Mind Soup

Workplace Bullying Is Often Quieter Than You Think

2026-10-09T09:52:00.000+03:00

When people hear the phrase workplace bullying, they often imagine something obvious. A manager screaming at an employee in the middle of an office, a colleague openly insulting someone during a meeting, or a supervisor making threats that nobody could reasonably interpret as acceptable professional behavior. Those things certainly happen, but they are only the most visible version of the problem. Workplace bullying is often much quieter, much easier to explain away, and much more difficult for the person experiencing it to prove.

That is partly because many of the behaviors associated with workplace bullying can look almost normal when viewed individually. A deadline can legitimately be demanding. A manager is allowed to question someone's work. Responsibilities can change, colleagues do not have to be friends, and disagreements are an inevitable part of working with other people. The problem begins when these actions become repeated, targeted, disproportionate, humiliating, retaliatory, or designed to undermine someone's ability to succeed.

Context matters enormously, which is why it is useful to distinguish bullying from ordinary workplace tension. Not every critical manager is a bully, not every disagreement is harassment, and not every difficult period at work means someone is being deliberately targeted. At the same time, dismissing everything as "workplace pressure" can allow genuinely harmful behavior to continue for months or even years. The most important question is often not whether one isolated incident looks terrible, but whether there is a pattern that gradually strips someone of confidence, credibility, responsibility, support, or psychological safety.

Bullying also does not have to come from a manager. It can happen between colleagues, from groups toward one person, and occasionally from subordinates toward a manager. Formal authority can make bullying easier because one person controls workloads, evaluations, opportunities, responsibilities, and access to senior leadership, but informal power matters too. A well-connected employee, influential colleague, or tightly bonded team can make another person's working life extremely difficult without ever holding a more senior title.

There are many ways this can happen, but nine behaviors in particular are worth recognizing because they can easily hide inside the ordinary machinery of work.

1. Spreading False Rumors or Making Unfair Accusations

Rumors are one of the oldest forms of workplace aggression because they are remarkably effective and remarkably difficult to confront. Someone does not have to criticize you publicly if they can quietly make other people question whether you are competent, trustworthy, difficult, lazy, disloyal, or somehow responsible for problems around you. Once an accusation starts circulating informally, the person being targeted may not even know it exists until colleagues begin treating them differently. By then, the story may have already become accepted as fact.

This is particularly damaging because reputations are rarely built or destroyed through one formal conversation. They are shaped through dozens of small exchanges between people who influence promotions, projects, invitations, budgets, and opportunities. A manager casually saying that someone is "not very committed" can have consequences even if there is no evidence supporting the claim. A colleague repeatedly suggesting that another person is difficult to work with can eventually create exactly the isolation that makes that employee appear difficult.

There is an important difference between legitimate criticism and unfair accusation. If somebody misses deadlines repeatedly, that should be discussed and documented. If there are performance problems, managers have a responsibility to address them directly rather than pretend everything is fine. The line is crossed when criticism becomes exaggerated, invented, selectively applied, or spread through conversations the employee has no reasonable opportunity to answer.

The worst version of this behavior is sometimes self-reinforcing. First, someone damages an employee's reputation. Then colleagues become cautious around that person because of what they have heard. The employee senses the change, becomes defensive or withdrawn, and that reaction is subsequently presented as proof that the original rumor was correct. A story that began without evidence eventually creates the conditions that make it look believable.

2. Sabotaging Someone's Work or Setting Them Up to Fail

Workplace bullying is not always about attacking somebody directly. Sometimes it is about making success unnecessarily difficult and then blaming the person when they struggle. Information can be withheld, instructions can be deliberately vague, approvals can be delayed, resources can disappear, or expectations can change after the work has already been completed. None of these actions is particularly dramatic by itself, which is exactly why sabotage can be so effective.

Imagine being asked to prepare an important presentation but not being included in the meetings where the relevant decisions were made. You submit the work based on the information available to you, only to be criticized for missing details everyone else knew. Or you are assigned a project with dependencies controlled by another colleague who repeatedly delays their contribution, while the final deadline remains entirely your responsibility. The problem is not merely inefficiency. The problem is that the structure of the work has been manipulated in a way that makes one person disproportionately likely to fail.

This behavior becomes especially concerning when the person setting the conditions is also the person evaluating the result. A manager can create impossible circumstances and then use the predictable failure as justification for a poor performance review. A colleague can withhold information and later complain that the targeted employee was unprepared. An organization that fails to examine the circumstances surrounding repeated performance problems may unintentionally reward whoever controls the narrative.

Good management removes unnecessary obstacles and makes expectations clear. It does not guarantee that employees will succeed, because people still make mistakes and sometimes underperform, but it gives them a fair opportunity to do the job. When someone repeatedly creates obstacles and then criticizes the person for failing to overcome them, the issue may no longer be performance management. It may be deliberate undermining disguised as accountability.

3. Ignoring, Excluding, or Isolating a Person

Exclusion is one of the easiest forms of workplace bullying to dismiss because there is often no dramatic incident to point toward. Nobody shouted, threatened anyone, or sent an obviously abusive email. Someone simply stopped being invited to meetings. Conversations happened without them, group chats appeared that somehow never included them, colleagues went to lunch together without mentioning it, and information increasingly reached them only after everybody else already knew.

Not every instance of exclusion is malicious. Teams form friendships, not everyone belongs in every meeting, and some conversations genuinely do not require every employee's involvement. But repeated exclusion becomes a workplace problem when it prevents someone from doing their job, separates them from information they reasonably need, damages their standing within the team, or appears designed to make them feel unwelcome. Social isolation can be especially powerful because human beings are extremely sensitive to signals that they do not belong.

This can become a form of professional erasure. An employee may still technically have a job, but their ability to participate meaningfully in it begins shrinking. Their opinions are no longer requested, decisions are made before they arrive, colleagues stop responding, and opportunities circulate through informal relationships they have been removed from. Eventually, management may look at the isolated employee and conclude that they are not contributing enough, even though the workplace itself has steadily reduced their opportunities to contribute.

Healthy workplaces do not require everyone to like everyone else. They do require a basic level of professional inclusion. Employees should have access to the conversations, information, and working relationships necessary to perform their roles. When exclusion becomes a tool for punishment or control, it stops being an interpersonal issue and becomes an organizational one.

4. Taking Away Major Responsibilities Without Reason

There are legitimate reasons to change someone's responsibilities. Organizations restructure, priorities change, departments merge, roles evolve, and managers sometimes need to redistribute work. None of that automatically constitutes bullying. What matters is why responsibilities are being removed, how the decision is communicated, whether similar standards are applied to others, and what the removal does to the employee's professional standing.

Stripping meaningful work away from someone can be as damaging as giving them too much. A person who once led major projects may suddenly find themselves assigned only minor administrative tasks. Client relationships they spent years building might be handed to somebody else without explanation. Decisions that previously required their involvement may bypass them entirely, leaving them with a job title that increasingly bears little relationship to their actual authority.

The psychological effect can be significant because responsibility is closely tied to professional identity. People build credibility through the work they are trusted to perform. Remove that work without a legitimate reason and you do not merely change someone's schedule. You can damage their visibility, future promotion prospects, confidence, influence, and ability to demonstrate the achievements on which their career depends.

Sometimes this is used as a strategy to push someone out without formally terminating them. The employee remains employed, but the role becomes progressively emptier until leaving feels like the only rational option. This can be difficult to challenge because management can always say responsibilities were simply "reorganized." A single restructuring may indeed be completely legitimate, but a repeated pattern of unexplained downgrading deserves closer attention.

5. Giving Impossible Deadlines or Unmanageable Workloads

Most jobs occasionally involve periods when the workload is genuinely unreasonable. A major event is approaching, somebody unexpectedly resigns, an important client creates an emergency, or circumstances force a team to work harder than normal for a limited period. That may be unpleasant, but it is not necessarily bullying. The concern arises when one person is repeatedly given workloads or deadlines that are unrealistic, especially when others in comparable roles are treated differently.

Impossible deadlines create a convenient trap because every outcome can be used against the employee. If they fail to complete the work, they can be accused of poor performance. If they complete it by working nights and weekends, management learns that the unreasonable workload is apparently possible and assigns more. If they object, they may be labeled uncommitted, negative, or unable to handle pressure.

This can also happen through accumulation rather than one obviously impossible assignment. A manager keeps adding "small" tasks without removing anything else, schedules meetings across the hours someone needs for focused work, and treats every new request as urgent. Eventually the employee is managing fifteen priorities that are all supposedly number one. The workload itself becomes evidence of how little control they have over their working environment.

Good managers understand that capacity is finite. They can demand high performance while still prioritizing, negotiating deadlines, adding resources, and acknowledging trade-offs. When everything is urgent, nothing is really being managed. If unrealistic workloads are consistently directed toward one person and then used to criticize their inability to cope, workload management can become a weapon rather than a business necessity.

6. Constantly Nitpicking or Micromanaging

Attention to detail is not bullying, and neither is close supervision when someone genuinely needs it. A new employee may require more guidance, a high-risk project may need additional oversight, and poor performance can justify more frequent check-ins. The problem begins when scrutiny becomes disproportionate, relentless, inconsistent with how others are managed, or focused less on improving work than on finding reasons to criticize it. Micromanagement can slowly make competent employees feel incapable of doing anything without approval.

This often appears through endless minor corrections. A manager questions every sentence in an email, rewrites work without explaining why, asks for constant updates, insists on being copied into every conversation, and repeatedly revisits decisions that were already agreed. No individual request seems outrageous. Combined over months, however, they communicate that the employee is not trusted to exercise even basic professional judgment.

The irony is that extreme micromanagement can create the performance problems it supposedly exists to prevent. Employees become hesitant, wait for permission, stop taking initiative, and spend increasing amounts of time managing the manager rather than doing useful work. Someone who was once confident begins second-guessing ordinary decisions because experience has taught them that almost anything might be criticized later. The manager then points to that uncertainty as evidence that the employee requires even more supervision.

Constructive management should make people progressively more capable of operating independently. Even when criticism is necessary, it should help clarify expectations and improve performance. If supervision consistently increases fear without increasing clarity, something is wrong. The purpose of management should be better work, not permanent dependence.

7. Pressuring Someone to Do Something Unethical or Give Up Their Rights

Workplace pressure becomes particularly serious when someone is asked to cross an ethical, legal, or professional boundary. This might mean manipulating data, misleading a customer, hiding a problem, signing something inaccurate, misrepresenting expenses, violating company policy, or remaining silent about behavior that should be reported. The employee can then find themselves in an impossible position. Refusing may damage their relationship with management, while agreeing exposes them to consequences for an action they knew was wrong.

Pressure can also involve convincing employees to surrender rights or protections they are entitled to use. Someone may be discouraged from taking approved leave, pressured not to report an injury, told not to contact HR, pushed to work during protected time off, or made to feel disloyal for using a process that officially exists for their benefit. The specific legal rights involved vary considerably between countries, so the details depend on jurisdiction. The broader principle is simpler: authority should not be used to make employees afraid of exercising legitimate protections.

These situations are especially dangerous because unethical instructions are rarely phrased as openly as people imagine. Nobody necessarily says, "I want you to do something illegal." Instead, the request may arrive through phrases such as "just make it work," "we do this all the time," "don't make this complicated," or "you need to decide whether you're part of the team." Ambiguity allows the person applying pressure to deny responsibility later.

Strong organizational cultures make it possible to question questionable instructions. They create escalation routes and protect people who use them in good faith. If employees learn that raising an ethical concern will make them a target, the company has a problem much larger than one difficult manager. It has created incentives that encourage silence precisely when speaking up matters most.

8. Retaliating When Someone Speaks Up

Retaliation is one of the clearest signs that an unhealthy workplace has become dangerous. An employee raises a concern about workload, treatment, discrimination, safety, ethics, harassment, or another legitimate issue, and suddenly their working life becomes much harder. They receive worse assignments, disappear from meetings, lose opportunities, face unusual scrutiny, or discover that colleagues who previously supported them are being encouraged to distance themselves. The official explanation may have nothing to do with the complaint, but the timing tells its own story.

Retaliation is powerful because it sends two messages simultaneously. The first is directed at the employee who spoke up: you will pay for this. The second is directed at everyone watching: this is what happens when people complain. That second message can be even more damaging to an organization because it teaches an entire workforce that problems should be hidden rather than addressed.

Organizations often say they value openness, feedback, and psychological safety. The real test arrives when somebody says something leadership does not want to hear. A company cannot claim to encourage honest feedback while punishing the people who provide uncomfortable versions of it. Employees notice these contradictions very quickly, even when senior leaders do not.

Retaliation can also be difficult to prove because it is rarely labeled as retaliation. The employee is suddenly "not a cultural fit," a project is "better suited to someone else," or management has "concerns about attitude." That is why patterns and timing matter. When negative treatment begins immediately after someone raises an issue, organizations should investigate carefully rather than accepting convenient explanations at face value.

9. Repeated Verbal Attacks, Ridicule, or Humiliation

This is the version of workplace bullying people recognize most easily, yet even verbal aggression can be normalized inside certain cultures. Managers shout because they are "passionate." Colleagues mock someone because it is "just banter." Employees are humiliated during meetings because the workplace supposedly has high standards. When people object, they are told they are too sensitive or cannot handle pressure.

There is a meaningful difference between criticism and humiliation. A manager can say that a piece of work is not good enough, explain exactly why, and require it to be improved. That may be uncomfortable, but it is legitimate management. Mocking the employee personally, ridiculing their intelligence, attacking them in front of colleagues, or repeatedly using insults is entirely different because the objective or effect shifts from correcting the work to diminishing the person.

Humiliation is particularly effective as a control mechanism because people quickly learn to avoid situations where they may be embarrassed again. Employees stop asking questions, challenging decisions, presenting unfinished ideas, or admitting mistakes. Meetings become quieter, not because everyone suddenly agrees, but because people understand that visibility carries risk. A manager may interpret that silence as respect when it is actually fear.

Healthy workplaces can contain disagreement, difficult feedback, strong personalities, and high expectations without degrading people. Respect does not require softness. It requires separating the quality of someone's work from their basic dignity as a person. Once humiliation becomes an accepted management technique, psychological safety disappears very quickly.

The Pattern Matters More Than the Label

One of the difficulties with workplace bullying is that people often spend too much time debating whether a specific behavior technically qualifies. Definitions differ between company policies, researchers, legal systems, and jurisdictions, and not every country treats workplace bullying as its own legal category. That makes it important not to assume that every unpleasant interaction has the same legal meaning. But from a management perspective, organizations should not need a courtroom-level definition before asking whether repeated behavior is damaging employees and preventing them from working effectively.

The pattern is usually more informative than the isolated incident. A demanding deadline followed by a normal workload may simply be business pressure. A demanding deadline combined with exclusion, reputational attacks, constant scrutiny, lost responsibilities, and retaliation tells a very different story. Workplace bullying frequently works through accumulation, with each individual incident remaining just plausible enough to explain away. The employee experiences the entire pattern while everyone else sees only fragments.

That is also why documentation can matter when someone believes they are being targeted. Dates, emails, requests, deadlines, changes in responsibilities, meeting exclusions, and specific comments are more useful than trying to summarize months of treatment through a statement such as "my manager is bullying me." Documentation turns a vague feeling into a pattern that other people can examine. It also helps the employee distinguish between an intensely difficult workplace and conduct that appears systematically directed toward them.

Good Management Is Not the Absence of Accountability

There is a risk when discussing workplace bullying that ordinary management begins sounding suspicious. Employees still need feedback, deadlines still need to exist, poor performance still needs to be addressed, managers still need to make unpopular decisions, and organizations still need the ability to restructure roles. Protecting people from bullying does not mean protecting everyone from discomfort. Work inevitably includes moments when somebody hears something they would rather not hear.

The difference is that good accountability is connected to the work, proportionate to the issue, clearly explained, and applied consistently. Bullying becomes personal, destabilizing, unpredictable, humiliating, or deliberately obstructive. Good management tells somebody what needs to improve and gives them a reasonable opportunity to improve it. Bullying keeps moving the target until improvement becomes impossible.

That distinction matters for managers too. Leaders should be able to challenge employees without constantly worrying that any criticism will be interpreted as bullying. Clear standards, documented expectations, respectful communication, reasonable workloads, and consistent treatment protect both employees and managers. Ambiguity creates space for abuse on one side and misunderstanding on the other.

A Workplace Reveals Its Culture When Someone Is Vulnerable

Company culture is easy to describe when everything is going well. Almost every organization can write values about respect, collaboration, openness, integrity, and inclusion. The real culture becomes visible when someone is struggling, disagrees with a powerful person, makes a complaint, admits a mistake, or challenges behavior that others would prefer to ignore. That is when employees discover whether the words on the website have any relationship to how the organization actually behaves.

Workplace bullying survives particularly well in environments where nobody wants to get involved. Colleagues may recognize what is happening but remain silent because supporting the target could create risk for them. HR may focus narrowly on whether one incident violates policy rather than examining the overall pattern. Senior managers may trust the bully because that person performs well commercially or manages upward effectively.

The cost eventually spreads beyond the person being targeted. People watching the situation learn what behavior the organization tolerates, high performers leave because they do not trust management, employees become more cautious, and problems remain hidden because nobody wants to become the next person singled out. A bullying problem that appears interpersonal can therefore become a retention, productivity, reputation, governance, and leadership problem. Organizations pay for it even when the cost never appears under a line called "workplace bullying."

The Most Important Question Is Not Whether Someone Is Tough Enough

People experiencing bullying often begin questioning themselves before they question the environment. Maybe they are too sensitive. Maybe they should work harder. Maybe every workplace is like this. Maybe the manager behaves this way because the work genuinely is not good enough.

Sometimes self-reflection is useful, because none of us is an entirely objective narrator of our own workplace conflicts. But resilience should not become an excuse for organizations to normalize mistreatment. The goal of a healthy workplace is not to discover how much humiliation, isolation, manipulation, or unreasonable pressure an employee can endure before leaving.

The better question is whether the behavior improves the work, serves a legitimate business purpose, and respects the people involved. If the answer repeatedly becomes no, the workplace should not require somebody to develop thicker skin. It should examine what is happening.

Because bullying at work does not always announce itself through shouting, threats, or spectacular misconduct. Sometimes it looks like another meeting you were not invited to, another impossible deadline, another responsibility quietly removed, another rumor you cannot trace, another criticism nobody else receives, or another consequence that appeared immediately after you raised a concern. Each moment can seem small enough to dismiss on its own.

The damage comes from what happens when they keep adding up.

AI Is Changing the Work. Is It Changing the Workers?

