couple of IT people and a couple of online people to a team of six IT in the back office and 10 11 on online engagement activities and Google search ranking and search, things like that. Richard Byrd, creative director came in. I mean, I went in that and it was. Pretty ugly for a lot of people because, you know, you've got people that have made their career with the written word and uh, and ads and headlines and taglines and advertising and all this sort of stuff.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:13:11] I said that's secondary to what we're focused on now, because then the, the power of that is that, you know, you go in, you think about a website, you go in there, well, you say that here, but then you don't say it here. Or if somebody's buying this. Does it logically, logically go together with this? Or how are you competing with that? Or you've got this company's portfolio where you realize they're bringing in a product here that's gonna force you to divest this product, or you realize that this competes directly with this. How are you gonna deal with that? Well, you can have different parts of the company out there, and this happens where I'm still gonna go see my clients and sell my thing and the guy from the company we just bought with this office down the road is in there selling against me.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:13:52] Okay. That'll work itself out. That was really when you asked my short version of that is that it just, I just had this aha moment that [00:14:00] said we need to have deep expertise in online engagement. I can give you the timeline quite well. They kind of brought me in early and said, look, we're not gonna bring you on the inside yet, but there's something really big going on and it's gonna be really changing. The company. They brought me on the inside of it. They said, well, look, we're probably gonna close in August, so we've got eight months to tell the story. They said, tell'em, the story's gonna come together fairly quickly because you just want to integrate everything. Construct oil and gas wells. You know, you want to be providing a, a wonderful hole in the ground that is secure, that can be measured perfectly, and then will produce effectively, and you wanna do it fast, save money.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:14:35] There's your story, you know, three elements to it. But how do I put the story out there? That's the question. And that's when I sort of went away in thinking about this. Then I went over and I met the, I met the communications team that I was taking on. I looked it all over and said, I don't know, the nine, the 1980s wants its communication. Stand back. They can have it. So gonna my a little pivot here, team. The rest is history. That was, that's what it was. So the pivot was, it's all about the website. It's all about telling the story on the website, having people be convinced of your differentiation on the website. Having people really go there to see what's new.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:15:13] To drive traffic there, to get your own employees and one of the most. Significant things I did, and one of my greatest sources of comedy was to quiz our own people, including our executives, to some embarrassment. On a couple of occasions about our own website, I had senior executives, and by that I mean people that were, you know, the top 20 people in the company, the, the significant company at the time, a hundred thousand, 120,000 plus people, 50 billion a year, whatever. They couldn't find the website. They, they, they could only find the internal hub. And they wanted to, they were talking about the hub. Well, we need to work on the hub. Oh, and I even had a conversation once with somebody in Africa where they said, I gotta have these case studies. I gotta, I gotta have these case studies.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:15:54] It says they're on the website. No, you don't understand. They're not, I can't find 'em there. No they're not. They're on the public website. General panic. I had to get him to type in the URL, coaching him on how to find his company's website, how to find his portfolio there, and find the case studies and the things that the clients see. I said, you realize you're now seeing what the clients see. And they're right there. Oh my God, this is amazing. How did you two meet? I moved to Houston July, 1999. I think that's probably when I met Ward. It was

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:16:23] with Hamco. When we formed the completions and WCP. You were in that first guardrails when you got back.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:16:31] That was it. Schlumberger decided to acquire and become a completions company, which is the plumbing and oil and gas. Well, and there was. Different possibilities out there, but the one they settled on was Gamco. And as luck would have it, I was actually their contract holder in Aberdeen as a drilling manager for them doing the completion. So I knew that company very well, and then I went over to be the marketing manager for it, which was to, from a strategy standpoint and a brand management standpoint, bring it in, pitch Schlumberger, bring it in into the parent company. Then that's when Schlumberger had already engaged Pennebaker in these activities, and I sort of came in and inherited it and went along with it.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:17:16] I didn't really lead that at the time. I kind of came in and said, oh, you're working with these guys. Then what are we doing?

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:17:21] So there, there are multiple levels of these acquisitions. There's one where there's the branding issues that you've gotta address and you gotta choose which products stay and which go and which have the new name and which don't have the new name. And then you've got the. Whole issue of like with Smith, 25,000 new bodies come into the Schlumberger culture, two totally different cultures. And how do you get those people into the Schlumberger way of thinking?

