Category: tools | 工具 | 도구 | ツール

Tools like my Howto category morphed out of a few things. I learned about the power of helpful content from Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog. At the heart of the Whole Earth ethos was sharing useful knowledge and tools for a person. Editor Kevin Kelly kept the Whole Earth ethos alive through his involvement with The WeLL, Wired magazine and his Cool Tools blog and book.

A second aspect of it was my natural inclination to share useful things or processes. I started writing this blog to explore the media so that I could advise clients so its roots were in the idea of channels as a useful tools mentality.

The third reason was my Dad. As a child my Dad who is a mechanical fitter by trade instilled into me a deep sense of quality in things, in ideas and in people. The idea of quality as an intrinsic thing was accelerated by my career in the UK’s dying manufacturing sector prior to going to college and having read Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance that put words to something I had felt and been driven by. Consequently I tend to gravitate to simple, overthought and overly engineered things like a Rolex Sea-Dweller watch, Carhartt jeans or the modern Victorinox Swiss army knife. My ‘iconoclastic’ view of quality continues to drive

Tools content tends to come when I am sharing things that I have found through work or solving a problem in my personal life. I have talked about tools elsewhere too, notably Kevin Kelly’s What’s in my NOW newsletter.

September 2026 – the Christmas Cake edition
September 2026 introduction – (38)

Welcome to the 38th edition of my newsletter or as a bingo caller would say ‘Christmas Cake’.

A less pleasant use of the term Christmas Cake was used in Japan during the boom times up to the 1990s..Mirroring China’s current use of ‘leftover women‘, Christmas Cake was used as a derogatory way of referring to a woman 25+ by comparing them to the cake which would lose its market attractiveness beyond (December) 25th.

Changing social norms has meant that this is largely a historical footnote in Japan.

38 in Chinese is largely considered positive as a number, based on its component numbers of 3 and 8. There are also 38 slots on an American roulette wheel, giving the house a 5.26% advantage. The wheels used in Macau and across European casinos have only 37 slots in them giving the house a 2.7% edge.

The cooler wetter weather was a welcome retreat from the heat waves we’ve been having. But summer still feels as if it lingered longer than it should. I spent the first two weeks still in shorts.

The soundtrack this month is a set by DJ / producer The Reflex at Defected Malta Glitterbox ’25. It’s as fabulous as it sounds, even when accompanied by a pumpkin spice latte if that’s your jam.

if you are baker read through to the end for some pro-tips from my Mam.

New reader?

If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.

Things that I’ve written

Strain wave gearing and more stuff. A round-up of interesting things from around the web. Strain wave gears are the main limitation and inciting technology for humanoid robots due to their unique properties.

Apple’s MacBook Pro at 20. I can’t believe that I have been using MacBook Pro’s for the best part of 20 years, so went back in time to reflect on how it changed laptop usage. Going back tells us a lot about the future of computing too.

ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
1. Gucci’s ‘Drip’ sneaker and the death of regional savoir-faire attached to nation brands as a pillar in luxury’s heritage sell.
2. Why the hot takes on Kylian Mbappé’s move from Nike to On as his boot sponsor were wrong and what it really means at the moment.
3. WARC’s Multiplier Playbook and their attempt to bridge the brand building / brand activating divide for sustained growth and pricing margins.
4. How Boots the Chemist have been bringing together media and creative in a more integrated way to deliver better-performing performance creative.
5. Novo Nordisk as an example of what happens when your brand narrative falls out of your control.
Books that I have read

Horse Under Water by Len Deighton – I first read Horse Under Water at 11 or 12. My Dad had a lot of these pulp novels that he used to devour at work. Reading it all these years later highlighted the differences that have occurred since Deighton originally wrote the book in there early 1960s. But it was a quick enjoyable read of adventure and treachery, not that different to John Buchan‘s The Thirty-Nine Steps or The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service by Erskine Childers.

Susan Choi’s Flashlight fits uncomfortably between genres. It ties together the complex identity of Koreans in Japan, the North Korean kidnappings of Japanese residents, past secrets and the American expat experience at home and abroad. As the book unveils the story in a non-linear manner it explores loneliness, the failings of human memory and the nature of identity and belonging. It weighs on you.

Things I have been inspired by.

Snickers insight of ‘You’re Not You When You’re Hungry’ is a great ownable, yet universal truth. Take that insight together with the centrality that AI is taking in culture (mirroring the role of ‘the net’ in culture during the dot com boom) and you have a fantastic campaign, more over at LBBO. I really like the way they integrate GEO/AEO into their campaign execution.

Chart of the month.

I had been looking at an apparel project. It’s been a while since I have touched the sector and it was working with an agency on an aspirational clothing brand. Said brand were looking at a creative project related to the circular economy and the agency who had been exploring it gave me a budget to run a few quantitative questions in the last week of August. Here is the answers to one of the questions that we asked.

We got responses from over 750 people, it was a simple poll question where they had to pick one answer to “What is the most likely reason for you to keep something you don’t wear often”.

