The Coffee Chat (#66)
My conversation with Prof. Marina Cooley: Award-winning marketing professor, banisher of busyness, former Coca-Cola brand manager and mom to 2!
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Hi there 👋🏽
It is the end of summer here in Canada and for a change this summer I was conscious about having free spaces in my day to just go on long walks and be alone with my thoughts.
One question that kept coming up for me over and over again was this ….How does one build a life?
It’s a deeply personal question with no one-size-fits-all answer. For me, it boils down to the idea of “Leading a bigger life.”
What does that mean? To some, it might mean doubling down on their current path; to others, it could signal a complete transformation.
The way I think about it is that we all contain multitudes and the essence is to embrace all aspects of yourself and avoid the feeling of leading a smaller life than you’re capable of living.
While our formal education and early career often frame life as a carpenter’s process—carefully planned, measured, and with a clear end product—real life, I have come to realize, is more like gardening.
You start with a vision but can’t predict how each element will interact. By embracing this uncertainty and staying open to change, you create space to explore all dimensions of your potential.
Leading a bigger life means navigating this garden with curiosity and courage, allowing each experience to contribute to a fuller, richer outcome. The final product may not be what you initially envisioned, but it will reflect the full scope of your journey.
☕ Now, on to today’s coffee chat…
Meet Prof. Marina Cooley
Professor Cooley’s journey into academia is as unconventional as it is inspiring. After following the traditional “successful person playbook”—graduating from top undergraduate and MBA programs, thriving in management consulting, and landing a role at one of the world’s leading brands—she found herself burnt out, losing sleep, and seeking a way out of the grind.
In what she calls the luckiest moment of her life, her favorite business school professor offered her the opportunity to apply for a faculty position at Emory University's Goizueta Business School.
Since joining in 2021, Prof. Cooley has become a celebrated educator, teaching hundreds of students Content Marketing, where she brings the science of viral ideas to life through real-world experimentation on platforms like LinkedIn and TikTok.
Beyond her expertise in marketing, Prof. Cooley is passionate about fostering deep work and work-life balance, creating innovative courses such as "Personal Development" and "Life Design for the Modern MBA."
Her unique perspective on culture and social media, honed by her time with students and her own content creation journey, has earned her accolades such as Poets & Quants’ 40-under-40 Best MBA Professors and multiple teaching awards at Emory.
Through her teaching, writing, and speaking engagements, Prof Marina Cooley is redefining what success looks like—one thoughtfully designed life at a time.
Below is my conversation with Prof. Cooley…
Please tell us a little bit about yourself
I'm a marketing professor at Emory Business School, but I'm also a practitioner. I worked in corporate America for 15 years before transitioning to academia. My background includes management consulting, where I served Fortune 50 clients, and I’ve also run my own startup.
After earning my MBA, I worked at Coca-Cola, where I built most of my career and scaled two brands to $2 billion, which was quite a ride. After that, I transitioned to the startup world and took a company from Series B to Series C as CMO. Throughout all these roles, I had a lot of flexibility, which was important because I had two children back-to-back—my daughter was nine months old when I found out I was pregnant with my son.
As many mothers might understand, it’s hard to grasp what a small age gap between kids feels like until you experience it. I was at a nine-month check-up for my first child when they told me I was expecting another!
That experience really shifted my operating model. I began looking for a way to structure my life differently, which eventually led me to academia. I wouldn’t say I work any less now, but I work in a very different and more autonomous way.
It’s deeply satisfying, and it gives me the freedom to be the kind of mother I want to be. I’m also a hobbyist—I’m an avid tennis player, I love drawing, and I don't want a life without hobbies.
I love that. As someone who used to play competitive Tennis but hasn’t picked up a racket in two and a half years, it’s inspiring. You seem to live a very fulfilled life, and I suspect that having the autonomy and control over your schedule plays a big part.
But you were also someone rising up the corporate ladder. How hard was it to make the decision to step off that path, especially given that your identity was so tied to becoming a corporate leader?
I went to business school in 2012—the same year Lean In was published. When I started, the conversation wasn’t about work-life balance; it was about how much you could accomplish before having kids and how to make sure no one noticed once you did have them.
At that time, Marissa Mayer was taking just two weeks of maternity leave, and the message was clear: keep grinding, keep wearing your heels, and there’s nothing you can’t do—even while pregnant or with kids. That was the narrative I grew up with.
But when it came time to live that life, I became a shadow of myself.
I produced at work, I produced at home, and I never had a moment to just be.
Eventually, my body broke down. I started losing clumps of hair, I became very thin, and I couldn't sleep. There’s only so long you can go like that before you have to take stock of your life.
It sounds like a very intense experience. Sometimes people need something to stop them in their tracks and make them question if this is the life they’re building.
I remember that era, though—I was just coming out of undergrad at the time.
The message was that as a woman, you could lean in, double down, and push through any institutional challenges by just fighting harder for a seat at the table. But now, post-pandemic, do you feel like there’s been a shift in how current MBA students approach their lives and careers?
Definitely. This is a good time to talk about what I teach. I teach marketing, focusing on storytelling—how to make your brand story resonate with customers. But I also teach a class called “Life Design for the Modern MBA,” which gives us a platform to discuss work-life balance and broader life goals.
One of the key takeaways from these conversations is that my current MBA students don’t aspire to be CEOs the way previous generations did. They want fulfilling personal and professional lives.
Wow for a group of MBA students to feel this way feels so surprising to me. But at the same time, it gives me hope. It shows that people are starting to see through the idea that life is just about climbing higher and achieving more. Life is about living a full, multidimensional life.
