Business leaders tell us is that a broken politics has created a void, and that in the words of Blackrock Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Larry Fink “society is increasingly looking to companies, to address pressing social and economic issues”. It’s the advancement of an ideology that seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market. Instead of the politics we are to have the marketplace, instead of elected representatives we are to have corporations, and instead of the citizen, we are only and everywhere consumers. We’re being asked to sign up to what the historian, essayist and university professor Tony Judt calls, “an eviscerated society”.
Read MoreWe are creating more and more advertising which neglects that part of the brain we must engage if we want to create the associations and connections that lie at the heart of long-term brand building. Client businesses are failing to leverage the real power and advantage that creativity confers. In fact when we insist that marketing marketing’s priority is not the longer-term health of a brand and business but the short-term, we are in the business not of value creation but value destruction.
Read MoreEach step along the long, long hard journey to getting work out into the world is an opportunity to exercise our innate negativity bias and focus on what’s not working; to fall victim to group think; to feedback simply in order to have one’s voice and participation made felt; to add and complicate; to shave the edges off; to second-guess how people in the real world will (or will not) respond; to second-guess how other people in the organisation will (or will not) respond; to lose sight of the original intent and objective; and ultimately, to lose conviction and run out of fucks to give. When great work has to navigate this many steps, running the gamut of feedback at each any every one of them, we need better process, and better conversation.
Read MoreAt the end of the day, strategy is the art of getting other people to do something.
In the pursuit of that, narrative (call it ‘storytelling’ if you really must) is the strategist’s tool.
Strategy is narrative.
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