Things that surprised me in the responses:
- We didn’t have one response that indicated that they didn’t hoard anything and instead gifted their items or used the likes of Vinted or Depop. Implication: if you are Vinted or Depop, your customers are at best selling mediocre items. They are gatekeeping on the good stuff which offers challenges and commercial opportunities if it can be cracked.
- Durability kills circular economy velocity: ‘Quality’ and ‘preserving outfit options’ tied as the top reasons to hoard unworn garments. ‘It was expensive’ clocked a measly 8%. Quality and outfit options were the joint top reasons for keeping items despite them not being in circulation. Outfit optionality makes sense, but quality is an interesting space, particularly when ‘it was expensive’ ranked far lower at a mere 8 percent. Implications: There are implied perverse incentives to make things with lower quality at both the top end and bottom of the market – fast fashion and luxury brands. This has implications for the viability of the circular economy. It also begs the following hypothesis: it may not be price gouging in terms of value that is affecting luxury, but the inability to spend. The latter being a pretty damning comment on the current economic outlook.
Why I am able to share proprietary research

The project collapsed before kickoff because the client lacked both the internal sign-off and the actual budget. I ate a few upfront hours, the agency took the bigger hit, but I kept the research rights. Finding out early was the win.

If you need sharp strategic thinking, I have an unexpected project-shaped hole in my calendar heading into Q4.

Things I have watched.

August bank holiday, I revisited a few John Carpenter films. I started with Escape from New York. I started into it after speaking with a friend who suggested that it felt very now. The film reflected a deep distrust of the government, which one can see in the divisive nature of politics and Netflixation of political debate and the political process.

As a film it looks much more expensive than it was. Stylistically it influenced the colour on black aesthetic that I bring to my own slide ware and even this blog (once I had the skill to edit the WordPress theme), you can see it in my charts of the month. What I didn’t realise about the film when I first watched it years ago was why it was so different and why it resonated so strongly.

Carpenter wrote the script in 1974 – 1976 towards the end of the Vietnam war and through the Watergate scandal. The film was shot towards the end of the Carter administration while there were still American hostages held in Iran. Operation Eagle Claw had failed in April and this came out the following summer. Carpenter’s work always had a degree of social commentary in it, so the urban decay was a concern of New York in the 1970s and early 1980s. The film owes a debt to Sergio Leone’s films and features a raft of Hollywood greats including Leone star Lee van Cleef and Ernest Borgnine.

Looking back on it now it uses techiques that were only starting to come in at the time including low light shooting including long tracking shots. The science fiction conceit hides some of the great acting performances in the film. Ultimately it’s great fun to watch. One thing to look out for if you do watch it, look at how well Escape From New York does matte backgrounds compared to the poor work done on matte backgrounds in The Terminator shot a few years later by James Cameron.

The second John Carpenter film I watched was Prince of Darkness. I am not a horror film fan, so it took me far too long to to sit down and watch it. Prince of Darkness features a plethora of actors that had appeared in other Carpenter films previously appeared in Halloween and Escape From New York. Victor Wong had appeared in Big Trouble in Little China.

Secondly the film is actually a science fiction film dressed up as a classic horror film and Carpenter plays with nods towards the Quatermass science fiction films and George A. Romeo’s zombie trilogy. In some ways the film feels close to The Thing.

Useful tools.

I was recommended Claude Academy by Neil Perkin in his newsletter Only Dead Fish. I have focused squeezing the most juice out of my Google Gemini subscription but I trust Neil’s judgment on this.

Tidy is a cross-app service that uses an on-machine AI model to fix grammar and make your writing more concise.

AI Toolbox is a browser extension for Chrome users that gives you a view of your AI chats in one place making organising them into folders or saving them down in Markdown or PDF really easy.

Thoughts for Mac is an app that sits in the menu bar and allows you to capture ephemeral thoughts.

The sales pitch.

I am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”. The kind where complexity, business goals, and human culture collide, requiring synthesis into actionable insights.

I have a decade-plus of expertise across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. I have been embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots with the rapid rise of Gen AI. Following the completion of this engagement, I have continued to partner with agencies and founders on high-impact projects. My recent freelance work includes architecting the brand narrative for a fast-moving startup, driving strategic creative for new business pitches, and developing a dynamic sports partnership activation.

I focus on what actually works: balancing long-term brand growth with short-term sales. I do not just write presentation decks; I build campaigns that actually ship. Clients hire me to develop or perform strategic QA on their ideas before they go live, helping leadership teams avoid expensive mistakes. I prioritise commercial reality, smart budgets, and measurable results over cosmetic solutions.

How I help leadership teams:
- Strategy QA: I put clarity into complex roadmaps before you commit capital.
- Cultural Translation: I bridge the gap between technical infrastructure and human adoption, across EMEA/JAPAC.
- Commercial Grounding: I build strategy for campaigns that ship, prioritising measurable ROI over “hype” metrics.
The Strategic Toolkit:
- Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
- AI-Enhanced Planning: Literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
- Modular Strategic Leadership: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Semiconductors), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Beauty, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).
I am an operator who reads—using a deep archive of industry expertise to ensure your next pivot isn’t just “new,” but actually sustainable. If you have a challenge that requires an all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my September 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Enjoy autumn as it can often be fleeting.

