HOST

Matt Poepsel, PhD

Vice President & Godfather of Talent Optimization

GUEST

Coco Brown

CEO & Founder, Athena Alliance

One of Coco Brown’s team members is a Juilliard-trained concert violinist who also runs operations at Athena Alliance. She knows his heart is in the music, and she’s fine being his base camp. That mindset shapes how Coco thinks about careers today. No one is managing your career for you anymore, and once you reach director level, the functional expertise that got you promoted becomes the entry fee.

Matt Poepsel talks with Coco Brown, founder and CEO of Athena Alliance and former President and COO of Taos, about what a decade of getting executive women into corporate boardrooms taught her about who keeps climbing. Boards are mostly founders and funders who see the whole business. That puts leaders who grew up through a single tower, like marketing or finance, at a disadvantage. Coco explains why the same gap holds back managers far below the boardroom, and how AI now lets people deep in the organization build across domains and get noticed for it. She also argues for career care as a practice we take as seriously as physical and mental health, and for a portfolio approach to work when your career could last 60 years.

What you’ll learn:

  • Functional Expertise Is the Entry Fee: Beyond the director and senior director level, the next step depends on understanding how the whole business works.
  • Your First Team Is Your Peers: Leaders who keep rising build relationships with finance, sales, and the rest of the C-suite before anyone asks them to.
  • Career Care Belongs Next to Your Health: Waiting for a layoff or promotion to think about your career keeps you in crisis response mode.
  • Think Like an Artist With a Portfolio: Multiple income streams and a “base camp” job are a smart way to build a long career, and managers can support it instead of fearing it.

Highlights:
(00:00) Meet Coco Brown
(02:17) What Coco saw at the top of the corporate food chain
(04:10) Founders and funders vs. climbing through a tower
(08:24) Why business acumen matters for every manager
(11:56) Walking around the building to build your first team
(15:09) Career care on par with physical and mental health
(17:05) Why the climb-and-get-off model doesn’t work anymore
(19:04) Your career can’t live in crisis response mode
(22:56) What it’s like to be someone’s base camp
(26:37) Fear of other people’s opinions and the “side hustle” label

Resources:
Follow Coco on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cocobrown/
Learn more about Athena Alliance: https://athenaalliance.com
Explore Atlas, Athena’s program for people in their first decade of career: https://join.athenaalliance.com


Follow Matt on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mattpoepsel/
Subscribe to The Predictive Index on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ThePredictiveIndex

Created in partnership with Share Your Genius: shareyourgenius.com