Dive deep into business, brand and strategy.
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Surveys are slop
Surveys are slop because they ask people to describe their own behaviour, and people cannot do this accurately. The instrument and the thing it claims to measure are structurally incompatible. A survey lives entirely in the slow, rational, narrating part of the mind. Behaviour is driven by the fast, emotional,…
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Your P&L Is the Only Positioning Statement
Let me start with the sentence that gets me in trouble. Your P&L is the only positioning statement your company has ever written. I don’t mean the number at the bottom. I mean the pattern underneath it. Where the money actually went. Who you actually hired. What you actually refused…
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Build with AI
Everyone wants the tool list. Which models, which prompts, which stack. I keep wanting to walk people back to the part that has nothing to do with tools, because that’s the part that built any of this. The order matters, so let me reflect back on it. It started with…
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Ninety Percent of What, Exactly — On the difference between copying a survey and predicting a sale
TLDR: Scientists taught a robot to fill out surveys like a human. The internet heard “robots can predict what you’ll buy!” and stampeded. Nobody checked what anyone actually bought. People in surveys say things they never do. The robot copied the saying part. The herd sharing the headline never read…
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Easy to Find vs. Worth Choosing
On the difference between getting considered and getting paid. Most of the people arguing about how brands grow are having two different conversations at once, and almost none of them know it. One camp says brands grow by being easy to find: easy to remember, easy to buy, present in…
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Up Didn’t Build a Bank. It Built a Generation of Savers
A note before you read this: Dom, Grant, Xavier: I have been watching what you have built with genuine admiration for the past few weeks. Up is one of the few products in Australian finance where you can trace a coherent identity all the way from the code to the…
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The Prancing Horse
The Positioning Delusion — On the Difference Between One Position and Two Disciplines The question making the rounds this week is whether the Ferrari Luce is really a Ferrari. It is the wrong question, and the speed with which everyone reached for it is the symptom worth studying. The popular…
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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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