James Stevens

We think social media has changed childhood and adolescence for the worse, so much so that it constitutes a “great rewiring of childhood.” Beginning in the 1990s, a childhood based heavily on outdoor play began to fade away and was replaced by a phone-based childhood in the early 2010s, when teens traded in their flip phones for smartphones.

Can we

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As T Bone Burnett once said, “Major labels figured out that catering to people who don’t need music in their lives makes them more money.” Passive streaming is a prime example—when music plays in the background at shops, hairdressers, or when Spotify keeps going after you’ve fallen asleep. Major labels don’t pay for these streams but heavily invest... See more

Often during busy days, breathing becomes shallow, using only the top part of the lungs. But the best oxygen exchange happens at the bases of your lungs.

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 core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors

The great works of Victorian England were erected by engineers who could not be sure of the properties of the materials they were using. In particular, whether by incompetence or malfeasance, the iron of the period was often not up to snuff. As a consequence, engineers erred on the side of caution, overbuilding to incorporate redundancy into their... See more