Why “Make This Punchier” Is A Dangerous Brief
A scream cuts across the river. You look up. A child is being swept downstream. “Help, the current is too strong!” she shouts. In what looks like a scene from Baywatch…
Re/Think Zone
Sharp Lessons From The Room
Most of these ideas aren't mine. The connections are.
Think of me as your filter. Thousands of business books. Millions of articles. Endless podcast episodes.
I collect the ideas worth keeping. I test them. I sharpen them. I connect them. I strip away the BS.
Then I give them back in plain English.
One useful idea every two weeks. Enough to help you see what you couldn't see before. Pull on any thread. See where it takes you....
Your Business Probably Needs More Holes
Look at a concrete block. Not exactly a triumph of design. Grey. Cheap. Ugly as hell. And full of holes. Which is precisely what makes it interesting. In 1887, American…
The Meeting You Should Worry About Most Is The One You Never Attend
“Why should we go with them?” The question comes an hour after you’ve left the building. The woman you spoke to is now sitting at a table with the CEO, the CFO and two…
When Everything Matters, The Order Matters More
Everything matters. People matter. Purpose matters. Performance matters. Culture matters. Wellbeing matters. Fine. But leadership gets hard when several things matter at…
If You Haven't Agreed On What You Mean, No Clever Headline Will Save You
I hated physics at secondary school. To be fair, I had bigger things on my mind. Metallica. Iron Maiden. Nirvana. Definitely not thermodynamics. Yet somehow one thing…
The Yellow Walkman Effect That's Costing You Customers
Long before Netflix, TikTok, and doomscrolling in bed, people occasionally had free time and absolutely no idea what to do with it. Some people got so bored that even…
Without A Point Of View Your Company Is Dead
AI made words cheap. Painfully cheap. You can now pump out a blog post before your coffee gets cold. A landing page before lunch. A LinkedIn post while pretending to…
Before You Burn The Room Down, HALT
Before you send the angry Slack message. Before you quit the project. Before you tell yourself your whole career is doomed. Stop. Run the four-letter test. HALT. Ask…
The Five-Word Question That Exposes Weak Messaging
Simple messaging is not a nice extra. It is the fight. It is the line between being heard and being thrown into the same grey pile as everyone else. And on Wall Street…
If A Teen Can’t Get It, You’ve Already Lost
Want to know who often sounds the dumbest? The person trying the hardest to sound smart. You can hear it right away. The long words. The stiff tone. The sentence that…
By Week Three, It Is Too Late And You Have Already Lost The Window
If you run a team, steal this for every new hire. I wrote before about keeping a WTF list when you first join a company. A private record of everything that makes you…
How To Be Remarkable
You’ve seen the word ‘remarkable’ everywhere. On websites. In decks. Across pitches that promise a lot and say very little. It once had bite. Then people sanded the edge…