Essays, arguments, and provocations.

The question a machine world presses on us is not whether the machine can make the picture. The question it forces is what our capacities are — what it is we can do, as human beings, that the picture alone never shows.

To see — really see, and not merely look. To suffer, and make something of the suffering. to re-enchant the everyday world. To make a self out of the wreckage. To stand in front of what exceeds us and not look away… These are the shape of a human life lived awake — and they belong to all of us, not only to the ones who paint. Not to the machine, which has no body, no world, no death, and therefore nothing to say about life. The artist is simply a human being like the rest of us — just more determinedly awake, more honest, more unflinchingly in contact with existence, and moved to make. Pointing to capacities that are in all of us.

A few years ago — this book has gone through many incarnations over many, many years — I took a call from the senior commissioning editor at Penguin while sitting in my mother's garden, surrounded by butterflies and the buzzing of bees. The feedback was basically to make it more like a generic business book — case studies, top tips, the usual. I understood. That is what the system needs it to be. But I had waited too long and come too far to compromise. I chose to self-publish — so that this book could be, for better or for worse, exactly what I wanted it to be, not what the system demanded.

My former chief creative officers at Wieden+Kennedy Amsterdam used to say it directly, about the work: “You do not have the right not to have an opinion.” They weren’t talking about taste. They were talking about responsibility. If the work goes out into the world and does something — to people, to a brand, to a culture — then everyone in the room owns a share of that. And gets to have an opinion.

An editor does not write the book. A consultant does not run the company. But what they both provide is the rigour of asking - what are you actually trying to do, and are you doing it? In this sense, the best editors and the best strategic consultants hold the client to the best version of themselves. The goal is never to make the book sound like the editor, or the brand sound like the consultant. It is to make each sound like the truest version of itself.

The agency side of the table talks about ownership -  clients to feel ownership of the work, how to bring them on the journey, how to make the creative decision feel like theirs. What we are less aware of (or honest about) is what ownership actually requires. It requires skin in the game. Real exposure to the consequences of the choice. And most agency practitioners operate without it. We make the case. We do the craft. We manage the process. The client bears the cost and the risk.

But an organisation with genuine clarity about who it is, where it is trying to go, and what decisions will get it there is not defenceless against that uncertainty. It is oriented inside it. It knows what signals to watch and which ones to ignore. It knows what a good decision looks like even when the data is ambiguous. It knows when to hold its course and when the signals that matter are strong enough to warrant a change of direction. It can move faster, waste less, and hold its shape under pressure in ways that organisations chasing certainty - commissioning the next round of research, waiting for the model to tell them what to do - simply cannot.

That is the job. It was always the job. It is the only honest account of what strategy can actually deliver. The work is not to make the uncertainty disappear. It never does.

That upstream narrative work cannot always be done from the outside alone, nor can it always be successfully delegated entirely within. Clarity and practical application often requires (particularly when conviction and direction have leaked from the organisation) both proximity and distance. But however they accomplish it, the organisations that do the work find that they become more deliberate and more coherent - not just in their communications, but in their decisions, their culture, their product, their conduct under pressure. The organisations that don't find that the activity never quite adds up to anything - and that consumers (and their own people) can feel the gap between the promise and the delivery. The infrastructure either gets built or it doesn't. The difference accumulates in both directions.

In the end, organisations don’t get the brand they advertise. They get the brand their decisions build. And those decisions either run on narrative infrastructure - or they drift.

AI removes the last remaining cover. In a world where everyone has access to the same generative capabilities, at the same cost, at the same speed, the only thing that differentiates one organisation’s output from another’s is the quality and specificity of the self-knowledge it was built from. If the model cannot clearly summarise what your brand stands for, what makes it different, and why someone should choose it, the issue is very probably not the model. It is usually that the brand itself lacks articulated clarity. So the good news is that AI will force marketers to answer the question it has spent the best part of two decades neglecting - "who are you?". You cannot prompt your way around the identity question, automate your way past it, or ask the machine to serve you an oven-ready answer. “Find out” - Dolly's instruction requires honesty about not merely what you said you believed, but what your decisions reveal you believed; what you could do and are choosing not to; and what you have become versus what you intended to be. 

At some point in the last few years, millions of people began having earnest, extended conversations about the nature of intelligence, the future of knowledge, and what it means to be human - conducted entirely through their fingertips, on glass rectangles, while their bodies sat forgotten in chairs. The WHO, in 2024, estimated that 1.8 billion adults - roughly one in four people on the planet - are now insufficiently physically active. The average person spends 44% of their waking hours looking at a screen. We are, in the most literal sense, losing the habit of having bodies. The irony is so complete it has become invisible. We are debating what minds can do, using bodies we have stopped noticing, in the service of building systems that will have no bodies at all. And nobody finds this strange.

