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 […]

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 […]

How successful brands die

Understandably we talk a lot here about growth.  That’s what most founders are interested in.  However, this is should only be one part of their agenda.  The other, less discussed, is survival.  Simply sticking around and maintaining your brand’s position – hopefully long into the future. When it comes to the growth side of the […]

Have you been taught the wrong way to think?

As some of you may have heard, humanities education is in something of a crisis. University enrolment in such subjects is in free fall, and many are now questioning what the point of studying literature, philosophy, history, etc. is, in comparison to practical STEM disciplines. This topic may seem outside of our purview here, but […]

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 […]

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, […]