Pro tips from my Mam: if you are making your own Christmas cake this year, steep your fruit this Friday, bake the cake on Saturday evening and leave to sit and mature in a tin. Be sure to skew the cake every few weeks and add a little Irish whiskey to drain in the top. The whiskey doesn’t need to be good, but you can’t go wrong with Power’s Gold Label.

And if you are making your own Christmas cake, why not make a barmbrack for Hallowe’en at the same time, here‘s my Mam’s recipe for the one we had each year at home as a child. Otherwise you are letting good heat go to waste in the oven.

Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.

Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on my blog, Substack as well as LinkedIn.
October 1, 2026
August 2026 – the more than eleven edition
August 2026 introduction – (37)

Welcome to the 37th edition of my newsletter or as a bingo caller would say ‘more than eleven’.

37 in Chinese is largely considered positive as a number, based on its component numbers of 3 and 7. On the Chinese internet 37 is used to say thank you because of its similarity in sound to the English phrase.

37 seemed appropriate given the searing heat we’ve experienced across Europe during July and August.

It was roughly this time three years ago when I started writing Strategic Outcomes. I was burnt out working far too many hours at an ad agency due to being massively oversold (150 – 200% utilisation rate during a typical week with new business pitches on top) to clients.

So took myself to Paris for a short break to recharge, truth be told it took until the end of the year for me to recharge fully.

I watched programmes, finally finished a great book I had been trudging through for months, while enjoying coffee and cake in the lobby of the George V Hotel.

The first issue was written in 20 minutes and I didn’t think I would still be writing some three years later. Since then over 600 people have subscribed, I had no expectations – so it was definitely more than I had expected and I am deeply appreciative that it gets a glance, let alone a read; from so many people in such attention-poor times 🙏.

Over time Strategic Outcomes has developed a format and a voice, but now takes longer to write despite me being more practiced in writing each episode. Secondly, the length of the episode doesn’t equate to the amount of time that it takes to write.

Onwards.

The soundtrack this month isn’t the usual track selection or mix, but a podcast from the European Space Agency highlighting sounds that are literally out of this world. If that isn’t your cup of tea then I also offer this live concert recorded in the US by Cabaret Voltaire for radio station KEXP. Think of it as a modern-day version of the BBC’s Peel Sessions.

New reader?

If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.

Things that I’ve written

Back in 2015, Stephen Waddington invited people to submit a media diary based on a common set of questions. I revisited during the middle of the CoVID lockdown when we were in peak-Zoom usages. And I decided to revisit again this month to compare and contrast with my past installments.

Apple is launching a TV adaptation of Neuromancer, William Gibson’s seminal novel and you can see the trailers online. I had been been thinking a lot about Gibson recently from the saturation of the Neo Tokyo aesthetic in mainstream culture to the surreal nature of Silicon Valley which sounds more like Wintermute at every turn. So I curated some video interviews that Gibson had done down through the years; as well as miscellaneous things from around the web.

ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
1. I wrote about Aston Martin putting up for sale the majority of its non-automotive naming rights. It’s an important issue for marketers, but the attraction of the Aston Martin brand for people interested in cars had my post seen much more widely than I expected.
2. I posted a video where Les Binet discussed brand loyalty from a marketing science perspective and the trap marketers face by focusing on the loyalty of generation-Z customers.
3. A breakdown of the BBC Research & Development’s research report on the state of the social Internet.
4. Michael Farmer triangulated advertising agency problems: big workloads, plummeting fees, clients trapped in low growth or de-growth.
5. Temporal mismatches can affect corporate innovation as much as it can affect hedge fund strategies like Leopold Aschenbrenner’s Situational Awareness LP.
Books that I have read

Like many people I read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby at school. At the time I was uneasy at the class interpretation of the book as a portrait of a tragedy set in 1920s excess. Re-reading it years later, I thought of it more as a clash of antiheroes dripping of prejudice and latent racism. The book is full of grifters and cads. What makes the narrator a more likeable at a surface level is that he’s a more inexperienced grifter who hasn’t managed to exorcise his own conscience at the time of the incident. Now, more than ever, it feels very of our times.

It was unintentional that I read Regime Change: Inside The Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump in tandem with The Great Gatsby. Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan craft a book that is a blow-by-blow account of the second Trump administration over its first 18 months in office. It’s gossipy without the analysis one got from Bob Woodward’s books on previous administrations. What struck me was the illusion of coherence.

A lot was made in the media about the publication of Mandate for Leadership The Conservative Promise Project 2025 Presidential Transition Project published by The Heritage Foundation as a plan for government. But Haberman and Swan’s book paint a picture of a government improvising it up as they went along with appointees who were often drowning in their roles. One thing stuck with me more than anything else was how partners like GCC nations and Jeff Bezos who courted the administration were bilked. This didn’t seem to be out of malice but incompetence and ineptitude.

Finally in a time of a thin skinned administration taking action against its critics, it’s a wonder Haberman and Swan haven’t been embroiled in legal disputes.

