Can a person have a strategy like a business?
One of my favourite concepts is the difference between expertise and strategic ability: Expertise = knowing things Strategic ability = knowing how things interact You can be extremely knowledgable and yet useless strategically because you can’t grasp the dynamics that lie between the things you know; and conversely you can be totally ignorant and yet strategically insightful, […]
The danger of boring yourself
The thing about churning out one of these essays every week, is that it forces me to constantly be focusing on the “next” thing: the next idea, the next theory, the next technique, the next talking point. In general this is no bad thing, as it helps me to continuously deepen my knowledge, and hopefully […]
What my strategy documents look like
One question new clients tend to ask when we begin working together, is “what do I get at the end of this?”. Naturally, they get a strategy – and all the ensuing clarity, growth, fame and fortune that goes with it. But that’s not really what they mean. What they mean is what actual “thing” […]
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 […]