2026-10-08T12:01:00.000+03:00

There is a familiar way of talking about artificial intelligence and employment. A new technology arrives, people worry that machines will take their jobs, companies promise that AI will make employees more productive, and eventually someone says that the jobs of the future will simply require different skills. We have heard versions of this story before with computers, the internet, automation and industrial machinery. What feels different about generative AI is that this time the technology is moving directly into the parts of work that many people assumed were relatively protected: writing, analysis, coding, design, research, customer service and even parts of management.

The interesting question is therefore no longer simply whether AI will replace workers. In many industries, we already have examples of AI replacing particular tasks and reducing the amount of human labor required to perform them. The more complicated question is what happens to the workers who remain. If a customer-service employee can handle twice as many conversations, does the company employ fewer people, or does it simply handle more customers? If a junior developer can produce code much faster, does that make the junior developer more valuable, or does it reduce the number of junior developers a company needs? If a marketer can produce ten pieces of content in the time it once took to produce one, does the marketing department become more productive, or does management simply expect ten times as much output?

Those questions matter because work is not just a collection of tasks. Jobs are also how people acquire experience, develop judgment, build careers and become senior enough to take on more responsibility. AI may therefore change something deeper than the work itself. It may change the path by which people become good at work.

The First Workers to Feel the Change Are Not Necessarily Being Replaced

One of the most useful real-world studies of generative AI came from researchers at Stanford and MIT who examined more than 5,000 customer-support agents at a Fortune 500 software company. The workers were given access to an AI assistant that suggested responses and provided information during customer conversations. The result was a roughly 14 percent increase in productivity, measured by the number of issues resolved per hour. The impact was considerably larger among less experienced workers, who saw productivity gains of up to around 35 percent.

That finding is more interesting than the usual "AI will make workers more productive" headline. The technology did not simply make the best employees better. It helped less experienced employees perform more like experienced employees by giving them access to suggestions based on the behavior and knowledge of stronger workers. The researchers also found improvements in customer sentiment and employee retention, suggesting that the technology could make a difficult job somewhat easier to perform.

There is an obvious positive interpretation. A new customer-service employee can learn faster, make fewer mistakes and become competent sooner. A company can provide better service without waiting months or years for every employee to accumulate experience. But there is another question hiding underneath the productivity improvement: if AI can help a new employee perform closer to the level of an experienced employee, what happens to the economic value of experience?

That question becomes particularly important when we move beyond productivity and start talking about headcount.

Klarna Shows What "Productivity" Can Mean to a Company

Klarna provides one of the clearest examples. The financial technology company introduced an AI assistant powered by OpenAI for customer support in 2024. According to Klarna's own filing, by the twelve months ending June 2025, the assistant was handling 69 percent of customer-service chats and doing work the company estimated to be equivalent to more than 700 full-time agents. Klarna also said the system contributed approximately $39 million in cost savings in 2024.

There is an important distinction here. Klarna did not simply discover that its employees could work faster. It changed the amount of human labor required for a particular category of work. The company itself described the AI system as doing the equivalent work of hundreds of full-time agents.

This is where corporate conversations about AI can become misleading. "AI makes employees more productive" sounds like a story about employees being given better tools. "AI allows the company to handle the same workload with fewer human workers" is a very different story. Both statements can be true at the same time.

For the customer, the difference may be invisible. They ask a question and receive an answer. For the business, however, the economics can change dramatically. If AI handles routine questions around the clock, a company may need fewer people performing repetitive support work. The remaining employees may deal with complex cases, escalations and customers who genuinely need human intervention.

That means the job does not necessarily disappear overnight. It can become a different job.

The Junior Worker Has More to Gain, and Potentially More to Lose

The productivity research around AI contains an uncomfortable paradox for younger workers. AI can make them dramatically more capable, but the same technology may also reduce the amount of entry-level work available to them.

Consider software development. Microsoft Research and academic collaborators conducted randomized field experiments involving 4,867 developers at Microsoft, Accenture and a Fortune 100 company. Across the combined experiments, developers with access to an AI coding assistant completed about 26 percent more tasks, with larger gains among less experienced developers.

On the surface, that sounds like excellent news for junior developers. Someone with limited experience can use AI to understand unfamiliar code, generate boilerplate, troubleshoot errors and move through problems faster. But imagine what happens if the economic logic continues. If a team previously needed five junior developers to perform a certain amount of work and AI allows three people to accomplish the same workload, the company may not necessarily hire five juniors again when those positions become vacant.

That creates a strange career problem. Junior employees traditionally learn by doing the simpler work first. They write basic code, prepare reports, conduct research, handle straightforward customer requests and gradually encounter more complicated problems. If AI absorbs a large portion of the simple work, people may have fewer opportunities to practice the fundamentals.

The technology could therefore make individual beginners more productive while simultaneously making the traditional beginner job less necessary.

That is one of the biggest workforce questions AI raises, and it is not solved by telling young people to "learn AI." They may absolutely need to learn it. But they also need opportunities to develop the underlying expertise that allows them to know when the AI is wrong.

Coding Is Already Becoming a Different Profession

Software development provides an unusually clear window into what this transition may look like because AI coding tools are already capable of performing substantial portions of programming work.

Anthropic analyzed 500,000 coding-related interactions involving Claude and Claude Code and found a significant difference between ordinary AI assistance and more autonomous coding. In its analysis, 79 percent of Claude Code conversations were classified as automation rather than augmentation, compared with 49 percent for ordinary Claude conversations. The research also found particularly high use in web development and user-facing applications.

That does not mean software developers are disappearing. It means the activity that defines the job is changing.

A developer who once spent much of the day writing code may increasingly spend more time describing what should be built, reviewing generated code, testing it, debugging failures and deciding whether the proposed solution is appropriate. The worker becomes less of a typist of code and more of a director, reviewer and problem solver.

Anthropic's own internal research offers a glimpse of this future. In a 2025 study of its engineers and researchers, employees reported using Claude for around 60 percent of their work and estimated an average productivity improvement of roughly 50 percent. At the same time, the researchers found that employees generally kept high-level thinking, design decisions and work requiring organizational context for themselves.

That last point may be one of the most important clues about the future of knowledge work. As AI becomes better at execution, humans may increasingly be valued for deciding what should be executed.

But AI Productivity Is Not Guaranteed

There is another reason to be cautious about simplistic predictions. AI does not automatically make every worker faster.

A 2025 randomized study involving experienced open-source software developers produced a surprisingly different result. The researchers expected AI tools to reduce task completion time, but the developers actually took longer on the tasks when AI was allowed, with the study reporting a 19 percent increase in completion time. The authors noted that the result may depend on the complexity and context of the work, but the finding is a useful reminder that AI assistance is not universally beneficial.

This matters because AI often looks more impressive in a demonstration than it does inside a messy organization.

A developer working on a clean example can ask an AI system to create a piece of code and receive an answer immediately. A developer working inside a huge, poorly documented legacy system has to understand whether the generated code fits the existing architecture, whether it creates security problems, whether it breaks something elsewhere and whether the AI misunderstood a dependency that only an experienced employee knows about.

The same applies to marketing, finance, law, HR and almost every other knowledge profession. The easier the work is to describe and verify, the easier it is to automate. The more the work depends on context, institutional knowledge, relationships and judgment, the more complicated automation becomes.

The Worker Is Becoming the Manager of AI

This may be one of the biggest changes to white-collar work. Instead of asking whether AI will replace the worker, we may eventually ask how many AI systems one worker will manage.

A marketing manager might use AI to generate campaign concepts, analyze customer feedback, produce first drafts, summarize research and create creative variations. A financial analyst might use AI to process documents, identify anomalies and produce an initial analysis. A lawyer might use it to review contracts and locate relevant clauses. A software engineer might delegate coding, testing and documentation.

In each case, the human remains involved, but the nature of involvement changes.

The worker becomes responsible for setting direction, checking quality, resolving ambiguity and making decisions. This sounds empowering, and often it will be. But it also raises the standard expected from the human. If an employee has access to powerful AI tools, management may reasonably ask why the employee is producing the same amount of work as before.

That is where productivity improvements can become workload increases.

If a writer can produce twice as much, the company may decide it needs twice as many articles. If a designer can generate ten concepts in an afternoon, the creative team may be expected to explore ten concepts rather than two. If a developer can build features faster, the product team may simply add more features to the roadmap.

Technology does not automatically create leisure. Historically, productivity gains have often created the capacity to do more.

The Worker's Identity May Change Along With the Job

There is also a psychological dimension that gets lost in discussions about productivity.

People often define themselves through what they are good at. A writer takes pride in writing. A designer takes pride in designing. A programmer takes pride in programming. A researcher takes pride in finding and understanding information.

When AI begins performing part of that activity, the question is not only whether the person still has a job. It is whether the person still recognizes themselves in the job.

A graphic designer who spends less time creating initial concepts and more time selecting and refining AI-generated options may still be a designer, but the craft has changed. A writer who spends less time drafting and more time researching, editing and developing ideas is still a writer, but the center of the profession has moved.

The Hollywood writers' strike offered an early example of this anxiety. During the 2023 dispute, the Writers Guild of America negotiated protections around the use of AI, including provisions concerning whether AI-generated material could be used as source material and whether writers could be required to use AI. The dispute demonstrated that the concern was not simply about losing jobs. It was also about preserving the role and status of the human writer within the production process.

The same tension appeared in the 2024 strike by U.S. video-game voice actors and motion-capture performers. Performers argued that AI could threaten their livelihoods through the use of synthetic replicas of their voices and performances.

These disputes are fundamentally about control over work. Who owns the output? Who gets paid? Who decides when AI can be used? And perhaps most importantly, where does the human contribution begin and end?

The Middle of the Organization May Change the Most

AI discussions often focus on entry-level employees because repetitive work is easier to automate. But the technology may also change the traditional middle of organizations.

Think about the people whose jobs involve collecting information, preparing first drafts, coordinating processes, producing reports and translating decisions from senior management into operational documents. These roles often sit between the person making the decision and the person executing it.

AI is increasingly capable of compressing that layer.

A senior manager can ask an AI system to summarize a large collection of documents. A salesperson can prepare proposals automatically. A consultant can generate an initial analysis. A marketer can turn a strategy into campaign variations. A manager can create a first draft of a performance review or presentation.

None of these capabilities necessarily eliminates the manager, consultant, salesperson or marketer. But it can reduce the number of people needed to support them.

That possibility is already influencing corporate restructuring. Reuters reported in 2026 that companies were announcing job cuts while shifting investment toward AI, with white-collar roles among those facing particular exposure. The same reporting noted that economists cautioned against attributing every layoff to AI because companies were also responding to broader economic pressures.

That caveat is important. Every layoff described as "AI-driven" is not necessarily caused by AI. Companies use AI as part of wider cost-cutting, restructuring and investment decisions. But the direction is still significant: executives are increasingly asking whether technology allows them to accomplish more with fewer people.

The Skills That Become Valuable May Not Be the Ones We Expect

For years, employees were encouraged to become specialists. Learn coding. Learn analytics. Learn design. Learn copywriting. Learn financial modelling. Learn another language. Become exceptionally good at a particular technical discipline.

Those skills will not suddenly become useless. In many cases, they will become even more valuable because someone needs to understand the work well enough to direct and evaluate AI.

But there may be a shift from simply possessing a skill to combining several skills.

The software developer who understands product strategy becomes more useful when AI handles more coding. The marketer who understands data, creative and business strategy can do more than someone who only knows how to write social posts. The financial analyst who understands the business behind the numbers is better positioned to evaluate an AI-generated report than someone who simply knows how to produce spreadsheets.

This is why the future worker may become more "full-stack" in the broadest sense. Anthropic's internal research found engineers using AI to work outside their traditional specialties, with backend engineers building interfaces and researchers creating visualizations.

AI does not necessarily make specialization disappear. It makes the boundaries between specialties easier to cross.

The Biggest Risk May Be Losing the Apprenticeship

Perhaps the most overlooked consequence of AI is what happens to learning.

People become experts by doing things badly before they learn to do them well. They write mediocre reports before they learn to write good ones. They create weak presentations before they understand what makes a strong one. They make bad marketing decisions before they develop judgment. They debug simple problems before they understand complicated systems.

If AI performs too much of the beginner work, the learning process changes.

A young marketer who asks AI to write every email may produce better emails today but learn less about writing. A junior developer who accepts every generated solution may deliver more code while understanding less about architecture. A new analyst who asks AI to interpret every dataset may complete assignments without developing the intuition required to recognize when an answer is nonsense.

This is why experienced workers may become more important, not less. Someone has to teach people how to question the machine.

The Real Divide May Be Between People Who Use AI and People Who Understand Work

There is a popular idea that the future belongs to people who know how to use AI. I think that is only partly true.

Knowing how to use AI will increasingly become a basic workplace skill, much like knowing how to search the internet, use spreadsheets or work with presentation software. It will be useful, but it will not necessarily be a lasting competitive advantage.

The more valuable skill may be knowing what to ask the AI to do, what not to ask it to do, how to evaluate the result and when the output is technically impressive but practically wrong.

That requires domain knowledge.

A person who knows nothing about marketing can ask AI to produce a marketing strategy. A marketer can look at the same strategy and notice that the customer assumptions are wrong, the positioning is generic, the measurement framework is weak and the proposed channels make no sense for the business.

The AI may have produced the better-looking document. The experienced person may still have produced the better decision.

The Workers Who Adapt May Not Be the Ones Who Work Harder

There is a temptation to frame adaptation as a personal productivity challenge. Learn the tools, use more AI, work faster and stay ahead.

I am not convinced that is enough.

The workers who benefit most may be the ones who understand which parts of their jobs should change and which parts should remain deeply human. They will use AI aggressively where it removes tedious work, but they will also protect the activities through which they develop judgment, relationships and expertise.

They will become comfortable delegating execution without delegating responsibility.

That distinction is important. If AI writes the first draft of a report, the human still owns the report. If AI generates the code, the developer still owns the system. If AI analyses the customer data, the manager still owns the decision.

The technology can change who does the work without changing who is accountable for the outcome.

AI Is Changing the Work. The More Interesting Question Is What We Become

The debate about AI and employment is often presented as a choice between two futures. In one, AI takes people's jobs and creates mass unemployment. In the other, AI makes everyone dramatically more productive and creates a new era of abundance.

Reality is likely to be considerably messier.

Some jobs will disappear. Some will become smaller. Some will become much more productive. Some will become more demanding because one employee will be expected to manage what used to require a team. Entire categories of work will probably be reorganized around AI rather than simply automated.

The most profound change, however, may happen inside the workers themselves.

A customer-service employee may become an exception handler rather than a person answering routine questions. A developer may become a system designer and reviewer rather than someone primarily writing code. A marketer may become an editor, strategist and director rather than someone producing every piece of content manually. A researcher may spend less time gathering information and more time deciding which information matters.

That could be a very positive future, but only if organizations take the development of people seriously. Productivity cannot be the only metric. If AI allows a junior employee to perform like a mid-level employee, we should also ask how that junior employee will eventually become genuinely mid-level. If AI handles the routine work, we need to make sure people still get opportunities to learn from doing it.

The most important workplace question of the AI era may therefore not be, "How many jobs will AI replace?"

It may be, "What kind of worker will this technology allow us to become?"

The answer will depend less on the technology than on the choices companies and workers make around it. We can use AI to eliminate the boring parts of work and give people more time for judgment, creativity, relationships and meaningful problems. We can also use it simply as a justification to reduce headcount, increase workloads and expect fewer people to produce more.

The technology does not decide which path we take.

People do.

The Boycott Economy: How Palestine Changed What People Buy

2026-10-07T09:27:00.000+03:00

For decades, marketers tried to persuade consumers that brands meant more than the products they sold. A soft drink was supposed to represent happiness, a coffee shop community, a fast-food restaurant familiarity, a pair of shoes identity, and a technology company a set of values about the future. That strategy worked so well that companies now face an uncomfortable consequence: consumers increasingly judge brands on things that have nothing to do with taste, convenience, packaging, or price. The Palestinian solidarity boycotts that expanded across the Middle East and beyond after the war in Gaza became one of the clearest demonstrations of this shift. Consumers did not simply ask whether they liked a product anymore; many began asking what purchasing that product represented.

By 2024, this was already measurable at a scale too large to dismiss as social-media noise. An Edelman survey of 15,000 consumers found that more than one in three respondents globally said they were boycotting brands because of perceived positions around the Gaza war, with that figure reaching 72 percent in Saudi Arabia and 57 percent in the UAE. The same research found that 60 percent of respondents globally were choosing or rejecting brands partly according to political considerations, while 78 percent said a company's country of origin could affect whether they bought from it. Whatever marketers think about consumers making political decisions through shopping, the behavior itself became commercially important. A brand strategy built around the assumption that customers would neatly separate geopolitics from breakfast, coffee, soda, burgers, or entertainment no longer reflected the market.

A Purchase Became a Tiny Political Statement

Consumer boycotts are obviously not new, including those connected to Palestinian rights, but the latest wave has lasted far longer and spread through a much more connected media environment than many earlier campaigns. Social platforms allow boycott lists, screenshots, company histories, product alternatives, accusations, corrections, and shopping recommendations to circulate almost instantly between markets. Someone in Cairo can discover an alternative drink from a TikTok, someone in Doha can compare boycott lists in a WhatsApp group, and someone in Beirut can photograph a local coffee shop opposite an international chain and turn an ordinary purchasing decision into public content. The boycott therefore becomes visible to other consumers in a way that private purchasing decisions once were not. Shopping is not merely behavior anymore; it can become communication.

This visibility matters because social accountability is one of the mechanisms that can make boycotts last longer than ordinary changes in consumer preference. TIME reported in 2024 that researchers studying boycotts generally find many campaigns fade relatively quickly, but the Gaza-related movement had already outlasted the typical pattern and was giving consumers enough time to establish new habits. Food and beverages are particularly susceptible because consumption often happens socially, making product choices visible to friends, colleagues, and family. A person ordering a local cola at a restaurant may be making an individual decision, but everyone at the table can see it. Once the choice acquires social meaning, the product is no longer competing only on flavor.

Not Every Boycott List Is the Same

One important distinction is often lost online: the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement does not treat every company appearing on a viral boycott graphic as an official priority target. Its current guidance distinguishes between priority consumer boycott targets, companies targeted by broader grassroots campaigns that BDS supports, and companies subjected primarily to pressure campaigns. McDonald's and Coca-Cola appear in the movement's category of grassroots organic boycott targets, along with companies such as Burger King, Pizza Hut, Papa John's and Domino's. Starbucks is different because it has been widely boycotted by consumers but has not been listed as an official BDS consumer target in the same way. That difference matters if the conversation is going to be based on actual corporate behavior rather than simply whatever list happens to circulate most widely.

