Part 2: A new beginning
“The ultimate, hidden truth of the world
is that it is something that we make,
and could just as easily make differently.”
David Graeber
It was time to put the three decades of life and strategy experience accumulated in London, New York, São Paulo, and Amsterdam to new work, and paint on a differently-shaped canvas.
And it begins with this.
A strategic consultancy for businesses and brands wanting to find the highest-fidelity version of themselves, find their superpower - and then manifest it in the world with intent, conviction, and authenticity.
A few convictions of my own have got me to this point…
Strategy is narrative. It’s a story about change and consequence, desired goals, and how challenges and obstacles to achieving them will be overcome. In doing so, narrative charts a compelling and persuasive route to a better future - one that recruits the belief and commitment of others to make it a reality. All strategy is narrative and it cannot exist without it. And strategy can only ever be as good as the narrative it’s embodied in.
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Every business, organisation, brand, and human being has a superpower within them. Music producer Rick Rubin has talked about how he doesn’t see sees his role as being about imposing his ideas, but simply helping people achieve the best version of themselves and their art. “I’ll spend time with an artist and listen very carefully to what they tell me and get them to talk about their true goals, their highest, highest goals." he says. "We’ll go back to the heart of why they started doing what they are doing in the first place.” The challenge and opportunity in brand strategy is little different. In other words, to identify and articulate its superpower and render it culturally potent. Dolly Parton said it best: “Find out who you are and do it on purpose.” It's an encouragement to manifest our value and uniqueness in the world with the uncompromised conviction, intent, commitment, and authenticity that is born of true self-knowledge, and self-worth.
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The potential surface area for genuine, ‘full-fat’ brand strategy to play on is vast. The effect radius of execution-bound strategy while undeniably valuable, touches but a fraction of this. Big-thinking strategy sees the entire canvas. Small-thinking strategy sees only the end of the brush.
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Business leaders want honesty, not complicity. They are acutely aware that they’re living in a non-linear world and do not see the trends and dynamics of yesteryear playing out like a straight line into the future. They understand that the past as a solution set cannot be the only viable option and are hungry for a genuinely outside perspective.
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Much of what passes for ‘strategy’ is not strategy at all but wishful thinking, word soup, stakeholder management politics, or a game of buzzword bingo. It’s used to dress up the ordinary, the obvious, the trivial, the cliched and the generic and pass it off as more significant and substantive than it really is. Swathes of strategy are uninformed by anything approaching the decisiveness and discernment of taste. Indeed sometimes the strategy word is nothing more than a smokescreen for bullshit. Businesses and the customers they serve deserve better.
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Client organisations want experience applied to their brand and businesses challenges. It’s seen more brands, more opportunities to be seized, more problems to be solved, more organisational cultures… It has seen the many ways in which brands and ideas actually serve commercial purpose. It acts as a prediction machine, and a pattern recognizer. It cuts through the extraneous. It moves decisively. It’s ruthless in killing what isn’t fit for purpose. It supercharges intuition. It’s a long-range antennae for spotting fledgling opportunity and potential. It provides the confidence to dare and try something new. It cultivates resilience. And crucially, it tempers the ego.
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The need for rigorous imagination is greater than ever. Client organisations and their brands need the imagination to help them see beyond what is, and see could be true and real. What they want to be true and real. To help them discover and unlock new skills, capacities and futures. Conflating analysis with this, the deep, hard work of strategy does nothing but put a brake on progress.
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You don’t need industrial-scale infrastructure, overhead, cost, and time to imagine better futures, get to great insight, great strategy, and great ideas.
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Great relationships are the source of all great work. The American choreographer Twyla Tharp has said “all collaborations are love stories”. Collaboration requires give and take. That we understand that in giving up some of our autonomy we gain exponentially more. That we treat collaboration as a place to give, not a place to take. And that we share a common ambition. Look closely at any successful collaboration. Crick and Watson, Sinatra and Riddell, Page and Brin, Fonteyn and Nureyev, Kahlo and Rivera, Warhol and Basquiat… We see a mutual and authentic purpose and passion, a sincere and shared commitment. All of which is to say that at the end of the day there is no greater reward than doing good work with kindred spirits.
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emdub is now open for strategic commissions.
How can I help?
martin@emdub.co