Writing
Ideas
Arguments I keep making, and the evidence behind them. Mostly about growth: what becomes possible when technology and an organisation are built to fit each other.
Essays
The long-form arguments.
Aug 2025
The Outcome-Based Revolution: Why Marketing Must Move Beyond Billable Hours
Agencies sell time. Clients buy outcomes. A model built on integrated data, hypotheses and experiments — with cross-functional delivery and commercial incentives aligned to the value created rather than the hours spent.
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Oct 2024
The Premium Paradox
Wider access to AI raises rather than lowers the value of premium, human-led work. What that means for anyone whose work depends on judgement, intuition and craft.
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Oct 2024
Will AI Make Coding Obsolete?
AI changes software development rather than ending it. Problem definition, user experience and responsible direction stay human — and get more valuable, not less.
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Jun 2018
Mental Exercises for the C-Suite
Work backwards from where your industry is going, assess honestly how well your organisation uses data, then decide what to build, what to buy and who to partner with. The essay the Data → AI framework came from.
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Seasonal
Is Santa Real?
Not a business essay. What I told my seven-year-old son the day he worked it out — about a man in Myra seventeen centuries ago, and how a person becomes an idea.
Returns each December
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Friday Thoughts
Fri 2 May 2025
Today we augment people with AI. Soon we will augment AI with people.
A scary thought about the future of work — and why, if it is right, creativity and real data are the two things worth investing in now.
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Wed 12 Mar 2025
Bill Gates explaining the internet to David Letterman
We are arguing about which AI apps will matter. The thing that matters is the capability underneath, and the complexity it lets us build.
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Fri 14 Feb 2025
The media industry's jargon problem
Tech learned to explain itself to clients. Media never had to, because its clients speak the language too. AI will force the issue by making smaller clients worth serving.
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Fri 22 Nov 2024
Shouldn't we teach business skills in schools?
Eight hours in a Manchester A&E in 1996, and a question I have not been able to put down since: who designs the systems the rest of us live inside?
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Fri 15 Nov 2024
At what age do we let children on social media?
Australia legislated for sixteen. As a parent of two, I found I had fewer objections to that than I expected.
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Fri 8 Nov 2024
Alright, boss?
Success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan. Why I would rather my team heard "blame me if it fails".
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Mon 28 Oct 2024
If everything seems under control, you are not going fast enough
Mario Andretti, on a slide in my onboarding deck. Agility is not chaos — it is strategic velocity, and it is supposed to feel uncomfortable.
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Fri 18 Oct 2024
Uber for builders
We rebuilt a Victorian terrace in seven months instead of two years by paying thirty per cent upfront. There is a business hiding in that.
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Fri 11 Oct 2024
Why don't more barbershops offer subscriptions?
My old barber did not survive Covid. Predictable cash flow might have saved him — and nobody is more loyal than a man to his barber.
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Fri 26 Jul 2024
One calamity is better than a thousand pieces of advice
A Turkish proverb about learning the hard way, and the harder question underneath it: where do you stop letting people fail, because the stakes are too high?
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