The disappearance of the original mind

Improve strategic and original thinking with your knowledge of the world 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 […]

How to grow a strategic culture

Creating An Environment For Strategic Thinkers 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 […]

How successful brands die

Without Brand Strategy, Even The Most Successful Brands Can Fail 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 […]

Have you been taught the wrong way to think?

How Humanities Develop Strategic Thought 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 […]

The Most Underrated Strategic Tool

The Basis Of All Successful Strategic Projects 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 […]

The utility of the open mind

We don’t have to know how something works in order to embrace it 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 […]