How to grow a strategic culture
What do you look for in a new hire? Immediately no doubt all the cliches come to mind. Hardworking, team player, problem solver, etc. Cliches are quite helpful like that: by on the tip of our tongue, they guide us effortlessly to good solid solutions. Solutions that have been tried and tested enough to become […]
The danger of knowing too much
Consider the following paradox: The more news you consume, the more ignorant you may become. How can this be true? After all, clearly the person who reads the paper regularly, watches a 24 hour news channel, devours current affairs podcasts, and spends hours on Twitter will end up knowing an awful lot of stuff. Certainly […]
The Most Underrated Strategic Tool
We are all cats in boxes. This is an analogy I once heard (can’t remember where) which really speaks to me, and has a lot of importance for smart and strategic thinking. Expanded, the concept is something like this. Imagine you have a cat in a box, with air holes punched in it so it […]
Great Brands Are Clueless Too
When I speak to businesses with a view to working with them, I tend to encounter two different attitudes. Very occasionally, the attitude is one of supreme confidence. We’re great, we’ve got it all figured out, everything’s perfect. This situation always begs the question of why exactly they’re speaking to me, but that’s by the […]
Appreciating scale – what to do with things you can’t control
There is a quote you may have heard which goes something like: “I am a libertarian at the federal level, Republican at the state level, Democrat at the local level, a socialist with my friends and family, and a communist with my dog”. The idea is designed to reveal the fatuousness of political labels, but when […]
How conformity leads to conflict
Two households, both alike in dignity, In fair Verona, where we lay our scene Romeo & Juliet __ Human beings are copying machines. This is the central idea of “mimetic theory”, which was put forward by historian René Girard to explain the motivations of human beings, the evolution of culture, and ultimately the rise of […]
Why Most Businesses Have No Strategy
All businesses have a brand. All have a product. All have people, sales, marketing, and various other building blocks which add up to “a company”. But not all – in fact very few – have a strategy. I don’t mean to say here that most businesses have bad strategies (though quite a lot do). I […]
The most powerful market force nobody talks about
The other day on Twitter, a chap asked a perfectly reasonable question: “Zoom is now worth $130B and I still don’t know what their moat is. Brand?” His question is a variation of the critique that has been put to many a founder when seeking investment. “What’s to stop someone coming and copying you?”. The […]
The utility of the open mind
If you ever read a book on creativity, you will find a recurring theme: the muse. It will be talked about in varying ways, but the central idea is generally the same: that rather than coming up with ideas ourselves, they are instead “given” to us by an outside force (the muse, the universe, God, […]
Before ideas, comes action
In the past 5 weeks, I feel like original thoughts have slowed to a trickle. Perhaps you’ve experienced something similar. Normally as I go about things, new ideas and theories are constantly bubbling up. Sometimes I’ll get the urge to write something in the most inconvenient of moments – whilst driving, having coffee with someone, trying to go […]