Female Disruptors: Cathy Lang and Stacey Hawes of Epsilon are shaking up how data is used in marketing

Cathy: The best advice I was given is that as leaders, one of the most important qualities is the ability to make decisions. Making decisions quickly, right or wrong, keeps your business moving forward. The good news: if you make the wrong decision, you can quickly recover and change the course. Let’s face it, what leader out there makes the right decisions 100% of the time? Aside from that: step up, be aware of your surroundings and your emotions. Learn how your unique characteristics can empower your career, whether through knowledge, empathy or otherwise.

Stacey: A great piece of advice I got many years ago is that it is OK to fail. As a woman I am constantly trying to prove my value and OVER-achieve. Over the years when projects didn’t come to fruition I really beat myself up over it. During my time at Doubleclick I led a project to develop an email data cooperative — which was super disruptive at the time. After a year, I realized it wasn’t the right solution. I presented to the President with the recommendation to close down the business and he accepted my suggestion. Suddenly, I realized I was left without a job! But, the opposite happened — he was so appreciative that I made the “right” recommendation, I had a choice of which role I wanted to do next — I learned so much from that failure. Some of my best learnings have come from failed projects.