If you are looking for or have questions about consulting, please see my company Bigwidesky or email me at eric@inboundandagile.com.
If you’re looking for information about me speaking, please see the speaking page.
This website
For the first portion of my career, I&A was my business. I contracted, freelanced, and otherwise worked with big and small businesses primarily is digital analytics in a time before Google Analytics existed, social media, in a time before Twitter and Facebook existed, and ecommerce post-dot-com bubble. It was great. I got to do some amazing things and worked with some Fortune 100 businesses in addition to smaller, more local and regional players. After seven years though, I was burnt out being a solo players and went to work for others. At that time, I transitioned this website to more of a publishing platform, which it is today.
As time has gone on, the content here has transitioned from digital marketing, to broader marketing, to management, and now, I focus more on organizational culture and leadership because of where my career has gone. I also read ~150 books per year and share the must-reads.
About Eric
The best relevant and up to date synopsis on me is on LinkedIn.
I have 3 degrees, have lived in 3 countries, play a lot of instruments (badly), speak a few languages (most not well), have a wife and children, keep bees, read–as already mentioned–about 3 books every week, and exercise religiously. I am particularly interested in what makes individuals and groups tick and am especially talented with analytics and some forms of research. Two of the more memorable things people have said about me to my face are:
- “You have an incredible ability to leave a thread in a conversation to talk about a tangent and then pick back up from that point half an hour later without forgetting where you were or what you had said.”
- “I’ve never met anyone, who uses metaphor and analogy to make their points so well.”
On the former point, sorry. I talk a lot. On the latter point, I’ve dealt with so many people that do not speak my language well (or I do not speak their language well) that–from a young age–it simply became natural to me to get creative when I needed to get my point across. Rarely does it help to just say the same thing again or louder. Usually, you have to figure out to how communicate in a way that the other party understands, even if it’s foreign to you.
Being outgoing, curious, and interested in people and having made a lot of mistakes in my career, I enjoy sharing through writing and speaking and have little shame about learning from mistakes. While I do not view many things as a competition, Nelson Mandela’s quote is a good example of how I think about failure and other aspects of life and work that could have gone better.
As a result, I have done a lot of speaking over the years. I’ve spoken at universities, local clubs and groups, large national and international conferences, and of course to clients. I’ve had over 1,000 people in the audience at times, and even when I taught at a university for a short period, I had students get up and walk out of class in the middle of my introduction on day 1. In my defense though, I was 21, and I believe they found it offensive that their German instructor was younger than them.
At one point in my career, I had a very popular blog (on a different domain sadly), was one of Twitter’s top 10 most followed accounts, and was the most retweeted account on that platform. Around 2010, I began to burn out on social media, and in 2012, my concerns about privacy issues were confirmed by people I knew that were working with Facebook at the time. As a result, I eventually dropped all social media except LinkedIn, so that is where you can find me. My clients almost universally all still use social media–both organic and paid typically–and I do recommend it for businesses, but my advice to you as an individual is to be very deliberate about your use of it and to focus as much as possible on things other than social media. The reasons are innumerable.
Throughout my career, I have literally saved clients’ organizations from going under, been a part of efforts that have driven massive growth, and done some really cool things like pitched to test how to grow food on Mars and the moon. I’ve managed a lot of people and would like to think I’ve made enough mistakes there (sorry) to have failed my way to success. In that and many other areas, I feel to my core what Michael Jordan and others have said. Always get back up and keep trying.
On this website, I share my experiences and knowledge to help you navigate and adapt to change, and drive long-term success for your organization. If you are simply looking for information, please check me out on LinkedIn or send me an email.