Charlie Cossad:

[00:17:50] So I would say there's two things at play. One is you have to shift the Schlumberger way of thinking a certain degree. Important and then they have to shift as well. And my answer would be you have to remove the emotions from the things. You have to get the emotions out of the room. So you need to create a set of very practical tools. You put in front of people that you use with them and walk them through processes to reach decisions that affect their brand.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:18:24] So for example, perception mapping. Very simple tool picture. I've got a very simple matrix. One is, what is your brand association with regards to the cost of what you offer? What is your global presence? Very simple. Well, we are known as being the low cost provider. Well, Schlumberger is the opposite. We operate in North America. Well, Schlumberger operates around the world. So are we going to take you to the Middle East where no one's ever heard of you, or are we gonna take. Products and services there under the Schlumberger brand. So when you start to have, and you just basically have a whole series of XY axis things that have to do with, maybe you're looking at your brand association.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:19:08] So it could be price, global presence, it could be service backup, things like that. And so you have your brand associations and you set up these little matrices for perception mapping. And you sit in a room with somebody that says, yeah, you're right. So you've got someone sitting there. For example, that is the manager of a brand, and that brand is very local. So this is someone, they're the head of a company. They're, they're head of a business that's not insignificant and they're ambitious. So I can't wait to, you know, fly into the Middle East and have Schlumberger, my new stepfather, take me by the hand to in front of all these clients I've never met before.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:19:45] And all of a sudden these doors are gonna open. I'm gonna start making all this money. Okay, let's think about that. Now, does that make sense to take, look at who we just got, who's a little small player in the United States and we're gonna bring you here and make you big? Or are we gonna take what you manufacture, what you make, and get our sales organization that's fully established in the Middle East that knows all the clients on the ground and make it part of their portfolio. So you end up with this situation to where when you actually lay it out. Instead of in a conversation as I just have, if you've got actual slides up there that show, here's this and this, here's this profile, here's that. So you get these tools there that are fundamental marketing base. Anyone with a marketing degree would look at this and say, really?

Charlie Cossad:

[00:20:25] This is the kind of marketing 1 0 1 guys, right? Yeah. But it's like a, you came down with the tablets from the mountain as far as the oil field was concerned for things like that. For the concepts of positioning, brand management, things like that. The corporate level. Very effective, but once you move into the organization, that knowledge does not exist. So to sort of summarize the sharp answer to your question is just come up with a really simple, well understood, easily understood practical toolkit that you put in front of people to where they look at it and say, yeah, I don't agree with it. I'm not happy about it, but I get

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:20:56] it. So Schlumberger's got, you know, exponential resources, obviously, and here you are, you go through this massive acquisition of Smith. 20,000 plus employees, et cetera. At what point did you realize you needed outside help and what were you looking for?

Charlie Cossad:

[00:21:11] I guess I reflect a little bit the attitude of executive management when they go to management consultants, you, you wanna make sure that you've got a second opinion on things because quite frankly, don't take this too harshly there P ennebaker. But I didn't need any outside help. I didn't believe it. I did, but. I wanted to use outside help because I wanted, you know, you need another pair of eyes, you need someone out there who's gonna call you out on things. You need someone out there who's gonna challenge you, but they're also gonna provide a couple of gems along the way.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:21:45] And also to take on some staff work. Frankly, you know, if your main organization is very busy with the day-to-day, 'cause it's a very large machine that is out there delivering products and services and developing technology. So there's sort of a. Strategic element of where I wanna make sure I get second opinions on some of the stuff I'm up to here. And then there's a very tactical part, which is to say I need to create some things for a certain situation that I don't want my designers and my. Call it my marketing agency skillset, spending their time on. So there's like two extremes there. It was really a kind of a two-pronged thing. I knew we'd need help on some agency stuff, but at the same time I wanted to make sure I had some second opinions and some good challenge and pushback on some of the bigger thinking that was taking place.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:22:35] It was necessary to take it forward, but I come back and say one thing made it easy, the website. Because you know, when you think about a website, short copy, it's all about short copy. You cannot have some 10 page PDF, you know, you gotta really short, sharp, articulate your differentiation. So the website made it kind of easy because once you've got that all sorted out, well that just cascades off into your trade shows, your displays, your PowerPoints, your brochures that just, it just cascades straight back off into everything. You've kind of done the hard work when you've got the website done.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:23:05] How'd you go about defining your differentiation?

