#1 - Nobody was researching values in marketing leadership. So I decided to make it my niche.

No guest this week. Just me and a coffee.I've been waiting to tell this story properly. Not the polished version, not the abstract. The actual one. Where the imposter syndrome hit hard. Where CrossFit kept teaching me more about leadership than any marketing job I'd ever had. Where I nearly didn't press send on that first outreach email to a CMO.This episode covers the whole journey. From realising the gap in my own career to spending the best part of a year interviewing 40+ senior marketing leaders, watching people pause mid-sentence to dig up a memory they hadn't thought about in years, and slowly making sense of over 250 mentions of different values.It's also the episode where I explain the IIOE framework in full — not the bullet point version, the real version. Why integrity sits at the centre. Why CrossFit of all things helped me see it clearly. And the moment one interviewee challenged me on whether values even matter for success. If you listened to the trailer and wondered what's behind all of this, here's your answer.You can read more about the research project and some of my thoughts here: https://medium.com/@eddieguevarra.mktg