WOMAN SINGING WITH MUSIC PLAYING: Barbie you’re beautiful, you make me feel, my Barbie doll is really real. Barbie’s small and so petite; her clothes and figure look so neat…
BRIAN KENNY: You’re listening to a milestone moment in history. On March 9, 1959, the Barbie doll made its American debut during a commercial break on the Mickey Mouse Club TV show. It was a daring marketing move by the Mattel Toy Company and it generated immense interest in the new full-figured doll. In the decade since, Barbie has been a cultural phenomenon as a must-have toy for girls around the world and a lightning rod for controversy. She and her growing cadre of friends soared to the pinnacle of popularity before stalling in the headwinds of the digital age only to rise again on the crest of a pop culture tsunami propelled by the movie called simply, Barbie.
The 2023 blockbuster put Barbie and Mattel back in the spotlight. But this time, the games and the stakes have changed significantly. Today on Cold Call, we welcome Professor Elie Ofek and Ryann Noe to discuss the case, “Barbie: Reviving a Cultural Icon at Mattel.” I’m your host Brian Kenny, and you’re listening to Cold Call on the HBR podcast network. Elie Olfek explores interactions between R&D and marketing decisions such as pricing and branding, and he is a repeat customer here on Cold Call. Elie, welcome back.
ELIE OFEK: Wow. Thank you so much, Brian. Great to be here.
BRIAN KENNY: It’s been a while, so great to have you back on the show. Ryann Noe is a doctoral candidate who examines how industries and technologies emerge and evolve. Ryann, welcome to the show.
RYANN NOE: Thank you for having me.
BRIAN KENNY: Great to have you both here. Of course, everybody knows Barbie and I will say even though I didn’t play with Barbies as a child, my memory of Barbies is trying to extricate them from their packaging on Christmas morning as my two daughters waited to get their hands on the Barbies we had just bought them. So super relatable for people. And of course with the movie that came out a couple of summers ago where everybody was wearing pink and making it an experience. I think this is a really fun case and you give some great insight into the strategy and the decisions that Mattel has to make when dealing with such an iconic toy. Elie, I’m going to start with you. If you can just tell us what the central issue is in the case and what your cold call is to start the discussion in class.
ELIE OFEK: One central issue is a brand that had been popular, indeed introduced sort of in the late fifties, early sixties. And that popularity has sort of had its moments of rise and moments of then coming down and being less popular. As you’d noted, there was a lot of controversy around this particular toy. How do you create that transformation for that particular brand? But it’s cast within a broader problem or context of the company that is also facing a sort of downturn of sorts. The question then becomes, what is a blueprint or how can this company think about a turnaround strategy? And the Barbie movie and the whole evolution of the Barbie brand in recent years provides a little bit of a context for that transformation. So that’s sort of the two central issues that are intertwined in the case. How do I start the case and what’s the cold call? Once again, there’s actually two ways I start this case. The first sort of outer layer of the cold call is a little bit related to the anecdote that you just spoke of with your own family is I literally say to students before we dive into the case issues, let’s take a trip down memory lane and did anyone here play with the Barbie doll? And I ask those students to share those moments. And then for those that were silent, I say, “What were the things that you played with as a kid?”
And so, once we get that sort of going and it exposes a lot of interesting things that later we can get back to, I then sort of dive into the case with the real “cold call.” And I mentioned that the Barbie doll was introduced by Ruth Handler, she was its sort of originator, and her philosophy in her own words was that through the doll, the little girl could be anything she wanted to be. And I ask the students, “Between that introduction in the late fifties and then sort of the lead up to the movie in 2023, has Barbie lived up to that philosophy?”
BRIAN KENNY: I love that. And I’m thinking the average age of our students is roughly 27 or so in the classroom. So, they grew up with a whole bunch of options other than Barbie to play with. So you probably got some interesting answers in that room. Ryann, let me turn to you. I’ll just ask, did you play with Barbie dolls when you were young?
RYANN NOE: I mean, of course Barbie, Ken, Skipper. I had all of them. So this case definitely means a lot to me personally.
BRIAN KENNY: So how did you come upon the idea of writing it? Everybody was aware of what was going on, but why did you decide to write a case about it?
