🧑🏫 The Value Equation
Next week! Supporting subscribers, join me Feb. 24 for an exclusive Q&A with Neil Golden.
As the Chief Marketing Officer of McDonald's USA for seven years, Golden helped establish and maintain the dollar menu, launch McCafé and reenergize the Happy Meal, Big Mac and Quarter Pounder, all while overseeing a $1.2 billion budget.
When he left, he expected he’d keep being an executive, but instead he found a new opportunity by looking closely at what work he wanted to do, and how. Bring your questions about developing and using broad principles to guide your professional decisions.
I always thought I was bad at math.
If you’d asked me as a kid what I wanted to be when I grew up, you would have gotten one of three answers: a reporter, a movie animator, or an astronaut. Somewhere around the time we started algebra, I kissed my space dreams goodbye when I decided that because math didn’t come easily to me, I should stay earthbound.
Imagine my surprise early in my career when I started not only applying math to my reporting and editing work, but enjoying it. I became a spreadsheet maven, and even ran a conference session called “Unleash spreadsheet magic,” complete with a prop magic wand. It wasn’t until statistics in grad school that I finally realized: I wasn’t bad at math in general. It was just harder for me to do abstract math; give me something concrete and I would plug away until I figured it out.
We put effort into what we care about. For me, it was digging out data that would inform our reporting. And for our careers, we can use a simple equation to see whether our work is offering us enough value.