Part 1: Because it was time.
Choose to make your life bigger. Opt for expression over observation, action instead of passivity, risk over safety, the unknown over the familiar.
- Twyla Tharp
On such a full sea are we now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose our ventures.
- William Shakespeare
When you come to a fork in the road, take it.
- Yogi Berra
It was twenty-nine degrees, the sun was was blazing, the water clear, and I was terrified. I had flown with my wife to Sicily for a week to celebrate the fiftieth birthday of one of my dearest, closest friends. I was standing at the back of a yacht moored somewhere off the island of Panarea. It was the 29th of September 2023.
Almost all of our friends had jumped into the stunning, sun-drenched water and whoops of sheer, giddy delight filled the air. I hate swimming at the best of times and the imagined depths below of open water scare the living daylights out of me. And so there I stood. Stuck at the back of the boat, looking out and unable to join an intoxicating scene of carefree joy and laughter I knew we’d remember for ever.
But some voice in me whispered “it’s time to stop being scared”.
And I jumped.
My wife, a far, far braver soul who was accustomed to risk and uncertainty and who had watched me jump said as I clambered back on board, “I know why you did that”.
And indeed she did.
That moment has played itself on loop in my mind ever since.
I have spent three decades in agency-side strategy roles in New York, São Paulo, Amsterdam, and London… at J. Walter Thomson, at Leo Burnett, as Chief Strategy Officer for Wieden+Kennedy in Amsterdam for fourteen years, and most recently as Chief Strategy Officer for AMV BBDO in London.
I have helped build transformative ideas for some of the world’s biggest, most iconic, most culturally influential, and creatively demanding brands and businesses including Allianz, booking.com, Coca-Cola, Corona, De Beers, Decathlon, Electronic Arts, Evian, Facebook, Guinness, Heineken, Instagram, Mercedes-AMG Petronas F1, Meta Reality Labs, Miele, Mondelez, Novartis, Ørsted, Ray-Ban, Samsung, Uber, United Ukrainian Ballet…
I’ve known the satisfaction of building stuff that becomes part of millions of people’s lives, and the incalculable pride in helping others realise their maximum potential - and of seeing my hires go on to be brilliant chief strategy officers around the world.
But what I have been in the past isn’t enough to make my today. I don’t want to simply flash-freeze this point in my life, like I’m Han Solo suspended in Carbonite. I need to keep moving - and feel that I am. Well-versed in the art of moving, and far, so very far from being done, the great American choreographer Twyla Tharp reminds us that there comes a point in life when it’s time to challenge one’s past:
“You have to be willing to find other ways of being in the world beyond those that have served you well throughout your life”.
Time’s gift is experience. Experience sharpens the craft. It acts as a prediction machine, and a pattern recognizer. It cuts through the extraneous. It moves decisively. It supercharges intuition. It’s a long-range antennae for spotting opportunity and potential. It broadens the intellectual and emotional palette from which to draw from. It provides all manner of raw material, traditions, and practices that can be subverted, repurposed, and remixed - “Impara l'arte e mettila da parte” as the Italian proverb puts it. It provides the confidence to dare and try something new. It cultivates resilience. And it tempers the ego.
It is time to put that experience to new work. To paint on a differently-shaped canvas. It is time to go out into the world as myself, unfiltered and unprotected, and to crawl out from under the corporate air cover that has for so very long supported and shielded me. To try something new.
“Tell me”, asks the poet Mary Oliver contemplating the grasshopper, “what is it you plan to do. With your one wild and precious life?” Enough time, more than enough time has passed since that heady, giddy, transformative week in Sicily. Since that voice in me whispered “it’s time to stop being scared”.
And so, dear reader, I have jumped once more.
January 2025 sees me launching my own strategic consultancy business.
A different way of being in the world.
And a different way of creating value in the world.