Charlie Cossad:

[00:23:07] Uh, well the classic ways, I mean, really good homework to say what's really important to the client, and that's where my operator, having spent on two different occasions, two plus four years, and operators plus always been curious about what the, how these guys work and what they get up to. You know, that allowed me to have a different view of understanding what's important to a client. Then you look around at your competition and see what they have. And of course, in Schlumberger it was made fairly easy because it was the leading technology company. It had the best widgets. So that made the job kind of easy to articulate, differentiation, you know, when you've got the best widget.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:23:43] Now, that's not to say there's an awful lot of circumstances in the oil and gas industry where that. Having the best switch is not that important. Let me circle back to something you asked about is, you know, why go outside for help? I'll give you, I'll give an example of where Pennebaker really helped out. Like any good company with a well-managed brand, you have brand identity guidelines. So brand identity guidelines. This can be a, a, you know, a hundred page document, anything from fonts, color palette, tone of voice. You take your pick. So we had this. Monster of an identity guideline set, but since it was a pretty hierarchical, dictatorial company, you know, people followed the rules.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:24:21] You've got a situation where in the field, in a global company, everybody's out there making golf balls and t-shirts and you know, other, doing local trade shows and events for clients or whatever. So talk to Ward about this is, look, here's an approach. What we need to do is imagine you're somebody in the field, you're in locations in West Africa, you're in Azerbaijan, wherever you are. What are your identity guidelines? I want you to make, for me, identity guidelines for that guy that's out there, the manager of Hoad. What's he need to know, right? Because he is not doing trade shows and things like that, but he kind of needs to know, I need to know what the logo looks like. I need to, you know, that sort of thing.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:24:56] So, so we made basically, uh, field level identity guidelines per new endorsed brand. So here's a miko identity guidelines for the guy in the field. So when you're making a t-shirt. That's the logo. When you're painting tools, that's the color when you're doing, you know, and that was important because to get that all done and get it out there on day one. That was the other thing we had, we basically had from, I kind of hit the ground running in the middle of January and we had till August, middle of August when it closed, we had roughly eight months. Seven months, uh, to get all this shit done. When they actually closed the merger in mid August, all of a sudden, like the lights go on.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:25:35] Oh my God. There's a whole new website and it's just, this is unbelievable. Everything's on brand, everything's perfect. It's all great, and then people in the field are gonna start doing stuff because everybody wants to have t-shirts with their new logo on it or whatever. Right? That was something that Panabaker jumped straight into is what, what's an identity guidelines look like for that manager around the world so that when the deal finally closes. Everybody's on brand around the planet. You got 150,000, well, 125,000 people on brand. You got seven months to get 'em there.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:26:04] Many companies, when they do an AC acquisition or merger, they say, oh, we paid so much for that. You gotta let them keep that brand and we'll change it over time. And of course one of the big downfalls there is if you don't change those brands early on, then the employees of that brand thing, nothing's gonna change.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:26:21] And when you do finally change, they get upset saying, wait, you told us nothing would change. So one of the things that was most impressive about Apple whole push was. Come hell or high water, every single person in the company would have a new business card. Day one would have a new title, day one, which was, I have seen very few companies who've been able to pull that off.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:26:43] Yeah. But that was, that was a real focus. And I guess you'd learned that from other acquisitions you'd done.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:26:48] I'd I'd been through lots of small ones. Over the years. And then CAMCO was of order a billion and a half dollars or so, 1998. So I've kind of seen other ones. So when this came along, I kind of knew what the deal was. But no, you're, you're exactly right. And I come back to having. I want to give people an understanding of why the decision has been made, but there's always gonna be people, you know, it's like, it's like, uh, Napoleon's thirds. I love Napoleon's thirds when they probably find us anywhere on the web, but my variation of Napoleon's thirds this, when Napoleon would look over his generals and all, okay.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:27:27] Napoleon's saying to himself, we're gonna go on a campaign, we're gonna go up, we're gonna get those Visigoths, we're just gonna wipe those guys out. That's what we're doing. Right? And he looks at his generals, and the generals fall into three categories. One says, what a good idea. Mount up. Let's go now, let's go wipe those Visigoths out. We're going, come on. And then you've got some other guys that are back there. No bad idea. Life's good. I like it here. No. What are we doing then? There's this group in the middle. Okay, that's an interesting idea. But. Eh, let's gotta make your case. Those are the guys. 'cause you're gonna have some people, they're just on board.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:28:01] Let's run. Love it. Others, no way. Don't waste time with 'em. Focus on these middle guys, get them on board, and then things move board. So I, I, I discovered the pollings thirds just through random reading at the time, trying to help my own frame, my own thinking on issues. And, and that was very helpful is to, to focus on those guys. Make the case, you know. Because those are the guys that can undermine you. You know, those are the guys where you're not quite sure where they're gonna stand, so you really wanna focus there. The second aspect of that is, though, at the end of the day, and perhaps this is for the people that are never gonna be on board with it, is they have to be removed.