Nov 18, 2025 | AI
AI is stripping out the commercial friction that previously required middle management as coordinators.
The old vertical model, with layers of functions passing work up and down the pyramid, is being replaced by horizontal flows of cross-functional orchestration.
Traditional organisations run on vertical alignment. Each function optimises its own sequence of tasks, reporting neatly up the line. It looks tidy on a chart but in reality, can be chaotic.
Customers do not live in your vertical world. They move sideways, across sales, production, logistics, and service, expecting a seamless experience.
AI is flipping that organisational pyramid on its side. It connects once-isolated functions into a single horizontal process. What was once delegated up and down now needs to be orchestrated across.
Sequential processes, the bread and butter of functional work, are predictable. They are easy to automate and improve. However, the processes that serve customers are not sequential. They are coordinated, and they demand awareness of what is happening across functions, not just within them.
This difference matters. Sequential work relies on delegation. Coordinated work requires orchestration. The first is mechanical; the second is musical.
To orchestrate effectively, AI needs agency. It must be allowed to make choices within parameters, not just follow a script. Without that level of agency, automation collapses into the same bottlenecks middle management used to create while claiming to fix them. True orchestration demands that machines can choose the next note when the music changes.
This is gold for the cost hawks and process zealots who love squeezing inefficiency from sequential work. It is also gold for the customer-facing teams because orchestration delivers something far more valuable: speed. When everything else is roughly equal, price, specification, guarantees, two things decide who wins.
- Delivered In Full, On Time, (DIFOT) what was promised when it was promised, without error.
- Cycle time, how fast an order moves from request to fulfilment.
Do both better than the competition and you are operating inside their OODA loop, seeing, deciding, and acting faster than they can react. That’s the sharp edge of AI’s agency.
AI will not just make work faster. It will force organisations to decide whether they develop and trust their AI systems more than their existing sequential and often manual processes. That is not a technical question, it’s cultural: and it is coming faster than most hierarchies can flatten.
Nov 10, 2025 | AI
AI has been labelled many things from a fundamental driver of change to just another technology.
People say AI kills jobs and creativity. That’s lazy thinking. The real risk is comfort—the reflex to cling to old silos and familiar workflows while the world moves on, and competitors build better systems.
Organisational silos evolved to manage scale.
AI has given us an alternative that is quicker, better, and cheaper, but requires a revision of the way we think about the tasks that face us. The silos of yesterday must be destroyed.
The biggest threat is resistance to change, a reluctance to embrace the huge productivity gains that AI has made possible. We become too comfortable to work at leveraging the available benefits of embracing the tech.
The leadership task is to leverage the capabilities of AI to become a catalyst for organisational and cultural change.
Rather than thinking about our jobs in functional silos we should be considering the potential to broaden our capacity to think and create new value at every point in the job process, leveraging the time freed up by AI to enhance the scope of the job itself. This applies to every job at every level in an organisation
Completing tasks quicker is the dimension that attracts most attention.
Expanding the scope and importance of the tasks done is at least as important, and I would argue, are where the real productivity benefits beyond costs as currently defined in a P&L hide.
We risk becoming less conscientious, less determined to get the facts straight when they are delivered to our inbox, all packaged up. This is a danger, as it erodes the capacity for creativity and critical thinking. However, being aware of a risk is 90% of being able to set boundaries and manage it.
AI can deliver momentum. Simple, repetitive tasks can be automated, leaving time and headspace for the stuff that builds ‘flow’. This is the state from which the most valuable outcomes always emerge. Ignoring the potential for AI to deliver momentum will see your competition race past you.
Use AI to smash those organisational silos and deliver the benefits.
Nov 6, 2025 | AI, Marketing, Uncategorized
Marketing loves a revolution, preferably one with fireworks, a celebrity CMO, and a paid Gartner report showing a hockey stick. Every new technology arrives promising to rewrite the laws of business.
Meanwhile, the laws never change.
Newton had it right centuries ago: every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Marketing keeps proving him right. The faster we chase shiny new digital tactics, the harder the pendulum swings back to the fundamentals we pretended we no longer needed.
The Hype Machine vs. Reality
AI evangelists shout that everything has changed. They’re half‑right. The tools have changed. The speed has changed. The expectation of real‑time response has changed.
But the bedrock?
