Just look like you have your shit together The problem with positioning and personal brand advice is that it keeps confusing the appearance of credibility with the conditions that produce it. My beef with almost all of positioning and personal brand advice online is simple: underneath the frameworks, scripts, hooks, and templates, the instruction is…

When the company becomes more important than the customer I don’t find “we’re customer-centric” very convincing. I want to know what happens when serving a customer gets in the way of hitting a target. That’s where I would look for the truth about a business. Imagine you run a support team. You want customers to…

Your P&L is your brand Your customers don’t read your financial statements. They experience them. I keep coming back to two statements. In March 2024, Nike’s finance chief acknowledged that the company had become too focused on its sales-channel targets and paid too little attention to “serving consumer demand where the consumer is shopping.” Management…

Your positioning problem starts with the CEO Three quick things before we dive into this week’s Digest. 1. The newsletter is here a day early. Figured tomorrow morning will be chaos for folks coming back from a long weekend. 2. Article I wrote: What Nike’s CEO failed to understand 3. Below are before-and-after case studies that…

How do you find a brand’s position? TL;DR — If I wanted to find out how other people feel and think about you, would I start with what you say about yourself, or find out what other people are saying about you when you’re not in the room? And yet every idiot online is doing…

Nobody is stealing your ideas Before we dive into this week’s Digest, I have to share two things. The first: I recently launched Kit.ceo Enterprise, which is essentially positioning-as-a-service that allows you to scale and sell strategy without the department or hire. This is for agencies and studios whose core competency lies elsewhere, such as…

AI in 2030   I didn’t write a dedicated Digest newsletter this week. I’ve been heads down building Monopoly. Last week, I was travelling and spending time with a fascinating group of people. Between building and travelling, I didn’t have much time left to write. But this idea had been sitting in my notes, so I…

How to Own a Position When Thinking Costs Nothing  A quick announcement before we dive into this week’s Digest. For all Kit users, I’ve added two capabilities to Pablo (previously GNYS “Genius”) to audit or create offers and a funnel for any brand. All you have to do is drop in the URL and let Pablo…

Deeds Speak  Before we dive into this week’s Digest, I have something to share with you that I care about deeply. Nobody hands you a manual for your own head. You get one for a car, a mortgage, a phone. For the thing running every decision you will ever make, you get nothing. Therapy is…

The Utility Was Never the Story In July 2026, a founder I follow posted that AI can ship 15 items to anyone in 4 weeks, so shipping proves nothing anymore. The real flex is knowing which one of the 15 matters, and having the discipline to ignore the other 14. I replied with one line. More…

Shape vs Moat How to Know If Your Company Survives the Day It Gets Copied The Three Engines framework, eight case studies, one forty-year-old counterexample, and the four tests I run before I believe any defensibility story. Over my career, I have sat in rooms where companies decided what made them safe, and I helped…

The Positioning Industry Has One Disease Two things before we dive into this week’s Digest. 1. I wrote an article on How Language Formed — And Why Professional Vocabulary Collapsed 2. I created a prompt that uncovers your blind spot and reveals your superpower. Drop it into your LLM chat and find out! Download. Now,…