Tom Goodwin

Hello, I'm a digital business transformation specialist, and the founder of All We Have Is Now (AWHIN, Inc), a consultancy created to help companies unleash the power of new technology, with a focus on making better products and services and on consumer centricity.

I'm the host of "The Edge", an original series on Euronews which reaches 250 million households, explores the future of business and culture through technology and spotlights the companies and people taking bold leaps into what’s next.

And recently I wrote  Digital Darwinism, a business book that has been translated into seven languages, now in a brand new edition.

As you can see I've got 700,000 followers on here, after being voted as the #1 Voice in Marketing. I'm a global Keynote speaker, delivering over 100 keynote speeches at leading public and private events across more than 42 countries.  I like to span the gap between pundit and practitioner. 

I now advise Fortune 500 companies and startups on business transformation and innovation. As a proponent of “nowism,” a more practical form of futurism, I think that we have all the technology we need at our disposal and we can drive meaningful growth by taking action and using our imagination to unleash its power. 

Over the past 20 years, I've built a career spanning digital, creative/advertising, and media agencies, and studied the impact of new technology, new consumer behaviors, and changing rules of business. 

This experience informs my work in digital transformation and innovation. My work has been referenced in The New York Times and The Economist. I've published over 500 articles in publications including The Guardian, TechCrunch, Forbes, Digiday, Quartz, Marketing Week, Adweek, and the World Economic Forum. 

I don't know more than others, but I know enough to ask good questions and listen to those who know more about things.  My style is provocative. I do this to get better and more passionate answers, not because I care one iota about engagement stats or building a community, but because I'm curious and like to learn.

I passionately believe that we're alive at the most interesting time in the world, that new technology is making incredible things possible and that it creates enormously exciting and profound new things achievable for many people and businesses.  I also think change is misunderstood, that many things are not changing, that many movements create existential threats and I'm here to try to provide guidance through this.

Co-Founder

Realistically if you were to build your company today, it wouldn't quite look like it does.

Ambitious CEO's, CIO's and CMO's are wrestling with the altered economics, dynamics, threats and opportunities of a world where technology has changed consumer behaviors, expectations and altered how companies are valued by the stock market.

It's very easy to change in a superficial way. It's fast, cheap, risk free, and requires no political risk or buy in. Deep change is what makes a difference.

We use imagination, clarity, and optimism to provoke ambitious companies into meaningful change.

It starts with well intentioned provocation, rethinking the assumptions you've made, generating a new vision, then building new processes, structures and protocols for your future. It then requires a change of culture to foster an environment of innovation and agility.

If you are happy with robust thinking, honesty, and unleashing the power of bold optimistic thinking, please get in touch to find out more about our program and booking a provocation session.

This is a fake story on Facebook and it's harmless, right? 

It's not the most damaging story ever, it's not like selling a cure for cancer that does't work, or making up political stuff to energize the base, it's not going to destabilize the world.

But this is just where we are now. It's just how life is. 

It's a fake AI image, with fake quotes, about a thing that's not happening.

It takes you a site where lots of ads are jammed into your eyeballs.

Because that's the model now.

- Facebook makes the money from promoting this fake story, because they don't care that 10% of their revenue comes from scams.

- The fake newsite (Vibetunes) makes a bit of cash, Dazzling Dolphins gets to make cash and gets some followers.

- Meanwhile the story goes a little viral as 3000 people jump in saying" hey guys, this is fake", and meanwhile some suckers think it's all real.

And everyone wins,  right?

I do wonder what the cost of the current media environment is. 

When you have a generation of people that, at best, don't know what to believe and, at worst, believe in stuff that's not true. 

When I started in advertising in 2001,  we had a painstaking process where EVERY claim made in a TV ad would need to be pre-approved by the BACC.

To TAKE money or PLACE money with ads was a big deal, it was a responsibility.

And now because we put things in the internet, we lost that oversight.

Everyone shrugs and nobody cares, because it could have been worse. 

I do wonder how we can take back the  high ground. 

How we can create a media environment that's based around informing people. 

Not tricking them. 

And how to we get Facebook and other providers of absolute junk to be smashed into a pulp like they deserve to be. 

You're not a platform that isn't technical culpable, you're the problem. 

When you said move fast and break things, you broke trust. You broke the tacit rules of society, of decency, or responsibility. 

AI is great, but let's not use it to destroy trust at scale.

Business Transformation Consultant- A focus on pragmatic use of AI and how it impacts culture, workflows and business structure | Author | Keynote Speaker | Trainer | 4 x LinkedIn #1 Voice in Marketing

I spent 32 years at Bloomberg LP and left in early 2022.

Since then I’ve founded Principals Media, a ghostwriting agency for executives. I am also advising startups, consulting media and financial firms on content strategy and angel investing.

I'm open to mentoring anyone interested in journalism, content strategy or fintech product. Please reach out to me via direct messages on LinkedIn.

I use LinkedIn to write about fintech product innovation, my career at Bloomberg, my views on leadership, and life lessons from my parents. 

I spent three decades working for Bloomberg, half of which was spent in editorial and half in product development. The common thread is deep thinking about how to create and find information. 

Bloomberg was still a startup when I was hired in 1990. I was the fifteenth person in the editorial group and worked the graveyard shift, starting at 4 a.m. Mike Bloomberg sat at a desk across the room. 

My first big assignment was to expand operations in Latin America. I opened 7 offices in the region and ran the group for many years. In the mid-1990s, I was named one of Bloomberg’s first five Managing Editors. I became New York Bureau Chief before the 9/11 attacks and directed that coverage. I was promoted to Managing Editor for the Americas in 2001. 

I was recruited to join the nascent product development group in 2006. I managed web scraping operations and pioneered content deals with media companies including the New York Times and Washington Post. 