RYANN NOE: So my Ph.D. dissertation is a study of the digital transformation of the toy industry. So I had actually been embedded in this industry for four years doing fieldwork when the movie came out. And I find that certain HBS cases are great because the authors have located a hidden gem. And this was not that case. This was splashy and flashy and pink, and it really demanded to be written about. Particularly because, and I think Elie will agree with this, Barbie is such an icon, an American icon, and so to not have an HBS case about Barbie is a little bit like not having an HBS case about Coca-Cola. And so I think we were both really excited to remedy that oversight and bring Barbie to HBS.
BRIAN KENNY: Elie, back to you for a second. The 2023 movie was part of a broader strategic shift at Mattel. And I think Barbie, if this statistic is correct, represents about 80% of Mattel’s earnings. It’s a huge part of their portfolio. What was going on behind the scenes and why was this a smart way for them to introduce kind of a shift in their strategy?
ELIE OFEK: Absolutely. When the new CEO took over in 2018, Kreiz, he had come from the entertainment world. He had come from the media world. And his vision for the company was to say, “Look, we’ve built up these brands like Barbie, like Hot Wheels, like American Girl Doll, and we are leveraging them in one space, the toy space. But that space is becoming increasingly difficult because of digital transformations and such. That space is becoming difficult because of the way society is thinking about the development of children in what they should be playing with. But yet again, we have built these brands, they do have some cultural significance in the US as well as abroad. Are we leveraging those sufficiently?” Answer to him was no, these are beyond just the physical toys. We can take what we’ve built here in terms of the concepts, the ideas, and what they mean and bring them into a broader entertainment domain. And that is that strategic shift that he was thinking, these are IPs more than they are just toy brands. And it’s appealing because you can take one concept and expose it in multiple places, multiple movies, TV series, games, live shows, anything of that sort. And so there’s more opportunity to do that. So that’s the broader shift in strategy that this CEO had. And Barbie, to him and to his other colleagues, represented the first true test case because it had already been out there in the domain of pop culture, if you will. And so the question is, if you can’t do it with Barbie, then you can’t do it. And so that was the thinking of why Barbie was so important as this litmus test for this new strategy.
BRIAN KENNY: But Barbie had some baggage. It’s fair to say. Barbie has had her share of controversies over the years, and some of those have been widely publicized. So this was a bit of a bold and daring move. What were some of the things that Barbie’s encountered over the years, Ryann?
RYANN NOE: I mean, where to begin? Probably at the beginning, because really from the earliest days, Barbie was controversial. We have to remember that she came out in 1959, and this was a time when most young girls were playing with baby dolls. So when Barbie arrived on the scene with her full figure, she raised a lot of eyebrows and it’s really only continued from there. Mattel’s had a series of missteps along the way, oftentimes, as you know, pretty public. So just as a couple examples, there was Babysitter Barbie in the sixties who came with a book titled, “How to Lose Weight.” And the instructions in that book read simply, “Don’t Eat.”
Then fast-forward to the nineties and you have Teen Talk Barbie and Teen Talk Barbie came with a voice box. One of the phrases on the voice box was, “Math class is tough.” But of course, all of this criticism has always run alongside celebration of Barbie for pushing the envelope, for showing girls that they can be an astronaut, a doctor, a professor, perhaps. So I think for our purposes, what’s most fascinating is how Mattel has responded to this controversy. One approach would be to run the other way, to hide the checkered past and present a clean front, but of course, that’s not what we see them doing. Instead, they’ve not only learned from these mistakes, but they’ve actually leveraged them, leaned into this sort of, we love her, we love her not, controversy in a really unique and productive way.
BRIAN KENNY: Elie, you were talking about the new CEO’s approach to thinking about this. It’s actually described in the case as the Mattel Playbook. Maybe you can describe that for our listeners.