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:28:39] You have to fire people. At the end of the day, the oil field is not a democracy. Th this is the way this thing has to run. Uh, the number of times I would kind of go back doors and say. Out, out, out, you know, to other managers and things. You kids can't have it. How'd you identify the that second category? The guys that ask you questions and want to hear what you have to say, but in a way to where you can tell they're listening as opposed to they've already made up their minds. You can ferret those guys out pretty easily. You can suss 'em out with a few conversations about things. Yeah. You can suss them out with conversations they appreciate and you, and finding the guy and, you know, talk to the bosses.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:29:18] You know, they will talk to the hats, the feet follow. Right. So yeah, you find the, you find the guys that are the, the line managers with. Responsibility in certain parts of the world or in certain areas. 'cause I was forever on the road going out to do presentations about what's going on. 'cause these people, you know, they're sitting off in some place in their office and all of a sudden they've been bought, right? That they're a little bit apprehensive and, uh, they're not quite sure what's gonna happen. To your point that, uh, you know, on changing brands and what I said to people, I said, look, if you tell me. You're gonna have something that you're gonna change in two years time. You're gonna make a decision, and it's gonna be in two years time.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:29:55] They do nothing with the brands, but tell people you're doing nothing with it. But then in two years, here's what's gonna happen because you'll just spend a fortune on stuff that's gonna be throw away work. So, you know, any brand decision, there's no such thing as a brand change in of, of less than two years. There's just no such thing. So people would want it. Let's, this comes back to your question on business cards and things like that. So once we got very clear on what we were going to do, and this comes back to your identity and when you bring up business cards, that was in the field identity guidelines.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:30:25] ' C ause business cards were a thing back then and they were all printed locally. So people need to see, oh, there's my new MI swipe O business card. That's what it looks like. Okay, I got every, I gotta get that made right. So you get those identity guidelines in the hands of the managers around the world for each of the brands you're keeping, and equally for the ones you're not keeping. So here's your new business card. You're in charge of this, but your company name has become a product name, and your product will be under the visual imagery brand. That's where those field identity guidelines. Became very important and I looked over the resources I had and we were so focused on the web and online and digital and making that presence perfect that I didn't want to get into doing identity guidelines with the design team and the resources I had.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:31:03] So that was perfect to to work with you on, and the beauty of working with you on that was you get it right away. I get it right away, boom. I can just leave you alone and leave you to.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:31:13] Going back to the identifying the, the various stakeholders in the organization, you assume that when you're talking to the leaders of the product lines or the bosses, they're gonna understand, they have to get on board, they're gone, and so they understand that they've got to. Start singing from the same hymnal below them. You've got those two thirds one who need to be won over and those will never be won over, but the ones who are gonna be won over, some will become evangelists. And what did you do to equip them to spread the word so that the people that they worked with g ot on board faster.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:31:53] Well, one thing was, you know, you gotta be on the road and be in the room with people. I, I come back to where the conversation started where, 'cause a lot of the things in marketing are conceptually quite simple and they're easy to get, but. They've not been explained or appreciated. You know, like a, like if you talk about brand, everybody knows what a brand is. Everybody knows all about brand. Sure, but can they explain it? Do they know how to manage it? Can they translate from the concept into a practical working approach to doing things? So I come back to that toolkit as to why decisions are made a certain way.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:32:26] You certain, find certain people that get it and they get it and they embrace it. The the other thing I would say is find people where it's good for their business and their career. Now, those two, if it's good for your business, it's good for your career. Let's face it. So you find people out there where the acquisition, and it is always gonna be different at different places, but in, in certain places, the acquired portfolio can be highly complimentary. You end up with someone in a position to where they can exploit that complimentary nature of the new portfolio and grow the business, or they compete, they can compete better. They've not been able to compete for certain work. And so you find those situations, you prioritize those situations where. Given individual, a manager in a given country or whatever, where you realize that now you can say and do this, and there's this big mothership behind you that you've never quite experienced before.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:33:25] And so you just find those places and that traces its way all the way all the way back up to the corporate. Speak to the investors on the logic of the transaction. Now, not only do you have the rotary steerable systems, but you can put a drill bit on the end of it. And a lot of times with operators, you know, you've got in place a contract, you look at contract structures, and so you can start to include things in bid proposals from the acquired companies where that acquired company was not on the bid list before in very obvious situations like that. So you find those kinds of places. And so the people that are full charge ahead, I get it. They're gonna be chasing that stuff. The guys in the middle that are sort of thinking about it, you wanna set them up with things like that, and then they get on board and they become evangelists for it. If anything, they become a more credible evangelists for what you're trying to do than the guys that are just charge ahead.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:34:16] Why not? Let's go get those guys. Now go. Why are we waiting? Charlie?