In 2012, I integrated Twitter onto the Bloomberg terminal. Later, my team focused on automated news and data analytics. That included working with machine learning and AI engineers to build models for news sentiment, news volumes and other algorithms to surface the highest-quality content. 

I enjoy connecting with people who want to talk or work on projects involving content, search and technology.

Ted Merz, CFA

My father is both frugal and practical, and it’s hard for him to pass up a deal.

Dad - who turned 99 in December - shared one of those stories with me this past weekend after I asked about his years in the military.

It was the early 1950s and he was about to be discharged from the Navy.

He went to the commissary on the base in Philadelphia where he was stationed and saw Revere Ware pans were being sold at a very good price.

He thought his mother might appreciate them, so he bought a full set and brought it home.

His mother, however, already had pots and pans, so he put the set in the attic, figuring they’d come in handy someday.

More than a decade later, when he got married, he brought them down so that  my mom could use them. 

Those pots and pans - now about 75 years old - are still in the family and I continue to use them every day.

(Part of a series of life lessons based on conversations with my parents.)

Founder Principals Media - Modern Storytelling for CEOs / Co-Founder Pricing Culture / Former Global Head of News Product at Bloomberg

There have been a bunch of eye-catching stories recently about companies paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to hire social media writers to help CEOs build their personal brand. 

The companies most often cited tend to be tech-centric including Andreessen Horowitz, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic. The jobs are often described in the media as mainly writing LinkedIn posts. 

What casual readers get wrong is that this isn't really about writing on social media in general or LinkedIn in particular. 

It's about communication and the need to adapt to a new medium. It's about creating compelling online content that people want to read and share.  

Business Insider reporter Amanda Hoover just published one of the better takes on the trend because she puts it in that context. 

One easy way to understand what's happening is this: Gen Z - your future customers - aren't watching CNBC or reading the New York Times or Wall Street Journal like earlier generations.

They are watching YouTube and reading social media. They are absorbing information from Instagram, X, Reddit, Substack and Threads. And they connect more with individual people than brands. 

So, as a company you need to be visible in those new places and you can't repurpose content that worked in the Before Times of legacy media. 

Content these days needs to be compelling and shaped for the new media. And more often than not it needs to feature either the CEO or an executive.  

Online content tends to use less formal language, have a faster cadence and be written in a more personal tone.

Most companies struggle to do this because it represents a radical departure from the way they have crafted messaging for decades. It's a new format for a new medium and to be successful you need to adapt.

That's why they are hiring specialists who focus on this style such as my agency, Principals Media. 

Companies such as A16Z that have invested in this new style of content creation are outliers today. But everyone will be doing it in the future. 

Because the world has changed and we aren't going back to a time when everyone is watching the nightly news.

Open article: The hottest job in tech pays $775,000 and has nothing to do with coding by finance.yahoo.com

The hottest job in tech pays $775,000 and has nothing to do with coding

Matt Zeigler asked me questions I had never been asked in this podcast. 

Matt is nothing if not thorough! Enjoyed the discussion.

Managing Director @Sunpointe Investments | Panoptica Editor | Podcast Host | Husband | CultishCreative.com

I assume everyone knows Ted Merz, CFA, has been to breakfast with him, or, at least, has read his writing about someone you know/admire and their breakfast-based conversation. 

And, EVEN IF YOU THINK YOU KNEW TED from some of this stuff - 

I bet I caught some stories from his years at Bloomberg, the before times (maybe my favorite poached egg story ever), and the modern LinkedIn era that will alter the way you think about:

Networking

Community

Building relationships

It's the Intentional Investor on Epsilon Theory - unpacking the Ted Merz origin story - and it's OUT NOW:

LinkedIn shared some best practices for CEOs writing online recently with a group of content creators including myself that I found helpful. 

The session was part of a series of webinars that they hope will help people be more effective writing online. It was hosted by Devin Banerjee and Alexander B. and included a presentation by Ian Cutler from the global communications team at PepsiCo. 

Four pieces of advice the LinkedIn team shared about writing posts: 

Be consistent 
Skip the polish
Explain the “why”
Don’t wait for perfection

They are looking for “authentic” content, not highly produced or glossy pieces. It’s good to post consistently. Maybe not every day, but once or twice a week. They want insight ie “explaining the why” of what you are writing. 

They encouraged executives to post more often about breaking news, such as earnings, but discouraged reposting the corporate release. 

Instead, they are looking for executives to write their own posts that focus on the larger, strategic picture, not the specifics you tend to find in press releases or government filings. The posts should not feel promotional. 

The best example of that genre I have seen lately was a post by Microsoft’s Satya Nadella. He wrote about earnings, but did so in a way that felt appropriate to a LinkedIn audience. 

The other big learning for me was that LinkedIn are looking for executives to “stay in their lane” of expertise when contributing to the conversation. 

Ian Cutler at PepsiCo provided a good example. When the company unveiled its first new logo in 25 years last October, a number of executives wrote about the event. But they did so from different perspectives. The CEO wrote about the big picture strategy while other executives wrote about the logo from the point of view of marketing, design and sustainability. 

The lesson: LinkedIn doesn’t want lots of people saying the same thing. 

It makes sense because the oft-employed corporate strategy of having a spate of employees “amplify” the same message is not interesting to readers.

LinkedIn is saying that everyone writing about an event should bring their own angle and perspective. 

That’s going to be hard for some companies, many of which would rather distribute “talking points.”

But anytime something is hard it’s also an opportunity.

Feel free to reach out if you want help writing effectively online.

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The Battle

Tom Goodwin

Ted Merz, CFA

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taplio

The Battle

Tom Goodwin

Ted Merz, CFA

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Tom Goodwin's LinkedIn Performance

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Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreTom Goodwin's LinkedIn Performance