ELIE OFEK: Sure. So there was a thinking at Mattel, it would seem that if they really want to build up their brands and make those brands successful in a sustained way, it has to be more systematic. And that systematic approach was the playbook. And this playbook has four pillars. And I think the most important pillar, or at least the starting point, is the purpose portion. Which is to say, what is the purpose of this brand? And leaning, I think, also into Ruth Handler’s vision. The way they refined that for Barbie, for example, was that the purpose was to inspire the limitless potential in every girl. And it’s that purpose then that guides you to be thinking about the second pillar, which is the cultural relevance, which is to say, if we need to inspire limitless potential in every girl, what is the cultural context and how do we leverage the culture such that we can inspire in a way that’s relevant? The purpose talks about inspiring and that limitless potential, and that emphasis on the every girl. And I think that’s where this idea came, we need to be more diverse in what we represent in this product line. And that led to this design-led innovation, which is the third pillar. Which is to say, what kind of products did we design that are based on what customers are experiencing, what they care about, what they need, and doing it in a way that the product itself gets designed such that it doesn’t overly offend any one group and highly resonates with most groups. And I think that’s where you saw them coming out with more skin tones, with dolls that were of different sort of body shape, form, length, height and so on. And they thought a lot about how to make that design work. And then the fourth pillar is the execution pillar, which has a lot to do with, how do you bring that purpose, that cultural relevance, and then this design of the product, how do you actually go to market with these? How do you implement? And do it in a way that’s creative, novel, and at the same time highly effective? So that’s kind of that Playbook where all of these pieces, pillars need to come together in order to break through into the commercial world and want customers to embrace you and want you.
BRIAN KENNY: I would’ve loved to have been in the conversations that they were having, because this sounds so fraught to me, the whole project, Dawn, which is the redesign of the physical doll. In fact, the movie even sort of plays on this because one of the key things is that Barbie’s feet are flat in the movie. Right? Ryann, can you talk a little bit about that? How do you capably move down this path without somehow offending some group in the process?
RYANN NOE: I mean, I think the easy answer is to say you can’t. There will always be critics of Barbie and Barbie will never be fixed, and Barbie will never be finished. But I think as you say, Project Dawn as an instance, was a real watershed moment for the brand. It really said to consumers that they were listening to criticisms and they were prepared to take radical steps. And it was radical, not just in the cultural sense, but also introduced complexities about manufacturing and distribution and marketing. And so it was a big step for them, and I think it paid off. Consumers were proud to see that Barbie stepped up and it was on the cover of Time Magazine, and I think it was a real indication that the brand was listening.
BRIAN KENNY: Elie, just from your experience in studying brands, this has been attempted many times and it doesn’t always work. Do you think there’s some sort of a key ingredient that brands have to think about when they make this kind of a departure from sort of the core brand that they’ve grown up with?
ELIE OFEK: I think this is a question that many brands ask, especially once they’ve been around for a while, they have to navigate or weigh the trade-off between, “We’re becoming less relevant. What we have meant to consumers is not cutting it anymore.” And at the same time, breaking away from that and going a different route, I think in the case of Barbie, she’s always been about this issue of what is the role of women in society. There’s always been that aspect. Sometimes it was about the body aspect of it, but other times it was about what can women accomplish and achieve? And I think where they sort of gravitated towards is a place where at the moment, or at least in society, the question was how do you balance that tension between, on the one hand being a supporter of feminism and thinking about women empowerment and equal rights for women, but at the same time not losing the femininity. That is, it’s okay to be feminine. And it’s a tension, and the movie sort of embraces that tension and puts it out full fledge. And I think it is somewhat of a departure, but it’s not to say that Barbie itself had not had an angle or had not been viewed by society as having something to say about women’s role in society. It’s just that they were a little more pointed and embraced what was going on in the culture at the moment. And I think that was a smart piece of what they did.
BRIAN KENNY: Is this part of the struggle or the challenge maybe, of moving from a product-centered brand to an IP-focused brand?
ELIE OFEK: To an extent, at least in the way it was brought out, because before that you had the doll itself. And yes, I can represent different skin tones and hairstyles, and I can bring out disabilities in the toy as a physical toy. Bringing it out this way in a movie is a completely different form of expression, and that is more along the lines of the IP.
BRIAN KENNY: Ryann, back to you for a second. I’m just wondering, as we talk about trying to be relevant and trying to respond to what’s happening in the current culture, how did Mattel’s efforts in this space affect the brand’s cultural relevance and public perceptions overall?
RYANN NOE: It continues to be a very complex and challenging problem for Barbie, particularly in the past decade as culture evolves more quickly. And I think for our purposes, again, what’s interesting is that there’s this tendency to celebrate the big win of the movie, but really this was the culmination of many hands working over many years. So it was Project Dawn, it was the Fashionistas line, and all of these efforts focused on thinking about, in today’s setting, who is Barbie and who is Mattel? Who should Barbie be and can she be for everyone? There’s a statistic that we have in the case that by 2023, Barbie was released in 35 skin tones, 97 hairstyles, and nine body types. So that’s a lot of diversity. And the movie is really just the last link in that chain of trying to rethink who Barbie can be.
