Waking up next to a golf course can be quite nice

So much power in a genuine smile

That's all I have to say about that.

A man after my own heart

Rob Campbell just said some amazing shit that I'm pretty sure I coincidentally said too this morning at a meeting with Anomaly.

Primarily this:

"Maybe if we just got on with what brands and society actually wanted and needed from us, we’d end producing more great commercially creative ideas than proprietary bullshit."

and this:

"Too many companies care more about the process than what the process delivers."

and this:

"I’m not talking about creative awards or effectiveness papers that have made a ‘degree of change’ sound like the second coming of Jesus … I’m talking about doing stuff that fundamentally – and undeniably – shifts the needle."

Digital pace

The pace of business is working up to a phenomenal pace - faster and more "digital". But where are the results? I see only anxiety.

In an attention economy, tracking and targeting people faster than ever before and generating more clicks than ever before, it's almost certainly only making it harder to keep up - and with what exactly? The type of value typically created today is more incremental and less noticeable as the digital space expands seemingly into infinity. I see little space for genuine competitive advantage.

More pace, more precision, more frenetic promises to engage customers is not going to make the world a better place, I am certain of it.

The time to fix the roof is while the sun is shining. And so, as a strategist, I am therefore relentlessly focused on the message, the meaning of the brand and the product, and equally meaningful innovation. That's my deal.

Oh wait, Seth said that too

Too much?

I don't always invent new words, but when I do...



Scroll around my other little baby, the award winning Hot Acid Rhythm for all-new vibescaping.

Oh Hellz Yeah

Ideas That Changed the World

I was given this book many years back. The author, Felipe Fernandez Armesto, portrays human history in terms of a series of intellectual and conceptual discoveries, adopted and understood by civilizations over time. I think it almost works better than a regular history book in the sense that history as a discipline is too much of a backward narrative for me. One tends to think of history as event-facts. But events are almost entirely the result of ideas, or sub-ideas (like the idea that say, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand needs to die).

When I see the world in terms of ideas and ages, and ages made from ideas, then everything makes so much more sense. Something like the whole of religion looks like just another man made idea, like cooking one's food, or democratic rule.

As the book begins from prehistoric time, one already is given a sense of the whole of humanity and what it means to be a race that grows off/with/out of planet earth.

By understanding, in this way, the ages and every smaller increment of time possible, I believe one is in a far better position to make educated predictions about the cycles or ages of at least the relatively near future. At least that's how I see it.

Check it out on Goodreads

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Seriously great work by Glenn O'Brien.

Why? On brand, on brand, on brand.