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:34:20] There are going to be people out there who are listening who might be in. Roles or companies that are looking at acquisitions, mergers, big change. What are some of the things that you would advise them before they get into it too deeply to be aware of?

Charlie Cossad:

[00:34:37] I have some conversations with people that can be a good source of advice. The company in a way got a little bit lucky with me because you need the competent. That's what bothered me when I first started to come into the whole marketing world in Schlumberger a bit, is you need the competence to manage your supply chain. So how can you manage a supplier? How can you make decisions on suppliers when you don't understand what they do? Or you're not better at. It's like a whole bunch of 20 handicapped golfers who are gonna be coaching a pro. You've got to somehow know what you don't know, and you've got to somehow get access to trusted advice, really serious, trusted advice if you're not gonna get it internally.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:35:24] We were fortunate in Schlumberger. It's a company, it's the space. It's got a lot of smart people. But when it kind of came down to the sharp end in 2000. Even 98, even managing the CAMCO brand and stuff in a, as huge as the company was, we were the guys and they got kinda lucky to have a couple of guys that became real students of all this stuff and had the real competence to manage the supply chain. So I, you know, it took a while, but I feel I could carry myself, uh, in a conversation with you about marketing and brand, you know, after, after a certain period of time. And so I think that my advice would be, make sure that you. Know that you have the right resources to manage the supply chain that's gonna help you in this endeavor and develop the communications that you need to take out into the real world for the.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:36:12] Companies that you're acquiring and bringing on board. So that's from a marketing standpoint. From a practical standpoint, I think one of the biggest risks you can have is, this is getting moved away from marketing to the business side though, is, you know, there's no such thing as brand decisions. There's business decisions that drive a brand decision, but there's no such thing as a brand decision. It's a business decision. Okay. Now that we see this business decision very clearly, how does that inform what we do with the brands? So you've gotta have someone who can sort of appreciate the whole business aspects of it. And then translate that into what the actions are necessary for managing the brands.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:36:44] Everybody gets all excited about, we're gonna redesign the logo. That's, that's gonna move the needle, isn't it? Yeah, no, my advice would be just make sure you, uh, have a certain humility and what you know, what your organization knows, and make sure you get access to something and then have somebody there, have somebody that's in a staff position. This is one of the things I noticed that I think one of the challenges for businesses today is really good quality staff people. They're hard to find really top quality staff people you can delegate to that run with something and come back with something that doesn't take much management time at all.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:37:17] They're a gym. You get good staff people. That was one of the things that I worked very hard at is to find very good staff people. So taking that back to answer your question is make sure you've got. Staff resource, possibly in the form of an outside consultancy or even an individual from an outside organization. But make sure you've got staff resource that you have absolutely know you can trust, and that you have the competence to manage.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:37:41] You know, you talked about differentiation earlier and it's really hard to articulate how, how you're different, how you're unique, you know, how you're in a category one. What advice could you give to, to people to really define that clarity? Or who you are and why you're different, and why, why somebody should buy something from you.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:37:59] I think I'd go back to a little bit, one of the things I did when I first started to have more marketing responsibilities was look at what the classics are and what the best practices are and simply read them, study them. I mean, study them with really the intent to learn and talk to people about it. Target stakeholders, what do you offer? What makes it different? Prove it. It's those four steps. Now, along the way, you can sprinkle in all sorts of stuff, and this is where Lord's strength is sprinkling in the fairy dust along the way, facilitating the conversations, challenging executives.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:38:34] And so now to answer your question, differentiation study and get a real good understanding of positioning and read about it. See great examples of it. See some Harvard Business case studies about it. Have a real deep appreciation of positioning. And recognize that you're not always gonna be differentiated, but the thing you wanna do is clearly you have to have a corporate position. But my advice to them would be, yes, you have a corporate position and you've done your best to have a position statement where clients see themselves in it, they recognize what you do, and they say, well, but take that. Find through your organization channels away to have your frontline people understand your company positioning, whether it be for the company, although that's not normally relevant for people in the field, what they're selling, the people that are out there doing things and selling things, have them have an understanding of positioning such that what you do at the headquarters cascades out to the Salesforce because this is the mark of the best salespeople because as you know very well.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:39:38] Something's different for one person than for another. So a good salesperson has a natural instinct for positioning, which is to say, in any given situation, they under understand what differentiates them, and it varies. It's highly situational. So you can do your best job up here at the corporate level with your positioning, but whatever you do up here, make sure that it allows itself to cascade down to those people that are having those conversations. So for example, with a salesperson, you might be talking to somebody with a certain technology you have in the morning, and I know this guy, he wants to be the first guy to use. Everything. This is gonna be an easy sell. He wants to be the first to use it. So I'm gonna go in and talk to him about it and say, we've just got it.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:40:21] There's only five in the world. I'm gonna get one here and I can give it to you. Okay? I'll give you a discount, but then you have to gimme a case study and I can use your name and you'll gimme a quote, da da. Close the sale. So, but that guy wants to be the first use technology. Then you've got the late adopters or you've got someone who says, you know something, I'm all about safety. I, it's just, I want to be the guy in my company known as the conscious of safety in this organization. You're gonna have a very different conversation with that guy about exactly the same product because the differentiation for him. Is different because you've got a technical differentiation, but then you've got a personal differentiation.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:40:59] The buyers are buying based on what's important to them and what differentiates for them. So do a hard work on the corporate level, but recognize you're gonna always have a hell of a challenge on articulating your differentiation because it varies so much from one to the next, and you quite frankly, probably aren't that different. But do the work and do it in a way that you get your sales force to understand that. 'cause your best sales guys, you don't need to coach 'em on that 'cause they get it normally. They go in there and their antenna are up and they know exactly what this people or department, or individual. Has that makes them shine, makes them the hero.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:41:35] That was the key thing is you as a salesperson, you have to be in the mindset that I'm gonna make the client the hero. I am not the hero. Look at me. I solved your problem. I brought this technology, and that really solved all those fricking problems you had. Nonsense. You make the client the hero. You get in there based on your differentiation. In a given situation, by all means, work hard to articulate your differentiation at company levels and things like that, but work hard on those salespeople that don't have those natural antenna, that just close deal in the real winners. Work hard on that next layer to have them understanding, positioning, and then understanding differentiation as it applies to be stakeholder specific and really work at that.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:42:21] Keep it simple. It does work. Is there anything that, that we didn't ask that you wish we had?