Know your customer, serve them relentlessly, and build trust you don’t squander.
Peter Drucker’s reminder rings louder than ever: The purpose of marketing is to create a customer.
That was true before AI, it will be true long after whatever replaces AI evolves.
Newton’s First Law: Brands That Stay in Motion… Stay in Motion
A brand with momentum earns attention even when the tools shift. Strong positioning and consistent storytelling generate their own gravity.
Campaigns used to last years. Now we rotate creative at the speed of TikTok. But the brands that last, the ones that compound mental availability play the long game.
Eyeballs come from activation.
Profit comes from brand.
The long term enables the short term. Always has, always will.
Newton’s Second Law: Force = Mass x Acceleration
Digital acceleration gives marketers more force: faster cycle times, instant metrics, and dashboards that look scientific.
The result?
Everyone is reacting. No one is thinking creatively from first principles, and trust is the casualty.
Trust is earned by performance as promised — repeatedly, and can be lost in one failed moment. That hasn’t changed since merchants first haggled in a marketplace.
Newton’s Third Law: Every Action Sparks a Reaction
The more we optimise for clicks, the more customers lose patience.
The more noise we make, the more deaf they become.
This is why brand building matters more today than ever, not less.
It gives people a reason to care before you give them a reason to click.
The fact that it is much harder to build a successful brand today amongst the tsunami of competition for attention makes success more rewarding when it is achieved.
Proof From the Pub
Advertising platforms come and go. Positioning endures.
Remember the Tooheys ads from the early eighties? “I feel like a Tooheys.” A social beer for a social moment. That construct worked because it tapped into a universal truth: reward, mateship, the end‑of‑day ritual.
Three decades later, after a long hiatus, the idea and variation on the 40 year old execution still works. The brand physics didn’t change. The accountants who inherited the brand 30 years ago did not know these basic laws of market positioning. However, it seems a marketer is back in the drivers seat, as the positioning is being renewed.
The Only Trend That Never Ends
Every marketer faces the same trade‑off: harvest now, or plant for later.
Short‑term activation makes the CFO smile.
Long‑term brand keeps the organisation alive.
Ignore the fundamentals and you may win the sprint, but keep them central and you’ll win the marathon.
The more things change in marketing, the more they stay the same.
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
A Final Thought
If you want to avoid being whiplashed by every new tactic dressed up as a strategy, bring someone to the table who has lived through enough hype cycles to recognise what actually moves the needle.
A wise old head. With battle scars. Who knows where the shortcuts lead — and where the traps are hidden.
Give me a call before you change everything… and accidentally change nothing for the better.
Oct 30, 2025 | AI, Marketing
For most, the answer to the question in the header would be ‘Yes’, but I am not sure how.
Google has spent 20 years conditioning us to rely on the ‘Last click’ a customer makes in their purchase journey, and monetising the generation of that last click.
Any marketer worth the label knows that there is a range of factors that influence a buying choice that have little to do with the last click.
That way of thinking was always lazy. Now, with AI search answering questions directly and starting a journey that in my view leads to strangling traditional SEO, it’s also muddle-headed.
Economists have two simple tools that expose how broken your attribution really is: the Lorenz Curve and the Gini Coefficient. Together, they can connect what is happening right now with SEO, AI answers, and the shift to “Answer Engine Optimisation” (AEO).
The Lorenz Curve is a way to show how unevenly something is shared. Economists use it to show income inequality. We can use it to show attribution inequality.
On the horizontal axis you line up all your marketing touchpoints: brand advertising, brochures, display ads, Google ads, word of mouth, showroom visits, social proof, installer van on the street, and so on. On the vertical axis you show how much “credit for the sale” each touchpoint gets.
If all touchpoints shared credit evenly, the curve would be a perfect diagonal line. That says: every channel mattered equally. When you only count that last click, usually a Google ad, everything else in the marketing mix looks like a rounding error. Reality never looks like that.
When you graph that unrealistic assumption that the last touchpoint is the key, the Lorenz Curve bends sharply down and across instead of sitting near the diagonal. The harder that curve bends, the more you are lying to yourself about what led to the transaction.
Now we give that bend a number.
The Gini Coefficient is a number between 0 and 1 that tells you how unequal the distribution is. Zero means “perfectly even”. One means “one thing took it all”.
