At home with Leaders: Bozoma Saint John

The new Netflix CMO on the business of being badass | Leaving a big job at Endeavor for a bigger one at Netflix in the midst of a pandemic | The role of the modern marketer | The marcomms challenge in sport, who's done it best, and what comes next.

Episode 93 of the Leaders Sport Business Podcast features a conversation with new Netflix CMO Bozoma Saint John (discussion starts at 8:42). Saint John is one of the most impactful marketers in modern corporate America. Her resumé reads like a Fortune 500 roll call: leading marketing roles at the intersection between consumer goods, tech, and entertainment at Pepsi, Apple, Uber and Endeavor presaged her current job as CMO of streaming giant Netflix, a role she took up at the beginning of August, one week after recording this conversation for Leaders.

Wherever she has gone across her career, Saint John has made a deep impression, her skill for brand storytelling allied closely to her own executive boldness and sense of personal authenticity. She is currently combining her new role with continued work on a series of podcasts co-hosted with TV journalist Katie Couric - Back to Biz with Katie and Boz - and the completion of a five-week set of digital personal and professional workshops - the Badass Workshop.

On the conversational agenda:

- The 'authentic self' and how to define it; bringing it to bear every day; and how you look and how you feel play into that;

- The business of being badass - the what, why and how behind the workshops;

- The job of the marketer and how that changed - and changed again - over the course of the pandemic;

- Lessons in shutting down and starting again from Back to Biz with Katie and Boz: guests include Kara Swisher, Judd Apatow, Mary Barra, Brian Chesky, and Ashley Graham;

- Zoom fatigue and communicating in the new digital-first age, and offenders who turn off mic and camera;

- The chutzpah it takes to start a big new job during Covid;

- What great leadership looks like today.