That distinction actually makes the marketing story more interesting, because it shows that centralized campaigns are only one part of the phenomenon. Consumers can build a reputational narrative around a company without waiting for an organization to formally designate it. Corporate statements, franchise actions, employee disputes, viral claims, historical business relationships, and perceptions about a company's home country can all combine into a simplified conclusion that travels far faster than the underlying corporate structure. Sometimes that conclusion is well documented, and sometimes misinformation becomes mixed into it. From a marketer's perspective, both situations matter because reputational damage is produced by what consumers believe while corrective communication has to deal with what can actually be substantiated.

Coca-Cola and Pepsi Lost Something More Valuable Than a Sale

Few products demonstrate the power of habit better than Coca-Cola and Pepsi. In large parts of the Middle East, ordering one of them had become almost automatic, which is precisely the kind of default position marketers spend generations trying to create. Consumers did not necessarily evaluate the entire carbonated-drinks market every time they sat down to eat; they asked for Coke or Pepsi because those names had become part of the category itself. The Gaza boycotts interrupted that automatic behavior and forced millions of consumers to reconsider a decision they had barely recognized as a decision. For regional competitors, that represented an extraordinary opportunity.

Egypt provides one of the clearest examples. The century-old Egyptian soft-drink brand Spiro Spathis saw demand surge after consumers began moving away from Coca-Cola and Pepsi, with the company reporting severalfold sales increases during the first months of the boycott. Another Egyptian brand, V7, expanded quickly enough that Reuters later reported its exports had tripled, while shops and restaurants increasingly searched for domestic substitutes. In neighboring markets, Jordan's Matrix Cola and Saudi Arabia's Kinza became increasingly visible as alternatives, while Lebanon saw restaurants offer brands such as Jalloul and Zee Cola. The UAE has also seen consumers seeking locally produced options including Shams, while Saudi brands such as Milaf Cola entered a market much more receptive to alternatives than it had been a few years earlier.

Pakistan provides another useful example because the change was large enough to show up in market-share data. Reuters reported that local brands including Cola Next and Pakola increased their combined share on ecommerce platform Krave Mart from roughly 2.5 percent to 12 percent as consumers looked for substitutes. These are still small competitors beside global beverage giants, but the strategic significance lies in the trial rather than the immediate market share. Coca-Cola and Pepsi had already done the expensive work of teaching customers to consume cola regularly; local brands only needed to persuade them to switch which cola they purchased. The boycott therefore gave competitors access to customers who might otherwise never have had a reason to experiment.

The Boycott Became a Giant Sampling Campaign for Competitors

Marketers normally spend enormous amounts of money trying to convince consumers to try something unfamiliar. They offer discounts, distribute samples, pay creators, buy shelf space, run introductory advertising, and accept lower margins because the hardest purchase is often the first one. The boycott movement reversed that dynamic because political motivation supplied the trial incentive for free. A shopper who had purchased Coca-Cola for twenty years suddenly had an emotional reason to pick up Spiro Spathis, Kinza, Matrix Cola, V7, Jalloul, or another alternative despite never having considered it before. No conventional launch campaign could easily reproduce that level of motivation.

The long-term question is whether temporary substitution becomes permanent preference. A consumer may initially buy Kinza because of Palestine, but six months later they may buy it because they now like Kinza. A restaurant may switch suppliers for political reasons and later discover that the local relationship is cheaper, more flexible, or easier to promote to customers. This is where the boycott becomes much more threatening to an incumbent than a temporary decline in quarterly sales. Once the customer discovers that the default brand was partly habit, the multinational has to win back a person it previously assumed it already owned.

Some New Brands Put Palestine Directly on the Can

Other alternatives have gone further by making Palestinian solidarity the product's explicit reason for existing. TIME reported that Palestine Drinks, founded by a Palestinian-owned company in Sweden, sold roughly 16 million cans within its first five months, with proceeds directed toward projects supporting Palestinian civil society. Cola Gaza similarly entered the market presenting itself directly as a Coke alternative, using Palestinian imagery as a central part of the brand rather than merely allowing customers to infer a political position. These products demonstrate an unusual form of positioning because the functional benefit is almost secondary. Consumers are buying cola, but the proposition is participation.

That is particularly interesting from a branding perspective because most consumer products spend years trying to attach meaning to something functionally ordinary. Water is turned into lifestyle, sneakers into identity, coffee into community, and cars into status. Palestine Drinks began with the meaning already attached, which gave an otherwise undifferentiated beverage an immediate story, audience, and media hook. The challenge will be whether those businesses can retain customers once novelty and political urgency fluctuate. Political identity can produce trial, but product quality, availability, price, and distribution still decide whether a beverage survives after the first purchase.

Starbucks Discovered That Corporate Facts and Consumer Perception Are Different Things

Starbucks is perhaps the most useful example of why companies need to understand the difference between an official campaign and a consumer movement. The chain has not operated stores in Israel since 2003, and Starbucks has repeatedly said that it does not fund the Israeli government or military. Much of the modern backlash accelerated after the company sued Starbucks Workers United following a pro-Palestinian social-media post that used Starbucks branding, while rumors about the company spread much further than the details of the trademark dispute. The boycott then took on a life of its own across markets where Starbucks had become a highly visible symbol of American consumer culture. Whether every customer could accurately describe why Starbucks was on their personal boycott list became less important commercially than the fact that they had stopped going.

The effects became substantial enough to affect the company's regional operating system. Reuters reported in March 2024 that Alshaya Group, which operates Starbucks across much of the Middle East and North Africa, planned to eliminate more than 2,000 jobs after what the company described as challenging trading conditions associated with boycott-driven declines. Starbucks also acknowledged that conflict-related perceptions had negatively affected traffic and sales in the Middle East. The local employees losing jobs were not responsible for international politics, which demonstrates one of the uncomfortable economic realities of consumer boycotts: pressure on multinational brands also passes through local franchisees, suppliers, workers, and landlords. That does not make the boycott economically meaningless, but it does make its consequences more complex than a logo on a protest graphic suggests.

Then Stories Coffee Was Sitting Across the Street

In Lebanon, one of the most visually perfect illustrations of the shift appeared in Zalka, where Lebanese chain Stories Coffee operates almost directly opposite a Starbucks. Stories was not created because of the Gaza boycott; it had been founded by Lebanese entrepreneur Tarek Nasser in 2021 and was already expanding before the latest wave of consumer activism. Yet the company's representatives acknowledged that the boycott positively affected sales, while customers interviewed by The National explicitly described choosing Stories because it allowed them to avoid Starbucks without giving up the café experience they wanted. By early 2024, the company had nine branches, employed around 150 people, and planned further expansion. A geopolitical consumer movement had effectively become customer acquisition for a local brand that happened to be ready when the market shifted.

Stories is strategically interesting because it demonstrates that consumers are rarely asking to sacrifice the underlying need. People who boycott Starbucks do not necessarily want to stop drinking iced coffee, sitting with friends, opening laptops in cafés, or buying pastries. They want another company to provide the same occasion. This means the true beneficiary of a boycott is often not ideological purity but competitive substitution. A local business that can match the convenience, consistency, environment, and quality of the global chain can transform political anger into ordinary repeat business.

McDonald's Exposed the Weakness Hidden Inside Global Branding

McDonald's spent decades teaching customers that the golden arches represented the same essential brand wherever they appeared. That consistency is one of the company's greatest achievements, but the Gaza boycott exposed the reverse side of the strategy. When one franchise associated with the brand announced that it had provided free meals to soldiers, customers thousands of kilometers away did not necessarily distinguish between a local franchisee, a regional licensee, and McDonald's Corporation in Chicago. They saw McDonald's. The company later emphasized that the franchise decision had been made independently, while franchise operators across Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan and other markets distanced themselves from it and announced donations for Palestinian relief.

The clarification did not prevent a measurable commercial effect. McDonald's chief executive acknowledged a “meaningful business impact” across several Middle Eastern markets, and the company reported dramatically weaker sales growth in its division containing the Middle East than analysts had expected. Boycott-related weakness continued affecting results later in 2024, alongside broader economic pressures. McDonald's subsequently agreed to acquire the 225 restaurants operated by the franchise whose actions had become a focal point of the controversy, although the company did not say the boycott alone caused that transaction. The situation demonstrated that legal separation is not the same thing as brand separation.

Local Fast Food Did Not Need to Invent a New Appetite

The opportunity for local fast-food businesses followed the same logic as the beverage market. Consumers did not stop wanting burgers, chicken, fries, or convenient meals; they simply became more willing to look at who else could provide them. In Egypt, local restaurant Tafwela responded unusually directly, publishing an offer to hire workers who wanted to leave McDonald's during the boycott moment. Other local operators used their domestic identity as part of their appeal, while established regional companies already offered alternatives, including Saudi Arabia's AlBaik and Saudi burger chain Burgerizzr, which today operates more than 120 branches across 25 cities. Not every regional restaurant has publicly reported a boycott-driven sales surge, so it would be misleading to claim that every local chain grew because of Palestine, but the competitive environment clearly shifted in their favor by giving consumers a reason to reconsider global defaults.

That distinction is important because the strongest marketing outcome may not be the creation of one “new McDonald's.” The boycott can fragment demand across hundreds of local restaurants rather than transfer it neatly to a single competitor. Cairo, Beirut, Amman, Riyadh, Doha, Kuwait City and Dubai already contained substantial independent and regional food scenes before the boycott, but multinational chains benefited from extraordinary habitual recognition and standardized convenience. Once consumers deliberately began searching for alternatives, local operators gained visibility they did not need to manufacture through traditional advertising. The market did not need a new appetite; it needed a reason to redirect an existing one.

A Global Logo Became a Global Liability

This exposes a paradox at the heart of multinational branding. Companies want the same identity to travel everywhere because recognition creates efficiency, trust, and scale. The consumer should see the logo in Cairo, London, Dubai, Kuala Lumpur or New York and immediately know what to expect. But that same consistency means reputational problems travel across borders just as quickly as product recognition does. You cannot spend decades teaching consumers that every location belongs emotionally to one brand and then suddenly ask them to appreciate the subtleties of franchise law when one part of the system creates controversy.

This is especially difficult in the Middle East because many multinational outlets are operated by local companies employing local people, buying from local suppliers, paying local landlords, and contributing to local economies. Corporate responses repeatedly emphasized this point, and it is factually relevant. Yet consumers participating in the boycott often judged the symbol rather than the ownership structure because the brand itself was what gave the franchise value in the first place. Global branding concentrates reputation, and concentrated reputation creates both enormous commercial power and enormous exposure.

Local Became More Than a Country-of-Origin Label

The boycott also changed what “local” meant in marketing. Buying a regional product could represent support for domestic manufacturing, local employment, Palestinian solidarity, reduced dependence on multinational brands, or all of those ideas simultaneously. That is much richer positioning than the traditional “made locally” message, which can otherwise feel like a weak substitute for an international brand with larger advertising budgets. Suddenly the local brand had a story that the global brand could not easily copy.

The effect was visible beyond food and coffee. In Jordan, Majid Al Futtaim ended Carrefour operations in 2024 and replaced the chain with Hypermax across 34 locations, emphasizing local sourcing and regional relevance, although the company did not publicly attribute the decision to boycott pressure. Social-media users and boycott campaigners nonetheless interpreted the transition through the political environment surrounding Carrefour. The case demonstrates how quickly local identity can become strategically valuable when international brands acquire geopolitical baggage. A retailer that previously competed primarily on assortment and price suddenly also competed on what its name represented.

Boycotts Turn Brand Research Into a Consumer Hobby

Another reason this movement has been unusually powerful is that consumers became investigators. Social media filled with graphics showing corporate ownership structures, franchise relationships, parent companies, subsidiaries, investments, donations and alleged connections. Some of that information was accurate, while some was badly researched or entirely false. The result was a kind of decentralized brand due diligence conducted by millions of people who had previously never cared who owned the company behind their shampoo, soda or restaurant meal.

This creates a serious challenge for marketers because misinformation cannot simply be dismissed once it changes purchasing behavior. Companies have to correct false claims without sounding as though they are avoiding legitimate questions, while activists also face the problem that inaccurate lists can weaken the credibility of evidence-based campaigns. The BDS movement itself stresses strategic targeting and documented research rather than attempting to boycott every company with any conceivable connection. In a media environment where a colorful infographic can travel faster than a corporate fact-check, accuracy becomes part of both activism and reputation management.

Corporate Neutrality Became Much Harder to Maintain

For decades, large consumer brands generally preferred geopolitical neutrality because taking a position could alienate part of the customer base. The Gaza war demonstrated that saying little does not necessarily keep a company outside the dispute. Consumers increasingly interpret corporate actions, silence, donations, investments, franchise decisions, employee treatment and executive statements as political signals even when the company insists it has no political position. A brand can therefore become politically associated without intentionally designing a political brand strategy.

This does not mean that every company should issue a statement about every international crisis, because that would create a different and equally obvious form of performative communication. It means marketers need to understand that neutrality is no longer something an organization can unilaterally declare. Audiences decide whether behavior appears neutral, and different audiences may reach completely different conclusions. A corporate statement saying “we do not take sides” can coexist with consumers believing that the company's actual conduct tells a different story.

Then the Same Dynamic Reached the Concert Stage

By September 2026, the intersection between Palestinian solidarity, reputation and consumer behavior had moved well beyond packaged goods and restaurant chains. Macklemore was removed from the remaining U.S. dates of Ed Sheeran's Loop Tour after using his opening set at MetLife Stadium to voice support for Palestinians and say “Free Palestine.” Tour promoter Messina Touring Group said venue owners for forthcoming dates had informed promoters that they would not allow concerts with Macklemore on the lineup. Macklemore said he and Sheeran had held difficult conversations, while reporting from Reuters and other outlets made clear that venue pressure was a central factor rather than a simple story of one artist personally firing another.

The controversy quickly became larger than Macklemore's removal because other opening acts withdrew from Sheeran's tour in solidarity. What began as a decision about one support performer became a reputational problem attached to the entire tour, illustrating exactly the same problem faced by multinational brands. A person or organization can become associated with a political decision even when responsibility is distributed among promoters, venues, partners and other stakeholders. The audience generally experiences one public-facing brand, and in this case that public-facing brand was Ed Sheeran's tour. Attempts to remain outside a political controversy do not always prevent the controversy from attaching itself to you.

Macklemore Turned Removal Into His Own Product

What happened next is particularly interesting from a marketing perspective. Macklemore announced a Free Palestine Tour with initial dates in Dublin, Paris and London, and all three sold out immediately after tickets went on sale. Proceeds were directed toward Palestinian-related organizations and initiatives, while the tour itself converted the controversy into a clearly defined product for an audience that identified with his public position. The artist had lost access to one distribution platform and quickly created another around the exact issue that caused the conflict. That is not evidence that every artist taking a political stance will be commercially rewarded, but it is evidence that political positioning can deepen demand among a particular audience rather than merely reduce it.

This is where the language of “bouncing back” is useful but incomplete. Macklemore did not simply recover the same market he had before; he transformed controversy into audience segmentation. People who disagreed with him may have become less likely to support him, while people who strongly identified with Palestinian solidarity had an additional reason to buy a ticket. A smaller but more committed audience can sometimes produce stronger commercial behavior than a larger audience with weak attachment. That principle is not unique to politics, but politics can make the emotional intensity unusually strong.

Ed Sheeran's Problem Was Different

The Ed Sheeran episode also demonstrates the risk faced by personalities whose brands depend on broad universal appeal. Sheeran has generally avoided making politics central to his public identity, which is commercially understandable for an artist with an enormous international audience. The Macklemore controversy nevertheless placed his tour inside a political story because audiences did not necessarily separate the promoter, venue owners, supporting acts and headline performer into distinct reputational entities. Some reporting later emphasized that Sheeran had attempted to mediate and that the removal was driven by external venue pressure, but the narrative had already become attached to his name.

That does not make it accurate to claim that Sheeran personally opposed Palestinian solidarity or personally ordered every decision surrounding Macklemore. It does show why brand reputation is partly uncontrollable once a controversy becomes public. The bigger the personal brand, the more likely decisions made throughout the surrounding commercial ecosystem will ultimately be interpreted through that person's name. Celebrity operates surprisingly like franchising in that respect: audiences see one recognizable identity while the actual business contains many separate decision-makers.

Brands Wanted Values Until Values Became Expensive

For years, corporate marketing embraced the language of values. Companies published purpose statements, celebrated social causes, talked about communities, built campaigns around inclusion, and insisted that consumers should choose brands whose principles reflected their own. Much of that communication emerged because research repeatedly suggested that younger consumers cared about corporate behavior beyond the product. The Gaza boycotts expose the difficult part of that strategy because consumers do not necessarily limit their expectations to the causes corporations find convenient or commercially safe.

A company cannot easily spend years telling customers that values matter and then insist values become irrelevant when the subject is politically difficult. At the same time, no multinational can plausibly satisfy every political expectation across every market in which it operates. The result is an increasingly complicated environment where companies have to decide not merely what they believe but which positions they can defend consistently through actual behavior. The marketing department can write the statement, but it cannot repair contradictions between the statement and everything else the company does.

Boycotts Are Most Powerful When Alternatives Are Easy

The commercial effectiveness of any boycott depends partly on substitution. Giving up something essential with no realistic replacement requires much more commitment than switching from one cola to another, one café to another, or one burger restaurant to another. This is one reason food, beverages and retail have become highly visible parts of Palestinian solidarity campaigns. The individual cost of participating can be extremely low.

That also explains why alternative-brand lists matter so much. Spiro Spathis, V7, Matrix Cola, Kinza, Shams, Jalloul, Zee Cola, Stories Coffee, Tafwela and countless independent restaurants do not all need to share one political philosophy in order to benefit from the same change in consumer behavior. Their strategic advantage is simply that they exist when the customer is motivated to switch. In some cases the brands actively embrace the opportunity, while in others management deliberately avoids political positioning even as sales increase. The consumer supplies the meaning whether the business asks for it or not.

The Biggest Threat Is Not the Boycott Day but the New Habit

Multinational companies can survive a bad quarter. Coca-Cola, Pepsi, Starbucks and McDonald's possess enormous financial resources, distribution networks, brand recognition, operational expertise and the ability to wait through periods of political pressure. The more serious question is what happens if customers spend several years building relationships with alternatives. A short boycott produces lost revenue, while a long boycott can produce changed habits.

TIME's reporting on the boycott movement captured this distinction through researchers who noted that sustained substitution gives competitors time to become normal. A customer who drinks another cola for a year may not automatically return when political attention changes, especially if the alternative is cheaper or has become socially familiar. A consumer who discovers a local café that they prefer does not need a political reason to continue going there. The boycott may start the trial, but ordinary marketing fundamentals decide what happens afterward.