Things I have been inspired by.

I was thinking a lot about the rise of betting culture, from the rise of Robinhood and crypto wallets or prediction markets to ‘trading courses’ promoted extensively across social media. IPSOS encapsulates the why elegantly with its trend of Nouveau Nihilism. It becomes a rational response to constrained circumstances.

Luxury brand CHANEL has been doing some interesting fireside chats in their CHANEL Connects project. I was particularly interested in their interview with Thomas Bangalter. He framed Daft Punk in terms of an experiment in anonymity. They were initially inspired by Detroit’s Underground Resistance but that evolved into cinematic science fiction.

Bangalter’s critiqued streaming media as eroding the ritualistic and symbolic power of listening space. Bangalter avoided generative AI because it reduces art to verbal prompting and pre-calculated outputs. He considered creation as an intuitive, non-verbal journey; bypassing the process misses the entire point of art. More from Bangalter here.

Chart of the month.

Growing up we were a family who read. My Mum was the first person to sit the Irish leaving certificate and civil service examinations in her family. My Dad, left school at 13 to serve an apprenticeship, but had a love of books. One of the books we had was an account of The Kennedy Family by Joseph Dinneen.

In the book there is one section where Joseph Kennedy Sr talks about the inciting incident that encouraged him to sell all his shares. Kennedy goes to get his shoes shined near his office. The boy shining his shoes immediately took him for an investor and began offering specific stock picks and market tips.

Kennedy then realised if a shoeshine boy knows as much about the market as he did, then it was time for him to sell up. Kennedy goes back to his office, closes out his portfolio and starts to short the market in advance of Black Thursday. How true the story was is a whole other story, but the ‘late’ buyer market theory underpinning it is sound enough. When those with the least disposable income are highly leveraged in the market, it means that the pool of ‘new buyers’ no longer exists to push prices higher.

Thinking about Joseph Kennedy’s story I dived into how Americans hold wealth. On the face of it Kennedy’s rule doesn’t seem to be coming through at the moment. However there might be several other factors:
- The massive appreciation in house prices.
- The hollowing out of the middle class wealth.
- Wealthy people make dumb money mistakes too (Bernie Madoff, Situational Awareness LP, Bear Stearns and Neil Woodford’s funds).
Things I have watched.

Many people of heard of Akira, which was originally a manga and then an anime film written and directed by Katsushiro Otomo. Later on Otomo wrote and designed Roujin Z that was directed by Hiroyuki Kitakubo. Roujin Z on the surface of it is social satire that addresses concerns about caring for the elderly population in the early 21st century, there are concerns about technology and the possibility of a resurgent military being authoritarianism.

The film taps into the phenomenon of social hospitalisation for the elderly where their families would sign them away to hospitals once they were admitted and refused to take them back. This happened because care homes carried a stigma that hospitals didn’t. This stigma came from the post-war collapse of the le system, where the eldest son and his wife lived with his elderly parents taking care of them to the end.

Stylistically, Roujin Z is interesting for its use of mixed media techniques including live film and photo-reference photogrammetry layout. This was part of a stylistic movement in anime called 90s realism. It includes Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers, Patlabor 2: The Movie and Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade.

Watching it 35 years after the film was produced was interesting in terms of the foreshadowing within the film.
- At the time Sony was secretly designing the Apple PowerBook 100 for Apple. Its design appears in the film with a Sony logo. The film launched in cinemas at least a month before Apple launched the laptop.
- Sony appears all over the film and throughout the hospital equipment. It foreshadows Sony’s pivot into elderly care and its abandonment of its iconic consumer electronics business.
- The film shows a ubiquitous, always-on network with messaging and what we’d now call artificial intelligence. This was way before the web was commonplace.
The film matches all these heavy themes with great physical comedy.

Useful tools.

Copynpaste is a single purpose website that acts as an intermediary moving copy between applications. It’s more of a lifesaver than you realise and works just as well on mobile devices as it does on desktop.

Googler is a cleaner way of experiencing search. Back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and people came into work hungover, Google was separated from search rivals like Infoseek, Excite and AltaVista by its clean interface. Now you have lots of things on a search engine results page fighting for your attention. If you install Homebrew on your computer, you can then install Googler which gives you the Google search experience without distractions in your terminal window.

The sales pitch.

I am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”. The kind where complexity, business goals, and human culture collide, requiring synthesis into actionable insights.

I have a decade-plus of expertise across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. I have been embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots with the rapid rise of Gen AI. Following the completion of this engagement, I have continued to partner with agencies and founders on high-impact projects. My recent freelance work includes architecting the brand narrative for a fast-moving startup, driving strategic creative for new business pitches, and developing a dynamic sports partnership activation.

I focus on what works: balancing long-term brand growth with short-term sales. I don’t just write presentation decks; I build campaigns that actually ship. I’m hired to develop, or strategy QA their ideas before they go live, helping leadership teams avoid expensive mistakes. I prioritise commercial reality, smart budgets, and measurable results over cosmetic solutions.

