James Stevens

Students at NYU asked the creators of South Park the million-dollar question: “What makes a good story?” They gave one of the best explanations of story I’ve heard: “If we can take the beats of your outline, and the words ‘and then’ belong between those beats…... See more

The ultimate competitive advantage is actually giving a shit about the problem you're working on. When Airbnb had just a few dozen employees, Rocket Internet raised $90 million and hired hundreds of people to clone and crush them.

What do you wish Strategists would do more of?

• “Find opportunities for action, and not just diagnostics.”


• “Choices. Most planning presentations open up possibilities but do not close them. They are exploratory; they analyze issues but never make choices, and for me, strategy is about choosing.”

How do you judge whether a creative brief is good or

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The region-beta paradox describes the phenomenon whereby, sometimes, a person may benefit from being worse off versus just mildly off, because being worse off may mobilize them to take action to address the problem, whereas being mildly off can lead them to stagnancy.

Visualizing “the current thing” throughout 2023

The voice of novel technological communication has been, almost from the beginning, a female voice, which is to say the voice of a helper, a perfect helper, pleasant, unflappable, immune to insults, come-ons and bossiness. It’s a short path from the telephone operator to Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa, both forever placating, always even-keeled,... See more

I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing – their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling – their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses.

To sit alone without any electric light is curiously... See more