Local Brands Still Have to Earn the Second Purchase

This is where some commentary about boycotts becomes too romantic. A local brand does not automatically become good because consumers have a political reason to support it. Poor quality, weak distribution, inconsistent service, unattractive packaging, bad pricing or unreliable supply can eventually send customers back to the multinational they originally left. Political goodwill creates an opportunity, not permanent immunity from competition.

The businesses that benefit most will be those that treat the boycott as accelerated customer acquisition rather than guaranteed loyalty. Spiro Spathis still has to remain available, Stories still has to serve coffee people enjoy, Kinza needs consistent distribution, and a local burger restaurant still has to compete on food, convenience and service. If they do those things well, the political moment can permanently alter competitive structure. If they do them badly, the global brand merely waits.

Palestine Changed the Meaning of Brand Loyalty

This may ultimately be the most important marketing consequence of the past three years. Companies used to think of loyalty primarily as preference built through product experience, convenience, habit, advertising and emotional attachment. Palestinian solidarity campaigns demonstrated that loyalty can also be revoked because of something far removed from the product itself. A customer can still enjoy the coffee and decide not to buy it.

That breaks one of the comfortable assumptions behind traditional brand equity. Strong brand preference was supposed to protect companies from competitive products, minor price differences and ordinary mistakes. It offers much less protection when the consumer begins interpreting the purchase as inconsistent with their values. In that situation, the emotional associations marketers spent decades constructing can reverse direction surprisingly quickly.

The Logo Is No Longer Just a Logo

The politics of consumption are unlikely to disappear when the current news cycle eventually changes. Consumers have learned to investigate corporate ownership, franchise relationships, investments, political donations, supply chains and institutional partnerships in ways that used to interest mainly activists, journalists and analysts. Social media has made that information easier to distribute, while apps and websites increasingly help shoppers scan products or search for alternatives before buying. The expectation that companies can keep business behavior and brand image in completely separate compartments is becoming harder to sustain.

That does not mean every purchasing decision will become ideological. Price, convenience, quality and habit remain enormously powerful, and most consumers are inconsistent about applying their political principles across every transaction. Yet companies no longer need every customer to participate for the effect to matter. Losing a meaningful minority in strategically important markets can change growth rates, franchise economics, media narratives and competitive opportunities.

The Most Uncomfortable Marketing Lesson

For decades, marketers worked extremely hard to make brands culturally meaningful. They wanted customers to love logos, identify with companies, join communities, describe purchases as expressions of personality, and believe products represented something larger than their functional purpose. Palestinian consumer activism demonstrates what happens when audiences accept that invitation but insist on deciding for themselves what the brand means. The same emotional connection that creates extraordinary loyalty can also create extraordinary rejection.

That is why the boycott story is bigger than Coca-Cola, Starbucks, Pepsi, McDonald's, Ed Sheeran, Macklemore, or any single company or celebrity. It is about the transfer of power that occurs when consumers believe spending is one of the few direct actions available to them in response to events that otherwise feel impossibly distant and beyond their control. The purchase becomes a tiny expression of agency, while the alternative brand becomes a way of making that agency visible in everyday life. Marketers may disagree about how much effect any individual boycott ultimately has on geopolitics, but they can no longer reasonably argue that it has no effect on markets.

The final irony is that the marketing industry helped create the conditions for this to happen. Brands spent decades asking people to believe that what they bought said something about who they were, what they valued and which communities they belonged to. Palestinian solidarity movements took that logic seriously and applied it in reverse: if buying a brand says something about you, then refusing to buy it can say something too. That is the part companies cannot solve with a new slogan, a better TikTok strategy, or another purpose campaign. Once the meaning of the purchase changes, the marketing problem is no longer simply how to sell the product, but whether the customer still wants their money associated with the name printed on it.

#FreePalestine

The Things I Still Don't Want AI to Do for Me

2026-10-05T08:52:00.000+03:00

I use AI a lot. I use it to research ideas, find better ways of explaining things, summarize information, challenge my thinking, rewrite awkward sentences and occasionally save myself from spending an unreasonable amount of time doing something that a computer can do in seconds. I have also watched it become much better at tasks that, not long ago, required a human being with a particular skill and years of experience. It can write, code, analyze, translate, summarize, brainstorm and produce images. Used properly, it is one of the most useful tools I have encountered in my working life.

That does not mean I want it doing everything.

There is a strange assumption creeping into conversations about AI that if a machine can perform a task, we should probably let it. The logic is understandable. Why spend two hours doing something manually when AI can do it in five minutes? Why write the first draft yourself when a machine can give you one immediately? Why search through hundreds of documents when an AI system can summarize them for you?

Sometimes those are exactly the right questions. But there are other activities where the time spent doing the work is not merely an inefficiency. The process itself is part of the value. The struggle, the uncertainty, the mistakes and even the occasional frustration can be how we learn, develop judgment and discover what we actually think.

The more I use AI, the more I find myself thinking about that distinction. There are things I am very happy to delegate because I genuinely do not care who performs them. There are other things I still want to do myself, even when I know AI could probably do them faster.

I Still Want to Think Before I Ask AI What It Thinks

One of the easiest ways to use AI is also one of the ways I think we should be most careful about using it. You can have a thought, immediately give it to an AI system, and ask whether it is good. You can then ask the system to improve it, challenge it, expand it and turn it into something polished.

The danger is that you can end up outsourcing the development of the idea before you have actually developed it yourself.

I still want to sit with an idea for a while. I want to discover where I stand before I ask a machine to tell me where I should stand. If I am writing about marketing, for example, I would rather first ask myself what I have actually observed in years of working with different companies and clients. I want to remember the campaigns that surprised me, the advice that turned out to be wrong, the meetings where someone changed my mind and the assumptions I no longer believe.

Only after I have done that do I find AI particularly useful.

This concern is not entirely theoretical. In 2026, writing about her decision to avoid AI tools, technology writer Wendy Liu described the value she found in the slow, frustrating process of learning to code before generative AI became capable of producing applications almost instantly. Her argument was not that the old process was efficient. It was that the difficulty itself taught her how to think. She made essentially the same argument about writing: the struggle with language was part of developing the ability to express an idea.

That distinction matters. If every unfinished thought immediately gets handed to an AI system for validation, there is a risk that we become very good at refining ideas without becoming particularly good at having them.

I Don't Want AI to Have My Opinions for Me

AI can produce a remarkably convincing opinion on almost anything. Ask it whether remote work is good or bad, whether companies should return to offices, whether marketing teams should invest in TikTok, whether university is still worth the money or whether employees should use generative AI at work, and you will usually receive a balanced and reasonable answer.

That is precisely the problem.

Real opinions are often less balanced than AI-generated ones because they are formed through experience. They come from things that happened to us, things we witnessed and things we got wrong. A person might strongly believe that a particular management practice does not work because they spent three years working under it. Another person might believe the opposite because it worked brilliantly in their organization.

I do not want an AI system to smooth those differences away.

Some of the most interesting writing comes from people who have actually changed their minds. Someone who once believed that working longer hours demonstrated commitment but eventually realized it was often a sign of poor prioritization has something useful to say. Someone who spent years believing that more data automatically produced better decisions and then discovered that the problem was interpretation has an experience worth sharing.

AI can help articulate that opinion. I do not want it deciding what the opinion should be.

This is also why I find the growing number of people who deliberately limit their AI use interesting. The Washington Post recently profiled students, workers, artists and professionals who were consciously opting out of AI tools. One student explained that she preferred doing her own schoolwork because she saw independent thinking as part of growing up. A worker avoided his company's internal AI chatbot because he was concerned about inaccurate material being passed to foreign partners. Another professional simply found that writing his own emails was faster than explaining to a chatbot what he wanted to say.

These people are not necessarily anti-technology. They are making a distinction between convenience and value.

I Still Want to Write Some Things Badly First

This may sound unnecessarily inefficient, but I think there is value in writing a terrible first draft.

When you write something yourself, particularly something personal or complicated, you discover things while writing. You begin with one idea and realize halfway through that the real idea is somewhere else. You write a paragraph that does not work but contains one sentence that reveals what you were actually trying to say. You remember an example you had forgotten. You notice a contradiction in your own thinking.

If I ask AI to produce a polished article immediately, I can skip much of that discomfort. The result may be more coherent than my first attempt, but I may also lose some of the thinking that happens during the struggle.

A writing instructor at MIT described a similar problem after confronting students who had used AI to produce creative-writing assignments. He found that some AI-generated stories were polished but emotionally hollow, and eventually adopted a clear no-AI policy in his workshop. His argument was not simply about academic honesty. He believed that wrestling with language, making mistakes and trying to express something difficult were part of the intellectual development that writing was supposed to produce.

That is an important distinction because writing is often treated as nothing more than a method for generating a finished document. It is not. Writing can be a way of discovering what you think.

I still want some of my writing to involve that process.

I Don't Want AI Writing Every Message I Send

There is an obvious convenience to asking AI to write every email, message and response. It can make a difficult email sound more diplomatic, turn a rough thought into professional language and remove the anxiety that comes with staring at a blank screen.

But there is a point at which communication stops sounding like communication.

If every difficult conversation is outsourced to AI, we may become less comfortable having difficult conversations ourselves. If every thank-you message is generated, we may lose some of the awkwardness and sincerity that makes an actual thank-you meaningful.

I am particularly wary of this with messages that carry emotional weight. An apology, a condolence message, a note to someone who helped you or a difficult conversation with a colleague should not necessarily be optimized like advertising copy.

There are situations where sounding slightly imperfect is part of being human.

The Washington Post's reporting on people limiting AI use included precisely this kind of resistance. Some people found that AI tools were being inserted into everyday software regardless of whether they had asked for them, from suggested writing to generated images. Their objection was not necessarily that AI was incapable of doing these things. It was that they did not see sufficient value in handing over activities they could comfortably perform themselves.

I understand that position. I would rather send someone a message that sounds like me than a flawless message that could have been sent by anyone.

I Don't Want AI to Choose What I Read

Recommendation algorithms have already changed this part of our lives. Streaming services decide which shows appear in front of us. Social platforms decide which posts we see. Search engines determine which information gets our attention. AI can now go a step further and summarize, filter and personalize information specifically for us.

That sounds wonderful until you consider what gets removed in the process.

Some of the best things I have read were not things I would have searched for deliberately. I came across them because someone recommended them, because I stumbled onto them or because an article happened to be next to something I was already reading. Serendipity is difficult to optimize because by definition you cannot know in advance what you are going to discover.

There is a risk that increasingly intelligent recommendation systems create increasingly narrow information environments. If AI knows what I usually like, it can give me more of it. But sometimes what I need is something I would not have chosen.

I still want the possibility of being surprised.

I Don't Want AI Making Every Decision Easier

One of the most attractive promises of AI is that it can reduce decision fatigue. Give it the options, explain your priorities and ask it to recommend the best choice.

For trivial decisions, that is fantastic. I have no philosophical objection to asking a machine which spreadsheet formula to use or which format makes more sense for a document.

But important decisions are different.

Sometimes the difficulty of a decision is useful. You have to compare competing priorities. You have to acknowledge uncertainty. You have to decide what matters most. You have to accept that there may not be a perfect answer.

If AI always gives us a recommendation, we can become accustomed to treating uncertainty as a technical problem rather than a human condition.

I do not want an algorithm to make every difficult decision easier simply because I find uncertainty uncomfortable. Some decisions should remain mine precisely because I am the person who has to live with the consequences.

I Still Want to Learn Things the Hard Way Sometimes

There is a growing temptation to use AI as an answer machine. Why struggle with something when the explanation is immediately available?

But struggling with something is often how you learn it.

A student who asks AI to solve every difficult mathematics problem may complete more homework while learning less mathematics. A junior developer who asks AI to debug every problem may deliver more code without developing the instincts required to diagnose problems independently. A marketer who asks AI for every campaign idea may have a full content calendar without becoming particularly good at understanding customers.

This is not just an abstract concern. Teachers are already changing how they teach because of it. In Fort Worth, Texas, high-school teacher Chanea Bond responded to widespread access to generative AI by moving her American literature and composition classes toward handwritten work. Students journaled in notebooks and completed most assignments by hand rather than on their school-issued laptops. The point was not nostalgia for paper. It was to make sure students were actually doing the thinking and writing themselves.

There is something important in that decision. The teacher was not claiming that students would never encounter AI. She was protecting a particular learning environment in which the struggle was itself part of the education.

That is a distinction worth keeping in mind at work too.

The frustration is part of the learning process. AI can be an excellent tutor, coach and explainer. The difference is whether I am using it to help me understand something or using it to avoid understanding it.

I want to preserve some of the struggle.

I Don't Want AI to Replace Human Expertise With Confidence

One of the most impressive and worrying things about generative AI is how confidently it can communicate.

A human expert might say, "I'm not completely sure, but based on these circumstances, I think this is probably the answer." An AI system can produce five paragraphs of beautifully structured reasoning that sound much more certain.

That creates a dangerous psychological effect. We naturally associate fluency with competence.

But fluent language is not the same as knowledge.

This is one reason I found the experience of Steve Royle, a professor of cell biology at the University of Warwick, particularly interesting. In a Guardian article about people deliberately limiting AI use, Royle explained that he uses ChatGPT for some of the "grunt work" of coding but does not want it generating code from scratch because he believes he can spend more time debugging an overambitious AI solution than he would have spent writing the code himself. He also expressed concern that excessive dependence could cause his own coding skills to deteriorate.

That is a much more interesting position than simply saying AI is good or bad.

Royle has found a useful boundary. He is happy to let AI handle a particular category of tedious work, but he does not want to surrender the expertise required to understand and control the work.

That is probably the balance I want too.

I Don't Want AI to Do the Parts of Work That Give Work Meaning

Not everyone experiences work as meaningful, of course, and plenty of jobs contain large amounts of unnecessary administration. Removing pointless tasks is one of the best uses of AI.

But some work is satisfying precisely because you are doing it.

A designer might enjoy solving a visual problem rather than simply selecting the best AI-generated option. A writer might enjoy finding the right sentence. A programmer might enjoy figuring out why a system is failing. A teacher might enjoy discovering the explanation that finally makes something click for a student.

If we optimize every profession around maximum efficiency, we risk removing not only the tedious parts but also the parts people actually enjoy.

There is some evidence that people feel this distinction even when they are perfectly comfortable with AI as a tool. A 2025 survey published by Scientific American asked people about AI-generated art and found that most respondents were uncomfortable with the idea of AI simply creating art on its own. At the same time, many were comfortable with AI being used as a tool when a human artist remained heavily involved in guiding the creative process.

That distinction is fascinating because it is not really about whether the machine is capable of producing an attractive image, piece of music or written passage. It is about authorship and human involvement.

People appear to care about who is behind the work.

That does not mean we should reject automation. It means we should be more thoughtful about what we automate.

I Don't Want AI to Become My Substitute for Experience

This may be the most important limitation I want to maintain.

There are things I can ask AI about that it knows far more about than I do. There are also things where my own experience is the asset.

After years of working with different organizations, clients, managers, teams and campaigns, I have accumulated a collection of patterns. Some are difficult to explain. Sometimes you simply recognize that something is going wrong before you can articulate exactly why.

That kind of judgment comes from exposure.

AI can tell me what the textbook says. It can summarize what hundreds of experts have written. It can even challenge my assumptions. But I do not want it to replace the process through which I develop my own judgment.

Experience is slow to acquire, and that is part of its value.

This is particularly relevant in professions where AI can produce convincing first drafts. A junior marketer can ask AI for a campaign strategy and receive something that looks remarkably sophisticated. But an experienced marketer may recognize that the strategy is based on an incorrect understanding of the customer, that the proposed positioning is indistinguishable from competitors or that the measurement plan is designed around metrics that look impressive but do not actually answer the business question.

The machine can produce the document. Experience tells you whether the document deserves to be believed.

I Don't Want AI to Replace the Human Relationship

There is one category of work I would be especially reluctant to outsource completely: anything where the relationship is itself the product.

A therapist can use technology to organize notes. A doctor can use AI to summarize medical information. A teacher can use it to prepare exercises. A manager can use it to draft administrative documents.

But none of those things means the human relationship is unnecessary.

A student does not simply need information. They need encouragement, challenge and someone who notices when they are struggling. A patient does not simply need a correct explanation. They need someone who understands their fear and circumstances. An employee does not only need instructions. They need a manager who understands them well enough to know when they need support and when they need to be challenged.

Recent debates about AI in education illustrate this tension. Critics of AI tutoring have argued that learning is not simply the delivery of personalized information and that human interaction plays an important role in developing judgment, creativity and social skills. Even advocates of educational AI generally acknowledge that the technology needs to be integrated carefully rather than treated as a universal replacement for human teaching.

There are some things we do for people rather than merely to them.

I do not want AI to erase that distinction.

I Don't Want AI to Decide What Counts as Creative

This is becoming increasingly complicated because AI can now produce things that look creative.

It can generate an illustration in seconds. It can produce a song in a particular style. It can write a short story. It can develop a visual identity or suggest hundreds of advertising concepts.

But creative work has never been only about the finished object.

A novel is also the years someone spent observing people before writing it. A photograph is also the photographer's decision to stand in one particular place at one particular time. A painting can carry the history of the person who made it. A marketing campaign can reflect everything a team has learned about a particular audience.

This is why the debate around AI-generated art is more complicated than whether the output looks good. The Scientific American survey found that people were considerably more comfortable with AI assisting a human artist than with AI acting as the artist itself. Many respondents wanted significant human guidance to remain part of the process.

That feels intuitively right to me.

I do not need every creative output to be entirely human-made. But I want to know that there is a human somewhere who had something they genuinely wanted to express.

I Don't Want AI to Do Everything Just Because It Can

The most important word in this entire conversation may be "want."

We have spent decades asking technology what it can do. Can computers calculate faster? Can the internet connect people instantly? Can smartphones put almost every piece of information in our pockets? Can AI write an article in ten seconds?

The answer to all of these questions is increasingly yes.

But capability does not create obligation.

Just because AI can write my email does not mean I should let it. Just because it can produce an illustration does not mean an illustrator should stop drawing. Just because it can answer a student's question does not mean a teacher should disappear. Just because it can generate a first draft does not mean I should stop thinking.

This is why I find the people deliberately limiting AI interesting. They are not necessarily rejecting technology. Many of them use it selectively. They are simply drawing boundaries around activities they believe are worth doing themselves.

The boundaries will be different for everyone.

The Point Isn't to Keep AI Out

None of this means I want to work without AI. Quite the opposite. I expect AI to become increasingly integrated into how I work, and I will probably become more dependent on it for certain tasks as the technology improves.

The important distinction is between using AI as a tool and allowing it to become the default intermediary between me and everything I do.

