IDEAS / POST What a $12 Body Wash Taught Me About Clarity I was killing time in the drugstore shampoo aisle while my wife stocked up, milling about in that disinterested way where nothing’s on your list and everything’s fair game. Method and Every Man Jack caught my eye first. No surprise there, seeing […]
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IDEAS / POST Why F1 Fans Pay Thousands to Hear an Engine A Night in Brescia I was 27 years old, standing on a street in Brescia, Italy, in a sea of the most beautiful cars ever built. It was the starting point for the Mille Miglia, a much-storied rally for pre-war and early
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IDEAS / POST The Physical World Strikes Back For years, we’ve chased the holy grail in the cloud. Now, it would appear the pendulum is swinging back down to earth. And for hardware founders, positioning has never mattered more. That was the thesis of the Websummit panel featuring founder / investors Lu Zhang and
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IDEAS / POST Nike Doesn’t Win Because AI Likes It James Cadwallader’s company, Profound, helps 13% of the Fortune 500 understand and control how AI talks about their brands… the sharp end of AI search optimization. His talk at Websummit this year was mesmerizing. The audience leaned in. And every founder in the room
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IDEAS / POST Your Best Customers Love Your Product. That’s Why You’re Stalled. It was a full house at WebSummit. Not surprising, considering the panellists: Jess Kirkman, Global Head of Brand Creative at Mattel, and Danny Rensch, Co-Founder and Chief Chess Officer at Chess.com. And they were talking about insanely successful products everyone knows
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IDEAS / POST The Blind Spots Driving Stalled Growth in PE Portfolio Companies Private equity firms are good at spotting underperformance in portfolio companies with stalled growth. What’s harder is understanding why some remain stuck, even after serious intervention. From the outside, a typical work in progress inspires confidence. Leadership has been adjusted, capital deployed,
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IDEAS / POST Why The Most Dangerous Portfolio Companies Look Like Rocket Ships In a recent conversation with Frederic Vanduynslaeger, my Where Growth Stalls co-host and I unpacked a real case of founder dependency risk: a $10 million ARR company that lost $3.4 million in value during acquisition. That flaw came out in an answer
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IDEAS / POST Lorraine McGregor and I had been working parallel tracks for years. She was helping companies unlock unrealized growth potential from operations and financial perspectives. I was doing the same, from the brand and narrative perspective. Both approaches delivered strong results. But when we compared what we’d been seeing in companies trying to
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IDEAS / POST In 1959, Volkswagen introduced the now-iconic Think Small campaign. While competitors focused on selling bigger cars with more features, Volkswagen leaned into simplicity, positioning the Beetle as the car that did exactly what people needed it to do, and did it well. In my experience, the lesson of VW (focus on a
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IDEAS / POST Noise is Only Part of The Problem AI is a confusing space, it’s true. You’ve no doubt heard about the MIT study citing 95% of businesses that aren’t seeing ROI from their AI investment. The study reveals most businesses are using AI for quick fixes and hacks, not ‘hard’ tasks like transforming
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