Twenty years after we made it, a colleague told me she still has the lunchbox.
It was part of a mealtime insulin campaign we ran back in my pharma days. Metal lunchboxes, leave-behinds, even a plush animal tied to the campaign theme. She was a sales rep then.
We crossed paths recently on a work call. About thirty seconds in, we both realized we’d actually worked together twenty years ago. We got on a separate call to catch up, and that’s when she told me about the lunchbox. She still had all of it.
I laughed when she said it. Then I sat with it for a minute, because nothing I’ve made at work has ever meant more to me than knowing one person carried it with her for twenty years.
It also reminded me how rare that is. People almost never hold onto something from a corporate initiative years later.
Nobody keeps the slide deck.
Most of my career has been spent watching transformations happen from both sides. As a sales rep. As a marketer. As an agency partner. And now in large-scale change work. Over time something pretty simple started to come into focus: people don’t change because they sat through another town hall. They change when they can see themselves in the story.
The difference between those two things is enormous.
Pharmaceutical sales was the start, and it was meaningful work. Helping physicians help patients mattered. Marketing came next, probably with a little overconfidence, because the assumption was: I’ve been in the field, I know what reps actually need. And sometimes that was true. Some of what we built really connected. Field teams used it, talked about it, leaned on it. You could feel when something landed.
Other times it didn’t. Campaigns that looked great in the conference room changed nothing once they hit the field. Sometimes the feedback was blunt. Sometimes it was silence, which is worse. That gap stayed with me, because by then I’d lived on both sides of it.
Here’s the part that still gets me. Today I keep meeting clients who went through one of our experiences years ago at a different company. They don’t remember the launch email. They don’t remember the deck. They remember the visual metaphor. “It was a boat in a storm.” “It was a spaceship launching.” And the strategy underneath it. That’s what they actually internalized. Years later they want to recreate that experience in their new role, at their new organization, because something about it stayed with them in a way nothing else did.
That’s what brought me to Root, part of Accenture. Watching the methodology in action on the client side, in rooms full of people who’d sat through every other kind of strategy rollout you can imagine, made it impossible to walk away from. Getting to do this work every day, talking to clients, helping organizations actually engage their people, honestly brings me joy. Twenty years of watching smart people get demoralized by good ideas badly rolled out will do that to you. So, I’m here.
Across sales, marketing, agency work, enablement, and transformation, the same pattern plays out, over and over, in smart organizations full of strong leaders trying to do meaningful things.
A strategy gets announced. Town halls happen. Leaders communicate the vision. (“We communicated it.” “We rolled it out.” Same defense, slightly different vocabulary.) And then people go back to work.
That’s when the real conversation starts.
It used to happen around the watercooler. Today it’s in Teams chats, text messages, the five minutes after the Zoom call ends. The conversation itself hasn’t changed much:
“Do they actually understand what we deal with every day?”
“Sounds great… but what does this mean for us, for me?”
“Here we go again.”
Those are the moments leaders rarely hear directly. They also tell you almost everything about whether the strategy is actually landing or just being politely received.
Here’s the thing: leaders do care. Employees do too. Most organizations are full of smart people with good intentions trying to move things forward. Somewhere in between, they miss each other.
Communication announces. Activation lands.
For a long time, organizations have treated activation like a communication problem. If the messaging is just clear enough, frequent enough, polished enough, people will come along. But that’s rarely what happens. Activation isn’t about what people hear. It’s about whether the experience around the change actually matches what leadership says is important. And people are very, very good at spotting the gap between messaging and reality.
Organizations are about to test that at a level we haven’t seen before. Because AI isn’t another initiative or system rollout. For a lot of employees, it raises far more personal questions:
Do my skills still matter?
Will my role change?
Am I being empowered… or replaced?
You can’t answer questions like that with another slide deck.
And that’s a very different conversation.