🖤🙏❤️
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Look now how small, how timid, how pusillanimous, how domesticated and de-clawed, how full of narcissistic hot air, how demoted to nothing more than a cabaret warmup act so much of what passes for ‘strategy’ appears to be, when set against its true nature, its true possibilities, and - irrespective of the size and nature of the canvas - the true, the urgent, and the thrilling need for it.
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What it is, where it is to be found, how we are to recognise it, its shape and dynamics… all this remains a mystery. And while we’re confident that we can be a part of it and even change it (whatever ‘it’) is, it’s a mystery we seem happy to keep as such. This absence of specificity calls to mind the words of the sixteenth century philosophy and statesman Francis Bacon: “There arises from a bad and unapt formation of words a wonderful obstruction to the mind.” If words are tools for thinking then perhaps if we had a clearer view on what it is we are talking about, we could have a clearer view of our place and role within it, better direct our energies, and more accurately chart and measure our impact and progress.
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The data-evidenced case for gratitude.
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There’s nothing like reclaiming a decades-long neglected garden to teach one about the creation and nurturing of things that last.
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The plates of culture are grinding and shifting beneath our feet. Forces are at work in the land. Fissures are opening. The fractal consequences bloom. All that is solid melts into air. Never did splendid isolation look so untenable.
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On the opportunity and need for revolution, on the fight of our lives, on surrounding a business with creativity, and why hope matters.
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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”.
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We 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.
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Each 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.
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At 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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