The thing I admire most about founders

People often ask me, given my job, whether I ever have any ideas for a new brand myself. It’s a fair question.  After all, I’ve seen inside a lot of different companies, at various stages of growth, so you’d think I’d have developed a pretty decent sense of what works and what doesn’t.  And of […]

Why is strategic thinking so rare?

I saw an old Peter Drucker quote today which really got me thinking: “Efficiency is doing things right.  Effectiveness is doing the right things”. Efficiency versus effectiveness.  Doing things right, versus doing the right things.  Two deceptively similar modes of working, which are in fact miles apart.  One means doing something well, with quality, with skill.  And […]

Is advice pointless?

When I was growing up, my favourite TV show was Frasier. One of the many things I liked about it – second perhaps only to his awesome apartment – was the way it portrayed the job of a psychotherapist.  In essence Dr Crane would listen to people’s problems, dish out some sage advice and move […]

The correct use of a “why” within strategy

The following is an excerpt from a book I’m working on, called: No Bullshit Strategy: A founder’s guide to forming a strategy that actually works I hope to have it published by the end of this year, and obviously will promote it on here shamelessly, so hopefully it will be of interest to some of […]

Does culture *actually* eat strategy for breakfast?

Before getting into this, let me point you in the direction of the always-worthwhile Bread & Jam Festival, where I’m speaking in a couple of weeks. If you’re going to be in London and fancy swinging by I have a 20% off discount with your name on it right here: www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/243627625787/?discount=BASIC20 Now on with the business at hand… […]

Here’s how to get your organisation to commit to strategy

If any of you have read my free little ebook Make Companies Without Competitors, or seen my “Love your competitors” talk, you’ll know that central to my philosophy is the idea of non-competition. Contrary to the common metaphor of the market being “battle ground” or “playing field”, where there is implicitly an enemy to be […]

What I learned being fired twice

This is a slightly tricky essay to write.  Not for the obvious reason that it brings up potentially embarrassing episodes from my past, but actually for the opposite reason: that these days it’s hard to write about “being fired” without it sounding like you’re bragging. It’s a weird thing, but as we have discussed before, in this perma-revolutionary […]

Don’t do this: The reason good strategies fail

A good strategy is not a guarantee of success, for two reasons. The first, as we’ve discussed before, is the unfortunate fact that a good strategy can still be wrong.  All strategies are, unavoidably, speculative – and therefore even the best of them may not work quite the way you imagined when they get out […]

My brand is doing great – Do i need a strategy?

One of the things about strategy that makes it so slippery (and occasionally hard to sell), is this: You can get away without it. Don’t get me wrong, you’ll be way better off with a strategy than without.  But at the same time it’s not like, say, branding, or IT services, or accountancy, or any […]

Are you living by lies

The other day I got an insightful bit of feedback on one of these essays from a client (hi Alan), and it really got me thinking. He said: “This is consistent with your philosophy that great strategies are revealed as truths in and of themselves, and not created by the whims of the strategist” Now […]