BRIAN KENNY: And obviously the movie itself created its own set of controversies. It wasn’t geared towards children, it was geared towards more of an adult audience, kind of handing all of this over to the director whose name was Greta Gerwig. That was a big step and a big leap of faith for Mattel. What are the implications of something like that? How do you think about that as a brand owner of literally handing your brand over to somebody who’s never managed it before?
ELIE OFEK: Right. That was one of the more interesting aspects here, but yet one of the more, I would say, calculated risks that they took. So the deal is this, you want to be culturally relevant, you want to be credible. It’s very hard to do that if the perception is that you have engineered things, that you have tried to control things. They needed to be genuine, they needed to be authentic. This needed to come from sort of voices that were living this type of controversy. And I think Greta Gerwig was that credible, authentic voice. And if they had tried to control her too much, A, she may not have been willing to play along, but B, it would not have had, I believe, the same level of success in the sense that she knew the nuances of this world. She knew how to bring those nuances out as the unique director and then her partner who helped with the script, with the screenplay. So the Mattel people knew that they themselves could not come up with a script that would be… It would be hard for them, that would be perceived as genuine. So they needed to hand it over to somebody that would be authentic, genuine. And in Greta Gerwig and in Margot Robbie, they had the two partners for which that was a calculated risk to do this with. And so I think, yes, it’s a leap of faith. Yes, it’s a risk. Yes, you are basically handing it over to another entity, and you’re going to say, “It’s not like we’ll go with everything they propose or that we don’t have final veto, but we are going to by and large accept what they give us.” And that’s what they did.
BRIAN KENNY: And sort of an interesting sidebar to all of that was that Margot Robbie negotiated an amazing deal for herself in this. So she’s sort of a living example of women empowerment in the context of the film. The case talks about Barbiecore, Ryann, I’m wondering if you can describe what Barbiecore is.
RYANN NOE: What is Barbiecore not? Barbiecore-
BRIAN KENNY: I never heard the term before the case.
RYANN NOE: I mean, it was really just this atmosphere of the summer of 2023 where everywhere you looked, everything was pink, everything was Barbie from the fashion to the interior design, to the food, everything, red carpet outfits. And so it really was just this sense like it was omnipresent everywhere you looked.
BRIAN KENNY: Was that just a marketing thing or did that just sort of take on a life of its own? I mean, did Mattel set out with the intent of saying we’re going to create this movement, or did people sort of take ownership of it at some level?
ELIE OFEK: I think it’s an interesting question, and I think it’s kind of a little bit of both in the sense that the sort of, call it the genius from a marketing standpoint of what Mattel had done was to say, “Look, we want to be omnipresent. We want to be embedded in culture because cultural relevance is one of the pillars.” How do you do that? One way to do that is if you get other partners that are part of people’s experiences, what they wear, what they eat, what they listen to and so on, and you get those partners to say, “You know what? We want to co-create with you.” So you tell them you have license to create a product that’s relevant in your world.
Let’s say it’s a piece of clothing. Let’s say if you’re Airbnb, it’s a rental that looks like the Barbie house. And if it’s a retailer, then it’s anything that they can put in their stores that has that element in it. And on the one hand, you get these partners to say, “Let’s be part of this. We will co-create, we also have skin in the game so we want this to succeed.” At the same time, it creates a 360 where the consumer is engulfed everywhere they go, they see this pink level or a Barbie-related theme, and then people start talking about it. People want to embrace it, and people want to be part of it. The only challenge here is that you run the risk of it’s going to be a fad. So it’s a moment rather than a movement in some sense. And so they definitely created the moment, the moment was big, everybody embraced the moment. And in the aftermath of the movie, one would have to see did this live up to sustained momentum?
BRIAN KENNY: Again, it’s part of letting go of brand control. I think the case mentions that Burger King did a pink sauce, which sounds kind of gross to me, but it’s how they interpreted the Barbiecore movement. Ryann, how far should they push this? There’s risk involved in all of the things that they’re doing, but they want to be relevant. That’s one of their pillars. But how far is too far?