Absolutely. Many of my students are serious about their hobbies and personal lives, and they’re open about not wanting to sacrifice those things for their careers. Interestingly, this sentiment isn’t limited to women. The MBA program skews male—about 65-70%—but these men want to be present dads. They don’t want to miss key moments in their children's lives.
One of my students, who’s a former consultant, shared a story about a partner who left his family vacation during spring break to pitch a big client. Ten years ago, that would have been seen as admirable, but today, my students were horrified. They couldn’t believe he abandoned his family for work. That’s a huge cultural shift.
As someone in academia who is shaping the next generation of leaders, how do you think companies should respond to this shift?
That’s a big question. If corporate America doesn’t change, I think the attractiveness of being a solopreneur will only grow. The one thing keeping people tied to jobs is healthcare. If that changes, the floodgates will open.
I also believe companies will need to embrace flexibility to retain talent. The conversation around remote work is still too black and white—it’s not about being all remote or all in-office. It’s about being intentional when we do gather in person.
We’ve achieved so much in four years since the pandemic in terms of flexibility, but the noise from corporate instability—layoffs, short job tenures—can make it feel like we’re not progressing as quickly as we’d like.
The pace of change has been remarkable, but the corporate world is still grappling with how to make these changes permanent and meaningful.
So what will the future of work look like?
We don’t know what the future of work will look like, but I do think it will involve more flexibility.
One of the coolest things we're doing with this "Life Design for the Modern MBA" course is that me and 26 students are heading to Denmark for a two-week visit. Our entire focus is to study how their workday is structured. They cap their workweek at 37 hours, but many companies even work just 34 hours.
For example, take LEGO as a model. They have some of the best margins in the consumer goods industry—on par with LVMH. Despite this, they have a much shorter workweek. So, we want to explore how they’re structured and what lessons we can bring back. The idea is that these 30 students, who will graduate with their MBAs in a year and become managers within five years, will start planting the seeds of how future leaders will operate.
I absolutely love that. If you ever make those research findings public, I'd love to get my hands on them. There’s so much potential for learning and cross-pollinating ideas. By the way, is this course currently only available to full-time MBA students, or can anyone sign up?
Yes, it's just for a select cohort of full-time MBA students. But whenever I casually mention the class, it doesn’t matter if the person is 30 or 40—they’re like, "I need that class."
People want to take a moment to pause and assess whether they’re designing their life, not just chasing the next promotion, but living out their hobbies and values. Everyone seems to feel the need to take a break and reflect.
Quick-fire questions:
What's the best thing you have read recently?
I read a lot—three to four books a week—so it’s hard to pick. But since we’re on this topic, I’ll mention Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career by Kristi Coulter. It’s a fantastic portrayal of corporate life, especially from a woman’s perspective. She worked at Amazon during its early days, and the book really captures what it’s like to be in a corporate environment. I wish I had read it in my early 20s. It reminds you to always center yourself in your decisions and not make choices for the sake of a company.
What's the best thing you have heard recently?
A podcast! I listened to No Stupid Questions yesterday—episode 201 titled “Are You Dreaming Too Big?”. It talks about how we spend so much time in fantasy, especially on social media, that we don’t actually accomplish things. I can watch people cleaning or doing projects, and it gives me a psychological high, but I’m not actually doing anything myself.
What’s the best thing you’ve watched recently?
To stay on the fantasy theme—there’s this woman I follow on Instagram. She and her husband moved their family from the U.S. to Mallorca, Spain.
They’re documenting their journey, and I’ve been obsessed with it. It’s fascinating, but it also made me realize that I need to ask myself why I’m so captivated. Is it Mallorca I’m drawn to, or is it something else like living offline? That’s why I’m taking six weeks off social media—to figure out my own narrative, not just absorb others.
🤓 Open tabs…
(I have modeled this section after those “open tabs” that we all have with a few (okay 30-40) interesting links that we promise we will eventually get to one day. These are the links that I had open for sometime that I finally got to …)
⭐U.S. Surgeon General Issues Advisory on the Mental Health and Well-Being of Parents
Over the last decade, parents have been consistently more likely to report experiencing high levels of stress compared to other adults. 33% of parents reporting high levels of stress in the past month compared to 20% of other adults. When stress is severe or prolonged, it can have a harmful effect on the mental health of parents and caregivers, which in turn also affects the well- being of the children they raise. Children of parents with mental health conditions may face heightened risks for symptoms of depression and anxiety and for earlier onset, recurrence, and prolonged functional impairment from mental health conditions…
This Surgeon General’s Advisory calls for a shift in culture, policies, and programs to ensure all parents and caregivers can thrive. The American public can do more to support parents and caregivers by shifting norms to foster a culture that values, supports, and empowers parents/caregivers and addresses stressors that can impact their mental health and well-being.
⭐ Best of parenting - Prof G podcast (🎧)
Prof Scott Galloway in conversation with Dr. Shefali, a NYT bestselling author of The Conscious Parent and The Awakened Family. Dr Shefali is a clinical psychologist, parenting expert, an international speaker and a wisdom teacher who integrates Eastern philosophy with Western psychology.
📖 My private thoughts from my very public diary…
(Sometimes on X (Twitter), sometimes on Threads)
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Disclaimer: All views expressed are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer
Hi Rashi, firstly congrats on your daughter's 1st day at Junior Kindergarden!!!
This episode was quite interesting in that I am able to see what life looks like for people who have spent a good chunk of time in corporate. While I am currently pursuing my MBA, I am able to draw on such experiences to actually "Design" my life rather than falling in line.