How I help leadership teams:
- Strategy QA: I put clarity into complex roadmaps before you commit capital.
- Cultural Translation: I bridge the gap between technical infrastructure and human adoption, across EMEA/JAPAC.
- Commercial Grounding: I build strategy for campaigns that ship, prioritising measurable ROI over “hype” metrics.
The Strategic Toolkit:
- Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
- AI-Enhanced Planning: Literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
- Modular Strategic Leadership: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Semiconductors), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Beauty, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).
I am an operator who reads—using a deep archive of industry expertise to ensure your next pivot isn’t just “new,” but actually sustainable. If you have a challenge that requires an all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my August 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other, stay cool and enjoy the well deserved bank holiday.

Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.

Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on my blog, Substack as well as LinkedIn.
August 27, 2026
July 2026 – the three dozen edition
July 2026 introduction – (36)

Welcome to the 36th edition of my newsletter or as a bingo caller would say ‘three dozen’. And yes that’s the most uninspired yet functional bingo lingo I’ve come across on this journey so far. 36 seemed strangely appropriate as that was the temperature inside my house on the celsius scale most days this month.

There is no fancy symbolism of the homophones in the Chinese language for 36. But The 36 Stratagems are sayings and tactical manoeuvres used in areas of Chinese life from business to politics.

My personal favourite is ‘borrow a corpse to resurrect the soul‘ – take something that has been forgotten or discarded and appropriate it for one’s own purposes.

This month’s soundtrack is by Horalion who created a divine mashup of Daft Punk and Miki Matsubara. Matsubara is famous for work in city pop and anime soundtracks. Together Something About Us and 真夜中のドア〜Stay with Me sound sublime.

New reader?

If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.

Things that I’ve written

I explored moral licensing from agency behaviour to a global health crisis.

Consumer grievance is coming as a steady drumbeat from consumer and economic research and has an impact on marketing.

I curated things of interest from around the web including an interview from Jensen Huang in advance of his publicly support for open models and open weight LLMs as cybersecurity tools.

ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
1. Global brand strategy has got harder with tainted national brands. Europeans are now torn between the US and China.
2. Rolex’s use of chōngchǎng (paid gig workers) as a rent a crowd in Shanghai caught the attention of watch collectors around the world
3. Corporate earnings skewed agency growth targets due to the artificially high values of hyperscalers.
4. Hard luxury outperforms soft luxury
5. A video where Les Binet endorse Byron Sharp’s line on loyalty.
Books that I have read

Gnomon by Nick Harkaway. Gnomon is a speculative fiction book set in the near future. The UK is totally surveilled by an AI. The main character Mielikki Neith is an investigator and is looking to the death of a suspect who dies in state custody. Neith explores the neural recordings of the dissident to try and work out what happened.

The recordings consist of four surreal impossible lives, but the lives are a form of hidden code designed to affect anyone exploring them. Questions then arise about the purpose of the surveillance system and whether it has undergone what could be called ‘model drift’.

It’s not the easiest book to read, but his rewarding as Harkaway takes you through the different worlds that Neith explores and her own experience in the real world.

This month I have been working my way through Dan Wang’s Breakneck. A book that looks at China’s development versus US development, written by a Chinese author who grew up in Canada. I am almost finished and it’s very readable.

The key thrust of the book is that China is a society governed by engineers and scientists, whereas the US (and by extension much of the west for that matter) is run by lawyers. In the US and the west that breaks down slightly but the point Wang makes is China asks what’s possible, the West winds its way through restrictions. I think modernism vs. post-modernism would have been more accurate short hand descriptors; as difference goes beyond government to the ‘industrial party’ and even science fiction like Liu Cixin’s TheThree-Body Problem.

Wang’s work has started to shape how I look about the ‘why’ behind the divergent approaches to LLMs and other products between the US and the west, but more on that another time.

Things I have been inspired by.

I am a long time fan of Kevin Kelly’s writing from his work with Wired magazine to the book What Technology Wants I have found his thinking right on the money. He reframes large language models as a latent space due to their massive compression of knowledge and information.

For instance it knows all Shakespeare plays, and it could create a new play that sounded exactly like Shakespeare, and can even quote famous lines in his plays, but nowhere in the model are the actual texts of Shakespeare. Instead there is simply the abstract information about all the plays, the plots, the characters, the words, the style, the references.

Until recently we might have thought that all the information about a thing would take up more storage space than the thing itself. That may be true for a single thing, but not for the aggregate of all things. That is because most things share a lot of common attributes with other things. The neural nets of an LLM do a magic trick by abstracting the information of everything at once, so that it uses the myriad common relationships between things and ideas to compress and abstract them into this virtual “latent” or hidden space.

Kelly reflects on this latent space as a new form of medium, implying more potential than a productivity hack. Kelly describes this latent space as a map built in millions of dimensions making it sound like science fiction or theoretical physics.

Gig Economy in China

Inspired is the wrong word, but I was surprised and shocked to find out by a piece from Think China that 44% of the country’s workforce now work in the gig economy.

Chart of the month.

