🔥 Risky Business: In Community #139

Your weekly spark at the intersection of community, culture, and commerce

Author

Fahad Khawaja, Founder of Hue
September 04, 2026

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💥 Today’s Highlights

  • The Mixdown event returns for Advertising Week NY

  • The CMO who put failure on the quarterly agenda

  • ICYMI: I’m hiring an Operations Lead - help me find them

  • Your weekly jobs roundup

🎟️ Save your spot for The Mixdown

We’re back during Advertising Week NY with The Mixdown cocktails event, in partnership with OpenX.

Join us on Thursday, October 8th from 5:30-8:30pm ET for an evening of community and connection with fellow brand marketing and media leaders.

Make sure to register to save your spot.

🔥 And now, for your weekly spark.

Risky Business.

“I don't know if we should be investing in new business models.”

Years ago, a C-level executive said this to me while my team was presenting one of the biggest bets we'd ever brought to him.

My jaw dropped. I remember thinking: Wait. What happened to everything you've been telling us about taking risks?

Last week, I wrote about who gets to influence decisions, even when they’re off target. This week, I’m getting into what happens when someone takes a risk to do just that.

What’s important to understand: At the time this executive sat across the table from me and made my jaw drop, a core part of my job was innovation and new business models to accelerate the company’s growth.

We'd brought forward a massively new idea that combined technology with a powerful human, consumer insight, but now they were questioning whether the company should be investing in new business models at all.

After a fair amount of back and forth, eventually, we took the risk anyway.

We unveiled the idea at CES, where it became the company’s flagship launch that year across divisions.

As our Chief R&D Officer stood on stage presenting the science and technology behind it, I watched from the audience. It turns out, next to me was essentially my counterpart who worked for a direct competitor. I noticed his badge just as I saw him turn to his colleague and say, “We're f***ed.”

You don't get much clearer competitive intelligence than that.

Several years later, that innovation is still a meaningful part of the company's product and consumer experience, with new generations continuing to come to market.

The interesting part is that the organization eventually saw what we'd seen. It just didn't see it at the same time.

That's one of the hardest things about innovation: sometimes the organization (or the internal or external partner you’re in conversations with) doesn't recognize the size of the opportunity at the moment you're asking it to take the risk.

That's also why people who naturally challenge the status quo can be so valuable.

👉🏽 A lot of us who haven't lived the status quo aren't as invested in protecting it.

But there's another side to that. Being the person who sees something differently can feel riskier when you're one of the few people in the room who sees it.

That's something we explore in the latest for Wellth: being positively recognized for having taken a thoughtful swing, learned something, and having something to show for it, even when the result is different than what you expected.

Because telling people it's safe to take risks isn't enough.

You have to show them what happens when they do.

📌 The Swing Factor

You can tell people to take a swing all day. What matters is what happens afterward.

👉🏽 What happens when someone brings you an idea you don't immediately understand?

👉🏽 What happens when they're early but right?

👉🏽 What happens when they're wrong?

If people see that the upside belongs to the organization but the downside belongs to them, they'll figure out pretty quickly how hard they're supposed to swing.

You can't ask people to challenge the status quo and punish them for being the first to do it.

🔥 Sometimes the risk isn't that the idea is wrong. It's that the room isn't ready to see why it's right.

✅ Now Hiring

Is someone you know considering what’s next for them? Here are a few roles with people hiring across the network. I list roles here every week, so stay tuned and make sure to spread the word.

💥 Operations Lead — Hue (Haaaaaalp, I’m hiring for this one!)

💥 Director, Brand & Creative — Palo Alto Networks (multiple other roles)

💥 Associate Director, Marketing — Kraft Heinz (multiple other roles)

ICYMI Last Week:

💥 Sr Manager, Product Marketing — NY Times (multiple other roles)

💥 Sr Manager, Growth Marketing — DuckDuckGo (multiple other roles)

And before you go, consider who else might value this newsletter and what’s coming up on YouTube. Make sure to fwd this newsletter onward to them too. They can subscribe here for more directly in their inbox.. 🔁 

In community,

Fahad