Dive deep into business, brand and strategy.
-
The Costume Industry, Part III: Musk Did Not Kill Tesla. The Original Position Did Its Job.
On the difference between the fame that follows proof and the fame that replaces it. The Harvard Business Review just published a piece arguing that Tesla’s brand is now hostage to its CEO, and that the fix is for the company to manage Musk’s perception more carefully. The piece is…
-
The Costume Industry, Part II: Why Positioning Work Almost Never Produces a Position
On the difference between vocabulary debt and decision debt. A week ago, I published an essay arguing that “personal brand,” “brand positioning,” “homepage positioning,” “product positioning,” and “brand marketing” are intellectually lazy terms that smuggle the wrong mental model into strategic work. The response was the most generous I have…
-
The Costume Industry: Why “Personal Brand” (and Every Term Like It) Is Vocabulary Debt
There’s a particular kind of word that quietly does damage. It sounds professional. It travels well in meetings. It shows up in bios, decks, agency proposals, and LinkedIn posts. Nobody questions it because everyone uses it. And that’s exactly the problem. “Personal brand” is one of those words. So is…
-
The Intelligence Layer They’re All Missing
TL;DR. The $153 billion global research industry (surveys, management consulting, analyst firms, social listening, and now AI search) sources its evidence from people and companies who know they are being observed. I call that performed signal. Every source biased in the same direction, toward the audience the data was produced…
-
Cloudflare built the internet’s Immune Layer
A note before you read this: I’ve been watching Cloudflare for a long time. What Matthew Prince, Michelle Zatlyn, and Lee Holloway built, and what the team continues to build, sits in a category of its own. Fifteen years of decisions that quietly hold up a meaningful portion of the…
-
You got the direction of travel wrong
Think Different. Just Do It. Red Bull Gives You Wings. Read them again. Notice what they’re about. Not one of these taglines describes a product. Apple doesn’t mention computers. Nike doesn’t mention shoes. Red Bull names itself but says nothing about energy drinks. Every one of them is about you.…
-
Nerdio: The Command Layer
A Note Before You Read: I’ve been following Nerdio and Vadim’s work the past few weeks, paying close attention to the content, the conference, the community, and the story being built in public. What you see here comes from genuine curiosity, not criticism. This analysis was assembled from publicly available…
-
The end of choosing a bank
You don’t choose an electricity provider the way your grandparents did. You don’t choose a phone company the way your parents did. Within a decade, you won’t choose a bank the way you do now. That sentence will make most people uncomfortable. Banks feel permanent. They feel structural. Your chequing…
-
OpenAI: The Intelligence Utility
From Clarity to Gravity: OpenAI + Sam Altman A positioning analysis of the company that created a category, owns a product noun, and is searching for the concept underneath. A note before we begin. I wrote this analysis because I admire the work. OpenAI and Sam Altman have done something…
-
Steve Jobs was right. The $140 billion research industry is wrong. And has been for 80 years.
In 1998, Steve Jobs told BusinessWeek: “A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” The research industry spent the next 25 years calling that arrogance. They were wrong. And the science to prove it existed before Jobs was born. 1938 That’s when…
-
Palantir: The Company That Owns a Concept It Rarely Names
From Clarity to Gravity: Palantir Technologies A positioning analysis of Palantir Technologies and CEO Alex Karp A Note Before We Begin: I have been watching Palantir closely for a while now. The work Alex Karp and the team have built over twenty-two years is genuinely remarkable, and so is the…
-
The ingredient nobody’s checking
In 2021, a global professional services firm spent $14 million on a brand transformation. New visual identity. New messaging architecture. New brand guidelines distributed across 47 offices. They commissioned research before the launch. Prompted awareness was strong. Sentiment scores came back positive. The positioning statement (something about trusted expertise and…
Get Your CEO Clarity Starter Kit
