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How to Pivot Your Career Without Starting Over
June 9, 2022 Brand Leadership Business Growth Career Growth Creative Agency Design Leadership Strategy
Guest Speaker

George Hammer

Global Head of Marketing, Tripadvisor

George Hammer leads a world-class global marketing team at Tripadvisor. Before joining Tripadvisor, George was the Chief Content Officer at IBM where he led the company’s transformations in storytelling, product and content marketing, and more. George was the CMO of a startup before spending time leading teams at media companies and digital agencies. He lives in Connecticut and loves to explore all the good in the world.

Maximize for happiness with purposeful career pivots.

A career isn’t something that happens — it’s something you make. Building a professional trajectory that puts happiness in the driver’s seat doesn’t have to just be wishful thinking. When you make it a priority, being happy in your job becomes part of the calculus for your decisions, your learning, and your results.

In this episode of Real Creative Leadership, George Hammer, Global Head of Marketing at Tripadvisor, talks about his deliberate career pivots that reflect his choice to lean into happiness and opportunities to learn. He shares how failures are actually wisdom and keys for understanding what makes business go, what makes teams better, and what makes creative work both satisfying and good.

Listen now to learn what a career looks like when you choose to craft your own story.

Watch this episode to discover:

  • How career pivots represent intentionality.
  • Where to spend your time to keep your skills relevant
  • Who to learn from in order to move the creative needle
  • Why creatives need to learn their company’s business
  • What makes a professional pivot purposeful in the creative realm
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mentioned in this show:
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Adam Morgan
Creative Leader and RCL Host
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The Stoke Group
Digital Marketing and Full-Service Content Agency
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RCL Episode Season 3, Episode 6
Title: How to pivot your career without starting over — with George Hammer
Global Head of Marketing, Tripadvisor

Transcript

Adam Morgan:

Hello, and welcome to Real Creative Leadership, season three. We are so excited to have a new guest here today, because there is a big question that a lot of people have been asking. You know, we talked about mentors and now people have asked, well, how do I change careers or pivot my career or do something different. And there’s just, there are a lot of questions people have around career growth. 

So I’m excited today. We are going to talk about how do you change your career without starting over? And our guest today is George Hammer. He is the global head of marketing at Tripadvisor, and he has a past of many other great positions. And I’m not going to reveal them right now because that’s part of today’s show, of him talking through his experience and where he’s been and how it’s helped him grow and change as he’s moved on from one role to the next. So welcome George to the show, thanks for joining us.

George Hammer:

Thanks Adam for having me, I’m excited to be here.

Adam Morgan:

Excellent. All right, well, let’s get started and get some good perspective here. So we’re going to dig deep into George’s life. So to start out, why don’t you give us a brief introduction about your career, maybe some background on your relationship with creativity and marketing, but it doesn’t have to be all the details, but at least some good broad strokes of different paths and things that you’ve taken on your career path.

George Hammer:

Yeah, well, I think like most people, our discovery starts as kids. And my creative journey started with Legos and turkey. Legos were given to me at a young age as a mechanism to build things. And my last name was Hammer, so I kind of had to build things.

Adam Morgan:

Of course.

George Hammer:

And I found that my brother, my older brother, was really good at getting the thing built faster, because he was great at following the instructions. And I did not like the instructions. And so I always built something a little different than what was on the box, but that’s kind of like how I led to you know, I love to play, but to also do something different. And I also remember when I was, I think in second or third grade, I participated in and I won an art contest. It was drawing a turkey out of your hand, but it was, better you know, I spiced it up and these are things I didn’t remember until I went home and my parents made me clean up my closet. And as they tried to turn my bedroom into a gym.

Adam Morgan: 

As you do.

George Hammer:

Yeah, right, it’s been in my DNA, and that’s kind of like, as you look back, that’s the type of person I am. I’m also a middle child, so I always strive to constantly be better. But I learned my creative craft on the job at a startup. I launched a startup, it was called Apple Batch, it was a LinkedIn for K-12 teachers. And I was passionate and interested in marketing human psychology, trying to figure out how to use creative and digital to drive more performance or to get people to fall in love with the brand.

