Author: alex

Is there such thing as a strategic personality?

My party trick is to guess people’s star signs. This is a bit weird, not just because it’s odd on the face of it, but moreover because I don’t really know anything about astrology, and nor do I put much stock into horoscopes.  As a matter of fact, I couldn’t even tell you which birthdays […]

The most simple strategic framework

I’ve made a song and dance in the past about my aversion to templates, models, frameworks, and the like in order to generate strategy. None, I believe, can be said to perfectly match every possible strategy – and in some cases they can even drag people away from perfectly good solutions, simply because they weren’t […]

The indispensable art of cartography

In the West, we are living through well documented crisis of meaning. There’s no need to for me to elaborate on this too much here, I think we all get it – the mental health epidemic, the rise in use of anti-depressants, opioid addiction, the prevailing mood of rudderlessness, confusion, and anxiety.  It’s easy to […]

The polymath advantage: should we be specialists or generalists?

The debate between specialism and generalism, between depth and breadth, is quite fascinating. Generally speaking I’m inclined to think the average Western person lacks depth, at least in terms of their lifestyle.  We flit from job to job, place to place, acquaintance to acquaintance, without ever truly becoming party of the fabric of something.  Without […]

Strategic unity: how to blend the functional with the emotional

I often say that the best businesses are generic in every way but one.  In amongst a framework of safe and recognisable best practice, they have a single disarming insight which subverts the status quo, and from which all their leverage stems. In my case, although I dress everything up to appear distinctive, there really […]