Anne Phey - Leadership Coach

Monday afternoon, Pan Pacific. I chaired The Revenue-Driven CMO Panel at CMO Asia, and as the panelist discussed, I exclaimed, "A CMO has to be an octopus!" A te****le in every division, so the boardroom seat stays warm.

The room laughed. Then it went a little quiet.

Because that is not a description of influence. It is a description of a job with no protection. No other role has to co-ordinate and integrate with other functions across product, finance, sales, production, technology to operations. And that's needed to maintain your chair.

Marketing was my first love. Sales was where I spent a good stretch of the years. IBM. MTV. Two decades of carrying someone else's number, before I started building my own. So going back into that room, in a different seat, meant something.

Full house. Three people beside me who each came at the same problem from a different angle.

Kavita Jhunjhunwala renamed the role on the spot. Chief Curiosity Officer. The CMO who has to stay ahead, hold the numbers, build the brand and narrate the growth story all at once. Curiosity is not a personality trait in that job. It is survival.

Sunita Venkataraman argued for measuring the demand system rather than the campaign. Brand, pricing, communication, distribution. Most companies do not have a data problem, she said. They have an integration problem.

Dr Mukundan A P brought the Ferrari, then landed a super sharp point. Tell a growth story. Know your top line, know your bottom line, connect all the dots. The board does not fund a campaign. It funds a story it believes.

Khushboo Nangalia said stop being everywhere and nowhere. Be in the mind of your customer. Show up on social, show up consistently, and the magic happens. Presence is not the same as being busy.

I closed with the thing I most wanted them to leave with.

Stop being the person who delivers campaigns. Start being the person who interacts with stakeholders and engages them properly.

Keep telling stories. Not only about the product and the service you are selling. Invest in telling your own.

Because you are the asset that generates the revenue. Not the campaign. Not the dashboard. That is what makes a revenue-driven CMO.

The CMO has the shortest tenure in the C-suite. Around four years. Most people assume that is a performance problem.

It is a belief problem wearing a performance problem's clothes.

And most people carrying a number find that out in the wrong order.

A mentor is not trying to be heard. They are trying to make someone else audible.

That is the strange arithmetic of mentorship. You give your hours, your network, your hardest-won lessons. The return shows up in a room you are not standing in.

As mentorship lead at APSS this past term, I watched it happen all year. Mentors who took calls between client sessions. Mentors who told the truth when encouragement would have been the easier thing to offer. Mentors who kept showing up after the formal programme ended, because the person mattered more than the term.

To every one of you: thank you. You gave something that does not show up on any invoice and does not come back to you directly. It came back to someone else, which was always the arrangement.

So we gave each of you a Bluetooth speaker.

Small enough to sit in your palm. It takes a voice that would barely carry across a table and fills the room with it. That is the whole job. Amplify Growth was our theme, and a mentor is the device. Your voice reaches further precisely because you lend it to someone else.

Alongside it, a caricature drawn by Tim Hamons. Each one catches something a headshot never does. People laughed when they saw them. Then they looked closer. Then they kept them.

If you were not able to make the AGM, your speaker and caricature are waiting for you. We will hand them over the next time we see you at an APSS meeting.

The portfolio now passes to Andrew Chow, with Avi Liran taking the lead on the mentorship programme. Both will take it further than I did.

Building something so it no longer needs you is not a loss of relevance. It is the point.

I had a moment of disbelief a couple of weeks ago. Favikon had listed me as number one for Executive Leadership Coach on LinkedIn in Singapore.

That was 19 July. Today, 4 August, I am number four.

Here is the honest part. Nothing changed in the work. What changed is that I took two weeks off social media because the workload got heavier. I was still coaching leaders, still running the C-suite and Leadership in AI programmes, still speaking and moderating. I did not become better or worse at any of it.

Which tells you exactly what a ranking measures. Whether you were seen. Not whether you were useful.

A number does not know what happened in a room last Tuesday. It does not know which leader finally moved on something they had been stuck on for two years. It does not know about the client who called at 11pm because something had broken in their management team.

