In my early teens I figured out that I think differently. I didn’t set out to be a marketer, but I know the value in bringing together numbers to tell better stories. Marketers tell stories to make the lives of others better and numbers help make marketing more meaningful. In my early career as a business analyst, I was given some advice on thinking about future leadership positions to aspire towards and to focus my efforts on those that would make it happen. Since then I have shared this advice with others.The decision on which aspirations I would focus upon was an easy one for me to make. My career in marketing and corporate/business development bring together the unnatural allies of conceptual thinking and using facts to make decisions. These are essential for creating relevant and rightly-timed brand interactions and customer-first experiences.I believe that marketers with breadth across most marketing disciplines, aptly combined with some that extend beyond marketing, will rise up to lead. My marketing portfolio includes B2B/corporate, small business (B2b), content, brand, digital, social, direct, CRM, and consumer loyalty. And then extends further with strategy, mergers and acquisitions, analytics, business development, and client services.A realist. A pragmatist. With a healthy twist of futurist.