Dive deep into business, brand and strategy.
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What the Subway Took From Joshua Bell
On positioning, costly signals, and why the cheapest part of the craft is the part the market believes least. I keep coming back to the Joshua Bell story, and the longer I sit with it, the more I think it teaches the opposite of what it gets used to teach.…
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“It’s Just Semantics” Is the Most Expensive Sentence in Business
Your words are making your decisions for you. In 1889, an Ethiopian emperor and the Kingdom of Italy signed the same treaty in two languages. The two versions agreed on everything except one word. That one word decided whether his country would stay free. His name was Menelik II. The…
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The Autopilot Corporation: When the Whole Economy Forgets the Customer
Part 3 in The Autopilot Corporation series. Part 1 here. Part 2 here. It’s brutally hard to start a company. Anyone who’s done it knows. You spend years looking for the thing — the product, the wedge, the customer who actually pays — and most of those years are quiet.…
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The Noun Elon Musk Left Out of the SpaceX S1: A Positioning Read of the June 12 IPO
A note before you read this: SpaceX has been operating for 24 years, and the part of the company most worth respecting is the part the financial press does not write about: the engineering culture, the cadence, the tolerance for failure as a method, and the willingness to ship at…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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