A low Gini means you’re spreading credit across the full customer journey. You acknowledge brand, reputation, trust, word of mouth, proof, and follow up.
A high Gini means you are giving credit to one or two digital clicks and pretending everything else did not exist.
Call it your Attribution Gini.
When your Attribution Gini is high, you’re under-investing in the work that actually created demand. You’re starving the slow compounding stuff: reputation, perceived quality, remembered expertise, physical presence, referrals. You are funding only the “closer” at the goal line, and not the team that marched the ball 90 metres up the field.
Think about how people actually buy. A neighbour mentions you. They see your installer van parked in a nice suburb. They see your name in a social media group, hear your name in a casual conversation, or meet you in a group of some sort. When they have a relevant issue, there is some level of ‘mental availability’ built up by these non-attributable mentions. So, they visit your website, and probably those of your competitors, then right at the end, they Google your brand name, click a link, and request a quote. Google dashboards give overweighted attribution to that last step in the process. It’s like giving most of the credit for dinner to the waiter who carried the plate to the table, and none to the farmer, the chef, ambience, or location of the restaurant.
We all know it is nonsense, but it is a nonsense we have accepted because it is easy, relies on numbers which pleases the engineers and accountants who run the place, and we did not have an easy alternative.
Consider the following example, a marketing program with seven touchpoints that appeared in a set of successful sales, with the google allocated sales impact.
- Google Ad (last click). Drove 60% of sales.
- Instagram Ad. Drove 15% of sales
- Email follow-up. Drove 10% of sales
- Website research visits/. Drove 5% of sales
- Brochure as PDF download. Drove 5% of sales
- Brand advertising / PR coverage. Drove 3% of sales
- Word of mouth. Drove 2% of sales.
If you graph that on a Lorenz Curve, you get a big bend, as demonstrated in the header. Then you calculate the Gini Coefficient and it’s high. The google dashboard reports that almost all the credit goes to one channel.
That will never feel right, but to date we have run with it.
The migration of search from the familiar SEO ‘tricks’ that suit the last click environment to single answer responses to longer queries is a profound change. So far, the share of LLM generated queries is a small percentage of total searches, 1-3% depending on the source, but is rising at geometric rates.
Those who are successful in the future will figure out how to ensure their brand is returned when an AI initiated search is done. This requires a rethink of the way questions are asked, and puts far more weight on the communication channels currently largely ignored by the old SEO rules. Google now shows an AI generated “overview” at the top of many searches. Chat-style engines like Perplexity, and AI assistants baked into phones and browsers, give a direct answer and cite a few brands as proof. Users tend not to scroll and browse. They ask, they get told, they decide.
LLM’s gives us the ability to dig deeper into the drivers of attribution that we have ever had. We are moving into the world of ‘Answer Engine Optimisation’. Do not be left behind.
Jul 15, 2025 | AI, Strategy
We are so busy debating whether AI will take our jobs, we’ve missed a more dangerous question: what happens when it takes the jobs that create our leaders?
So far, the brunt of automation has fallen on blue-collar roles. Machines took over factory lines, robots handled dangerous or repetitive manual tasks. But the spotlight is shifting. White-collar work, particularly at the entry level, is squarely in the crosshairs of AI. Roles in sales, marketing, law, accounting, admin support, anything process-driven or rule-based are already being swallowed up by bots, templates, and AI agents that never sleep, strike, or slack off.
In past industrial revolutions, we saw enormous upheaval in labour markets. Steam displaced the weavers. Mass production killed off artisans. Electricity reduced manual labour but turbocharged the rise of middle management. Each wave destroyed jobs but also created new ones. That’s the comforting story we tell ourselves.
But this time, the tempo is different. AI is rolling through industries faster than we can repurpose workers. We may eventually find equilibrium, but it’s likely that the rate of job creation will lag the rate of job destruction. And this time, it’s not just jobs on the line, it’s the culture, resilience, and leadership pipelines of entire organizations.
Most of the white-collar roles under threat are entry-level. These are the proving grounds where future leaders learn the ropes, earn their scars, and get spotted by mentors. Strip away those jobs, and what are we left with? A dangerously thin layer of next-gen talent. No feeders. No bench strength. Just a void.
