Michael Diamond teaches marketing at New York University’s School of Professional Studies, and was chief marketing officer at Time Warner Cable before that. He describes the discipline his school teaches as human centered and data driven, and treats holding those two together as the work rather than as a slogan.
The most useful disagreement in the conversation is about purpose. Diamond argues that what a leadership team actually needs is a shared sense of something, and that purpose is one candidate among several. A shared set of facts about the customer did the same job for him at Time Warner Cable.
Key findings
- Diamond’s account of his own training is the argument in miniature. He read at Oxford, then took a theater management degree at Yale because he wanted to learn a craft practically, and he credits the interdisciplinary habit of making theater for the way he has worked since.
- He locates the heart of whole-brained work in curiosity rather than in either half of the brain, and says the starting discipline does not matter. What matters is the appetite for the material you are not comfortable with.
- The phrase he borrows for that appetite comes from the playwright Anna Deavere Smith, and he extends it past professional curiosity into a kind of empathy with oneself.
- Asked what the crisis changed, Diamond reads it as acceleration rather than redirection, and gives a specific example: community supported agriculture, where the organizations were reporting output and demand doubling or quadrupling.
Three tensions that moved
Diamond had taught a session for IRG on the world in 2025, built around ten tensions. His view is that the crisis put pressure on most of them. The first he picks out is the relationship with technology, where a generation that had held it at arm’s length adopted it because it was the only way to reach anybody.
The second is privacy against personalization. He suggests the trade people were unwilling to make became easier to make when what was bought with it was their own safety.
The third is local against global, and here his interest is in why people wanted local food. Part of it is preference. Part of it, he thinks, is wanting to know how many hands had touched it.
What a university is actually for
Diamond’s answer to what universities offer companies is not content. It is a place to stop, and a context in which to do the stopping. He contrasts that with working life, which he describes as goal-oriented and near-term by construction.
He is also impatient with the caricature of the university as immovable, and points out that NYU offered the first practical public relations course in the United States a century ago. His preferred image of a teacher is the guide at the student’s side rather than the lecturer above them.
The interviewer reports the same finding from IRG’s own leadership program, where the thing participants name most often is the chance to think about what is important rather than what is urgent.
Marketing and HR are studying the same person
Diamond describes the historical division bluntly: marketing believed it owned the consumer and HR believed it owned the employee. His objection is that both are the same species.
Two things have made the shared ground usable. One is analytics, where he thinks marketing is somewhat ahead. The other is that customer experience and employee experience draw on the same body of knowledge about people.
The CMO and the communications officer
Diamond runs both the marketing and the public relations faculty, so the question of where the two disciplines meet is a daily one for him. His account is that public relations was framing thought leadership before marketers used the phrase, and held a broader definition of a brand, built on reputation and trust.
He also credits communications with a habit marketing has been slower to acquire: taking a public position on a societal question rather than borrowing a cultural moment for a campaign.
The interviewer adds a temperamental difference he had heard from Jon Iwata, formerly of IBM: communications people look for risk, and marketers are optimists. Diamond agrees the overlap in the two job descriptions is large.
Data visualization as the place the two halves meet
Diamond teaches data visualization, and treats it as the clearest case of analytical rigor and storytelling doing one job. His argument is about how the eye lets a person process a quantity they would not process from a table.
He points to Hans Rosling as the practitioner who proved it, and observes that the pandemic gave the whole field its moment: an entire public learned to read a log scale.
The polemical point about purpose
The exchange the two do not settle is worth reading closely. The interviewer’s position is that companies that had a real purpose reacted faster because the reaction was instinctual, and that companies whose purpose was decorative were caught on the back foot.
Diamond does not disagree that something is needed. He disagrees that it must be purpose. Shared values, a shared strategy, or a shared understanding of where to play and how to win would each do the same work, and what matters is that the leadership team holds one of them and knows its own contribution to it.
He then makes the harder point. Agreeing on the facts is the easy part. Agreeing on what to do about them means trade-offs, and that is where senior teams stall.
Scope and limitations
This is a conversation rather than research, recorded early in the pandemic, and the trends Diamond identifies are his reading at the time rather than measurements. He is also a partner of the Institute for Real Growth, which he says himself at the start.
Source
This page summarises HGS #1: Michael Diamond (NYU) talks purpose and the role of marketing, by Marc de Swaan Arons, 2020-10-08.