Dive deep into business, brand and strategy.
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The Gap CMOs Are Defending
You have 4.3 years. That’s the average CMO tenure at a Fortune 500. At the top 100 advertisers, it’s 3.3. In SaaS, it’s 18 months. And most of you are first-timers. 71%, to be exact. Walking into the highest-stakes marketing seat with no precedent for navigating it. Here’s what happens…
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Monopoly Moves: Agency Edition
For the agency professional who already knows the brief isn’t the whole story — and is ready to stop pretending it is. You already know. You know the brief is curated. You know the client’s positioning describes who they want to be, not how the market sees them. You know…
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Monopoly Moves: In-House Brand Edition
You’re not going to like this. You think your company owns “innovation” in the market’s mind. Your customers think you’re “reliable but boring.” A competitor you barely track owns the word you’re spending millions to claim. You don’t know this. You won’t find out for six months. And by then,…
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The Gap You’re Signing Into
Every high-stakes decision follows the same ritual. Before an acquisition, the deal team opens a data room. Revenue. EBITDA. Churn. Customer concentration. Contracts. Financials get audited. Legal gets reviewed. The numbers get stress-tested. Before a vendor contract is signed, procurement runs the process. RFPs go out. Demos get scheduled. References…
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AN INCOMPLETE MANIFESTO FOR POSITIONING
WHY THIS EXISTS I built systems. Monopoly surfaces external reality — what the market actually believes about a company. It can be run on clients, competitors, acquisition targets, or yourself. It shows the gap between what companies claim and what customers perceive. The Clarity Kit does the inside work —…
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The Bifurcation Problem
Why consumer-loved companies lose their identity on the way to IPO. The moment a beloved product hires a “B2B CMO,” a clock starts ticking. Not toward growth but fracture. Not visibly or immediately. But the fracture is there, and it widens. There’s a pattern hiding in plain sight. The products…
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The $108 Billion Word That Broke Strategy
Consulting firms needed differentiation. Academics needed publications. Corporations needed org charts. MBA programs needed career tracks. And “brand” needed to pay for all of it. This is the story of how one word got a hundred jobs, and why most of them shouldn’t exist. The Word That Launched a Thousand…
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Harvey AI: The $8 Billion Position Nobody Has Named
A Note Before We Begin: I wrote this because I admire what Harvey is building. I’ve been following Winston Weinberg’s content, watching how the company moves, and studying the decisions they’ve made over the past three years. There’s something happening here that’s worth understanding more deeply. This analysis isn’t a…
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How to fix your ‘brand’ in 1 day
Note before we begin: Dan Koe’s article “How to Fix Your Entire Life in 1 Day” got 90 million views on X. When I read it, I understood why. Also, some envy ensued. LOL! Dan’s core thesis is that you aren’t where you want to be because you aren’t the…
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Context isn’t the preface. It’s the work.
Most bad decisions don’t come from a lack of intelligence. They come from skipping context. You’ve seen it. Someone asks a question that sounds clear: “Should we do product-led growth?”“Should we hire an enterprise seller?”“Can you help sharpen our marketing story?” Within minutes, smart people start handing out solutions. That’s…
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The “Brand Positioning” Problem: Why Two Words Reveal a Fundamental Misunderstanding
The Tell Two words that reveal you don’t understand positioning: “brand positioning.” This isn’t pedantry. It’s diagnostic. The phrase inverts causality, conflates two distinct phenomena, and reveals a conceptual confusion that has cost companies billions in misdirected strategy work. When someone says “brand positioning,” they’re typically doing one of three…
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The Real Bottleneck in the Age of AI Isn’t Intelligence. It’s Unlearning.
The highest-IQ people aren’t the wealthiest. They never have been. The Terman Study tracked 1,528 children with IQs above 135 for 74 years — one of the longest longitudinal studies ever conducted. The conclusion surprised everyone: these “geniuses” were no more successful in adulthood than children randomly selected from similar…
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