And so I signed up to be the CMO and lead the marketing team, and I never led marketing nor creative, never hired a designer or writer. And here I am building and hiring a team and through late nights and working with my engineering team in India to kind of tweak and build things to working with the first designer I hired because I didn’t know how to screen designers. It actually was a colorblind designer. I remember one night sitting next to him and trying to say, let’s turn the button green and see what happens. And that’s when I realized that he couldn’t tell. But he was brilliant. He learned all of design by memorizing the codes that corresponded to colors. And so, because of that, I spent a lot of time sitting next to him on building design. And so that’s how I got started reading up and studying it and kind of figuring out what makes great design and great creative. And he was still to this day, one of the best designers I ever worked with.

And then I learned off the job creative through stumbling into Second City in Chicago, auditioning, and making it into the improv of conservatory program, where creative there is an exercise of failing fast, finding what works, and then codifying it and going. And that kind of you know, the DNA of who I am, the learning on the job in business and learning off the job through improv, was my creative awakening.

And that took me through all sorts of industries and businesses to the place where I’m at today, which is Tripadvisor. And you know, I think that’s been a foundation for my career.

Adam Morgan:

This is interesting because normally this is what I’m hearing from someone who’s like an executive creative director or something of their early beginnings of creativity, but obviously your end goal is you know, head of marketing, which is a totally different role. So that’s very fascinating to see there is good crossover of learning those same skills, regardless of wherever you end up.

George Hammer:

No, marketing is getting really good at using AI machine learning data to help inform decisions, and marketers need to become great creative problem solvers to use that data to look at it in different ways. Otherwise, every marketer in the similar industry looks at the data and comes up with a blue logo. Every marketer ends up in the same events looking at each other and having similar outcomes. Right? 

So I think the key to great marketers is the ability to kind of creatively interpret the data. So, and in that sense, creatives are the future of marketing and you know, but I started my career in business consulting. So it’s an interesting journey to have. I think rounding out the skills is critical to success.

Adam Morgan:

Tell us some more about it. So you did consulting and I know IBM or some other places maybe just hit just a few highlights of how your career has just taken some different turns as far as the company.

George Hammer:

I was really fortunate when I came out of school, it was the dot com bubble. And I was fortunate to get hired by Deloitte, a consulting company. It was a two-year rotation program, thirty people around the country. And not only did I have like eight different managers and bosses in each rotation, but then I had to go do totally different things to the point when the recession got so bad for three months, they rotated me in to do tax returns for high net worth individuals. And so I was terrible at it, but I had to learn how to do tax returns. It was just crazy. But what was good about consulting, what you learn, is how to be adaptive to the manager, how to understand client’s needs and wants, and then how to take structures and apply them to make creativity faster.

Now, what I learned in consulting, I didn’t want to do. One of my last projects was working for Mayor Bloomberg and New York City Public Schools. And I remember spending months on coming up with a solution, and we were kind of digitizing and turning around and reinventing the school system. And after months of work later, the client brought in a deck from BCG and McKinsey, and they were all hired to do the same problem, and we all had the same deck, the same solution. And that was eye awakening to me, which was wow, if we’re business consultants, the best, if we’re all kind of looking at problems, coming with the same solutions, business schools training people maybe not to think creatively enough. And then there’s a big gap in the market for winning to actually think about how to be different.

And so that was a huge learning for me. After consulting, I did the startup, the credit crisis hit and you know, had to sell off the business and worked my way into a media agency, Mindshare. And that was you know, somehow, I think by, by doing the startup and coming up with a test and learning approach to building a business and having that learning on digital, I was able to figure out how to integrate and help clients at a media agency transform from traditional to digital.

