Kevin Susman


Principles of Pitching: Need Motivates The Search

The key to success is remembering that the need motivates the search, but people engage based upon who you are. Shot at Innovate Pasadena's Friday Morning Coffee Meet-up

Principles of Pitching: No One Cares

When it comes to pitching yourself or your company, an essential element of success is assuming that no one cares what you have to say. Shot at Innovate Pasadena's Friday Morning Coffee Meet-up

Digital Marketing, Ad-Tech & Spotify Thinks My 10-Year Old Is 25

Spotify thinks my 10 year old daughter is 25. To be fair, Instagram thinks her 12 year old friend is 23. And Apple thinks my 13 year old neighbor is 17. Welcome to the self-reported user data that will wreak havoc with your data strategy.

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That Leadership Thing... Nailed!

Have You Got That Leadership Thing Nailed? The books, the articles, the interviews, the seemingly endless stream of #leadership posts… and they are seemingly endless…. “Have a vision!” “Shape a culture!” “Empower your people!” The leadership paradigm is frequently cast as leader vs. manager - leaders are awesome and 'managers' are pathetic, incompetent, or both, pathetically incompetent.

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Defying Doomcasters, Apple Continues Refusing To Die

Another iPhone release yields a new record for units sold during the launch. When will Apple accept what all those naysayers and doomcasters have been proclaiming for years – Apple is dead!

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Hating Uber Won't Make The Sharing Economy Go Away

Ride-sharing companies have found a new enemy - this time, in their own backyard. If you’re not familiar with California’s AB 2293, it would mandate that drivers for ride-sharing companies be covered by a commercial liability policy the moment they open the ride-sharing app, as opposed to when they accept a fare.

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Lessons I Learned From Lying To James Cameron

In a former life, I got to work on some pretty cool films. But, it was an April 1997 meeting on my first day working as a digital effects producer on James Cameron’s “Titanic” (at the visual effects studio Digital Domain) that I share with business school students because of its implications for decision-making processes in high-pressure environments.

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Airbnb's New Logo, My Worst Nightmare

Airbnb made the long-awaited debut of their new brand identity yesterday. And what happened with the logo launch is one of my company’s worst nightmares.

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Yes, Blockbuster's Epic #brandingfail still matters

Whether I'm working with companies to develop and/or refine their brand strategies, or teaching branding principles to MBA's, I love to use the failure of Blockbuster Home Video as a cautionary tale of what can happen when a flawed brand identity informs the wrong business strategy.

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Stop B****ing About Millenials, Start Acting Like One

I know, it’s fashionable to complain about Millennial employees for all sorts of things – but the complaint I find most entertaining is that, “Millennials have to feel engaged by their company.” We’ve all heard the complaint, uttered as though demanding engagement were some kind of overbearing imposition placed upon the company by its younger employees. Don’t those entitled kids know that an employee’s place is to suck it up and hope for opportunity when it arrives?

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