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A reader called to complain that page five had come out in black and white. He collected those photos, and colour wasn’t an option. He still got his page. What that call, and a group of very vocal business clients years later, show about when the customer is right, and what you owe them when…
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Two people, adjacent roles, a piece of work sitting in the space between them. Both saw it. Neither picked it up, and both had good reasons. What happens next depends on whether somebody steps in or somebody gets told to, and those two things are not the same.
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A courier walked out of a supermarket with four bottles of drink, headed for a customer a hundred metres away. About two euros to avoid four minutes and one decision. That is a large business built on sloth, which sent me looking for the other six deadly sins and the company built on each.
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Everything a research agency knows about what you are trying to decide comes from one page. They were not in the meeting where it came up. What has to go on that page, and what to do when the budget, the deadline and everyone who had to approve it are pulling the other way.
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The report that analyzes nothing. The strategy deck that averages every strategy deck ever made. The three-page email that took four seconds to produce and wants twenty minutes of your life. A new genre of document is loose in the workplace, and the interesting question isn’t whether it’s any good. It’s who ends up paying…
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Businesses grow because people build them. For me, that’s been true across a bakery group, a publisher, and eighteen years in banking. But the same stretch kept showing the opposite too, mergers, acquisitions, market shifts that moved size faster than any team could build it. Building is not the whole story, and knowing the difference…
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A bank’s quiet decision to remove a feature sent me back to a general question: how do you decide when to cut something you’ve already built? The usual checklist, sunk cost, adoption, maintenance, misses the one cost that’s hard to undo. The signal.
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Most markets have one leader and many followers, and the leader gets to define what everyone competes on. Match them point for point and you lose slowly. The durable alternative is narrower than most strategy advice admits, and it usually means choosing to stay smaller on purpose.
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Asked once for the achievement I’m proudest of, I didn’t name a product or a title. I named the people. The method behind it was far less noble than that answer made it sound.
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Most marketing decisions that disappoint are clarity failures, not execution failures. They happen upstream, before the brief was written, before the budget was approved. Three questions, asked in order, every time, that’s where the clarity either gets built or gets lost.