And a large portion of that was integrated marketing communications. So I helped lead that practice, but I was real passionate about not just reach and frequency, but what was in the impression like the content, the story, the creative. And so I wasn’t fulfilled just in the media agency. And fortunately, I met with someone who was working at Discovery Communications, Discovery Channel, and they were looking to build out their digital practice, their digital arm to market shows to build creative solutions, to self advertisers and everything digital. And I positioned myself well for that role and got into something that I thought was my dream job at the time and in an industry that was really hard to get into, TV. I just was in shock that I was there, working in this company, doing this great job.

I was in a satellite office in Chicago because the whole digital team was acquired through acquisition. When they closed our office, I had to make the decision what to do, and I really wanted to lean into creative storytelling. I felt like there was something I didn’t know because I never really worked in a creative digital agency. I ended up interviewing and I connected with a guy who was the CEO at the time. He went to the University of Chicago for MBA like I did. We connected, and two weeks later I’m working at Digitas, working on Small Business Saturday, working on Taco Bell, working on all these great campaigns that were just super fun.

That’s where I learned the importance of bringing fun into work. There was a lot of really creative smart people, working for not a lot of money, working really hard hours, and the main drivers were a purpose and fun. Those were key parts of the creative world.

I started to see the writing on the wall for agencies, in that we started competing with media companies, like T Brand Studio, and those companies. We started competing with other agencies. We started competing with brands building their own studios. I wanted to spend less time on thinking about how to compete with each other. I want to spend more time about building a brand.

That’s why I decided that the brand was the right place for me. I was fortunate that IBM reached out, and I started interviewing for this VP of marketing role. During the interview process, there was a need to help build storytelling and content marketing and the content arm of this brand. I leaned in there because I was passionate about brand storytelling. I kind of created the title that didn’t exist then, ‘chief content officer,’ wasn’t at the company. I helped build a function, a discipline, and a title that wasn’t wasn’t really there. That took me to brand world.

My creative journey takes me to Tripadvisor because after five years at IBM, I built such a strong team that they were able to really do amazing stuff and it wasn’t pushing me as much as leader anymore. I wanted to go do something that I could continue my own personal learning journey, and here I am today.

Adam Morgan:

Well, that’s awesome. That’s a pretty windy journey, but you can see some of the threads of growth and looking at things in new ways. I know when we spoke before, you have this, what do I say? It’s like almost like this major driver in your life of what you’ve optimized towards. I’d love you to talk to us about that. Of like what… I loved how you mentioned the fun aspect, and this kind of relates to that. What is the glue that’s kept you going throughout your career?

George Hammer:

I’ve always been wrong about what I thought I wanted to do. That’s why I hate the question of, “What do you want to do 10 years from now?” I thought I wanted to be a heart surgeon, own a Jimmy John sub shop, be a showrunner, everything. What I learned is to stop trying to pick a job and optimize for happiness instead.

For me, that means a lot of things. It means changing how I hire, and surround myself by more diverse people that lead to more interesting and unique cultures. Going from a manager to a coach and helping people find their own thing they love and happiness.

Changing my mindset. At agencies, it was all about retaining your people. When someone left, you said, “Oh, we hate you for leaving,” and it’s almost like they were leaving you. But now I look at the world as creating alumni networks, and that we embrace and support people wherever they go.

Focusing on learning more and focusing on creating a mechanism to innovate so that we can spend more time on the ideas and testing people’s questions and hypotheses versus fighting about them.

All of those things I try to do, hopefully leads to focusing more time on the work, more things that matter to the audience, better time at work, and really it’s my own personal happiness. It works out for me.

Adam Morgan:

I love that, because you’re right. So many of us are looking for some sort of a career ladder or what’s the next step that’s natural that I should be going to? Maybe a lot of people are like, “Why am I not getting that next step?” They’re really grumpy and unhappy in the company they’re at.

