Leaders of Change: Rob Gonzalez

ROB GONZALEZ is the Co-Founder of Salsify, which works with companies like Coca-Cola, 3M, Johnson & Johnson, Mars, LEGO, Levis, Bosch, L’Oreal, and hundreds of other global brands manage and optimize their brand presence on the digital shelf. Rob's team at Salsify manages strategic alliances with retailers, technology partners, agencies, and systems integrators. Prior to founding Salsify, Rob and his co-founders were with Endeca Technologies, acquired by Oracle for $1.1B in 2011. Endeca pioneered search, navigation, and merchandising for eCommerce, and powered eCommerce sites in the 00's such as Walmart.com, HomeDepot.com, Target.com, Walgreens.com, and more than half of the top 100 internet retailers in North America, and hundreds more globally.

Why did you choose to pursue eCommerce in your career? Because it’s awesome.

Seriously though, the other industries I’ve worked in are pharma & finance (with IBM and an IBM spin-off, Cambridge Semantics) and education (I started my career teaching in public schools). eCommerce is waaaaaaaay more dynamic and fast-paced than those industries. If you want to have an impact and make a difference (and don’t have the patience to make an impact over 20 years…) then eCommerce is a great place to work.

I got started in eCommerce when I joined Endeca in 2006. Endeca powered the site search, navigation, and merchandising for most of the biggest retail players at the time (Overstock, Walmart, Home Depot, Target, etc.). The eCommerce teams at those companies were cowboys: high energy, fearless, experimental, almost without corporate oversight. It was – and is – fun as hell. Winning in eCommerce is almost more art than science; it requires creativity, constant reinvention, and a sense of the dramatic. As much as we look at numbers it’s not simply a numbers and optimization game, and I love that about it.

What is your biggest strength, and how have you used it for your success in eCommerce? As it pertains to eCommerce, my biggest strength is my passion for the space. (Yes, I know this is ironic given that I said the Passion Hypothesis for a fulfilling career is total BS; passion is really important but it is developed over time with expertise – I wasn’t born loving eCommerce!).

Passion is absolutely essential to evangelizing a radical idea. What we’re trying to do at Salsify is empower Brand manufacturers to deliver amazing product experiences to consumers everywhere consumers interact with a Brand. And succeeding in that goal often requires meaningful organizational and process transformation within a Brand. Brands euphemistically call it “digital transformation” but it’s really a total tear-down-and-rebuild for the entire organization, including supply chain, accounting, media, etc. You look at how digital-first brands are structured and it’s nothing like the current market leaders; they’ve built new structures and modes of operation that are more tailored to today’s environment.

So how do you help the Digital Transformers within Brands make the hard cases for change in companies that are frequently over 100 years old? I try to arm them with exciting stories that they feel excited about relaying to teams internally, where their own energy can help bring others to their point of view. Passion really helps drive the story home and keep momentum against entrenched interests. Any Brand reading this knows you have to sell and sell and sell some more internally to drive the change the is needed to win online – and therefore survive in the future.

What is the weirdest skill or talent to come in handy in your eCommerce experience? Being OK with being wrong is an underappreciated super power.

I’m completely egoless when it comes to being “right”. I change my mind often and am always looking to refine what I know. I can argue a position passionately, and the moment it becomes clear that I’m wrong I say, “Oh, I’m wrong, glad you helped me clear that up!” change my mind and move on. It can be unsettling to people because very few people do this well; most tie some self-identity to what they believe to be true and when someone says “good point! you’re right, let’s move on” it throws them off balance. This skill enables me to grow and adapt in this space much faster than most people around me.

In eCommerce for example, I knew almost nothing about winning on Amazon two years ago and had many ideas that were very wrong in retrospect, but our customers have helped make me really smart on Amazon now, and I’m really lucky to be able to share what I’ve learned with others in the industry.

On to an organization – Endeca in fact – where I could have direct and meaningful impact, and that’s been the core requirement of every job I’ve had since: to have impact.

