strategy has to move. Out of the agency, into the organisation. Not as a visitor with a deck, but as embedded intelligence. The slow, patient, political work of understanding a place well enough to actually help it. This isn’t strategy as we’ve known it. It’s something closer to organisational anthropology - with the mandate to change things.

In 2004, I sat down in my boardroom with our strategy documents and started to dissect them. There were lots of familiar and comfortable terms. We had to be innovative, efficient, customer centric, web 2.0 and all that this entailed. Alas, I suspected these common “memes” were repeated in the strategy documents of other companies because I was... See more