RYANN NOE: It’s a great question. And also to pick up on something Elie mentioned, it was a very unique moment in time, even just socially. So casting our minds back, this was right when Covid lockdowns were ending. There was a lot of political turmoil and protests and fears about the future. And so part of what Elie is speaking to is there was this yearning for something that was social and colorful and somewhat nostalgic, but also somewhat iconoclastic. And so to your question, Brian, it’s a question about was this lightning in a bottle that was released or is this something that you can keep repeating? So it’s a real challenge for them going forward about how far can you push this sort of Barbie branding without it coming tired or trite or overplayed? And how much should you just accept that you met the cultural moment head on and you did something superlative, and maybe now it’s the time that you need to start thinking about what’s next.
BRIAN KENNY: That’s a great point. Elie, brand marketers love to talk about Maslow’s hierarchy. It’s one of these things that shows up in all these branding books. You can’t get away from it, but the case does talk about it, and I know Mattel thought about it. Can you talk about where Barbie sits in Maslow’s hierarchy today versus where she may have been 20 or 30 years ago?
ELIE OFEK: It’s very, very interesting. I mean, the question is with Maslow’s hierarchy and layering on top of that, the brand hierarchy, there is this idea of what need is it satisfying? Is it a basic need? Probably not a basic need. Is it sort of a need for security? Probably not. But it does start going up on that Maslow hierarchy. And their goal has always been for the Barbie brand and for what it means to kids when they play with it to be aspirational and to reach that highest level of the hierarchy where it’s about who you are, who you want to be, your identity and what it says about you. And I think going back to even our first part of the discussion, because society changes, because the culture changes who I want to be, how I interpret who I want to be, if your brand doesn’t evolve with that, you’re going to lose out. You’re going to get stale. And so I think they had a sort of a fork in the road where they said, “If we don’t shift, if we don’t figure out what it is that we need to tap into in order to get into people’s higher levels of what we satisfy for them in the hierarchy, we’re going to become irrelevant and we’re going to lose out.” And they were already starting to see that because kids play with Barbie, but it’s the parents that make the decisions. And so if the parents are not seeing this as a brand and a toy that they want their kids to be associated with it, tough luck. And so that’s where the movie was then targeted at adults. They wanted to win back those millennials that were sort of pushing aside the whole concept of Barbie, and they wanted them to sort of reignite that. And so to your point, I think yes, that needed to change on the Maslow hierarchy or at least what it meant or what it was aspiring to be. And I think the movie was an attempt to do that.
BRIAN KENNY: That’s a good lead into the next question I had, which is another new word that I learned was kidult. I’m still not exactly sure what kidult means, but maybe Ryann, you can explain that to us because back to what we were discussing just a moment ago about how far do you push this? How far do you go to be relevant? There’s been thinking about whether or not Barbie breaks out of her gender stereotype, for instance. I mean, is that pushing it too far?
RYANN NOE: It’s a great question. So first on kidult. So what we have with kidult, and this is a new thing within the industry, it’s obviously a portmanteau of kid and adult. So it’s really when you’re targeting more adult collectors rather than children. But also on the question of breaking out of the gendered box, this is a big question that the industry as a whole is facing and has for the past decade. But I’m excited to report that just a couple of weeks ago, Mattel released a new Ken Doll in the likeness of LeBron James.
BRIAN KENNY: Really?
RYANN NOE: Yes. And my understanding is this is the first time they’ve ever released a Ken Doll in the likeness of a professional athlete. And as you can imagine, the lines were out the door. I think the doll is already totally sold out. And so it’s an early signal that Mattel is taking steps to break out, to think about boys and also adult collectors as consumers. I think something that’s always fascinating to me is that a Ken Doll is for girls, but a Ken action figure?
BRIAN KENNY: Right? When you call it an action figure, it’s different.
RYANN NOE: All of a sudden it’s for boys. And so I think that what Mattel is trying to do is perhaps rethink and break down some of these seemingly artificial barriers.
BRIAN KENNY: So going back to you, Elie, you mentioned earlier the Matchbox line, the Hot Wheels line rather, which is another important line for Mattel. They also have Polly Pocket. They’ve got a number of very popular toy lines. Are they going to follow the same sort of MO? Do those four pillars apply to all of their product lines?
ELIE OFEK: Yes. I think that is the sort of million-dollar question here. And I think one where it really puts this strategy to the test, can you really turn all of the other toy brands that Mattel has? Can you turn those into “IPs” and sort of port them into other segments and into other media entertainment sort of products? And so far, it’s not been as easy or as simple as I think Mattel would’ve liked. And if you take their second best brand, Hot Wheels in terms of sales, you would ask yourself the question… I think there’s more Hot Wheel cars in the world than there are physical cars in the world.