How have you most successfully influenced change within your organization (or with your clients)? Whether within my own company or within my clients, the key to influencing change is to get a First Follower. The great Derek Sivers gave a fantastic TED talk on this that I highly recommend (it’s only 3 minutes).

In summary, leadership is about getting people to become owners in the journey along with you. Everyone has to feel the wins and take ownership in them. If you’re trying to get others to take action because you know in your heart the action is right, but they don’t feel ownership of the action or the result, you will fail more often than not. The key to leadership – and by leadership I do not mean “leading people that report to me” – is to get that first person 100% bought into your hypothesis and then get him or her to feel total ownership of the outcome on his or her own regardless of your continued involvement, so that if the action is taken, and it works, they, not you, get the credit. It’s true empowerment.

Many organizations fall short on digital because incentives and ownership are not aligned. You get a digital or eCommerce team with a number, and a marketing org with a totally different set of metrics that aren’t aligned, and a supply chain team with yet another set of metrics, and no true co-owners across the teams. So the digital team is begging the rest of the company for help, and if they get the help and it works the digital team – not the helping team – gets the credit. That can’t work, especially in the long run. The rest of the company has to be bought in and feel ownership of the success and share in the wins.

What was your most “valuable” career failure, and why? I started my career as a software engineer at IBM in a research group. I loved the people but hated the job because nothing I did mattered. There was no direct impact for the work I was producing. No one used my software, and I couldn’t see where the research I was doing was going. It took me a few years to really understand this and move on to an organization – Endeca in fact – where I could have direct and meaningful impact, and that’s been the core requirement of every job I’ve had since: to have impact.

In the last five years, what new belief, behavior or habit has most improved your life? Waking up at 5am (or sometimes 5:30am...). Win the morning, win the day! By 1pm my brain energy is largely spent; I can do routine work (answer emails, meetings, etc.) but nothing creative or mentally demanding. So by getting up early I get a couple hours of meaningful, high quality concentration time in before the day even begins. It also means that at 5pm I’m done.

What are you learning right now? I’m reading a lot about the history of Branding. The whole concept of what it means to be a Brand and how each Brand tells its story is undergoing a tectonic shift. The major manufacturers of the last 100 years have lost a ton of market share and market cap recently as consumers have flocked to challenger brands and private label alternatives.

There are interesting lessons in this. The challenger brands have invented new ways of branding and telling a brand story by going directly to the consumer (Brandless), via social media (Casper), via search mastery (Anker), etc., and so I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about what it means to build and maintain a brand today vs. 20 years ago. Are there branding patterns that older Brands can take to heart and use here? If I wanted to build a new company with a household recognizable name how would I do it? This isn’t the first time the act of branding has had to change, but it’s the first time that it’s happened this quickly.

What are the 1-3 songs that would make up your career soundtrack today?

• Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger by Daft Punk. is the song that got me into electronica back in the 90s. I remember hearing it and thinking, “Woah; what the heck was that?” The question “what can I do to help my business grow just a little faster, be just a little better?” is forever on my mind.
• Halcyon and On and On by Orbital. I originally heard this during the opening credits for Hackers (totally underrated movie btw). I’ve listened to it a million times and often have it on repeat when working. To win at this game you need periods of extended concentration, and for me Halcyon helps me get there.
• Ramblin’ Man by Lemon Jelly. This song is simply delightful. I’m on the road a lot visiting customers & partners, attending events, and trying to change the way eCommerce is done.

What are the 1-3 books you’ve gifted the most or that have greatly influenced your life, and why?

• So Good They Can't Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love. I believe the “Passion Hypothesis” for a fulfilling career is crap, and that you develop passion through developing excellence, not the other way around. This book is by far the best career advice book I’ve ever seen, even for someone in the middle of the journey trying to figure out how to be great at what they do.
• Getting Things Done. I’ve used GTD to manage my life for nearly a decade, and in fact am in the middle of a re-read right now. If you have too much to juggle in your professional and personal life, the GTD approach helps you maintain control and stay on top of everything. In particular, the system removes the vast majority of the stress from the equation. Highly recommended.
• I Will Teach You To Be Rich. Cheesy title, but it’s an incredible personal finance book. It should be required reading for every 22-year old college grad (and every 30-something that still doesn’t have their stuff together). If your financial life isn’t on solid ground and on autopilot then it will always occupy more of your brain- and emotional-space than it should, taking away from more important activities.