“Late style arrives when you realise that you are: competent enough to write those things you wanted to write when you were twenty-five; impatient enough to have one more go at going all the way; angry enough not to allow anyone else to persuade you to do something else. At the same time, late style is cold, amused, contemptuous and savage about everyone you have been or ever tried to be. Late style is when the monster down there has finally had enough of you.”

How many brands and businesses I wonder, perform the promise rather than keep it, satisfying themelves instead with sending a double to the hard moment and hoping the audience won't notice the substitution? The airline that sells you a experience and delivers a call centre populated by underpaid contractors reading from a script at 11pm when your flight has been cancelled and all you need is a hotel. The hotel that puts "passion for hospitality" on its walls and a QR code on the table where a waiter used to be because they're "short-staffed tonight." The telco company that promises to make life simpler and whose customer service is a chatbot maze that would make Kafka proud. The bank  that's all about being on your side and then restructures its branch network into oblivion. The food brand that tells you about its sustainable farming practices - knowing that there is no legal definition of "sustainable" as a marketing term.

AI-readability is simply a new stress test for an old discipline: say what you are, mean it, make it legible, and let your decisions prove it. I will never get tired of quoting Dolly Parton – "find out who you are, and do it on purpose ".

We know that brevity in strategy is not performative minimalism. So why the industrial scale slide-count?

The end of the year approaches, so I’m writing this as a way of finding out what I now know. After a whirlwind year of motion, decisions, change, and consequence, I needed to pause and reflect what actually changed in my work, my thinking, and my sense of self - and what the year taught me about doing it on purpose.

Like what do you do when your brand has become a prisoner of executional formula and wants accelerate growth with a real long-term brand platform?

That was the challenge facing Corona.

Brand problems? I’ve seen a few…

Like what do you do when being a single malt whisky with a deeply authentic, hundred-plus-year-old story of craft and tradition isn’t enough of a reason to buy in an ocean of whisky with deeply authentic, hundred-plus-year-old stories of craft and tradition?

Like how do you bid farewell to your most successful and arguably most valuable driver in a way that sets the team and its fans up for the next chapter once he leaves?

That was the challenge facing the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 Team.

Like what do you do when your business and brand has become so addicted to chasing short-term innovation uplifts that it’s allowed its core business to be eroded?

Like what do you do when you have a fractured global brand, communications, and marketing organisation, and are needing to support premium pricing while you aggressively expand distribution?

Like what do you do when you are disproportionately reliant on paid search and find that your customers are booking accomodation but have no memory that it was through you?

Observation, curiosity, empathy - these are vital. Dieter Rams said "Indifference towards people and the reality in which they live is actually the one and only cardinal sin in design”. His words apply to the development of brands and advertising too. But the idea that ‘insight’ is and must always be the starting point and first hurdle to overcome is deeply flawed. The strategist’s real job isn’t to find truth - it’s to create traction, and create change. Insight may be helpful in that endeavour. But it is not holy.

There is much that is problematic with the theology of ‘insight’ as presented by the self-appointed members of its Inquisition. But even if one were to reject the various articles and tests of faith they demand and think more simply (heresy!) in terms of useful understanding, I have come to believe that as a way of thinking about our intended audience, it is still not quite enough.

Patience and timing, curiosity and exploration, improvisation and adaptability in new environments, economy of effort, presence and focus, independence, not conformity, play as necessary preparation, sensing beyond the obvious, rest as renewal… I was going to close by suggesting that cats can teach us so much about the straegic mindset. But as I type this I find myself reflecting that cats can teach us so much about the art of living.

In the development of strategy we must stay alert for drift and bloat - and work to inoculate strategy against thoughtless (if well-intentioned) meddling. Surrendering the integrity and fidelity of our strategy is not an acceptable price to pay for playing nicely and allowing for input and collaboration. So be open to high quality input but make the price of mere meddling steep. And enlist in advance the support of somebody able to drop the hammer should the need arise. Honestly it’s not complicated. It just needs some clear-sighted intentionality.

We should aspire to the standard that Bono spoke of - brands that talk, like they walk, like they perform, in which everything adds up. Want to find your brand’s true, compelling superpower, the true source of its value and magnetism in the world? Then strip it all back to just that, and that alone. Be the heartless truncator, the merciless editor, and take a scythe to the unwanted and unnecessary acres of fluff and bullshit.

All of which is to say that I’ve chosen to work differently and focus my efforts not on inputs, hours, costs, and activities but on what client organisations really want and buy, which is solutions to business problems. Exciting conversations about value as opposed to dreary conversations about time are where real relationships and partnerships - and transformations - are forged. I mean, there really didn’t see much point advising client organisations to adapt, evolve, think different, innovate, create meaningful and lasting value in the world, lean into the future, or grab a seat at the front of the bus while there still is one if I wasn’t going to do the same.

We say that it’s all about “the work” as if clients are merely shopping for outputs and assets. And then complain about squeezed revenue and margins.

But it becomes ever more clear to me. Point to what you are proudest of, and you’ll find the scope of your value.