McKinsey have published a paper on Agents, robots, and us: How AI reshapes work and skills in Europe. In it, they have estimated what tasks LLMs will do well.

“Most human skills will endure, even as they are applied differently. Three-quarters of the skills sought by European employers today, including problem solving, writing, and research, are used in both automatable and non-automatable work. This overlap means they are more likely to be applied in collaboration with AI than replaced by it, at least in the near term.”

Things I have watched.

German TV series Where’s Wanda made some light watching as a Germany family manages to stay together while searching for their missing daughter. It’s got humour, creative problem solving and a giant Sasquatch-type creature. I will leave it there so I don’t give away any spoilers.

I rewatched To Live and Die in LA for the first time in years. The film was written and directed by William Friedkin, and second only to The French Connection in his filmography of outstanding films. William Friedkin was part of the New Hollywood movement, alongside figures like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Peter Bogdanovich.

The screenplay was based on a book by a former Secret Service agent and documents an investigation into a talented counterfeiter. Like Michael Mann’s Thief which demonstrated how to crack a safe vault with a thermic lance, Friedkin went into detail abut the photolithographic process that counterfeiters used prior to desktop publishing. You get fantastic performances from an edgy young William Defoe and William Petersen.

I found it as enjoyable to watch as I remember but I picked up on different things, particularly the detail in Friedkin’s introduction that showed the art and grim edginess of 1980s Los Angeles with retina-burning typography, with an interesting use of fonts to give ‘place’ and the cinematography which made the city a key character.

Useful tools.

Ever done research, or tried to pull in data from a website or table and had the format go funny. You then spend an inordinate amount of time fixing it? That’s where TextSoap comes in. Its a Mac app that cleans the data that you are bringing across, It has a number of built-in cleaners or you to choice from and also allows you to create your own one using its cleaner editor.

Hookmark cleans up weblinks, this helps with bit rot since a lot of links add additional privacy related information that stops working over time.

The sales pitch.

I am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”. The kind where complexity, business goals, and human culture collide, requiring synthesis into actionable insights.

I have a decade-plus of expertise across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. I have been embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots with the rapid rise of Gen AI. Following the completion of this engagement, I have continued to partner with agencies and founders on high-impact projects. My recent freelance work includes architecting the brand narrative for a fast-moving startup, driving strategic creative for new business pitches, and developing a dynamic sports partnership activation.

I focus on what works: balancing long-term brand growth with short-term sales. I don’t just write presentation decks; I build campaigns that actually ship. I’m hired to pressure-test their ideas before they go live, helping leadership teams avoid expensive mistakes. I prioritise commercial reality, smart budgets, and measurable results over cosmetic solutions.

How I help leadership teams:
- Pressure-Testing: I put clarity into complex roadmaps before you commit capital.
- Cultural Translation: I bridge the gap between technical infrastructure and human adoption, across EMEA/JAPAC.
- Commercial Grounding: I build strategy for campaigns that ship, prioritising measurable ROI over “hype” metrics.
The Strategic Toolkit:
- Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
- AI-Enhanced Planning: Literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
- Multi-Sector Expertise: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Semiconductors), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Beauty, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).
I am an operator who reads—using a deep archive of industry expertise to ensure your next pivot isn’t just “new,” but actually sustainable. If you have a challenge that requires an all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of my July 2026 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other, stay cool and enjoy the sun when you can. We have less than one month to wait until the next bank holiday.

Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.

Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on my blog, Substack as well as LinkedIn.

PS: Why Buzz Aldrin as this month’s picture? I try and have a photo that matches the theme, in this case 36. This photo taken during the Apollo 11 mission was from the film magazine 36/N – Trans-Lunar. A tenuous but cool link.
July 29, 2026
June 2026 newsletter, issue 35 the ‘jump-and-jive’ edition
June 2026 introduction – (35)

Welcome to the 35th edition of my newsletter or as a bingo caller would say ‘jump-and-jive’. The phrase feels like an anachronism. It likely came from 1930s and 1940s African American culture. A portmanteau of ‘jump blues’ music and high-energy ‘jive’ dance style of the era. Jive was also used to describe related slang. All of which was popularised by the likes of Cab Calloway.

This month’s soundtrack is by Dimitri from Paris, recorded at Defected Records. It’s sublime.

While 35, is considered neutral in Chinese culture; there are aspects of it which bear thinking about. Depending how you read it, it can sound similar to ‘life without’ or ‘life not’. All of which seem appropriate when one thinks about the 35-Year-Old Crisis. Employers in China unofficially have 35 as a cut-off age for hiring.

New reader?

If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.

ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
1. R/GA‘s concept of intelligent brand systems.
2. Brands can’t wait for sovereign cloud but have to work with what they have.
3. The argument over UPF (ultra processed food) is a blunt instrument that ignores the benefits of functional foods, focusing on how things are made, rather than nutrition and what they do.
4. The need for determination, taste and deciding what matters is as important as AI in advertising planning
5. Havas research on desirable brands revolving around attraction, attachment and affinity.
Books that I have read

Murder on Mt Fuji by Shizuko Natsuki is the story of the Wada family. A multi-generation family tied to a pharmaceutical business. The family patriarch Yohei Wada is killed and the story unravels the mystery of who really killed him and why. The Japanese title of the book references a play by a 1930s detective story author. The mystery plays out as an Agatha Christie novel with Japanese characteristics.