But this idea of optimizing for happiness. Not just your own happiness, but others around you, I like that too, of the team and everything. It’s an interesting aspect to think about in a different way. The result is, of course you’ll grow in your career, of course you’ll do all the right projects and do all the things that will make an impact on your customers. I really like that idea. 

George Hammer:

Thank you. When one of your happiness things is to do things different and continuously learn, that makes it tough because some people they look at resumes and they want to hire people who are just like their resume, just like that. I think resumes kind of stink because they’re all about work experience, not the learning experience.

Think of your resume. You put all these stats on there on things you accomplished and everyone tries to make themselves look good about things like ROI, but no one ever puts on the things that they learned, the failures they had. When I go through my resume and interviews, I talk about what I learned and how it translates, and not what I did and totally just the outcomes. That’s table stakes these days and it’s totally not provable, so it’s hard to even hold anyone accountable to it. What people learned, that’s wisdom, and that’s transferable. That’s my approach.

Adam Morgan:

When we talked before, it adds onto that idea of it’s not so much the position on your resume that matters for the next step in growth… But you’re right. The things you’ve learned and the skills you’ve acquired, and there’s this idea of not just positioning yourself for the job that you already have, but changing and positioning yourself for the job that you really want, which may be completely different. I think that’s something that a lot of people struggle with in that they’re like, “Oh, I’ve already gotten into this path. I got to go all the way to the end. If I’m midlife, I can’t just switch because I’d have to start from scratch. I have to start all the way over.”

Talk to us more about how do you do that? How do you position yourself for the right fit without having to worry about starting in a new path?

George Hammer:

One thing I do is try to make sure I spend enough time grounded to the work. Because in our industry, work changes so fast. If you just spend all your time managing the people, then you lose track of how work changes your future interests and stay relevant with your own skillset.

I always try to pick one or two projects per quarter to like go deep in and stay relevant. That helps me have those stories, too, to pivot when I want to potentially change industries or careers. You’ve leaned in enough.

The other is you have to have time to reflect. Mindfulness is becoming big at work now, but what about reflection for your health? But what about reflection just on your career experiences and then your learning. I think that is critical.

But even if you do that, there’ll be some doors that are still closed to you. While I love the movie Rudy and believe I’m continuously trying, you can’t kill yourself banging on some doors. Some companies and industries are just really hard to get into. I applied for 10 years straight to go work at Lego and I just could never get through a gate.

Adam Morgan:

Oh, really? That’s awesome.

George Hammer:

Yeah. They wanted someone… They want people, I guess, who come from CPG and that industry. But there were other places. Tripadvisor is a great example of a brand that was open to hiring someone outside their industry. Know what you want, but there has to be a fit too. Not every manager is innovative and accepting of people’s transferable skills. They want more of the transferable resume. Then you need to change your resume.

Adam Morgan:

That’s a good point, because I’ve seen that problem where people will fix up their LinkedIn telling the one story and then send it out there for all these different universal roles that are out there and it doesn’t work. What we need to realize is if there really is this Lego job that you really want, rewrite your story, rewrite your resume, rewrite your LinkedIn profile and really update it to the skills that are transferable, the things that are relevant and tell the right story. I think that’s so critical.

George Hammer:

Yep. One of the producers I hired in my last job, she applied to work on my team four years in a row and finally, I was like look, this person really wants to work here. She’s going to be happy here. I think sometimes you just got to take risks on people too. They don’t have the perfect skillset. I’ll take someone who really wants to work at my company who’s maybe a little less qualified than someone who’s really qualified, but on the fence whether they prefer my company or someone else. So I’d encourage people to not give up, but maybe after 10 years you try something else.

Adam Morgan:

Who knows? Just give it time George. You may find yourself there someday.

Well, let me ask this one then. When we talked before as well, there’s this idea that there are leaders who kind of put people into stereotypical buckets, right? You had made some comment about being a performance marketer versus a brand marketer, and people just put you in one or the other. Talk about that a little bit more of how do we get past that stereotype and how do we reframe ourselves to fit the right needs?

