Brands must empower their community to be change agents in their own right. To that end they need to take on a mentoring role. This means the brand provides the tools techniques and strategies for their customers to become more effective marketers in achieving their own goals.

A guy named Charlie Beacham was my first mentor at Ford. He taught me the importance of the dealers and he rubbed my nose in the retail business.

Imagine it's 1981. You're an artist in love with art smitten with art history. You're also a woman with almost no mentors to look to art history just isn't that into you. Any woman approaching art history in the early eighties was attempting to enter an almost foreign country a restricted and exclusionary domain that spoke a private language.

My dad was my best friend and greatest role model. He was an amazing dad coach mentor soldier husband and friend.