Things I have been inspired by.

AI transformation progress

Stanford HAI have built an online dashboard to track AI-related transformation through economics. At the moment there is still little evidence for a rapid wave of automation in the macroeconomic data, but its definitely worthwhile keeping an eye on for evidence-based analysis as an antidote to hype and speculation.

Chart of the month.

Going back over the IPA’s research into influencer campaign effectiveness, this chart buried in the report caused me to pause. It implies that there isn’t an effective formula for repeatable influencer marketing success.

Reading around the chart further, the data is artificially skewed by the removal of campaign data for which no RoI was received at all. That would lower the curve further than it is already.

Things I have watched.

I have been enjoying season two of The Agency, Paramount’s adaption the French series The Bureau about modern-day spies and the dangers of emotional attachment. I can highly recommend both of them. The Agency has a really strong cast with Michael Fassbender playing the protagonist, with Jeffrey Wright and Richard Gere as supporting characters.

Seeing Richard Gere in the film reminded me to rewatch Red Corner which is a classic murder mystery from 1997, with the plot twist being that it occurs in the go-go era of an opening up China.

Bai Ling appears as his court-appointed lawyer. Parts of it reminded me of the late 1990s media gold rush into China by Rupert Murdoch looking to expand his then booming satellite TV business, but once the murder trial gets under way it stays into the land of fantasy with an American court room drama projected into a Chinese setting. Ling manages to turn out a great performance given the material that she was working with.

Useful tools.

I have been working on a number of qualitative interviews and found MumbleNote an invaluable part of the process. Its key benefit is not having bot join the calls that I have been doing. Instead it works of your Mac’s audio system.

The sales pitch.

I am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”—the kind where deep-tech or complexity, business goals, and human culture collide.

With over a decade of experience across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. I was embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots and the rapid rise of Gen AI. And have recently been helping out agencies and startups in various sectors from narratives, creative platforms and new business pitches to sports partnerships.

My approach is simple: I use insight and analytics to find the “surprise” in the strategy. Whether it’s architecting an experiential event or defining a social narrative for a SaaS powerhouse, I focus on making complex brands feel human and high-velocity businesses feel accessible.

The Strategic Toolkit:
- Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
- AI-Enhanced Planning: Deeply literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
- Multi-Sector Versatility: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Arm Holdings), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Personal Care, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).
I am officially open for new adventures with immediate effect. If you have a challenge that needs a all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of this newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other, stay cool and enjoy the sun when you can.

Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.

Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on my blog, Substack as well as LinkedIn.
June 30, 2026
May 2026 newsletter – issue 34 the ”ask for more” edition
May 2026 introduction – (34)

Welcome to the 34th edition of my newsletter. This issue sees me writing this from my parent’s home in the North West of England. It’s also part of the reason why this has been published later than usual.

The change of pace in Granadaland in comparison to London was noteworthy. In bingo lingo 34 would be ‘ask for more’ – which seems to be very much on the zeitgeist at the moment. There is a general zeitgeist of dissatisfaction in the UK,

In Chinese 34, is considered an unlucky number as 4 sounds similar to the word for death and similar in nature to the number 13 in western cultures.

For this edition’s soundtrack, I went back to move forward with a mix by the late great Larry Levan playing at End Max, Tokyo in 1991. By this time the famous DJ had become a long term heroin addict and had complications due to his drug use and HIV; yet you wouldn’t know it from this set, he died the following November.

New reader?

If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.

Things I’ve written.

An analysis of Omnicom’s Q1 2026 earnings to try and understand what was happening beneath the big numbers in a febrile time.

From AI shamans, the Ulm School of Design, an AI reckoning and everything in between.

The 2026 World Cup marketing kick-offs and a bunch more things.

ICYMI – Top five shares on LinkedIn
1. Omnicom’s Q1 2026 earnings tells a far more nuanced story than the top-line numbers.
2. High end shopping hauls are becoming a cultural phenomenon. Chanel is no longer just behind a velvet rope; but may erode brand equity
3. Publicis Groupe’s acquisition of LiveRamp and the move to orchestrating enterprise data
4. How the FT thinks marketing is being shaped by AI from production to consumer behaviour.
5. Advertising sectors apparent cycle of delusion
Things I have been inspired by.

Ipsos on sports fandom

I worked on a few sports partnerships activation whilst embedded at Google Cloud and an F1 sports partnership at a freelance engagement more recently. So my attention was immediately grabbed by this collection of research from Ipsos on sports partnerships. It shows the need for long ongoing sports partnerships and the power of a brand sponsor that is highly aligned with the sport and the team.

Nigo at the Design Museum

Nigo is a natural subject for a museum as he has assiduously curated his own life. What particularly impressed me about the Design Museum exhibition was how it made clear that Nigo’s work was a continuation of the earlier work done by the people behind Major Force and File Records: Hiroshi Fujiwara, Takagi Kan, Gota Yashiki and Toshio Nakanishi.

