Heatwaves and Strategy
It’s hot here. For anyone reading outside the UK, the country broke its June temperature record yesterday, and today may go higher again....
Strategy
AI and Hollywood Accounting
This week Harvard Business Review published an article by E. Glen Weyl and Raul Castro Fernandez, How AI Companies Can Pay Fair Rates for...
Building AI Workflows That Survive Platform Risk
AI platform volatility, pricing changes, usage limits, makes it risky to build workflows inside specific models. The smartest users are using AI as a harness, keeping data and value in their own stack. Optionality matters as much as optimisation.
ECPA Conference Reflections
Reflections from the ECPA Leadership Summit on AI's impact on publishing. Bob Hutchins' proxy failure framework - how AI undermines trust in writing as a signal of thought and effort - connects to George Akerlof's market for lemons: when quality signals break down, adverse selection can collapse markets. The strategic question for publishers is whether they can credibly signal editorial judgement in ways that are costly for low-quality producers to fake.
Strategic Debt and the Hidden Cost of AI Adoption
AI initiatives aren't free gains: they're commitments. Strategic debt explains why more AI capability can mean less organisational clarity and control.
The Author's Bargain
How should authors respond to Generative AI? A clear-headed look at strategy, licensing, publisher policies, creative use, and why human authorship may become more valuable, not less.
Four Scenarios for Scholarly Publishing and AI
Four scenarios for scholarly publishing and AI, exploring what happens when AI changes both how knowledge is produced and how it is discovered—and what the enduring role of a publisher might be.
London Book Fair 2026 Reflections
Eighteen observations from three days at London Book Fair 2026, including procedural debt, AI adoption maturity, audio publishing, discoverability, and the value of unscheduled conversations.
Accelerating the Right Things
On the risk of using AI to accelerate the wrong things, and why the collapse in the cost of building makes judgement, not execution, the scarce resource.
Trade Publishing as a Data Business
Trade publishers generate valuable forward signals—submission patterns, acquisition trends, category momentum—that they have not yet treated as products. Could they follow the Washington Post's playbook?
Parix Audio Day 2026 Slides
Slides and a brief summary from a keynote at Parix Audio Day 2026 in Madrid on the impact of AI across the audiobook value chain: authors, publishers, narrators and the competitive landscape.
IPG Spring Conference 2026
Sixteen observations from the IPG Spring Conference 2026: on leisure time, platform risk, AI in workflows, procedural debt, and what it means to think generationally in a structural market shift.
Execution is Free
As AI lowers the cost of execution toward zero, professional value shifts up the stack—from code to judgement, from delivery to deciding what is worth delivering at all.
Twenty Minute Prototyping
What happens when a non-developer builds a playable text adventure and a new blog layout using Claude Code? A reflection on AI as a prototyping tool for those who sit across strategy and execution.
Geopolitics, Publishing and TikTok
TikTok's geopolitical vulnerability is a prompt for publishers to ask a harder question: what proportion of your social audience are you migrating to channels you own?
Four Ages of Strategy
Applying Rumsfeld's four epistemic states—including the often-overlooked 'unknown known'—to map the four ages of business strategy and what they demand of leaders today.
Business Models and Borges
On building useful business models: why a Borges short story about a 1:1 scale map is the perfect reminder that abstraction, not precision, is the goal.
Defining Strategy
A working definition of strategy—and the assumptions behind it—developed while designing an online strategy workshop for a client.
EBITDAC
How companies began using EBITDAC—earnings adjusted for coronavirus—as a vanity metric, and why creative accounting measures should be treated with scepticism.