Weeknotes & Articles

Weeknotes

Weekly updates and learnings.

  1. Projects ending, projects starting and styles of confrontation
  2. Annual planning, long-lived businesses and collaborative budgeting
  3. Career moats, portfolios, and life sciences
  4. Annual planning, molecular biology, spirits portfolios and travel
  5. Travel, creative presentations and designing dashboards
  6. Travel brands, annual planning and sampling
  7. Workshops, off-sites, information-absorption and anniversaries
  8. Creative workshops, new projects and growing distribution
  9. New relationships, sweet workshops, buyer meetings and word games
  10. Coffees, serendipity and merch
  11. Sweets, manufacturers, influencers and variation
  12. Pricing data, store shelves and fractal side projects
  13. Whisky galore and winning retail listings
  14. MSG and B Corp values
  15. Big RFPs, filling packs and starting a factory
  16. Cornish trips and transport woes
  17. Workshops, blitzes and conflicts of interest
  18. Bow waves and booze brands
  19. Reflections on an away day
  20. Bandages, Relative lunches and the scarcity of ideas
  21. Consumer portraits, big pitches and the merits of consultants
  22. Ad briefings, pitches, Finnish culture and executive off-sites
  23. Collective genius, bakery ads and dungarees
  24. Six months in
  25. Project completions, schmoozing, strategy offers and setting visions
  26. Mixed bags, Chinese food, productisation and psychotherapy
  27. Focused weeks, Chinese ingredients, brand strategy and Hotel Chocolat
  28. Youthful sweets, tired biscuits and bleak stats
  29. Beans, agencies, sweets and startups
  30. Creating partnerships, investment banks, working time and losing pitches
  31. Agency strategy, gut health, and pack redesigns
  32. Pitching, workshops, filling knowledge gaps and pondering agencies
  33. Recruitment, whisky business, sad films and hot custard
  34. Tissues, pet food, and Scotch
  35. Baileys, birthdays, visual inspiration, and randomness
  36. New offices, new starts, Italian booze, pitching
  37. Beginning weeknotes, emailing, a new startup

Articles

Longer-form thoughts and analysis.

  1. Is there life in Mars?

    Whether the acquisition of Hotel Chocolat was a Mars masterstroke or a massive rip-off

  2. The future of agencies

    What next for the “big four” communications agency groups, and the smaller agencies that live in their shadow?

  3. Faster, better, cheaper: pick three

    A manifesto for strategy that’s fast, inexpensive, and effective

  4. Buying it brand new

    If you acquire a brand, is it best to merge it with your own, or maintain some separation?

  5. Shaking those assets

    Why the concept of distinctive assets offers a useful way of looking at brands

  6. Numbers and narratives

    The importance of asking “so what?”

  7. Brands are about to get interested

    How much of brands’ behaviour is the result of low interest rates?

  8. Decking around

    Strategy as a discipline is obsessed with slide decks – but they’re a terrible way to convey subtle and complex information

  9. Understanding variation

    How do you know if a change in a metric is a cause for alarm?

  10. Focus on the levers you can pull

    The difference between input and output metrics, and why it matters

  11. Hello, world