That work has no scoreboard.

What I do value the board for is that it shows me who else is doing this work in Singapore. Crystal Lim-Lange, Eric Phay, Kent Choi, Coen Tan, Melinda Ng, Serene Ong Shwu-Yng, Adeline Tiah, Chuen Chuen Yeo, Lorraine Lee. Every one of them is building something real, and most of what they build will never appear on a scorecard either.

Glad to know the company I am in, and cheering all of them on.

The scoreboard moves. It always does.

The room does not.

Remember when IBM sponsored SCCCI's SME conferences with our business partners? It stopped when we sold our server division and went enterprise.

Back then it was my IBM badge, a global company, and a team of business partners behind me, speaking and showcasing technology for SMEs. This Thursday I walk back into the SCCCI SME conference as a business owner, in my own name.

That is a stranger feeling than I expected.

When you represent a multinational, the resources arrive before you do. The credibility is lent to you. You get trusted for what is printed under your name, and it takes years to notice how much of your confidence was borrowed.

Then you build your own thing and every one of those props is gone.

Here is what I did not fully understand back then. The tow-kays in those rooms were not there just to network. They were there because they carry questions you cannot ask your own staff, your own family, or your bank, and they were working out how to survive and thrive through the next eighteen months.

The chamber has been holding those conversations for 120 years. This time I am on the business owner side of it, chairing "Built on Partnerships, Powered by People" with three people who sit at very different scales.

Emily Tan of Empower Partners, on growing beyond the founder. Trust and referrals built your business, and that same circle is now your ceiling. How do you widen it without losing what made the place work.

Jeslin Lim, Head of People and Culture at Cycle and Carriage, on when best practice fails. A business trading since 1899, every framework available to it, and she will tell you what she has watched break. Context decides what survives. You cannot import someone else's answer.

Saurav Atri, Group Head of Leadership Development at DFI Retail Group, on learning versus capability. Knowledge is cheap now. Judgement, trust and the difficult conversation are not.

Then we open it up with real scenarios, the kind most owners recognise before they will admit to.

Thursday 6 August, 1.30 to 3.30pm, Level 3 Room 324, Suntec Singapore. Free pass at smeicc.org.

Come and bring the thing you are actually stuck on.

I moved through sales and marketing across two decades. IBM. MTV. Digilog. Bates. Different titles, different numbers.

Marketing was always the first love.

So today I am back with the CMO community at CMO Asia, in a different seat. Entrepreneur. Programme leader for leadership in AI. Advisor to Chief Strategy Officers.

Twenty-five minutes to push four sharp people past the dashboard: Sunita Venkataraman, Kavita Jhunjhunwala, Dr Mukundan A P and Dawn Liu.

To my dear IBM marketing friends, you may remember Dawn who has grown up in IBM and now leads Field Marketing. So glad to have her on the panel and hear how the new IBM marketing operates now.

Also, my friends...the organiser has found some non-corporate photo of mine that seems to remind me of my IBM days.

These days, I'm less flashy and still strong on substance. And that is what we will have. - a powerful panel of 5 speakers.

And that is why I train and coach leaders, and let them shine.

On 10 December…I’ll be hosting!
We gather in a Garden of Expression.
A night to honour our mentors, celebrate our members,
and let our voices bloom in their fullest colours.

✨ The Art of Expression with Anne & Has
🎶 Songs of Expression with Carson & Lily
👗 Floral fashion by Rose of Sharon
🎨 Gratitude art with Tim Hamons
🌷 Create your own bouquet for your mentor
🎁 Lucky Draw: 20 ski lessons (worth S$2,000)
💐 Extra chance for mentors who sign up

📅 10 Dec • 6–9pm • Knots Café Pasir Panjang
💐 Dress Code: Floral & Forest Elegance
🎟️ Early Bird $99 (till 3 Dec)

If you’re ready to bloom with us,
the link is in my bio ✨