My Working Philosophy
Notes on the surprisingly simple mechanics of business, strategy in a post-AI world, and more.
The Real Mechanics of Business
When you get right down to it, the mechanics of business are remarkably simple.
Every business is making the same request to potential customers: “Let me make your life more wonderful.”
In B2C marketing, the business usually claims to make the customers’ lives more wonderful by solving a real problem, a pain the customer would rather live without.
Look carefully and you’ll see the same principle at work in B2B marketing. A different dynamic, to be sure, with different pain points – but every vendor is still appealing to humans who are responsible for likely hundreds of different KPIs within the business they manage.
Solve a B2B problem and you make someone’s life more wonderful. Solve a technological problem that constrains human flourishing, and you change the world.
Over the last 25 years I’ve marketed and sold across many sectors in both B2C and B2B environments. It all comes down to communication. I love the challenge of finding the right way to communicate that one simple request – “Let me make your life more wonderful” – and adapting the messaging that follows that request to the product on offer and the customer who will reap the benefits of a problem solved.
Sometimes, for big ideas and emerging technologies, that means telling a world in crisis how your solution can make the lives of billions more wonderful.
I’d like to make your life more wonderful. Reach out to tell me what problem your business is facing, so we can find a marketing and communications solution.
Strategy in a Post-AI World
2026 will be remembered as the year everything changed. Sure, the disruption began earlier. I felt it myself, in my own business. Information has become commoditized, and every business running their strategic and tactical questions through the same LLMs will converge to sameness – if they don’t consciously resist that convergence.
Copying has become easier than ever. I’ve seen this first-hand in the e-commerce industry, where competitors are spinning up dupes of successful brands and running the same strategy, the same products, and even the same ads.
I agree wholeheartedly with the strategist Alex M H Smith, who is thinking more deeply about this topic than anyone else in the game. The businesses that will win now (and in the coming years) will be built on: Vision, Meaning, Adventure, Romance, Ambition & Charisma.
Those are not qualities that AI can reproduce.
If you think I’m only talking about consumer brands here, I’m not. I’ve seen examples of this winning strategy in (for example) a startup developing high-temperature downhole electronics.
I use AI every day. I also know its limitations in the realm of strategy. My advice to you (and to myself) is to see this convergence to sameness as an opportunity. Accept the challenge to dig deep and create a magnetic, charismatic brand. One that people will talk about without being paid to do so. Use AI where appropriate to supercharge your own creativity and move the process of systems-building along. But always bring to the table something humans truly care about.