Look up, look ahead

While the headlines have softened a little and the rhetoric is more of a ‘soft’ recession than the self-inflicted imminent implosion of the Truss/Kwarteng aftermath, the mood music out there is still not that upbeat. Brands are still wanting to spend less. Agencies still fighting to get their share of the even smaller pie. With

More room for thinking, less room for meeting.

Busy-ness is a curse. Best seen in your calendar bursting with back to back meetings. How many have a real purpose? How many even have an agenda attached to them? Does everybody invited even need to be there? The January meeting fest has begun and given me a headache. In the US there are 55

Growth outlook: Winter is coming. Should I get my coat?

About this time of year everyone gets their crystal balls out and we all know most of it is made up and hoping rather than knowing. But what feels different this year is that universally every agency person has the same level of optimism around new business. And that level is pretty bloody low. Sitting

we don’t like clients

We had a meeting last week. We were hosting, not actually part of the meeting. Just lending the Bank of Brilliant Ideas to a client to have an off-site. Much coffee and croissants prepped, we also gave each person our new notebook that has ‘we don’t like clients’ on it. It had the effect we

48 shades of beige

Cleaning up my old notes recently, I found this from c. 2016/7 and thought it deserved an airing and quite poignant reading this today given what’s happened the last few months in my own life. I wrote it verbatim after a day out with the delivery drivers as a means of me processing the information

the evolution of a deck

It seems in our world, decks have become our currency. It used to be the black and white Art Director scamp was the most revered ‘product’ in an agency and in meetings. Today it seems it’s the deck. Whether that’s right or wrong is another thought for another day. I work in Keynote because I

business not quite as usual

Working closely with an Italian team means seeing your future before it happens. I’ve seen them react to their evolving situation including travel restrictions, school closures, shops closing and working from home. In almost daily update video calls, over the last few weeks it’s been clear that this was going to be the new normal

workshops and horns

It’s quite strange how reluctant people are to put away their phones and close their laptop screens in meetings. Having been frustrated a lot recently as both participant and running workshops, we decided to be very clear and deliberate in two sessions we ran this week. After limited response to the first request, we repeated,

Broken

There are good people and not so good people. They’ve defined who I work for and who I am. It’s how I react to situations. It’s why I’ve run through walls for people and broken myself in the process – not necessarily as a result of those people but what happens in life. But what’s

Remote lessons

This is me sitting outside the One Co Work offices in Barcelona’s marina some weeks ago. We spent two days inside here workshopping and scheming. And quite a few hours after the meetings in the cafe opposite the hotel, and in the hotel, working remotely and collaborating to do the day job outside of the