Mindful Leadership, the Gen AI Juggernaut, and a Win-Win Mindset: Reflections for 2025

I shot the image above in college with a single-lens reflex camera, then developed and printed the black and white film in a darkroom.? It’s a joyful yet complex image from a simpler time, so it seemed a fitting anchor for celebrations from 2024 and reflections to welcome 2025.

In 2024, I had the honor of bringing visibility to the great work our marketing teams do and how Sephora lives its values through three phenomenal events. The first experience I’ll mention was the chance to put a spotlight on the team’s innovative work in Personalization.? It was a fireside chat at Reuters Strategic Marketing West conference.? It was satisfying to have a venue to geek out on our MarTech journey and reinforced that our teams continue to push the edges not just for retail, but across industries.??

The second event was the Celebration of Women in the Mix.? The event stemmed from Sephora's partnership with The Recording Academy and their mission to expand the role of women and generally amplify and support diverse voices in the music industry. The beauty and music industries are such natural collaborators in support of the ultimate creative expression and celebration of individuality.? Women in the Mix focuses on breaking down barriers and supporting diverse creator representation. Representing Sephora on stage at the event was an unusual star alignment of the personal and professional for me.? The fact I got to go the Grammy’s out of the engagement was a bonus!

My final "pinch me" moment was the Yelp Women’s Leadership Retreat.? I was invited to be a speaker on the “Setting the Stage for Success in 2025” panel.? I shared how much my personal leadership has evolved from trying to be expert at everything to learning how best to advocate for everyone. Way harder, but much more satisfying. The retreat itself was several days of connecting with amazing women, hearing their stories and distilling what it means to be a successful and whole leader today. Add in some meditation techniques, moonlight yoga and mimosas.? My definition of heaven!?

In addition to speaking opportunities there were also quite a few notable and incredible learning opportunities in 2024: from the SEPHORA global executive leadership training in Paris (“Sephora Winning Together 2”) to premiere retail conference in Las Vegas, ShopTalk and The Room Marketing Conference by invitation-only in Montreal.? Throw in the annual Gartner Marketing Symposium in Denver, and a chance to get my design thinking on at Room 98, the 谷歌 + IDEO innovation workshop called Forward Lab.? A wild card was LVMH Mental Health First Aid training, where leaders learned how to identify, address and redirect mental health crises in the workplace. Finally, I attended the Meta Global Data Council meetings hosted at the Meta offices in NYC and Menlo Park. Along with an amazing assembly of executives, I received insight into product roadmaps and Meta teams asked questions of their power-users (and actually seemed to listen to the answers!)?

As I reflected on my key takeaways from all these incredible adventures in 2024, I thought I would share my top three themes that I will be taking into 2025:

• Mindful Leadership has become mandatory. In multiple events, speakers put focus on the importance leaders getting a better understanding of…and then getting control of their emotions and motivations so that they can make better decisions for their businesses and their people.? I was impressed by how deep we went with this at the “Sephora Winning Together 2” executive training. We not only created personalized toolkits to better manage stress, but spent significant time analyzing and role-playing better leadership responses.? These themes were echoed again in depth at both the The Room Marketing Conference and the Yelp Women’s Leadership Retreat. It led me to organize a full day workshop with my directs through the Workplace Programs at the UC San Diego Center for Mindfulness to gather even more tools and techniques. Blame in on some combination of a pandemic hangover and our schizophrenic zeitgeist, but we have all become infinitely more fragile creatures.

• Get ready for Gen AI to infiltrate everything.? I’m personally having a déjà vu moment where I am back in 1994 on the cusp of seeing what this new thing called the internet would do.? Only a few years out of college, I remember doing a presentation to senior marketing leadership at the software company I worked for at the time.? I didn’t really know how, but it felt like it was going to change everything. I was lobbying that in addition to the traditional direct marketing were doing (direct mail and telemarketing at the time), we should be testing messaging on platforms like Prodigy (then a closed pay-to-play internet system) and email for commercial use. Crazy ideas at the time. Fast forward thirty years and the internet and subsequently social media have radically changed the way we research/search, learn, shop, and even interact with each other.? We are sitting at the edge again. Themes around the coming dominance of Gen AI flooded the Gartner Marketing Symposium, threaded through numerous presentations at the Meta Global Data Council meetings and were a recurring part of the conversation at The Room Marketing Conference in Montreal.

Gen AI will radically evolve the way we live our lives in similar ways that have yet to be fully defined.? Some will be great and some will be terrifying.? I can only hope that there will be fewer shady people trying to make deep fakes than brave souls trying to solve deep problems using this new computational power– and we’ll finally make some progress on the age-old problems of hunger, poverty and access to clean water.

• Learn to be a steward of the “third way.”? The “third way, ” part of growth mindset thinking and also dubbed “both/and” (vs either/or), is the concept that two opposite and potentially contradictory realities can both have validity if we learn to access our creative problem solving abilities and question our assumptions.? The Sephora executive training had a significant module on “both/and” and then later in the year I attended a workshop where we detailed out pros and cons of opposing stances and then were challenged to define what could bring the best of both of those situations together.? The goal is always an outcome that drives greater value for all involved and moving away from “winners and losers.” As business and world problems continue to become more complex, more creative brainpower (from humans and machines!) will be needed.?

I’m looking forward to what the new year has in store for me.? I’m quite sure it promises to be another adventure.? Here’s wishing you a gratifying and productive 2025.