I want AI to remove friction where friction is pointless. I want it to handle repetitive tasks, help me research, catch mistakes, organize information, explore possibilities and challenge ideas. I want to use it for the things where speed genuinely improves the outcome.

But I also want to retain some activities precisely because they are mine.

I want to think before I ask. I want to write before I generate. I want to make some decisions without requesting a recommendation. I want to struggle with difficult ideas occasionally. I want to form opinions from experience. I want to remember things imperfectly. I want to have conversations that sound like conversations rather than perfectly optimized pieces of communication.

There is a bigger question underneath all of this. If AI eventually becomes capable of doing almost everything faster than we can, what exactly are we trying to optimize for?

If the answer is simply efficiency, the logical conclusion is uncomfortable. We could eventually build systems that remove enormous amounts of human involvement from everyday life. But a life optimized entirely for efficiency may not be the same thing as a life optimized for meaning, curiosity, connection or satisfaction.

I do not think the answer is to reject AI. That would be as unrealistic as refusing to use computers because they changed office work. The better answer is to become more deliberate about what we hand over.

Some tasks are worth delegating because the human contribution adds little. Other activities are valuable because a human being is doing them, thinking through them, struggling with them or experiencing them.

AI will probably become capable of doing many more things than I want it to do for me.

And perhaps that is the point. The challenge of the AI era will not simply be learning what machines can do. It will be deciding what we still want to do ourselves.

The Coming Age of Extremely Average Content

2026-10-01T11:48:00.000+03:00

There was a time when creating content required enough effort that the effort itself acted as a filter. Writing an article meant sitting down and actually writing it. Producing a video meant planning, filming, editing and, usually, involving several people. Designing a campaign required someone to come up with an idea, someone else to turn it into something visually interesting, and someone somewhere to decide whether the whole thing was actually worth putting in front of customers. None of this guaranteed that the resulting content would be good, but the cost of producing it meant that there was at least some pressure to make it worthwhile.

That pressure is disappearing. Artificial intelligence has dramatically reduced the time, money and effort required to produce almost every common form of marketing content. A company can now generate social posts, blog articles, email campaigns, video scripts, advertising variations, headlines, product descriptions and dozens of creative concepts before the first coffee of the morning has gone cold. The technology is genuinely useful, and there is no point pretending otherwise. The problem is not that AI can produce content. The problem is that it can produce an enormous amount of content that is perfectly acceptable without being particularly interesting.

This is where I think marketing is heading: an age of extremely average content. Not terrible content, because terrible content is relatively easy to identify and reject. Not brilliant content, because genuinely distinctive work will always exist. The bigger problem will be the enormous middle ground filled with content that is grammatically correct, professionally presented, reasonably informative and almost completely forgettable.

The Content Problem Was Never Really Production

Marketing has spent years talking about the challenge of producing enough content. Companies have built content calendars, hired writers, created social media teams and established publishing schedules because there was a widespread belief that brands needed to maintain a constant stream of material. The question was often, "What should we post this week?" rather than the more difficult question, "Is there actually anything worth saying?"

AI changes the economics of that equation. If a marketer needs ten LinkedIn posts, an email newsletter, three blog articles and a handful of social captions, generating the first draft of all of them is no longer particularly difficult. The bottleneck has moved somewhere else. The difficult part is deciding whether those pieces deserve to exist in the first place.

Imagine a company that sells automotive batteries. It could now ask an AI system to produce twenty LinkedIn posts about battery maintenance, five articles about signs of battery failure, ten captions about summer driving and a series of educational posts about battery health. None of this is difficult. The resulting content might even be perfectly accurate. But there are thousands of companies producing automotive content that follows exactly the same formula, and customers have little reason to remember one generic battery post over another.

The problem is therefore not a lack of content. There is already more content than any person could consume. What is becoming scarce is content with a reason to exist.

When "Good Enough" Becomes the Default

The most interesting danger of AI-generated content is not that it will produce obviously bad work. It is that it will produce work that is good enough to get approved.

A marketing manager receives an article from an AI tool. It is 1,500 words long, contains the required keywords, has a logical structure and makes no obvious grammatical mistakes. The internal stakeholder reads it quickly and says, "Looks good." The article gets published. The next week, another one appears. Then another. Eventually the company has a library containing hundreds of articles that are technically competent but remarkably interchangeable.

This is what makes average content so difficult to fight. Nobody has made a catastrophic mistake. There is no embarrassing typo, bizarre sentence or obviously terrible idea that forces someone to stop the process. The content simply passes through every approval stage because there is nothing sufficiently wrong with it to reject.

The same thing happens visually. A company can generate a polished social media graphic containing a photograph of a smiling professional, a headline about innovation and a paragraph about customer-centric solutions. It looks like marketing. It resembles thousands of other pieces of marketing. It does its job just well enough to survive, but not well enough to become memorable.

That distinction matters because marketing is not ultimately about producing material that can be approved. It is about influencing what people notice, remember, believe and eventually do.

AI Didn't Invent Generic Marketing. It Industrialized It.

It would be unfair to blame AI for generic marketing. We were producing generic marketing long before generative AI existed.

Corporate language has been remarkably repetitive for decades. Companies describe themselves as innovative, customer-centric, future-focused, agile and committed to excellence. They talk about empowering customers, delivering value, building partnerships and driving transformation. A consulting company, a bank, a software business and an automotive company can all end up using almost exactly the same language to describe themselves.

AI has simply made it easier to reproduce this language at scale.

Ask an AI system to write a corporate announcement and there is a good chance you will encounter phrases such as "in today's rapidly evolving landscape" or "we remain committed to delivering innovative, customer-centric solutions." These sentences are not necessarily wrong. They are simply so broadly applicable that they communicate almost nothing about the company actually speaking.

One useful test for corporate content is to remove the logo and company name and read the material again. If the reader could easily imagine the same paragraph appearing on the website of five competitors, the company probably has a differentiation problem.

AI is exceptionally good at producing language that sounds appropriate for a category. That is precisely why marketers need to become better at producing language that sounds specific to a company, a person, a customer or an actual experience.

The LinkedIn Post That Could Have Been Written by Anyone

LinkedIn is likely to become one of the clearest examples of this problem.

There is already a familiar structure for executive content. Someone tells a short story about a meeting, a difficult decision or a morning conversation. The story leads to a lesson about leadership. The lesson becomes three or five takeaways. The post concludes with something about growth, resilience, listening or the importance of people.

Again, none of this is inherently bad. The problem begins when everyone starts using the same structure, the same vocabulary and the same emotional conclusions. Once AI can generate this format instantly, the internet can become filled with thousands of executives apparently discovering the same lessons every week.

The interesting executive post is usually not the one with the most polished writing. It is the one that contains something the person could only have learned by actually being there. Perhaps a major client rejected an idea they believed was excellent. Perhaps a campaign that looked successful in the dashboard produced disappointing business results. Perhaps an employee challenged a decision and turned out to be right. Perhaps a senior executive made a mistake and had to explain it to the team.

Those experiences contain something AI cannot manufacture simply by being asked to "write a thought leadership post." The technology can help articulate the experience, but the experience itself has to come from somewhere.

The SEO Article Nobody Needed

Search marketing provides another obvious example.

For years, businesses have produced articles because they wanted to rank for particular keywords. An article targeting "What is digital transformation?" might explain the definition, list several benefits, describe common technologies and finish with a paragraph encouraging the reader to contact the company.

There is nothing wrong with explaining digital transformation. The problem is that the internet already contains thousands of explanations. Publishing another generic version does not necessarily create value simply because it contains the correct keywords.

The same thing will happen much faster with AI. If every company can generate an SEO article about every conceivable topic, the number of articles available online will explode. Search engines and users will increasingly face an ocean of technically acceptable information that differs mainly in wording.

The response cannot simply be to publish more. If everyone can publish at enormous scale, volume stops being a meaningful competitive advantage.

A more useful article might begin with an actual observation: perhaps a marketing team spent six months implementing a new technology only to discover that the underlying process was broken. Perhaps a company invested heavily in automation and discovered that customers actually wanted more human interaction. Those experiences create a point of view, and a point of view gives an article a reason to be read.

Information Is Becoming Cheap. Experience Isn't.

AI is extremely good at explaining things that are already known.

It can explain the difference between CPC and CPA. It can describe the principles of search engine optimization. It can provide five tips for improving a LinkedIn profile. It can explain why customer segmentation matters. It can compare different advertising platforms and produce a reasonable summary of almost any established marketing concept.

What it cannot do is genuinely have your history.

It does not know what it felt like to sit in a meeting when a client rejected six weeks of work. It has not managed a campaign where the numbers looked fantastic but the actual business outcome was disappointing. It has not spent years watching different clients make similar mistakes for completely different reasons. It has not had to convince a skeptical executive to approve an idea with an uncertain outcome.

That is where experienced marketers have an advantage, provided they are willing to use it.

The value of experience is not simply knowing more information. It is knowing which information matters, understanding the exceptions, recognizing patterns and having enough scars to know when conventional advice does not apply.

The New Advantage Will Be Having Something to Say

For a long time, marketers competed partly on their ability to produce content. Increasingly, they will compete on their ability to have a perspective.

There is a huge difference between saying, "Here are five marketing trends businesses should watch in 2027," and arguing that marketers have become too dependent on attribution dashboards and are sometimes confusing measurable activity with meaningful business impact. The first statement is broadly safe. The second gives someone something to agree with, disagree with or think about.

That does not mean every piece of content needs to be controversial. It means it needs to contain a reason for existing beyond filling a publishing slot.

A marketer who has worked with many different companies might notice that businesses repeatedly confuse marketing activity with marketing progress. Another marketer might have learned that the best-performing creative is often the least polished because customers respond to familiarity rather than production value. Someone else might believe that many companies are collecting customer data they never actually use. These observations become interesting because they come from somewhere.

AI can help turn those observations into articles, scripts or posts. But it cannot replace the underlying observation.

AI Can Generate a Post. It Can't Generate Your History.

This is probably the most important distinction for people who want to use AI without becoming indistinguishable from everyone else using it.

If I ask an AI system to write an article about remote work, it can produce a competent article in seconds. It can discuss flexibility, productivity, communication, loneliness, meetings and work-life balance. It might even sound thoughtful. But thousands of other people can ask exactly the same question and receive something remarkably similar.

Now imagine someone writes about the specific experience of spending years working remotely across different countries, managing projects through time zones, discovering which meetings were genuinely necessary and which existed mainly because nobody knew how to communicate asynchronously. The subject is technically the same, but the material is different because the experience is different.

That is increasingly where the value of human content will live. Not in the ability to explain what everyone already knows, but in the ability to contribute something that could not have been produced without a particular person having lived a particular life.

The Marketer's Job Is Moving From Writer to Editor

As content generation becomes easier, the marketer's role will increasingly involve judgment.

The important question will not always be whether we can produce something. It will be whether we should. Marketers will need to decide which ideas deserve development, which claims are unsupported, which examples make an argument credible and which pieces should simply be deleted.

This makes editing much more important than many organizations currently understand. Editing is not merely correcting grammar. It is deciding what the work is trying to say and whether it says anything worth hearing.

A good editor might take an AI-generated article containing ten generic observations and discover that one paragraph contains an genuinely useful idea. Instead of publishing all ten observations, they might build the entire article around that one idea and add evidence, examples and experience around it.

That process may result in less content. It may also result in considerably better content.

The Corporate Content Factory

The temptation for companies will be to treat AI as a content factory.

Imagine a marketing department that previously published three social posts a week. With AI, it could easily produce thirty. The team could generate articles, newsletters, captions, video scripts and sales materials almost indefinitely. A dashboard could show an impressive increase in output, and someone could present this as a productivity success.

But production volume is not the same thing as marketing effectiveness.

If a company publishes thirty forgettable posts instead of three useful ones, it has not necessarily improved its marketing. It has simply increased the amount of material competing for people's attention.

There is also a hidden cost. Every additional piece of content needs to be reviewed, approved, distributed, monitored and eventually replaced or updated. An organization can create so much content that its own team struggles to distinguish the important material from the noise.

The future content operation that interests me is therefore not the one that produces the most. It is the one that has the strongest filter between an idea and publication.

The Death of the Content Calendar as a Productivity Metric

Content calendars are useful organizational tools, but they become dangerous when publishing frequency becomes a goal in itself.

A marketing team should be able to look at its calendar and ask why each important piece of content exists. Is it answering a real customer question? Is it demonstrating expertise? Is it addressing an objection? Is it telling a story competitors cannot tell? Is it explaining something customers genuinely struggle to understand? Is it reinforcing a position the company wants to own?

If the only answer is "because we needed something to post on Thursday," the calendar has become the objective instead of the tool.

AI makes this distinction more important because the cost of filling the calendar is approaching zero. The temptation will be enormous. There will always be another post to generate, another article to publish and another variation to test.

The better marketers will become comfortable leaving spaces empty when they have nothing worthwhile to say.

What Happens When Average Content Becomes Infinite?

The obvious consequence of this shift is that people's attention becomes even harder to earn.

We already ignore enormous amounts of content every day. Most social posts disappear into feeds without making an impression. Most marketing emails are deleted or ignored. Most corporate blogs are visited briefly, if they are visited at all. Increasing the quantity of this material does not necessarily make people more interested.

When average content becomes effectively infinite, people will become increasingly selective about what they pay attention to.

This may actually be good for marketing.

For years, marketers have been told that they need to produce more content because audiences supposedly expect constant communication. AI may finally expose the weakness in that logic. When everyone can produce endlessly, publishing more stops being a meaningful differentiator.

The scarce resources become attention, trust, credibility, taste, experience and judgment.

The Paradox: AI May Make Human Judgment More Valuable

There is an interesting paradox here. AI could make human judgment more important precisely because it makes production less important.

When writing was expensive, organizations had to decide what to write before investing significant resources. When writing becomes cheap, the decision becomes easier to postpone. A company can produce ten versions and worry about the consequences later.

But producing ten versions is not the same as knowing which version deserves to exist.

The same applies to creativity. AI can generate hundreds of concepts, but someone still needs to recognize the one idea that is actually interesting. It can create variations of an advertisement, but someone needs to understand why one might resonate with a particular audience. It can write ten headlines, but someone needs to know which headline reflects the brand rather than simply sounding persuasive.

The more abundant the output becomes, the more valuable selection becomes.

We Don't Need More Content

I suspect that one of the biggest marketing lessons of the next few years will be surprisingly simple: we do not need more content.

We need more reasons to care about the content we already produce.

The coming age of extremely average content will not mean that everything becomes mediocre. Quite the opposite. The flood of competent, generic material may make genuinely distinctive work easier to recognize. When every company can produce polished articles, a useful insight becomes more valuable. When every executive can produce a professional LinkedIn post, an honest experience becomes more interesting. When every brand can generate attractive creative, a strong idea becomes harder to ignore.

AI will make it easier than ever to create something that looks like marketing. That is not the same thing as creating marketing that matters.

The marketers who benefit most from AI will probably not be the ones who use it to replace every difficult part of thinking. They will use it to remove the tedious parts of production so they can spend more time doing the things that technology still struggles to do well: noticing what other people miss, asking better questions, understanding people, challenging assumptions, making judgments and developing a point of view.

The future may contain more content than any previous period in history. That does not mean we will have more things worth reading.

It means that the ability to recognize what is worth saying will matter more than ever.

The Marketing Advice I No Longer Believe

2026-09-28T10:57:00.000+03:00

When you have worked in marketing for long enough, you accumulate a strange collection of things you are supposed to believe. Some come from books, some from conferences, some from managers and clients, and an increasing number come from people on LinkedIn who have apparently discovered the one thing every marketer needs to know. The advice changes with the technology, but the certainty rarely does. One year everyone is told that email is dead. The next year it is video. Then organic reach is dead, Facebook is dead, blogs are dead, SEO is dead, television is dead, traditional advertising is dead, and apparently everyone should now be building a personal brand on whichever platform happens to be fashionable that month.

After enough years in the industry, I have become much less interested in declaring things dead or insisting that there is one correct way to do marketing. I have worked with different kinds of businesses, different industries, different budgets and very different audiences, and one of the most useful lessons has been that marketing advice rarely survives contact with context. Something that works brilliantly for a consumer brand can be completely inappropriate for a B2B company. A tactic that produces excellent results in one country can perform poorly in another. A strategy that works when a company has an enormous budget can be impossible to execute when the marketing team consists of two people and a spreadsheet.

This has changed the way I think about marketing advice itself. I still learn from other marketers. I still read, listen, experiment and pay attention to what is changing. But I am much more likely now to ask why something worked, under what circumstances it worked, and whether those circumstances exist in the business I am dealing with. I have become suspicious of universal rules because marketing is fundamentally about people, and people rarely behave according to universal rules.

There are quite a few pieces of marketing advice I used to accept more readily than I do today.

"You need to be everywhere"

For years, marketers were encouraged to build a presence on every possible channel. The logic was understandable. If customers are spending time on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, X, Pinterest and whatever comes next, why would a business deliberately choose not to be there? More channels mean more opportunities to reach people, and more opportunities should mean more growth.

The problem is that being present on a platform and being effective on a platform are completely different things.

I have seen companies create accounts everywhere because someone in a meeting decided that the brand "needed to be on TikTok" or "should also be on Pinterest," only for those accounts to become abandoned a few months later. The problem was rarely the platform itself. The problem was that the company did not have a clear reason for being there, did not understand what its audience wanted from that particular channel and did not have the resources to create good content consistently.

There is also a tendency to treat every platform as though it should be managed in the same way. It should not. People use different platforms for different reasons, and the way a person responds to a company on LinkedIn can be very different from the way they respond to that same company on Instagram or TikTok. A B2B company selling specialist equipment to procurement managers does not suddenly become a consumer entertainment brand because somebody has created a TikTok account for it.

I would much rather see a company understand two or three channels properly than spread itself across seven or eight platforms without doing any of them particularly well. Marketing is not a competition to see who can collect the most social media accounts. The objective is to reach the right people in environments where the company has something worthwhile to contribute.

"You have to post every day"

Consistency is useful, but I think marketing has confused consistency with frequency.

There are certainly businesses for which publishing frequently makes sense. A media organization, entertainment company or creator may have very different content requirements from a specialist engineering business. Some audiences actively expect frequent updates, while others may only need to hear from a company when it has something genuinely useful to communicate.

Yet marketers have increasingly treated the content calendar as evidence of productivity. If there are seven posts scheduled for next week, everyone feels that marketing is moving. If there are only two, somebody starts asking whether the team is doing enough.

That can lead to a dangerous situation in which the objective becomes filling the calendar rather than communicating something meaningful.

I have never believed that a mediocre post becomes good marketing simply because it was published on schedule. If a company has something useful to say, it should say it. If it has something interesting to show, it should show it. If it has a genuinely valuable insight for its customers, it should share it. But there is no inherent strategic value in producing content simply because the calendar says Tuesday.