George Hammer:

Yep. I joined Tripadvisor four months ago now and during the interview process with other companies, which was, I was looking for about three months, the top question I got is people would ask about, “Tell me your story,” is that they heard my story and somehow after hearing that story, they came back to the question, Well, are you a brand marketer or a performance marketer? Because they couldn’t put me in a box. The world is this black and white.

I asked them, “What type of person left the role? What type of person was here before?” You can always tell that they go, “Well, this person was a brand marketer and they didn’t do well. So now we’re looking for a performance marketer.” Or vice versa.

All it seems like that’s happening, the translation from marketing requirements for leaders to recruiting seemed like it was basically becoming the inverse of the other person and a pendulum going back and forth. In that, a company’s never going to find the pursuit of what they’re looking for, which is a great diverse team. Someone who understands how to pull together all of marketing and someone who can do both. This notion that people can’t do both is partly because of right now the world’s so polarized with things with labels, but it’s also that we as a marketing discipline have moved towards hyper specialization.

There’s people who could spend their whole career doing one very… Marketing automation or one very specific thing. There are people who spend their whole time developing copy and they’ve never met in person the target market because technology allows us to be further away from the audience, but use data to try to figure out who they really are. So this notion of both technology and our discipline, and then recruiting, pulling people apart, I think is detrimental to the future of our craft. Where it’s brands being for humans, it’s creative being for good, it’s people understanding people and creative problem solving.

So I always told people when they asked that question and they explained what they were looking for, that I wasn’t the right person. If you want someone who can do one or the other, that’s the person below this person that’s what you’re looking for. We talked about making the leap across disciplines and across careers. It’s scary, but it pays off. If you want to just focus and be really great at one thing, there’s nothing against that. But I think you’ll be happier when you’re really, really good at what you do when you’re closer to the top. In order to be great at what you do, you have to understand and that understanding needs to be broad.

So for me, that was a major source of wow, when I interview, and actually now I’m setting up my team, more rotation programs, more people hiring across backgrounds, across disciplines, trying to create less silos and more opportunities for people to grow.

Adam Morgan:

That’s so interesting to hear and certainly I can at least empathize with the feeling between, are you brand marketer? Are you a performance marketer? The world that I experience as a creative is even more stark where it’s they will see you in a creative role up to executive creative director. But when it comes time for the search for a company CMO, they’re not going to be looking at a creative person at all. It’s always going to be a performance marketer or a brand marketer. That’s where they’re going.

But I like this at least starting the conversation of first of all, a lot of people need to step up and learn to jump side to side. Absolutely. Someone who’s a creative leader, who’s not willing to speak marketing and understand performance marketing or do all those things isn’t going to be the right fit. But I can only hope that in this era of experiences, that those who have diverse backgrounds, that there’s some diversity in background, not just all the D&I stuff that we’re going through.

George Hammer:

Right. Well, diversity of thought is huge. At IBM, I was in the leadership cabinet of marketing execs. So there were all the business units CMOs, myself, and a few others. Of those 40 people, I think I was the only one who ever worked in a creative role. There are others that may have done it a long time ago, but it never really came out. But as far as diversity of thought, it’s huge. More so though, you don’t have to have worked in the role to seek to understand it.

I think to be able to go to the top, you need to understand business. You need to understand creative, understand marketing, understand people, understand how your brand makes an impact on the world. 

When I first started at Tripadvisor, I spent time trying to understand how we make money. I’ll never be an expert in all these things, but if you’re not at least interested, then you’ll never really understand enough to have a dialogue, because everything is the people business and people business is about relating to them, being able to talk their language, understand them. If you don’t show any interest in what the CFO does or another discipline does at the top, then it’s going to be really difficult for someone who comes from a creative background to sustain in a leadership like role.

