a strategist’s convictions

Out came the market research and strategy types with their hot takes, speaking on behalf of "walkers", speaking on behalf of the "inclusive running community", running it through every rational filter imaginable. I'd wager that the vast majority of ordinary consumers either loved it, or simply moved on. It's not that deep, it's just marketing. Even... See more

The best campaigns in history (at least as far as I know) and the ones people still talk about are usually not optimised into existence. They are great ideas, believed in by someone who trusted their gut, when often the data would have said otherwise.

“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.”

Might he say now: Have nothing in your feeds?

Morris insists that utility must coexist with beauty in our lives. His famous maxim is a deep elucidation of an extraordinarily powerful combination. When something manages to be both useful and beautiful it... See more

Whenever the only objective behind something is to move a metric, like clicks, watch time, engagement, or conversions, then what you’re looking at is slop.

Strategists are trained to spot patterns in the world. The harder task is interrupting the ones running your own life.

Insight is not intervention. You can name a pattern, teach a pattern, even warn yourself about a pattern, and still obey it. The work, I think, is to catch yourself a little earlier - to notice when the body starts to close, when... See more

It comes down to the difference between post-rationalising and pre-rationalising. Right now, we live in a moment of pre-rationalising: we won’t commit to anything unless we can justify it in advance. “Do I have the dashboard? The metric? The deck? The support?” If the data doesn’t say yes, nothing happens. Post-rationalising is the opposite: you... See more