This matters even more now that artificial intelligence has made it possible to produce large amounts of competent-looking content very quickly. We have made the production of content easier, but that does not mean we have made content more valuable. In fact, the opposite may be happening. As more companies produce more generic material, the ability to say something specific, useful and genuinely interesting becomes more important.

The question I would rather ask is not how often a company can publish. It is whether the company has anything worth saying.

"Content is king"

I understand why this phrase became popular. Content can educate customers, establish expertise, generate search traffic, build awareness, support sales and keep a brand visible. But the phrase has encouraged an enormous amount of content production without necessarily improving the quality of marketing.

Content is not automatically valuable simply because it is content.

A company can publish a hundred blog posts and still have no meaningful position in the market. It can create dozens of social posts every month without giving its audience a single reason to remember it. It can produce beautifully designed videos that communicate absolutely nothing that matters to the people watching them.

The more useful question is what the content is supposed to accomplish. Is it explaining something customers do not understand? Is it addressing an objection? Is it demonstrating expertise? Is it making the company more memorable? Is it helping a salesperson close a deal? Is it making an unfamiliar brand more credible?

Once you ask those questions, the amount of content often becomes less important.

I have become much more interested in the idea that content is a tool rather than the product. Sometimes you need a long article. Sometimes you need a short video. Sometimes you need a case study. Sometimes you need an email. Sometimes the best thing you can produce is a useful piece of information that answers a question your customers keep asking.

The format should follow the purpose, not the other way around.

"The customer is always right"

This is a difficult one because the intention behind the advice is good. Businesses should listen to their customers. They should take complaints seriously, understand customer expectations and avoid the arrogance of assuming that the company automatically knows more about the customer than the customer knows about themselves.

But customers are not always right about everything.

A customer can accurately describe a frustrating experience while being wrong about what caused it. They can tell you what they want without understanding what would actually solve their problem. They can ask for a feature because they believe it will make their lives easier when another solution would address the underlying need much better.

This is one reason research requires interpretation rather than simply collecting opinions.

If customers were always able to tell companies exactly what they needed, innovation would be considerably easier. Businesses would simply ask people what product they wanted, build it and sell it. In reality, customers often describe the world as they currently experience it. It is the responsibility of the business to understand that information and decide what to do with it.

Listening is essential. Blind obedience is not.

"Know your audience"

This is probably the most universally repeated piece of marketing advice, and it is also one of the easiest to pretend you are following.

Most marketing presentations contain some version of an audience profile. There is usually a name, age, occupation, income bracket, location and collection of interests. Sometimes the persona even has a photograph.

None of that necessarily means the marketing team understands the customer.

Real audience understanding comes from observing behaviour and asking difficult questions. Why do people choose one supplier over another? What makes them hesitate? Who actually influences the decision? What happens between awareness and purchase? What do they complain about after buying? What do they tell salespeople that they will never tell a survey?

Some of the best customer insights do not come from marketing research at all. They come from the sales team, customer service department, technicians, account managers and people who deal with customers every day.

A marketer can spend weeks building a beautiful persona document while a salesperson can explain the five objections that actually stop customers from buying in a fifteen-minute conversation.

I still believe strongly in understanding the audience. I simply no longer believe that creating a demographic profile is the same thing as understanding people.

"Data doesn't lie"

Data can be extremely useful, but the phrase "data doesn't lie" gives data more authority than it deserves.

Data can be accurate while our interpretation of it is completely wrong.

A campaign can have an impressive click-through rate without generating meaningful business. A social post can receive thousands of interactions from people who have absolutely no intention of becoming customers. A landing page can have an excellent conversion rate because the audience arriving there was already highly motivated.

The numbers may all be correct.

The conclusion may not be.

This is why I have become increasingly interested in the questions behind the metrics. Who actually converted? What happened after conversion? Did those people become customers? Did the campaign influence the purchase or simply appear somewhere along the journey? Would those customers have bought anyway?

Marketing has more data available to it than ever before, but having more numbers does not automatically create better decisions. In some organizations, the opposite has happened. Teams spend so much time reporting metrics that they have less time to think about what the metrics actually mean.

Good marketers need analytical skills, but they also need judgment.

"If you can't measure it, don't do it"

I understand the frustration behind this advice. Marketing has historically struggled to prove its value, and marketers should absolutely be accountable for what they spend and what they produce. Measurement matters, particularly when significant budgets are involved.

But I no longer accept the idea that something has little or no value simply because it cannot be measured perfectly.

Brand awareness is difficult to attribute to a single activity. Reputation is difficult to put into a spreadsheet. Relationships with journalists, partners, industry organizations or influential people may not produce an immediate conversion. A strong executive presence may influence a future decision without providing a convenient tracking parameter.

The answer is not to stop measuring. It is to accept that different objectives require different forms of measurement.

A direct-response campaign might be judged heavily on conversions and revenue. A brand-building initiative may require awareness, consideration, reach, search behaviour or other indicators. A thought-leadership program may be evaluated through invitations, relationships, inbound opportunities and changes in perception.

Not everything valuable happens inside an attribution window.

"Organic reach is dead"

I have heard some version of this claim for years, usually from people selling paid media services.

Organic reach is certainly harder than it once was on many platforms. Algorithms have changed, competition has increased and platforms have become much more commercial. But saying that organic marketing is dead is an exaggeration.

People still share things they find useful. Customers still recommend companies. Employees still influence how organizations are perceived. Journalists still write about businesses. People still search organically. Communities still form around useful information and strong brands.

Paid media is powerful because it gives you distribution and control. But paying for attention does not automatically make that attention valuable.

The strongest marketing strategies often combine paid and organic activity. Advertising can help you reach people, while useful content, credibility, reputation, customer experiences and word of mouth give people reasons to believe you.

Paid media can accelerate awareness. It cannot manufacture trust indefinitely.

"More budget means better marketing"

Money obviously helps. I have worked with enough advertising budgets to know that having resources can make an enormous difference. A larger budget can give you more reach, more testing opportunities, better production, more data and the ability to keep campaigns running long enough to learn from them.

But money does not compensate for poor thinking.

A company can spend a huge amount of money promoting the wrong message to the wrong people. It can buy enormous amounts of traffic and send that traffic to a terrible website. It can spend heavily on beautiful creative that does not communicate the value of the product.

I have also seen limited budgets produce surprisingly effective marketing because the people responsible were forced to think carefully about where every dollar would make the greatest difference.

A constraint can sometimes create discipline.

The question is not simply how much money a business can spend. It is whether the business understands where spending will actually create value.

"Creativity is the most important thing"

I have enormous respect for creativity in marketing. Without it, much of the industry would become a collection of identical campaigns using identical language and identical stock photographs.

But creativity is not a substitute for strategy.

A campaign can be clever without being effective. A slogan can be memorable without communicating what the company actually does. A video can receive millions of views from people who will never become customers.

There is a temptation to judge creative work by whether people liked it rather than whether it achieved its purpose.

The best creative work usually begins with a clear problem. It understands the audience, the context, the proposition and the objective, and then finds an unexpected way to communicate something that matters.

Creativity is valuable because it can make communication more effective. It should not exist simply to prove that the marketing department is creative.

"Marketing should make people buy"

Marketing absolutely has a role in generating sales, and marketers should never become so focused on awareness that they forget the business ultimately needs customers and revenue.

But marketing does not always produce an immediate transaction.

A person might see a brand today and not need the product until six months from now. Someone might encounter a company through an article, remember its name and eventually recommend it to a colleague. A potential customer might repeatedly see a brand before finally becoming comfortable enough to contact sales.

Not every valuable marketing interaction can be connected to an immediate purchase.

This is particularly important in industries with long sales cycles. If a company sells expensive industrial equipment, enterprise software or professional services, expecting every marketing activity to produce an immediate sale is not realistic.

Marketing can create demand, capture demand, support sales, strengthen reputation and build preference. Direct response is one part of the job, not the entire definition of it.

"You need to follow every trend"

This is one of the easiest traps for marketers because trends create a sense of urgency.

A new platform appears and everyone asks whether the brand should be there. A meme becomes popular and someone wants to adapt it. A new content format suddenly gets attention and marketing teams start producing their own version.

Sometimes this is smart. Often it is simply fear of missing out disguised as strategy.

A trend only matters if it has some meaningful connection to the brand, the audience and the objective. There is little value in participating in a trend simply because other companies are doing it.

In fact, trying to imitate every trend can make a brand less distinctive. If every company uses the same format, joke, sound or visual style, the result is not differentiation. It is a crowded room where everyone is shouting the same thing.

Good marketing requires knowing when to participate and when to ignore something.

"Your competitors should be your benchmark"

Competitor analysis is necessary. You need to understand what other businesses are offering, how they position themselves, what they charge, where they advertise and what customers appear to think about them.

But competitors should not become the source of every marketing decision.

If a competitor launches a podcast and your response is to launch a podcast, you are not necessarily being strategic. You may simply be following.

This happens constantly. One company redesigns its website and three competitors announce redesigns. One brand starts producing short-form video and suddenly everyone is making short-form video. One company introduces a loyalty program and everyone else develops one.

Eventually, the market becomes full of companies copying one another.

The more interesting question is often what customers are not getting from anyone.

That question can lead to differentiation. Competitor benchmarking can tell you where everyone else is. It does not necessarily tell you where you should go.

"Marketing strategy needs to be complicated"

There is a tendency within marketing to confuse complexity with sophistication.

A long strategy document can look impressive. A complicated funnel diagram can make a presentation feel strategic. A framework with fifteen boxes can create the impression that an enormous amount of thinking has taken place.

Sometimes it has. Sometimes it has simply been turned into a diagram.

A good strategy should be able to answer some fairly straightforward questions. Who are we trying to reach? What problem are we solving? What do we want people to believe? Why should they believe us? What makes us different? What action do we want them to take? How will we know whether it is working?

The answers may be complicated. The strategy itself should not be unnecessarily complicated.

If the people responsible for implementing a strategy cannot explain it clearly to someone else, there is a good chance the strategy needs to be simplified.

"Marketing can control the message"

This may have been more realistic when brands had fewer channels through which people could respond to them.

Today, companies can carefully craft their messaging, but they cannot control the conversation around it.

Customers have opinions. Employees have opinions. Former employees have opinions. Journalists have opinions. Influencers have opinions. Competitors have opinions. And all of them have platforms through which those opinions can travel.

A company can publish a carefully written campaign about customer service and then have someone publicly document a terrible customer experience. It can spend months developing brand guidelines and still discover that people perceive the company very differently from how its marketing department intended.

The job of marketing is therefore less about controlling perception and more about influencing it.

You can control what you say. You can control the promises you make. You can influence expectations and create consistent experiences. But ultimately, the audience gets a vote.

That is not a weakness of marketing. It is simply the reality of communicating in public.

"The marketing funnel is linear"

The funnel remains useful because it provides a simple way of thinking about stages of customer behavior. Awareness, consideration and conversion are useful concepts.

But real people do not behave like a diagram.

Someone might discover a brand, forget about it, encounter it again six months later, search for reviews, speak to a friend, visit the website, leave, see an advertisement and finally contact the company. Another person may see the brand once and immediately buy.

A customer might enter through a referral rather than an advertisement. Someone else might discover a company through its CEO's LinkedIn post. Another person may become aware of a business through an employee before ever seeing an official marketing message.

The funnel is a useful model. It is not a description of human psychology.

The mistake is not using the funnel. The mistake is believing the funnel is reality.

"If something worked once, scale it"

Successful campaigns deserve investigation, but success does not automatically mean something can be scaled indefinitely.

A campaign can work because it is new. It can work because it reaches a particularly responsive audience. It can work because the timing is unusually good. It can work because a particular person or relationship makes it successful.

Scaling changes the conditions.

The audience becomes larger and less qualified. The creative becomes familiar. Costs increase. Frequency rises. Performance starts to decline.

Before scaling something, I want to understand why it worked.

If we know the underlying reason, we have a much better chance of reproducing the result. If all we know is that the campaign generated good numbers, scaling becomes little more than copying something that happened to work once.

"Marketing can fix a bad product"

This is one piece of advice I no longer believe at all.

Marketing can create awareness around a bad product. It can generate trial. It can convince someone to give a company a chance. It can temporarily make weaknesses less visible.

It cannot permanently compensate for a poor customer experience.

Eventually the customer gets the product. Eventually the service gets delivered. Eventually the promise meets reality.

This is why marketers should care about what happens outside the marketing department. Product quality, customer service, operations, sales and fulfilment all affect the brand.

A beautiful campaign creates an expectation. The business then has to deliver against it.

When that happens consistently, marketing becomes much easier because the experience itself becomes part of the story.

What I believe now

None of this means I have stopped believing in marketing. Quite the opposite. I think I believe in it more now because I have become more skeptical of the formulas surrounding it.

I believe marketing works best when it starts with understanding people rather than platforms. I believe strategy is more important than activity, and that a full calendar is not evidence of a good strategy. I believe content should have a purpose beyond filling a content schedule. I believe data is essential but interpretation matters just as much as measurement. I believe creativity is powerful when it solves a real communication problem rather than simply making something look impressive.

I also believe marketers should spend more time talking to customers and less time talking to other marketers about what marketers should be doing.

The industry can become remarkably self-referential. We write content for marketers about how to create content for marketers. We create trends that marketers follow because other marketers are following them. We measure engagement from an audience that sometimes consists primarily of other people working in marketing.

Meanwhile, the customer is somewhere else entirely, trying to decide whether they trust the company enough to buy from it.

That is probably the biggest thing my relationship with marketing advice has changed. I am less interested in what is supposed to work and more interested in what actually works for the specific problem in front of me.

Sometimes that will mean paid advertising. Sometimes it will mean content. Sometimes it will mean SEO. Sometimes it will mean a sales enablement project, a better website, an event, a partnership, a customer referral program or simply fixing something that is broken in the customer experience.

Sometimes the right marketing decision is to do more.

Sometimes it is to stop doing something.

And sometimes the best marketing decision has very little to do with marketing at all.

The longer I work in this industry, the more comfortable I have become with uncertainty. I no longer think every marketer needs to have a definitive answer immediately. I think we need to ask better questions, test our assumptions and be willing to change our minds when the evidence tells us to.

That may not be as satisfying as a list of ten rules for guaranteed marketing success. It certainly does not make for as convenient a LinkedIn carousel.

But after years of working with different businesses, audiences, markets and budgets, I have come to trust context more than certainty.

Most marketing advice contains some truth. The mistake is assuming that the truth is universal.

A tactic that worked yesterday may work tomorrow, but it may not. A strategy that transformed one company may be completely wrong for another. A channel that is essential for one audience may be irrelevant to the next.

That is why I no longer believe there is a single playbook for good marketing.

There are principles worth learning, mistakes worth remembering and experiments worth running. There are patterns that become visible after enough years of doing the work. But there is also something that no framework can completely replace: judgment.

Good marketers need to know the rules, but they also need to know when the rules no longer fit the situation.

That is probably the most useful marketing lesson I have learned so far, and perhaps the reason I am less interested today in telling other marketers what they should believe.

I would rather ask them what they have seen, what they have tested, what surprised them, what failed, what worked for reasons they did not expect, and what they have changed their minds about.

Because after enough time in marketing, changing your mind is not necessarily a sign that you were wrong before.

Sometimes it is simply evidence that you have learned something.

Things Nobody Tells You About Working Remotely

2026-09-25T11:27:00.000+03:00

Working remotely sounds deceptively simple when you describe it from the outside. You have a laptop, an internet connection, and theoretically you can work from almost anywhere. There is no commute, no office politics happening around the coffee machine, and no manager walking past your desk to see whether you're working. For many people, that sounds like the perfect arrangement, and after spending a significant part of my career working remotely with teams, clients, and organizations in different countries, I can understand why.

There is a lot to love about remote work. The flexibility can completely change the way you organize your life. You can structure your day around when you are most productive, avoid spending hours commuting, and sometimes choose where you live without having to consider whether you can realistically get to an office every morning. You can have a much greater degree of control over your environment and, depending on the organization, considerably more autonomy in how you get your work done.

But remote work also changes things that aren't immediately obvious. When the office disappears, you don't simply lose a physical workplace. You lose many of the structures that came with it, and you have to replace some of them yourself. You have to become more deliberate about communication, boundaries, relationships, time, and even your physical environment. Some of those adjustments are easy, while others can take years to understand.

After working remotely for years, I've realized that the hardest part isn't learning how to work without an office. It's learning how to make remote work fit into a life that still has to exist outside of work.

The Freedom Is Real, But So Is the Responsibility

The first thing people usually notice about remote work is the freedom. You don't necessarily have to start your day at exactly the same time every morning. You can take a break when you need one, work from a different room, go out for lunch, or occasionally change your environment without asking anyone for permission. Depending on your role and organization, you may even have the freedom to live somewhere completely different from where your employer is based.

That freedom can be incredibly valuable, particularly for people who have learned how they work best. Some people are more productive in the morning, others in the afternoon or evening. Some need complete silence to concentrate, while others work better with background noise. Some people need to take care of personal responsibilities during the day and make up the time later. Remote work can accommodate many of these differences in ways that a traditional office often cannot.

What nobody tells you, however, is that freedom also removes a lot of the external structure that used to organize your day. An office tells you when the workday begins and ends simply because you physically arrive and leave. Your colleagues create natural breaks. Meetings happen at particular times. The commute creates a transition between your professional and personal life. When you're working from home, none of those things happen automatically.

You have to create your own structure. That sounds liberating until you realize that you are now responsible for deciding when you should start, when you should stop, when you should take a break, and when something can wait until tomorrow. Remote work gives you more control over your time, but it also means you can no longer blame the office for taking that time away from you.

Your Home Stops Being Completely Separate From Your Work

One of the biggest adjustments to remote work is surprisingly physical. When you work in an office, you have a place that is associated with work and another place that is associated with your personal life. Even if you don't particularly like your office, there is something psychologically useful about leaving it behind at the end of the day.

When your home is also your workplace, that separation becomes much less obvious. The desk where you worked for eight hours is still sitting there when you finish. Your laptop is nearby. Your phone continues to receive notifications. You can see tomorrow's unfinished tasks from the same room where you're trying to relax tonight.

Over time, that can make work feel strangely permanent. You may finish for the day but still feel as though you're at work because nothing about your physical environment has changed. You might find yourself checking an email while making dinner or opening your laptop because you suddenly remember something you didn't finish earlier. None of these individual decisions seems particularly significant, but they gradually blur the boundary between working time and personal time.