Adam Morgan:

I haven’t heard that same advice. I know we’re kind of shifting this conversation in a different way, but as far as growth and getting to the C-suite, there was another person who said that so often we go at that coming from our discipline, our field of focus, and we keep going up to these upper leadership moments and only representing that field of focus. What they’re looking for in greater leadership roles is more of someone who can see across the company, understand finance and marketing and this and that and this, and really come at it from a kind of more of a broad perspective on everything.

I think that resonates to what you’re saying here of just, it’s not a matter of just when you’re trying to find this path and move around, but maybe purposefully zigging and zagging your career path to learn and understand different ways that businesses works and find out how your business makes money. Then you can add in the creative ideas, and flare and marketing expertise and all those things.

George Hammer:

Yeah. Agree. The scariest conversation for a creative would probably be to go befriend the CFO and try to learn the business. But when you do that, everything else will seem easy and you’ll be able to, I think, be more effective because then you’ll be able to creative problem-solve on things that move the needle. You’ll be able to have a perspective that maybe not many other people in the company do. So it’s uncomfortable sometimes on learning someone else’s discipline. But look, everyone has an opinion on someone’s creative.

Adam Morgan:

Oh yeah.

George Hammer:

Every other discipline thinks they know marketing. Why don’t we go out and learn everyone else’s discipline?

Adam Morgan:

Let me tell you about that spreadsheet there and we’re talking numbers, I’m going to tell you exactly which one’s on it.

George Hammer:

There’s no reason why creative can’t have a great idea on how to make more money. So I think it’s really the opportunity. I mean, that’s what happens in a five person startup anyways. They’re all sitting around the table, sharing the conversations and that’s why they come up with really cool stuff that rapidly grows the company. And, then as we grow, we get into our silos and then people get stuck. And, next thing you know 40 years later, they’re doing the same thing. And so, and then now we’re back to taking leaps back and forth and trying to advance your career without taking a step backward.

Adam Morgan:

Hmm. Yeah, maybe that’s just a good idea because I’ve seen a lot of people who feel like they hit a wall and so they’ve jumped off and done the startup and been a creative founder or whatever it may be. But, I really think there is an opportunity to… That’s not the only path forward as a marketer or creative to get to the C-suite. There certainly are other paths and this is the starting of it and learning those disciplines, understanding it, and then crafting your career to map to some of those moments on purpose.

George Hammer:

Yeah. I mean, if you’re a great creative, you’re really good at understanding the essence of a brand, figuring out a challenge and then figuring out how to attack the brief to get from here to there. That’s what taking a leap in your career is, right? You’re the brand. You have a challenge where there’s people out there that don’t believe you’re relevant for the role. So, how are you going to take the brief, which is your resume, which most of us get these briefs of a bunch of stats and freedom facts that don’t really tell the story that we need, that we know will break through, and figure out how to make it work. Simplicity is key and there’s, I think within every great… If you can’t tell your own story, then who can?

Adam Morgan:

Yeah, well it’s the cobbler’s children, right? That’s the biggest reason we don’t do it, but that’s advice. Go back, treat your resume or your LinkedIn profile as a brief. How are you going to creatively tell that story in a way that breaks through? Yeah, I love it. That’s great. Well, getting near the end here, maybe a couple quick, last questions. First, what about if you join a new team, how have you helped convince… Let’s say you spun a great story. You got a new role. Maybe everyone on the team is, “Who is this character?” How do you work with teams and what is your strategy to build those relationships and try something new and reframe the story so that the team comes along with you?

George Hammer:

Yeah. I’d say the last two ways I did and the pluses of minuses of both. One time, I set up a list of a hundred people I’m going to interview and meet. I’m going to fly to every office. I’m just going to build relationships. I’m going to develop hypotheses, talk to the CMO and the other execs, and then formalize a POV that can sustain. And, that POV at IBM is called ‘Make less matter more.’ It’s make half as much stuff twice as good focusing on mattering, make every impression count. And, that was kind of the DNA of what originally started as content and spread to all disciplines, to the point where our whole marketing strategy for the next couple years was about cutting the number of campaigns in half. Figuring out how to really focus on the essence, the message and holding it down. And, we went from 300 campaigns down to six by the time we were done.