The Major Force crew weren’t just musicians, DJs and producers; but designers and cultural commentators with columns in Japanese magazines.

Even the name Nigo came from people in Tokyo clubs calling Tomoaki Nagao ‘Hiroshi Fujiwara Ni-go’ aka Hiroshi Fujiwara number 2.

When Fujiwara and co. finished their Last Orgy culture column in Takarajima magazine and the spin-off late night TV show, Nigo got their blessing and wrote Last Orgy 2 continuing on in Popeye magazine.

Fujiwara helped fund Nigo’s expansion into retail with the Nowhere boutique, which was the foundation for A Bathing Ape and Jun Takahashi’s Undercover. More on this here, and more on the exhibition at The Design Museum here.

Chart of the month.

Ipsos looked at fans who had differing levels of fandom for a premier league football team and partner brands with different levels of brand fit with the game. Prompted recall was measured over the 2020/21 football season. While the levels changed, there was a clear correlation between the level of brand fit and degree of fandom and prompted brand recall.

Things I have watched.

I watched the rest of the original OSS 117 series of films that I didn’t watch last month. This moved the action to Tokyo and Brazil.
- OSS 117 Mission For A Killer
- OSS 1167 Mission to Tokyo
- OSS 117 Double Agent
Mission For A Killer saw Frederick Stafford take over the role of OSS 117, if you are a classic film you might recognise him from the Alfred Hitchcock film Topaz. Mission to Tokyo was the acme of the series, and a wonderful cinematic capture of the Japanese post-war economic miracle. The final film Double Agent had John Gavin take on the mantle. By which time the franchise felt like a poorer version of Hollywood, Gavin himself was a competent actor, but the creative spark in the franchise was gone. Instead it became part of a sea of sameness in western espionage cinema.

I can understand why there was a major reset, when Michel Hazanavicius rebooted the franchise. He had rich material to work with, from disclosures on what was going on with Jacques Foccart running economic sabotage, deniable military networks and regime change in the Francophone region. Even the private sector were involved, Elf the petroleum giant servicing as a covert slush fund and instrument of foreign policy as France decolonised. The scandal only broke over in the 1990s.

I got to see The Mandalorian and Grogu. It’s a good but flawed film. I got into The Mandalorian, not as a Star Wars devotee, but having a deep appreciation for the spaghetti westerns and the chambara films that it subtly drew from.

The film plugs a gap in the Star Wars franchise in the cinema, so expectations were high for Star Wars fans. What you get is spectacle, an experience that would feel at home in a Disney park. So it’s entertaining. The bad points in my opinion are down to a loose plot points, having an actress of the quality of Sigourney Weaver and not using her properly.

What put salt in the wound was the trouble put into scenes that pay clumsy homage to Ray Harryhausen and Francis Ford Coppola respectively. Putting the same effort with less money into tightening up the script would have paid dividends. Maybe Disney didn’t care so long as the space was filled.

I guess the moral of the story is don’t watch this film with a cinephile.

Useful tools.

I have been a big fan of Parcel for a while, but didn’t realise until I listened to a John Gruber podcast episode that it now allows you to track Amazon deliveries as well. Given that I work from home a lot having this app makes like a lot easier to manage package deliveries.

The sales pitch.

I am a strategist who thrives on the “meaty brief”—the kind where deep-tech or complexity, business goals, and human culture collide.

With over a decade of experience across the UK, EMEA, and JAPAC, I specialise in bridging the gap between high-level strategy and creative execution. I was embedded within Google Cloud’s brand creative team, where I helped navigate the “messy steps” of global pivots and the rapid rise of Gen AI. And have recently been helping out agencies and startups in various sectors from narratives, creative platforms and new business pitches to sports partnerships.

My approach is simple: I use insight and analytics to find the “surprise” in the strategy. Whether it’s architecting an experiential event or defining a social narrative for a SaaS powerhouse, I focus on making complex brands feel human and high-velocity businesses feel accessible.

The Strategic Toolkit:
- Brand & Creative Strategy: From B2B infrastructure to luxury travel.
- AI-Enhanced Planning: Deeply literate in Google Gemini and prompt engineering to accelerate insights and creative output.
- Multi-Sector Versatility: A proven track record across Tech & SaaS (Google Cloud, Arm Holdings), Consumer Goods (FMCG, Personal Care, Health), and High-Interest Categories (Luxury, Sports Apparel, Pharma).
I am officially open for new adventures with immediate effect. If you have a challenge that needs a all-in, hit-the-ground-running strategic lead, let’s talk.

More on what I have done here.

The End.

Ok this is the end of this newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and enjoy the sun when you can, don’t linger on the next long weekend being at the end of August.

Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful as this helps other people and the algorithmic gods of Google Search and the various LLMs that are blurring what web search means nowadays.

Get in touch and if you find it of use, this is now appearing on my blog, Substack as well as LinkedIn.
June 1, 2026