I've found that creating some kind of ritual around finishing work can make a surprisingly big difference. It doesn't have to be complicated. Closing the laptop, leaving the room, going for a walk, changing clothes, or simply deciding that you won't check work messages for a certain period can create a psychological transition that the commute used to provide automatically.

The important thing is recognizing that remote work doesn't remove the need for boundaries. It makes those boundaries your responsibility.

You Discover How Much Structure an Office Was Providing

Before working remotely, I don't think I fully appreciated how much structure an office provides without anyone consciously thinking about it. Your day has a rhythm that is partly created by the people around you. Someone suggests going for coffee. Someone asks if you want to have lunch. A meeting ends and you walk back to your desk. People start leaving in the afternoon, which subtly reminds you that the working day is coming to an end.

None of these things are particularly important on their own, but together they create a framework. They give the day a natural rhythm without requiring you to consciously plan every transition between one activity and another.

When you're working alone at home, that framework disappears. You can sit down at your computer in the morning and suddenly realize that several hours have passed without you moving much at all. You can finish one task and immediately begin another without ever taking a proper break because there is nobody around you doing the same thing.

This is one reason remote work requires more self-awareness than people expect. You have to notice when you're becoming unproductive, when you've been sitting too long, when you need a break, and when continuing to work is no longer producing anything useful.

The solution isn't to recreate an office schedule down to the minute. One of the benefits of remote work is that you don't have to. The important thing is to understand that flexibility works best when it sits within some kind of structure. Without any structure at all, flexibility can quickly turn into a day that simply disappears.

Communication Becomes Part of the Job

When you work with people in person, communication happens constantly without anyone having to think about it. Someone can see that you're struggling with something and ask what happened. You can lean over and clarify a question. A colleague can tell from your expression that you're confused about something. A manager can hear the hesitation in your voice when you explain that a deadline might be difficult.

Remote work removes much of that context. A message that looks perfectly straightforward to the person writing it can be interpreted completely differently by the person reading it. A short reply might mean that someone is busy, frustrated, or simply typing quickly. Silence might mean that someone agrees, missed the message, or doesn't know how to respond.

This makes communication a more deliberate part of remote work. You have to become better at providing context, explaining what you need, and making the status of your work visible to people who cannot physically see what you're doing.

That doesn't mean communicating constantly. In fact, excessive communication can become its own problem. It means communicating clearly enough that other people don't have to guess. If you're waiting for something, say so. If something is blocking progress, explain it. If a priority has changed, confirm what that means for the work you're doing. If you have completed something important, let the relevant people know.

Remote work doesn't necessarily require more communication. It requires better communication.

Then There Are the Meetings

Once organizations become comfortable with remote communication tools, there is a tendency to turn almost everything into a meeting. Because nobody has to physically walk into a conference room, scheduling another thirty-minute call feels almost effortless. Before long, your calendar can become a collection of back-to-back video calls with barely enough time between them to remember what the previous conversation was about.

This is one of the great ironies of remote work. Technology was supposed to make work more flexible, but poorly managed remote cultures can create incredibly rigid days. A calendar full of meetings can leave very little time for the work those meetings were supposed to help accomplish. You finish one call and immediately join another, then discover at the end of the day that you haven't had an uninterrupted hour to actually think.

I've become increasingly convinced that remote teams need to be much more disciplined about what deserves a meeting. Some conversations genuinely benefit from being live and interactive. Others can be handled through a message, a shared document, or a short recorded update. Not every decision requires ten people to spend thirty minutes discussing it.

One of the advantages of remote work is that you have more tools for communicating than simply gathering everyone in a room. Good remote organizations use those tools intelligently rather than simply recreating every office meeting on a screen.

You Learn a Lot About Management

Remote work is also a very good test of management. When everyone is physically present in an office, it is possible for a manager to confuse visibility with productivity. They can walk around, see who is at their desk, ask people what they're working on, and feel as though they have a good sense of what is happening.

Remote work removes much of that visibility, which means managers have to become more comfortable managing outcomes rather than physical presence. Good managers adapt to this. They give people clear expectations, establish priorities, provide feedback, and judge performance based on the quality and impact of the work. They understand that someone being offline for an hour doesn't necessarily mean they're not working, just as someone being online all day doesn't necessarily mean they're being productive.

Bad managers often respond to remote work by trying to recreate the office digitally. They want constant status updates, frequent check-ins, visible online status, and proof that employees are at their computers. Eventually, the employee spends more time demonstrating that they're working than actually doing the work.

Remote work exposes the difference between managing people and monitoring them. The two are not the same.

Time Zones Change the Meaning of Flexibility

Working remotely can also open the door to international collaboration in a way that traditional office work rarely could. I've worked with people across different countries and time zones, and there is something fascinating about being able to collaborate with someone who may be thousands of kilometers away without geography preventing the relationship.

But time zones create their own challenges. Someone's morning can be another person's afternoon, while your convenient meeting time might be someone else's evening. If a team is spread across several regions, there may be no perfect time for everyone. Somebody will often have to make an adjustment.

This becomes particularly important when teams start treating remote work as though everyone has the same working day simply because they are using the same communication tools. They don't. Their lives are organized around different clocks.

Good remote teams recognize this and distribute the inconvenience fairly. They don't always schedule meetings at the most convenient time for the people with the most seniority. They make an effort to avoid consistently asking the same people to join calls outside their normal working hours.

Remote work makes geography less important, but it doesn't make geography disappear. Time zones are still real, and respecting them is part of respecting the people you're working with.

You Still Need Other People

One of the things I underestimated about remote work is how much incidental social interaction happens in an office. You might not particularly enjoy small talk, but there is a difference between disliking small talk and not having any spontaneous interaction at all. The conversation before a meeting, the person you run into while getting coffee, the colleague who tells you about something funny that happened over the weekend, or simply being in a room with other people creates a sense of connection.

Remote work removes most of that. You can spend an entire day communicating with colleagues and still feel as though you haven't actually been around anyone. Meetings tend to have a purpose. Messages tend to have a purpose. Emails definitely have a purpose. There is much less room for the random interaction that happens naturally when people share a physical environment.

This doesn't mean everyone who works remotely becomes lonely. Some people prefer the lack of office interaction and find that they are more comfortable without it. But it does mean that remote workers have to be more intentional about maintaining a social life outside their work.

For me, this is one of the biggest differences between simply being alone and actually feeling connected. Remote work can give you enormous independence, but independence isn't the same thing as community.

Your Location Suddenly Becomes a Choice

Once your job no longer requires you to commute to an office, something interesting happens. Your relationship with where you live changes. If you can work from almost anywhere, you suddenly have more choices. You might decide to live closer to family, move to another city, spend time in another country, or choose a location based on lifestyle rather than employment opportunities.

But having more choices doesn't necessarily make the decision easier. When work is no longer determining where you live, you have to think about what you actually want from the place where you live. Cost becomes one consideration, but so do community, culture, safety, convenience, friendships, family, climate, and the kind of daily life you want to have.

Remote work can make moving somewhere technically possible without necessarily making it a good idea. I've learned that the question isn't simply, "Where can I work from?" It's a much bigger question: "Where do I actually want to live?" Those are not always the same answer.

People Around You May Not Understand That You're Working

Another thing nobody tells you about working remotely is that other people don't always understand what your workday looks like. If you're physically at home, it can be difficult for family or friends to understand that you're unavailable simply because you're not in an office. They may assume that because you're there, you can answer the door, run an errand, take a phone call, or help with something.

It isn't necessarily malicious. For someone who has always worked in an office, the visual distinction between "at work" and "at home" is obvious. For a remote worker, it isn't. You have to create that distinction yourself and communicate it to the people around you.

This can take some adjustment. You may need to explain that being physically present doesn't mean being available, particularly during meetings or periods of concentrated work. You may need to establish certain hours when interruptions aren't practical.

Remote work changes the boundaries between your professional and personal life, but it can also change the boundaries between your work and the people you share your home or neighborhood with.

You Have to Learn When the Workday Is Actually Over

Perhaps the hardest part of remote work is learning how to stop. There is almost always something else you could do. Another email could be answered, another message could be sent, another task could be finished, another article could be reviewed, or another meeting could be prepared for. When your laptop is sitting a few meters away, it becomes very easy to tell yourself that you'll just do one more thing.

The problem is that "one more thing" rarely remains one thing. Over time, the workday expands quietly. You start earlier because you checked your phone when you woke up. You work through lunch because you don't have to leave your desk. You answer messages in the evening because you're already at home. Eventually, you may find that you're technically working more hours than you ever did in an office, even though remote work was supposed to give you more freedom.

I've learned that finishing work is something you sometimes have to actively decide to do. There will always be something unfinished. There always has been and there always will be. The ability to close the laptop while knowing there is still work waiting for you tomorrow is an important skill.

You Have to Leave the House

This sounds obvious, but it becomes surprisingly easy to forget. When your entire working life happens at home, there can be days when you barely have a reason to go outside. You can wake up, make coffee, open your laptop, work, eat something, continue working, and eventually realize that you haven't physically changed environments all day.

That can happen occasionally without any real consequence. When it becomes your normal routine, however, the world can start feeling much smaller. I've found that simply leaving the house can change the character of a day. Going for a walk, getting coffee, meeting someone for lunch, working from somewhere else for a few hours, or even running an unnecessary errand can create a break between different parts of your day.

The point isn't productivity. It's perspective. When your computer is also your office, your entertainment, your communication device, and sometimes your main connection to the outside world, it becomes important to remember that there is a physical world beyond the screen.

Remote work can give you freedom from commuting without giving you a reason to stay indoors all day.

Being Seen Still Matters, Even When You Work Remotely

One uncomfortable reality of remote work is that visibility still matters. Ideally, everyone would be judged entirely on the quality of their work. In reality, people naturally have more awareness of the colleagues they interact with regularly. When you're in an office, people see you working, hear your ideas in conversations, and notice the projects you're involved in simply because you're physically present.

When you're remote, good work can sometimes become invisible. That doesn't mean you should turn your workday into a performance or constantly tell everyone what you're doing. But it does mean that remote workers need to become comfortable communicating their progress and contributions.

If you've completed something important, share the result. If you've solved a problem, make sure the relevant people know. If you're waiting on something that is blocking your work, communicate it. If you've achieved something meaningful, don't assume that everyone automatically knows.

This isn't about seeking attention. It's about making your work visible in an environment where people can't see it happening. Remote workers sometimes have to be more deliberate about demonstrating impact because the physical presence that naturally provided some of that visibility no longer exists.

Productivity Is Not the Same as Being Online

Remote work has also forced me to think differently about productivity. One of the easiest mistakes organizations can make is measuring activity instead of results. Someone can appear online for ten hours and accomplish very little, while another person can spend five highly focused hours producing excellent work.

The computer doesn't tell you which one happened.

Being available isn't the same as being productive. Responding instantly to every message isn't necessarily a sign of effectiveness. Having a calendar full of meetings doesn't mean you're making progress. Remote work makes this distinction particularly important because there are fewer visible signals of activity.

When a manager can't physically see an employee working, there can be a temptation to look for digital substitutes: online status, response time, meeting attendance, or constant updates. But these are imperfect measures. Good remote work cultures focus on outcomes. What was delivered? What changed because of the work? Were the objectives achieved? Did the person contribute something valuable?

Once you start measuring those things, the location of the employee becomes much less important.

Remote Work Doesn't Automatically Mean Better Work

After working remotely for years, I've become skeptical of the idea that remote work is automatically better than office work. It can be better for some people and worse for others. It can work brilliantly for certain roles and be much more difficult for others. It can be highly effective when the organization has good communication, strong management, and clear expectations, and it can be miserable when a company simply takes a dysfunctional office culture and moves it onto Zoom, Teams, and Slack.

The technology isn't what makes remote work successful. The culture does. If a company doesn't trust its employees, removing the office won't suddenly create trust. If managers communicate badly, video calls won't fix the communication problem. If priorities constantly change, working from home won't make them clearer. If people are already disconnected from their colleagues, a collection of digital tools won't automatically create a sense of community.

Remote work works when the underlying way of working works. The location is only one part of the equation.

The Real Skill Is Designing Your Own Working Life

The longer I work remotely, the more I think the biggest benefit isn't simply flexibility. It's the opportunity to become more intentional about how work fits into your life. Traditional office work often dictates a surprising amount of your day. Where you live, when you leave home, when you return, how long you commute, when you take lunch, and sometimes even when you take vacations are influenced by the structure of the workplace.

Remote work can give some of that control back to you. But control only becomes freedom when you know what to do with it. You have to decide what kind of schedule works for you, figure out how much structure you need, establish boundaries around your availability, maintain relationships outside work, communicate effectively with people you may never meet in person, decide where you want to live, and determine what kind of environment helps you feel good.

Most importantly, you have to decide what role work is actually going to play in your life.

That last part is probably the most important. Remote work makes it easier for work to follow you everywhere. Your office can be your bedroom, your living room, a coffee shop, a hotel room, or another country. Your colleagues can reach you from anywhere. Your inbox doesn't care whether you're technically on the clock.

That means you have to decide where work ends. Nobody may tell you when you've worked enough. Nobody may notice that you've been staring at the same screen for hours. Nobody may realize that you're becoming isolated. Nobody may tell you that you've allowed your laptop to become the center of your life. You have to notice those things yourself.

That is the part of remote work that rarely makes it into the promotional material. The freedom is real, but it comes with responsibility. You gain control over where and how you work, but you also become responsible for creating the boundaries and structures that an office used to provide automatically.

After years of working this way, I don't think the question is whether remote work is better than working in an office. That's too simple. The more interesting question is whether you've built a way of working that allows you to do good work while still having a life outside of it.

For me, that's ultimately what remote work should provide. Not the ability to work from your couch all day, and not the ability to answer emails from every country you visit, but the opportunity to build a working life that gives you more control over your time, your environment, and your choices.

The challenge is making sure that freedom remains freedom. Because the best thing about working remotely isn't that you can work anywhere. It's that, if you do it well, work no longer has to determine everything about where, when, and how you live.

Sponsors Don't Buy Logos: A 10-Step System for Partnerships That Renew

2026-09-23T21:36:20.361+03:00

If you have ever sent a sponsorship deck and heard nothing back, you are in very large company. Most of us learned sponsorship the same way: build a nice PDF, list Gold, Silver and Bronze packages, attach it to an email, send it to thirty companies and wait. A week later, you send it to thirty more.

The silence is not bad luck. It usually means the request was built around our problem, not the sponsor's. We needed money, so we asked for money. The company reading the email had a different question in mind: what does this do for us?

This post is the written version of a workshop I built for JCI Lebanon on attracting and engaging sponsors. The aim is simple. By the time you finish reading, you should be able to take one of your own projects, whether it is a conference, a community initiative or a training program, and build a much stronger sponsorship approach around it.

The approach is a ten-step process that starts well before the first email and ends well after the event. Only one of those ten steps is called Pitch. Everything else is the work that makes the pitch worth listening to.

[Full presentation at the end of the article]

Start with the right mindset

Great sponsorship is not a donation request. It is a value proposition built around the sponsor's objectives and delivered with discipline.

That one sentence changes almost everything that follows. When we approach a business and say, "We need $5,000 for our project," we are talking about our problem. The person reading it is thinking about their own targets for the quarter. A good sponsorship sits in the middle: we achieve something we could not achieve alone, and the sponsor gets something that is genuinely worth the money to them.

There are always two sets of interests at the table. The organizer wants funding, credibility and long-term partners. The sponsor wants a relevant audience, measurable results and a team that delivers what it promised. The job is to design an exchange where both lists get satisfied.

The most useful habit I can offer is to separate assets from outcomes. A logo on a banner is an asset. The sponsor does not want a logo on a banner; they want the right people to notice the brand. A speaking slot is an asset; what they may actually want is credibility or authority in their industry. A lead form is an asset; what they want is qualified interest and a follow-up conversation their sales team can use.

Whenever you write down a sponsorship benefit, ask yourself what result it is supposed to create. If you cannot answer, the benefit probably should not be in the package. Logos get seen. Great sponsorships get results. Visibility still matters, but the logo should be one part of the solution, not the entire solution.

This is the framework the rest of this post follows. The first five steps (Define, Target, Discover, Design and Value) happen before anyone outside your team sees a proposal. The last five (Pitch, Contract, Activate, Measure and Renew) are where the relationship is either won or quietly lost.

Most teams start at step six. They pitch before they have defined the opportunity, chosen the right companies or understood what those companies need. That is why so many decks go unanswered.

Before you contact anyone, you should be able to answer six questions internally:

Who exactly can we help the sponsor reach?
What business or brand result could this create for them?
What proof makes our ask credible?
Which type of sponsor is a natural fit?
What could they do with us beyond putting a logo somewhere?
How would we measure success if they said yes?

If those answers are fuzzy, you are not ready to approach sponsors yet. The good news is that each of the ten steps answers one or more of them.

Step 1: Define the opportunity

Before you worry about who might sponsor you, you need to understand exactly what you are offering. Think like a partner, not like a fundraiser.

A sponsor should grasp your business case in a couple of minutes: what the project is, who it reaches, what success looks like, how much support you need and what evidence says it will work. You do not need a forty-page document. You need clarity. If your own team cannot explain the project the same way twice, a sponsor will not manage it either.

The last of those questions, proof, is where many requests fall apart. Enthusiasm is useful, but proof reduces risk. Attendance figures from last year count, even if last year was smaller. So do testimonials, confirmed partners, a booked venue, confirmed speakers, media mentions and photos from a similar project. The key is to explain why the proof matters. "We had 500 people last year" is information. "We had 500 university students from six campuses" starts to tell a sponsor something useful.

Audience quality beats audience size

This is one of the easiest improvements you can make to any proposal. "We expect 1,000 attendees" sounds impressive and tells a sponsor almost nothing. Compare it with: "We expect 1,000 attendees, including 300 young professionals, 120 business owners and 40 civic leaders with decision-making influence." Now the sponsor can picture exactly who they would reach, and whether those are the people they need.

So describe your audience the way a marketer would: roles and industries, decision authority, geography, interests, media habits, buying behavior and community influence. Decision authority and buying behavior are the fields organizers skip most and sponsors care about most. If you lack the data, a short registration form at your next event is the easiest place to start.

Know your numbers

Do not pick a sponsorship target because $20,000 sounds like a nice round number. Start from the economics of the project. If it costs $30,000 and you already have $12,000 in confirmed funding, your gap is $18,000. You might aim for $22,000 to leave a buffer, because some sponsors will say no and others will pay less than you hoped. From there you work backward: perhaps one anchor partner at $5,000 and several smaller supporters, or another structure entirely. Whatever you ask for should have logic behind it that you can explain in one breath.