If you could have a gigantic billboard for the world to see with anything on it, what would it say, and why? “Assume Positive Intent.”

This is perhaps the most important life lesson / change of thinking I’ve learned and internalized in the last 10 years. Most people are good people. They mean well.

So the email they sent that pissed you off? Not about you. Don’t personalize it. Assume they wrote it with good intent, such as to solve a problem you both care about. And you know what? 99.9% of the time you’ll be right! They did mean well. Getting angry at them is a waste of your time. The tone you read in that email? Not a tone! Slow your roll.

So if I find myself getting worked up about an email or a phone call or a facial expression I think, “well, what if they were acting with positive intent?” It’s like magic in helping me respond more productively – and feel better about it in the process!

If you want to take this a step further, then you should assume that the person you’re upset with is just as smart as you and just as rational as you. The dumb move you just saw a partner or competitor make? Assume it’s not dumb. Assume you would have done the exact same thing if you were in their situation. Now, with that assumption, why would they have done that?

Props to Lee Feigenbaum, our VP of Customer Success, for this life lesson.

What are the worst recommendations or advice you have heard related to eCommerce? There’s a whole “old school” group of folks in the industry that believe that data and content standards are the future of brand / retail collaboration, and they try to push data and content standards on retailers and brand manufacturers alike. Standards made sense 20 years ago when companies only had to exchange supply chain data or content specific to a promotion, but they make zero sense today when the competitive landscape is each individual consumer and not the physical shelf.

The future of retail is personalized experiences that are optimized to an individual in the context of a specific set of actions and goals. That is the opposite of standards. One-size-fits-all product detail page is like a muumuu; it fits everyone but looks great on nobody. We could use standards on how to exchange content and data back and forth efficiently (something like GraphQL but for product schema), but not standards on what that data – categories, attributes, image requirements, etc. – should be.

What advice would you give to a future leader of change about to enter business, or specifically the eCommerce field? The people in your network are everything in this game. The whole industry is changing unbelievably quickly, so any advice, book, roadmap, or best practice you read about online is already out of date. The only hope any of us have of staying on top of things is to surround ourselves with a network of the best and brightest in the field and always be looking to learn from them.

What specific, industry-related change do you believe will happen that few others seem to see? The mass market that developed in the post-war era is breaking up, and I don’t think will ever return. The future is personalized products and product experiences almost down to the individual level based on interests and demographics. When Oprah was Oprah she got over 40 million viewers every week; the current daytime talk show leader, Ellen, gets around 4 million. Remember Friends? That show was terrible, but immensely popular because it had a captive audience during prime time and was maybe a little better than other shows at that same time it was competing with. The same applies in retail: you can get 70% market share if you’re competing with one alternative right next to your product, but not if you’re competing with 1,000. The age of “good enough for most people” is over; I want “great for me specifically”.

The challenge for the big CPG conglomerates is to be able to manage a portfolio of hundreds or thousands of smaller, more niche brands with smaller market share vs. a portfolio of dozens of larger brands with dominant market positions. Some will be able to make this major structural transition, others will not.

What is the last thing you bought online, and why? Go Away Monster for my 20-month old daughter. The idea of the game is that the kid picks things out of a bag and places them on a board, but if the kid draws a monster she’s to throw it as far as she can and yell “Go away monster!” It sounds like a perfect game.

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Leaders of Change is a weekly interview series featuring select industry pioneers who are driving the evolution of commerce, the consumer and everything in between. If you would like to recommend a Leader of Change for consideration, please reach out to me on LinkedIn.