This matters. Organisations depend on a steady flow of energetic, irreverent, risk-taking young guns to shake things up. These outliers challenge orthodoxy, surface new ideas, and eventually rise to reshape the culture. Remove the ground floor, and over time, the whole building becomes brittle.
We don’t yet know the full consequences. But we do have some clues. History is littered with unintended consequences when change is forced onto complex systems.
Consider China’s one-child policy. Designed as a population control measure, it has led to a demographic cliff. Too few young workers. A rapidly aging population. Long-term consequences no one foresaw.
Or nature: rabbits and cane toads introduced to Australia for pest control. Wolves removed from Yellowstone to protect livestock. In each case, the ecosystem was disrupted. Only decades later did we see the cascading damage, and in the case of Yellowstone, the healing when wolves were reintroduced.
The same pattern may emerge in our workplaces. AI may be brilliant at cutting costs and boosting productivity. But if it wipes out the very roles where human potential is first tested and tempered, we could be sowing the seeds of a cultural and leadership vacuum that won’t show up in KPIs until it’s far too late to fix.
Jul 4, 2025 | AI, Leadership
Most marketers wouldn’t know John Boyd if he jumped out of a strategy deck and tackled them. However, his OODA loop brainchild leverages the power of AI to turbocharge tactical marketing effectiveness.
Boyd, a maverick US Air Force fighter pilot and strategist, understood that survival in combat came down to one thing: speed of decision-making. The OODA loop: Observe, Orient, Decide, Act, then rinse and repeat was his insight that gave him the nickname of ’40 second Boyd’ He was never beaten in flight simulator dogfight combat. He understood that whoever cycles through that loop faster reshapes the contest and forces the opponent into reactive mode. In air combat, this meant living. In business, it means winning.
OODA is a mindset. AI is changing the tempo of that mindset in ways even Boyd could not have imagined.
AI can Turbocharge tactical Tempo
Until recently, the bottleneck in decision-making wasn’t data, or insight, or even creativity. It was people. Our slow, deliberate committee meetings, our weekly WIPs, the reviews that drag on longer than a Sydney DA approval.
AI doesn’t suffer these constraints. It observes more, faster. It orients by processing billions of data points in real-time. It proposes decisions with options and probabilities baked in. And it acts immediately when allowed, not months.
What used to be a quarterly campaign development cycle can now happen in an afternoon. And that changes everything.
The limiting factor is the siloed org chart.
The challenge isn’t getting AI to do the work. It already can. The real challenge is getting organisations to leverage the power of speed AI can deliver.
Too many CMOs are caught in the headlights, stuck in outdated governance and fear of missteps. They’re playing the game like it’s 2012. Time as a constraint is rapidly being removed. AI can produce a full marketing program overnight. Then it is handed to the organisational approval processes, often as decisive as my Aunt Mimi.
Meanwhile, your competitor, the one who slashed the approval chain and taught their AI what “on-brand” means, has already launched, learned, and iterated.
Leadership Is the Bottleneck
The real AI revolution is not technical. It’s cultural, and it is leadership.
Speed has become the underrated competitive edge. Not speed for its own sake, but speed to consider, learn, adapt, execute, and then repeat the cycle. This means leaders must rethink their role. They are no longer approval gatekeepers; they act as tempo setters. The conductor of a real-time orchestra where instruments never sleep and tempo changes every hour.
Reclaim the OODA Loop
Every time a decision is delayed, it hands the advantage to the opposition.
In Boyd’s world, if you could stay inside your opponent’s OODA loop, responding to changes faster than they could comprehend, you won.
AI lets us do that not just to competitors, but to markets, media shifts, consumer moods, even cultural trends.
But only if we let it.
As AI becomes embedded in workflows, the question becomes: who trains the AI?
Who owns the “brand brain” that defines tone, style, and judgment?
Smart brands are reclaiming that brain. They are training AI on their own assets and experiences, not renting a brain from their agency. That brain learns, evolves, and becomes an unfair competitive advantage.
Marketing to succeed in this new world must become an adaptive system.
In a world moving at AI speed, Boyd’s old dictum is truer than ever:
Decide fast. Act faster. Or die slow.
If you are not already building your AI-accelerated OODA loop, your competitors are. By the time you notice, they’ll be on to the next loop, and you may be headed for oblivion.
