The ANA and IRG announced a program for chief marketing officers designed to develop leadership capabilities and drive business growth. It runs in quarterly cohorts of thirty to fifty chief marketers and launched in April 2022.
The design goal behind the cohort model is continuity rather than a one-off event. It is meant to fuel ongoing engagement from chief marketing officers learning together as a global leadership community.
Key findings
- The program runs twelve weeks at two hours a week, alternating individual online self-learning with facilitated group calls.
- Cohort size is bounded at a minimum of thirty and a maximum of a hundred.
- It is built on the IRG100 Leadership Program, which was in its third year at the time, and draws its joint sessions from the combined networks of both organizations.
- The curriculum rests on the IRG Growth Study, which drew on interviews with over seven hundred and fifty senior business leaders, five thousand survey contributions from seventy-three countries, and behavioral analysis of publicly available LinkedIn data from three million members.
- Participants are expected to share a common commitment: shifting from shareholder primacy to multi-stakeholder value creation.
What the two organizations say it is for
The ANA’s chief executive frames it around community. Mobilizing chief marketing officers with a continuous stream of growth-focused forums, he argues, gives marketers the best opportunity to learn from each other and from what is happening in the market. He notes the program builds on almost a decade of collaboration between the two organizations.
The ANA executive who leads its Global CMO Growth Council frames it around recency, saying that the previous two years taught the industry which skills matter most and that the program brings those learnings together in its core curriculum.
IRG’s two founders frame it around the stakeholder argument. One says the pandemic made humanized growth more important than ever. The other says organizations need marketers to create value for multiple stakeholders, and that this is an opportunity for marketing to take a leadership role.
How it works
Participants work individually, in small groups, and in plenary sessions, addressing new growth opportunities. The program connects them with growth learning, benchmarking data, leading practitioners and experts, and industry best practices.
The output is applied rather than theoretical. Participants take practical frameworks into their own role and business to create a roadmap for more modern leadership and humanized business growth.
The intended intake is broad. The program is described as including leaders from all backgrounds and experiences worldwide and from almost every industry, with previous IRG100 cohorts drawing from companies including Bayer, Copa Airlines, Danone, Microsoft, PayPal, and Procter and Gamble.
The two institutions behind it
The ANA describes its mission as driving growth for marketing professionals, brands and businesses, the industry, and humanity. It states that it serves the marketing needs of twenty thousand brands and more than fifty thousand industry members who collectively invest more than four hundred billion dollars a year.
IRG describes itself as not-for-profit and independent, supported by a list that includes WPP, Google, Salesforce, the NYU School of Professional Studies, Oxford’s Said Business School, CKGSB, and Spencer Stuart.
The Global CMO Growth Council is described as representing over twelve hundred chief marketers worldwide, chaired by the chief brand officer of Procter and Gamble, with a leadership team of fifty chief marketers. Since its 2018 launch it has worked to transform marketing into a force for economic growth and for societal good.
Scope and limitations
This is an announcement made before the program ran. It describes the design, the intake, and the research the curriculum rests on, and reports no outcomes for participants.
Source
This page summarises ANA AND IRG TEAM UP ON NEW CMO LEADERSHIP PROGRAM, by John Wolfe, Marc de Swaan Arons, February 2, 2022.