Dominic Leung is Executive Director of Strategy & Transformation at Monigle, a brand experience agency based in Denver and New York. Leung also leads Confessions of a CMO, where he has candid conversations with senior marketing leaders about the challenges they’re navigating right now.
NDA spoke with Leung to find out more about the changing mandate facing CMOs…
Tell me about your day job – what sort of thing takes up most of your time?
My day job is all about harnessing the power of diversification, interrogating ideas, and structuring creative chaos to drive both internal and client transformations. Having trained in medical science before transitioning into brand strategy, advertising, and consulting, I operate in the space between those worlds. I take the scientific rigor of my medical background to build structures, fusing it with creative chaos to solve complex problems.
At its core, my philosophy is simple: transformation isn’t a big-bang event; it’s a living, continuous calibration of human behavior. We don’t just “launch” rebrands; we engineer living systems that continuously adapt operational behavior to drive human value and business growth.
At Monigle, I serve as Executive Director of Strategy and Transformation. A huge part of my time is spent standing up key future-forward initiatives, whether that’s architecting our Living Systems of Experience (LSE) framework, piloting our internal Outcomes Lab, or creating new service lines to lead both Monigle’s internal evolution and our clients’ transformations.
My job is essentially like alchemy, taking existing assets, insights, IP, whatever we’ve collected, reverse engineering it, and reassembling it to create new growth opportunities on a continuous basis.
Internally, I focus on building a culture of curiosity and adaptation. Externally, client work often feels like strategic “brand therapy”. We first level-set, then strip away distractions. We use our LSE framework to surgically calibrate continuous operational changes across 20 distinct business levers to achieve 5 distinct experience outcomes that deliver real enterprise growth.
Ultimately, it’s about learning, unlearning, and relearning in real time. And that also includes adapting to use AI as a cognitive supplement not a replacement, to refine our thinking and actions continuously.
How long have you hosted the Confessions of a CMO podcast?
To clarify, Confessions of a CMO isn’t a traditional podcast hosted by us, it’s a strategic research partnership with Jon Evans and The Uncensored CMO.
We kicked off the foundational research in summer 2025 and launched the initial report that October. But rather than letting it sit as a static PDF, we’ve kept it alive. We’ve continued conducting qualitative interviews, translating those real-world C-suite conversations into a clear taxonomy of adaptive leadership traits.
Recently, we turned that research into an interactive training lab. It allows creative leaders and marketers to map their natural adaptive traits, match them against real-world organizational challenges and lead through cross-functional influence rather than top-down authority.
What are the most common themes/trends coming up with guests this year?
The ultimate takeaway is simple: marketing always finds a way. Because marketing sits right at the intersection of the enterprise and human behavior, the CMO is always the first to feel environmental shifts.
The biggest trend we’re seeing is a complete pivot in how leadership works, moving from mandate-driven authority to influence-led adaptation.
In our research, we identified seven distinct species of adaptive traits. The leaders who are actually winning today aren’t launching massive, disruptive three-year overhauls that trigger the corporate “immune system”. Instead, they master continuous operational calibration. That’s the act of making surgical, real-time micro-adjustments that keep the business moving forward without causing organizational panic.
Is the CMO’s voice being heard in the senior management suite? Is the situation getting better or worse?
It’s less about the title or role itself and more about the organization’s overall philosophy and ability to recognize intersectionality. When you look at enterprise value today, there is a 92/8 enterprise gap: roughly 92% of S&P 500 market value is tied up in intangible assets (brand, reputation, culture, intellectual property, and human capital). Yet, traditional corporate governance models still try to manage businesses as if physical assets dominate, creating an “authority paradox” for leaders.
When a CMO (or any leader) tries to force cross-functional execution through top-down mandates, it fails. But the situation is actively improving for leaders who understand how to build cross-silo coalitions. The CMOs who are listened to in the C-suite are those who stop viewing structural siloing as a roadblock and start treating it as an opportunity to integrate influence across operations, HR, and technology, anchoring everything to shared human outcomes.
Do you have a favorite guest (or guests) to date?
While I won’t single out a single individual – after all the study is anonymous – my favorite discussions are consistently with the enterprise stewards who embrace the “author of influence” mindset. The conversations that stand out most are with leaders who candidly unpack how they navigate the authority paradox. This showed how they moved away from big-bang, campaign-only rebrands and instead worked behind the scenes to code brand ideology directly into their operational mechanics. Listening to a CMO explain how they built an “influence coalition” with their COO, CIO, and CHRO to drive systemic change is always the most rewarding part of this work.
My single favorite quote from our research sums up this dynamic perfectly: “You have to understand—marketing is the lightning rod for every irrational thing a company does.”
It captures the exact absurdity and pressure of the role: when internal operations fracture, or when corporate strategy logic breaks down, it’s the marketing organization that feels the spark first. The best leaders we’ve spoken with don’t fight that lightning; they harness it to show where the business needs to adapt.
Who would be your dream guest to interview?
If I had to pick one dream guest to sit across from for a full-length feature interview, my dream pick would not be a CMO, it would be Gordon Ramsay.
On paper, he’s a Michelin-starred chef, restaurateur, and global media personality. But in practice, Ramsay is a masterclass in modern, adaptive business leadership operating in high-pressure, hyper-volatile environments. While he doesn’t hold a traditional corporate marketing title, his entire career serves as an undercover field study on organizational survival, influence, and living operational systems. He embodies our Confessions of a CMO taxonomy and Monigle’s Living Systems thinking in a way that is wildly entertaining, absurd, and deeply practical.
Sitting down with him to frame “Kitchen Confessions: Applying High-Pressure Culinary Leadership to the Corporate Adaptive System” would allow us to unpack organizational behavior as a living organism even more. We would explore how an enterprise’s reaction to transformation mirrors a high-stakes dinner service, map his rapid turnarounds directly to our Chief Momentum Officer mindset, and show how leaders can use operational structure and fierce clarity to alchemize internal friction into long-term enterprise value.
What advice would you offer, in 2026, to any young person considering a career in marketing?
My core advice is to live between worlds and cultivate a culture of relentless curiosity.
Don’t stay comfortably in your lane: the most valuable marketers of the future won’t just be communications experts; they will be cross-functional integrators who understand science, data, operations, and human behavior. Learn how to translate creative chaos into structured business systems.
Lead with influence over authority. Real organizational velocity comes from building coalitions and bringing people along, not from imposing mandates.
Master the art of unlearning. In an era where AI serves as a powerful cognitive engine, static knowledge depreciates quickly. Focus on developing your capacity to continuously learn, unlearn, interrogate assumptions, and re-learn.
Focus on micro-adjustments. Don’t measure success only by the grand, high-profile moments. Long-term value is built through continuous, surgical calibrations that keep an enterprise adapting in real time.
It is only when everything works and is connected as a system that you can truly extract value.
