The incomplete leader is not a failure in progress. They are the most commercially effective kind of leader there is, provided they know which pieces are missing and build around the gaps honestly. The leaders who have caused the most damage in agencies and marketing teams I have worked with were not the ones who…
Market segmentation is the process of dividing a broad target market into smaller, more defined groups of customers who share common characteristics, needs, or behaviours. Done well, it tells you exactly who to focus on, what to say to them, and where to spend your budget. Done poorly, it produces a slide deck full of…
BNPL customer behavior follows a distinct pattern that most marketers misread. Shoppers who use buy now, pay later aren’t simply looking for credit. They’re making a deliberate choice about how they want to manage cash flow in the moment, and that distinction changes almost everything about how you should market to them. Understanding that distinction…
Strategic leadership decision making is the process of identifying, evaluating, and committing to choices that shape an organisation’s direction, resource allocation, and competitive position over time. Done well, it is disciplined, deliberate, and grounded in commercial reality. Done poorly, it is expensive theatre dressed up as strategic thinking. Most leaders do not fail because they…
John P. Kotter’s 1990 Harvard Business Review essay “What Leaders Really Do” draws a sharp line between management and leadership, arguing they are distinct functions that organisations confuse at their peril. Management is about coping with complexity. Leadership is about coping with change. Both matter. But mixing them up, or assuming one person can do…
Generative AI is changing creative work, but the change is less dramatic than the headlines suggest and more significant than the skeptics admit. The tools are real, the productivity gains are real, and the creative risks are real too. What’s shifting isn’t whether creativity has value. It’s where the creative effort now needs to go….
Leadership is one of the most written-about topics in business and one of the least honestly described. Strip away the frameworks and the keynote abstractions, and what leaders actually do comes down to something far more unglamorous: they hold things together when the situation is unclear, they make calls with incomplete information, and they create…
Leading in times of uncertainty is not about having all the answers before you act. It is about building the conditions, the clarity, and the commercial discipline that allow good decisions to be made under pressure, with incomplete information, and without the luxury of consensus. Most leadership frameworks treat uncertainty as a temporary state to…
Marketing myopia is the tendency of businesses to define themselves by what they sell rather than what their customers need, leading them to miss the broader market shifts that eventually make their products obsolete. Theodore Levitt introduced the concept in his 1960 Harvard Business Review essay, arguing that companies in declining industries had not failed…
Customer experience in the age of AI is not a technology problem. It is a business character problem that technology is now making harder to hide. AI gives companies more ways to respond faster, personalise at scale, and automate the friction out of routine interactions. What it cannot do is manufacture genuine care for customers…
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