Adam Morgan:

Wow, that’s something we need to do. We’re still at 300.

George Hammer:

Oh, it was a journey. I’m not saying… I didn’t do that journey alone. It was a movement. Everyone was on board. But, when I handed over the keys to that mantra and tried to make it more about we and us versus my own mantra for a discipline, it became more ownable for everyone. And so best advice is when you start a company, spend time on thinking about your position that you’re not going to change for years because great leaders come in and, if you flip flop too often, you’re done.

The other approach I took was I was handed this 90 day book, which is like your first 90 days, things you should do. And, I read it and I thought, I don’t know. I had a couple weeks in between jobs. I was, “I’m going to write down this and develop a 90 day plan and come up with my strategy.” And, there’s a couple challenges with that approach. One is not every organization is ready in 90 days for your interview. Another is not every organization can be fully understood in 90 days. And, another is not… Very few relationships can be built to the point where trust is there for you to actually be broadly accepted in 90 days.

So, overall that may work at some companies and some cultures, but I’m real hesitant to apply going back to my learnings from consulting the same structured deck applied to the same problem, get to the same solutions. And, I don’t know if that leads to the best outcomes. So, my own personal advice to myself is to not do that again and try to figure out — don’t ‘time box’ it. However long it takes you to get to the vision that becomes so compelling, but so obvious that everyone and simple that everyone jumps on board is the right approach to build a team.

Adam Morgan:

ll right. Well, this has been awesome. Maybe last question, any just last advice for marketers or creatives who are hoping to make a change and how they can do it without starting over? What are the big, broad strokes that you’d let them know of what to do moving forward?

George Hammer:

Well A, figure out your money situation. And, you might not have to start over title wise, but you might take less money to go take the job you want. And, you have to figure out on how much you’re willing to sacrifice in that scenario. So, A is figure out where you’re willing to bend versus not.

The second is to treat yourself like the brief. Have a story, but I wouldn’t waste any time applying on websites. If you’re making a leap, don’t go through the black hole, right? Go to people. And, so if you’re going to go to people and do a one-on-one approach to telling your story to people, then it has to be tailored to the person in the company every time. So, it’s going to take a lot of energy. And, the key here is just not giving up and getting discouraged then, because the energy it takes to do change management, which is changing your career, requires changing someone’s perception on what they need in that job. It’s going to take energy. It’s going to take storytelling. It’s going to take persistence, but it’s possible.

And, I think in the end, if you know there’s a change that you need in order to follow your happiness, that it will be possible, and will happen. You just have to keep figuring out where the open doors are and how your story resonates with that person.

Adam Morgan:

Great advice. Great advice. Thank you so much, George. All right. As we close here, where can people follow you? How do they know what’s going on in your world? LinkedIn, social somewhere, let us know where they can find you.

George Hammer:

Yeah. Just go to LinkedIn and search for George Hammer. I post there regularly and DM me, and I’m happy to have a conversation and continue with anyone about… And if I can help you in any way possible, let me know.

Adam Morgan:

Awesome. Well, we appreciate it. As always, you can find us at realcreativeleadership.com or on YouTube or at your favorite podcast. So, thank you everyone for listening in. This has been a great session. Hopefully you got a lot out of it. I know I did.

Again, our ask to all of you, if you like this content, please share with your friends, your colleagues, whatever. Make some notes, getting in the comments, add some comments, whatever it is just to engage. We appreciate any form of engagement on the show. Again, you can find me at adamwmorgan.com or on LinkedIn. And this show is produced by The Stoke Group. You can always find them at thestokegroup.com. And, if you need media, marketing, creative partner to get through whatever you need for your business, they can help out with that as well.

So, thank you for listening to Real Creative Leadership and we’ll see you next time. Take care.