BRIAN KENNY: I think my grandson has most of them actually.
ELIE OFEK: Very possible. And they are relevant culturally in the sense that they come out with new models that are part of… So they’ll have a Tesla model S. If there’s new cars that are gaining traction, they’ll come out with those models too. And they’re releasing this year a series around the Formula One racing cars. So that’s going to be a big hit I’m expecting. So they’re relevant in the culture in the sense that they’re trying to make sure that they bring in everything that in vehicles is part of what people care about and are excited by. But I don’t think that Hot Wheels in and of itself has a societal message baked into it. And so if they are thinking of turning that into an IP, it would not be around a sort of tension in society that has to be resolved through the movie. No, no. They’d have to think a little more creatively around what else in society or in culture that they can link to vehicles can they bring out. And it doesn’t have to be something so controversial like with Barbie in terms of what is the role of women in society and how are men perceived and what is patriarchy and all of that. They’ll have to find something else, and that’s not so easy to do. So we’ll see if they’re able to pick up on where they left off with the Barbie movie and port that into other franchises. And I think they’ll have to evolve what cultural relevance means to not be just about societal tensions, but it’s yet to be seen.
BRIAN KENNY: That’s a great endpoint. And maybe better to stay away from societal tensions because back in-
ELIE OFEK: Especially in today’s reality.
BRIAN KENNY: It can get you in trouble, can’t it? This has been a great conversation like I knew it would be. I’ve been looking forward to this one for a while. I’ve got one question left for each of you, and I’ll start with you, Ryann, which is that if we look five years into the future, how relevant will Barbie be? How will Mattel know if they’ve been able to succeed in sustaining this movement that they started?
RYANN NOE: I think at this point in time, a big question that I’m sure they’re asking themselves is how can we really start to lead and not to follow? And I think the Barbie movie wasn’t the first movie based on a toy property. Many said it was a long time coming. And so to think really expansively about what can Barbie be beyond just a doll and what can Mattel be beyond just a toy maker? And when you start thinking expansively like that, your metrics can’t just be about toy sales anymore. You need to be thinking about permeation in society and frequency of conversation, and sometimes positive, sometimes negative. But I think five years from now, we won’t just be talking about Barbie dolls, we’ll be talking about the brand as something more expansive than that.
BRIAN KENNY: I love that. And maybe there’ll be a B case that we’ll be discussing on Cold Call five years from now. You don’t know, right? Elie, I’m going to give you the final word in this, which is quite simply, if you want our listeners to remember one thing about the “Barbie” case, what would it be?
ELIE OFEK: If I wanted them to remember one thing, it would be something along the lines of you have to walk that line between being controversial on the one hand and then leaning into that and turning it into something positive. And I think that they were able to do that in a way that’s so unique that yes, there were the missteps that we discussed on earlier, and so there was a lot of critique. But the line I love in the marketing of the movie, is the line where the CMO says, “If you love Barbie or if you hate Barbie, this movie is for you.” And so can you take something like that where there’s attack on the one hand, there’s love on other hand, you can turn it into something creative and build on that. And that’s something we want businesses to do in general. Look, things are not always going to go well. How do you learn from the critique, from the feedback from what you’re getting and turn that into something that you can then build upon even further and be a success on its own? I think that kind of thinking and the way they navigated that to me was very unique and in some sense inspiring and a lesson that a lot of companies can take.
BRIAN KENNY: That’s a great final thought, and I’m looking forward to the Ken movie. I predict there’ll be a Ken movie coming out sometime soon.
RYANN NOE: You can feel the Ken-ergy.
BRIAN KENNY: Excellent. Ryann, Elie, thank you for joining me.
RYANN NOE: Thank you for having us.
ELIE OFEK: Hey, it was a lot of fun. Thank you.
BRIAN KENNY: If you enjoy Cold Call, you might like our other podcasts, After Hours, Climate Rising, Deep Purpose, IdeaCast, Managing the Future of Work, Skydeck, Think Big, Buy Small, and Women at Work, find them on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And if you could take a minute to rate and review us, we’d be grateful. If you have any suggestions or just want to say hello, we want to hear from you, email us at coldcall@hbs.edu. Thanks again for joining us, I’m your host Brian Kenny, and you’ve been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School and part of the HBR Podcast Network.