Charlie Cossad:

[00:42:27] Ooh, that's a good question. I guess not so much what might you have asked me, but I think talent identification and lateral thinking and talent identification, and I come back to. Very, very good quality staff skills. That is something that I think was one of the great strengths of SCH scholarship because it had such a pool of talent. You know, it had from, from the earliest origins of the company it hired internationally, it found great people. It took, uh, it put them in positions where they were, uh, completely, you know.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:43:02] Unqualified for what they were thrown into and things like that. So I think coming back to what might you have asked me, but I think this role of talent identification and skills development and, and finding these absolute gems of, of, uh. Skillset to put in just the right place that are really gonna help you with your business. I think that's underestimated as an important thing to do. I think it, I think where that's gonna really start to show up, it's really gonna start to show up with AI in today's world of AI machine learning. 'cause now that all of a sudden, now that the AI is gonna be writing code, you know, you, you don't, you only have to go back about five years and there are a lot of people out there saying, I gotta learn how to write code.

Charlie Cossad:

[00:43:44] I gotta learn how to write code. Okay. So tell me, what is the person out of, you know, a, a team of 50 writing code? Who are those three or four people you're gonna keep? So I think that, uh, that whole idea of talent acquisition, talent management, finding really strong staffers. I don't know what else to call it because you've got the managers run a business, right? But it's the people around them. So I think that that for me would be companies, I'd be really scared about that today with AI and everything else going on, is do I have the right people in the right place? Because boy, could that ever wipe you out and surprise you? I.

Ward Pennebaker:

[00:44:20] Charlie , this has been super. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today, and I'm sure that people will have all kinds of follow up questions that we can get back to you on.

Matt Pennebaker:

[00:44:31] We really appreciate it, Charlie. You bet, guys. Thanks for listening to Rethink Change. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it and be sure to follow the show so you don't miss a single episode. If you're a disruptor looking to challenge the status quo and don't know where to start or what to do next, Pennebaker can help find out more a t Pennebaker.com.