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 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 […]
Does the military have anything to teach us about strategy?
I’m going to level with you here, I’ve not actually read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. I know, I know, what kind of strategist am I? A pretty poorly read one, truth be told. I did not learn my craft “top down”, through careful study of canonical texts and Harvard Business Review papers, but […]
How to move beyond knowing to understanding
My friend Greg, a strategy director in Paris, has been compiling a series of words which have the power to make you see the world differently. One of these in particular jumped out at me, so I thought I’d share it here: the word “chaunaissance”. Roughly translated this means something like “driver’s knowledge”, and it […]
Master or servant: how should you work with agencies?
The relationship between brands and their creative agencies is often an unhappy one. I don’t have any stats at my fingertips, but it’s often observed that the rate of satisfaction tends to be quite low on both sides of the table. From the client’s side, the complaints tend to centre on agencies’ inability to understand […]
The founder’s dilemma feat. Dov Charney
I love founder led businesses. Aside from the obvious reason that they tend to be my clients, they have certain qualities which are simply not shared by their corporate cousins. For one thing, they take risks. They have to, because it’s only through such risks that they are able to compete with corporate competitors who […]
Jobs, dating, and treating yourself as a commodity
We’ve all heard of the concept of managing your “personal brand”, right? Typically this doesn’t really mean anything more complex than managing your reputation, but even so people tend to find it a bit “icky”, since it mixes the impersonal language of business with the far deeper subtleties of ourselves as human beings. Certainly I […]
The strategic difference that really counts
Difference, as we know, is at the heart of strategy. In any realm – business, politics, military, personal – it is about walking a different path to the others around you. Indeed we might say that’s its very definition: Strategy is that which only you do. Naturally, you will be the same as others in […]
The disappearance of the original mind
By the time he was 22, Jack London, author of The Call of the Wildand White Fang, had variously: Worked in a cannery, electrical plant, and laundry Taught himself to sail and become an oyster pirate Lived as a tramp and spend a month in jail for vagrancy Travelled the pacific on a seal hunting schooner […]