Buying AI and Other Shiny Tech Can’t Save a Broken Strategy
Companies are spending millions on technology that nobody ends up using. Nicole McNamara has spent her career figuring out why—and what to do instead.
In this episode of the Customer Obsessed podcast, Coastal CEO Eric Berridge sits down with Nicole, founder and CEO of Catalyst Innovation, to get into the real work of transformation: the facilitation, the resistance, the co-creation, and the moment when a room full of skeptics starts pulling in the same direction.
What You’ll Learn
- Why executives zone out three minutes into a demo, and what Nicole did instead during Salesforce’s Ignite program to get C-suites genuinely bought in
- The velvet hammer: how Nicole handles the corporate friction that software can’t fix
- What a Coca-Cola bottle cap has to do with your customer strategy
- Why Nicole describes good facilitation as carrying around a fainting couch (and why she’s not wrong)
This one gets specific. If you’ve ever watched a perfectly good strategy die in a conference room, Nicole has seen it too—and she knows exactly where it went wrong.