Decide who fits, and what you will not accept

Not every company with money is a good sponsor for you. Look for audience overlap, compatible values, a relevant product, a realistic budget and a clear budget owner, and walk away from reputational risk or category conflicts. Decide your boundaries early too: which industries conflict with your mission, what exclusivity you can honor, what data you can ethically share and how much say a sponsor gets over content. These questions are much easier to answer before money is on the table.

If your project fits in one strong sentence, your audience is described in commercial terms and your funding need has clear logic, you are ready for step two.

Step 2: Target the right companies

Once the opportunity is defined, the next question is who actually has a reason to care about it.

Start close before you start far. Your existing network is the most credible place to begin: members, board, alumni, suppliers, vendors and past partners. Then look at market adjacency, meaning the companies already spending money to reach an audience like yours. Who sponsored a similar event or initiative last year? Which businesses share your geography, mission or audience? If a company sponsored something comparable before, the budget line probably exists. Also watch for budget signals: a major campaign, a product launch, new hiring or an expansion into a new market all suggest marketing money is moving.

Score before you chase

A long sponsor list can make a team feel productive while producing very little. I would rather have ten well-qualified targets than a spreadsheet of 150 random companies. Score each prospect on five things: audience fit (do they want the people you reach?), strategic fit (does the partnership make sense for their brand?), budget potential, values fit and access route (do you know the decision owner, or someone who does?). Then put the team's energy into the companies where several of those line up.

Find the person who owns the budget

Finding the right company is only half the job. You also need the right person, and the sponsor's objective usually tells you which door to knock on. Awareness goals often sit with brand or marketing. Community impact sits with CSR, the foundation or public affairs. Leads and pipeline belong to sales, growth or field marketing. Employer branding usually lives with HR. Hospitality goals point to business development and key account teams. The right company with the wrong contact can look like a dead lead when it is really just a bad route in. Writing to the general info inbox and hoping it gets forwarded is the classic version of this mistake.

Before the first message, spend twenty minutes on each company: current campaigns, recent sponsorships, priority markets, likely decision makers and any pressure they are facing. You need enough context to explain why this conversation makes sense, and ideally a first guess at the value exchange.

Warm beats cold

Cold outreach can work, but warm relevance usually gets better conversations. Whenever possible, start from a relationship. Maybe a member knows someone in the company. Maybe a previous contact can point you to the right department. The sequence matters: known contact, introduction request, a short relevance note, a discovery call and only then a custom proposal. Most of us jump straight to the last step.

Timing matters as much as the route. There is no best month for sponsorship; there is only the sponsor's month. Learn when their fiscal year closes, when campaigns are planned, how long procurement, legal and brand approvals take, how much lead time they need to activate properly and when renewal decisions happen. Many companies set next year's budgets in the last quarter, so asking in March for a May event is often too late. A fantastic proposal that arrives after the budget is locked can still get a no.

This is the step where we stop guessing and actually learn what the potential sponsor needs. It is also the step most organizers skip.

The old habit is familiar: send the deck, attach three packages and ask which one they want. The better habit is to first understand what the sponsor is trying to achieve, then recommend the partnership that fits. Your proposal should be the result of a conversation. If it arrives before the conversation, you are designing blind.

Ask questions that change the proposal

A good discovery conversation is mostly questions, followed by a lot of listening. The ones that tend to change what you eventually propose are:

What audience are you trying to reach this year?
What business or brand outcome would make this worth it for you?
What kinds of partnerships or activations have worked well before?
Are there timing, approval or category considerations we should know about?
How would you judge success if this went well?
What would make this more useful than a standard sponsorship package?

The success question is gold, because the answer becomes your measurement plan later. The "what has worked before" question tells you what they can get approved internally. And the last question often tells you exactly how to win the deal. Take notes in front of them; it shows that the proposal will be built on their words, not yours.

Match the proof to the objective

Most sponsor objectives fall into a few groups: awareness, engagement, leads, reputation or CSR impact, and relationships. Each needs different proof. Impressions may satisfy an awareness sponsor but mean very little to one who invested to generate leads.

This is where discovery turns into design. If the sponsor says, "We need visibility," you might offer branded content, media moments and a prominent but uncluttered presence. If they say, "We need leads," you design opt-in capture, demos, hosted meetings and follow-up content. If they want authority, think speaking roles, research or an expert panel. If they want engagement, an interactive challenge, lounge or workshop. If they care about impact, beneficiary stories, volunteering and an impact report. A bank and a telecom company could sponsor the same event for completely different reasons, and the offer should reflect that. The benefit is not chosen because it happens to be available. It is chosen because it solves something.

If you change only one sentence in your next sponsor meeting, make it this one. Instead of saying, "Here are our packages. Which one do you want?" try: "Let's understand what you need to achieve, then I'll recommend the right partnership shape." That single shift moves you from seller to partner.

Step 4: Design the partnership

Now you can design the package. The key idea here is that Gold, Silver and Bronze are options, not laws of nature.

There are three useful ways to structure what you offer. Tiered packages are standard levels with increasing value; they are simple, fast and easy to compare. Modular packages are a menu of benefits sponsors can combine around their own goals. Bespoke partnerships are custom plans built for an anchor sponsor or a larger strategic investment. None of these is automatically better. Strong projects often use a mix: one bespoke anchor partner, a modular menu for mid-size sponsors and simple tiers for smaller supporters.

Tiers work well when the offer is simple, benefits are easy to standardize, you expect many sponsors and speed matters. They work poorly when sponsor objectives differ a lot, when you need real customization, when exclusivity is complicated or when the sponsor needs a measurable business case. The mistake is not having tiers. The mistake is using them automatically.

If you keep tiers, make them less generic. "Gold Sponsor" can become "Community Builder Partner," a name that says what the company is part of. "Social media mention" can become a co-created content series, and "booth space" an interactive experience with opt-in data capture. Small changes in framing make the offer feel intentional instead of copied from last year.

A modular menu goes one step further by organizing benefits by purpose: visibility, experience, content, data and action, and hospitality. After discovery, you assemble the modules that fit that sponsor. A leads-focused sponsor will lean toward data and action. An impact-focused one will care more about content and experience.

Go beyond logos

Activation is the part people actually remember: a sponsored lounge or charging station, a co-branded interview series, a community challenge, an expert roundtable, a product trial or a VIP breakfast. Pick one or two that fit the sponsor's objective, never all of them. The best activations give the audience something useful while giving the sponsor a meaningful role.

For your anchor sponsor, the partnership should feel like co-ownership rather than the top row of a table: a named partnership role, category exclusivity where it makes sense, customized content or activation, a shared measurement dashboard, executive access or a hosted experience, and a clear renewal or multi-year path.

Finally, plan value across time. Most packages only cover the event itself. Sponsor value can start before the event through the registration page, email features, social teasers and speaker promotion. It continues during the event through booths, hosted meetings, stage moments and sampling. And it should carry on afterward through an impact report, thank-you content, lead follow-up, a case study and a renewal debrief. That "after" column is what gets you next year's check.

Content-led benefits help here because they keep working after the event ends, from a co-branded video to an insight report the sponsor's sales team can use. If the sponsor wants measurable action, choose mechanisms that prove it: opt-ins show interest, meeting requests show serious engagement. Collect data only with proper consent, and never promise data you should not share.

Step 5: Put a value on it

Once the partnership is designed, you need to decide what it is actually worth. This is where many organizers undersell themselves.

A sponsor is not buying your printing bill. If a banner costs $100 to print, that tells you almost nothing about what the placement is worth. Adding up your costs gives you a minimum, not a price. What the sponsor is really buying is access to people they cannot easily reach, in a context they cannot easily create on their own. Think about it this way: if your project puts a CEO and forty civic leaders in one room, what would it cost a company to arrange that meeting by itself?

Five drivers shape that value. Access: is this audience hard to reach, or especially relevant to the sponsor's decisions? Exclusivity: does the sponsor own the category, free of competitors? Reach: how many relevant people will see it? Engagement: can people interact with the sponsor rather than just see a logo? Business value: could this lead to relationships, reputation, leads or product trials? When a sponsor asks why the package costs what it does, these five words are your answer. The stronger the combination, the stronger your pricing argument.

Define exclusivity or do not sell it

Exclusivity is valuable only when everyone agrees what it means. If you sell it, spell out the category definition, which competitors are excluded, the territory or event scope, the duration and what happens after the event. Avoid vague promises like "main sponsor" with no definition, unlimited category protection, rights you cannot enforce, future commitments nobody approved and ambiguous logo hierarchies. Undefined exclusivity is how two sponsors end up angry at the same event.

When they push back on price

Reduce scope before you reduce price. If a sponsor wants to pay less, offer a smaller, cleaner package and keep the price per benefit intact. If you do give a discount, get something real in return: a longer commitment, a broader role or a faster decision. And protect your signature assets, such as named roles, exclusivity and headline moments, because they anchor the value of everything else. Once you discount the naming rights, it is very hard to raise the price again next year. Good pricing keeps the partnership credible for both sides.

Step 6: Pitch the case

Notice that pitching is step six, not step one. By this point it should feel much easier, because you already understand the project, the sponsor and the value.

A proposal does not have to be long. Eight slides can carry the whole argument: the opportunity, the audience, the sponsor's objective, your recommended partnership, the activation plan, the measurement plan, the investment and the next steps. The order matters. You do not open with twenty slides about your organization's history. You start with the opportunity and move quickly into why it matters to them. The price appears at slide seven, by which point the sponsor should already want what you are describing. And slide three, the sponsor's objective in their own words from the discovery call, is the one most decks leave out.

A proposal is not a brochure. It is an argument for a decision.

Personalize the substance

Real personalization is not putting the sponsor's logo on the cover or inserting the contact's name. It is choosing the audience segment that matters to them, the business outcome they care about, the activation you recommend and the business case that connects the price to the value. Here is a quick test: could you send the same proposal to their competitor by changing only the logo? If yes, it is not personalized.

Keep the first email short

Your first outreach does not need to contain everything. Four parts are enough. A relevant trigger explains why you are writing now, for example a new branch opening in the city where your project takes place. The audience fit explains who they could reach through you. A possible outcome suggests what the partnership could help them achieve. And a soft ask requests a short conversation, not a sponsorship commitment. The goal of the first email is rarely to close the deal. It is to earn the next conversation.

Use the meeting to listen

If you get thirty minutes, spend most of them listening: a few minutes of context, around ten of discovery, then one or two ideas to test. Before you leave, clarify who owns the budget, who else approves and when you will review the proposal together. The meeting succeeds when there is a next step with a date attached.

Step 7: Contract the details

Enthusiasm and a handshake are not enough. Friendly relationships still need precise agreements, and a clear contract protects the relationship as much as it protects either side.

At minimum, the agreement should cover six things. Deliverables and deadlines: what will be provided, by whom and when. Exclusivity: the category definition, scope, duration and boundaries. Payment terms: the fee, timing, invoicing and any staged payments. Measurement: the KPIs or reporting you already agreed on during discovery. Rights and approvals: how logos, names, copy and content can be used. And risk provisions: cancellation, force majeure and how changes will be handled. If something is not written down, each side will remember it a little differently, usually in its own favor.

Rights and approvals are where most day-to-day friction lives. Agree who can take and reuse photos, who approves logo placement, how long creative approvals take, and name one operational contact on each side. That is not bureaucracy. It is how you avoid chaos in event week.

Three clauses deserve extra attention. Data: what can be collected, with what consent, and what the sponsor will receive. Cancellation: what happens if the project changes or cannot go ahead, which is a very real question in markets where plans can shift quickly. Measurement: what evidence you have committed to providing and when.

The best contract is not the longest one. It is the clearest one. Ambiguity feels easy before an event and becomes very expensive during one.

Step 8: Activate like a professional

Getting the check is not the end of the sponsorship. In many ways, it is where the sponsor's real experience of working with you begins, and where they quietly start deciding whether they will come back.

Activation starts well before the event. As soon as the deal is confirmed, hold a kickoff with the people on both sides who will actually run it. Turn the contract into a production plan: every deliverable, an owner and a date. Confirm assets, brand approvals, logistics and who is responsible for capturing content. Then keep the sponsor informed throughout the run-up with a short update every couple of weeks, even when nothing has gone wrong. Silence makes sponsors nervous. The goal is for them to feel, from the first week, that they are working with an organized team.

It helps to think in four phases: before launch (kickoff, assets, approvals), the run-up (publishing content, briefing staff, testing lead journeys), live delivery (managing sponsor touchpoints and capturing content) and immediate follow-up (thanking the sponsor within a day or two and gathering data). This discipline rarely appears in the proposal, but sponsors feel it.

Sponsors notice the visible activation, and they notice the invisible professionalism behind it. Deliver branding accurately and on time. Treat sponsor representatives like important guests, because that is what they are. Communicate proactively when something goes wrong instead of hoping they will not notice. And capture photos, proof and feedback while the event is live, because you cannot recreate those moments afterward.

What you want to avoid is the pattern many sponsors know too well: the team takes the money and disappears. A sponsor who has to chase you for basic information will remember that much longer than they remember the size of their logo.

A simple checklist keeps this from depending on anyone's memory: every deliverable mapped to an owner and a due date; logo files, copy and brand approvals complete; sponsor contacts clear on who to call on the day; any lead or data process tested and compliant; content capture responsibilities assigned; and a debrief date already in the calendar. The more you settle before the event, the more room you have to handle the surprises that will inevitably happen.

Step 9: Measure what you promised

If you promised value, now you have to show whether you delivered it.

The most important word in this step is "before." Agree the KPIs before the activation starts. If you wait until after the event to decide what to measure, some of the evidence will already be gone, and you will end up writing a story instead of a report. Sponsors can tell the difference. When success is defined up front, the whole team knows what needs to be counted, captured, photographed or documented. And remember where those KPIs came from: the discovery question about how the sponsor would judge success. The whole process connects.

Measurement should follow the sponsor's objective. For awareness, that means reach, impressions, content views, visibility delivered and media mentions. For engagement: participation, dwell time, entries, scans and interaction rates. For lead generation: opt-ins, qualified leads, appointments and follow-up actions. For reputation or impact: stories, sentiment, testimonials and beneficiary outcomes. For relationships: the quality of VIP attendance, hosted meetings and stakeholder feedback. The wrong KPI can make a good partnership look weak. A sponsor who invested to generate leads does not care how many impressions their logo received. Measure what they actually paid to achieve.

A report that sells the future

A strong sponsor report starts with the objectives you agreed and shows performance against each one. Use a concise mix of numbers, visuals, screenshots and photos (this is where all that content you captured during activation pays off), but also explain what the numbers mean. Raw data with no interpretation leaves the sponsor to do your job for you.

Finish with what you learned and a recommendation for what the next partnership could improve or expand. That final section is where the report stops being a record of the past and starts helping you sell the future.

Skip the vanity metrics, do not hide what fell short and send the report while the results are still fresh. Sponsors trust teams that are honest about what did not work.

Step 10: Renew the relationship

Sponsorship should not restart from zero every year. The strongest teams start the next conversation while the evidence and the memories are still fresh.

Send the thank-you quickly, then move to a commercial follow-up. Review the results together, ask what worked and what they would change, and show them what the next partnership could look like. Never end with "let us know if you want to do it again." End with an option.

A good debrief has a simple agenda. Revisit the original objectives and the reported results. Ask what the sponsor valued most and what they valued least; that one question can reshape your next offer. Discuss any friction or missed opportunities honestly. Then ask the question that matters: what should happen next? Renewal, expansion or a different role? Before you leave the room, agree who owns the follow-up and when it happens.

Renewal does not always mean repeating the same package. You can repeat it, keeping the same role with stronger planning and clearer targets. You can expand it, with more investment, more inventory or a broader scope. You can upgrade the sponsor into a named role, category ownership or a title partnership. Or you can move to a multi-project relationship that spans several events, campaigns or chapter activities. For volunteer organizations, that last option is often the strongest, because it gives the sponsor a year with you instead of an evening.

The best renewal is usually the easiest to sell, because the sponsor already knows what working with you feels like. What kills it is waiting until next year's project is suddenly urgent and then sending the same sponsor the same cold request all over again. A good event does not guarantee renewal. A good follow-up does.

The whole system on one page

Here is the complete system in ten short phrases: clarify the case, find the right fit, learn what matters, shape the package, price the value, make the case, lock the terms, deliver well, show the results and open the next deal.

None of these stages works especially well on its own. A beautiful proposal cannot rescue a badly defined opportunity. A great sponsor cannot rescue poor activation. Strong results cannot create a renewal if nobody reports them. Put simply: a clear opportunity, smart targeting, sponsor-centered design and disciplined delivery add up to partnerships worth renewing. Sponsorship becomes much more predictable once you treat it as a process rather than a lucky ask.

If you take one idea from this post, let it be this: sponsors renew when three things are true. They can see the value, they trust the team and they believe the next partnership will be even better than the last. Getting a sponsor once is useful. Building a relationship that improves every year is far more valuable.

So here is a small assignment for this week. Pick one project you are working on right now and answer the six questions from the start of this post. Who can you help a sponsor reach? What result could you create for them? What proof do you have? Which sponsors are a natural fit? What could they do with you beyond a logo? And how would you measure success? If you can answer all six, you are ready to book your first discovery call. Finish strong, report honestly and start the next conversation while the results are still alive.

Full slides

Things I've Learned From Bad Managers

2026-09-23T09:18:00.000+03:00

I've had good managers, difficult managers, and managers who taught me more about what not to do than they probably ever intended. Over the course of my career, I've worked with people who approached management in completely different ways. Some gave me the freedom to do my job and trusted me to make decisions. Others wanted to be involved in everything. Some knew how to give difficult feedback without making it personal, while others seemed to believe that authority gave them permission to speak to people however they wanted. Some understood that their job was to help their team succeed, while others seemed to view their team primarily as an extension of themselves.

At the time, some of those experiences were frustrating, exhausting, and occasionally difficult to understand. Looking back, however, I can see that they taught me a great deal. Good managers taught me what effective leadership looks like, but bad managers taught me to pay attention to the things that can quietly destroy trust, motivation, and performance inside an organization. They made me think more carefully about communication, accountability, authority, recognition, and the kind of working environment I want to create when I'm responsible for other people.

I've also come to realize that being a bad manager doesn't necessarily mean being a bad person. Some people become managers because they were excellent at their jobs, without ever learning how to manage people. Others inherit management styles from the people who managed them. Some are insecure about their position, some are overwhelmed by the responsibility, and some genuinely believe that being a good manager means maintaining strict control. Understanding where bad management comes from doesn't excuse it, but it does make it easier to recognize.

The most useful thing I've taken from those experiences is that management is often defined by the small things. It's how you react when someone disagrees with you. It's whether you give people credit. It's whether you communicate a change in direction or simply expect everyone to somehow know about it. It's whether people feel comfortable telling you that something has gone wrong. It's whether employees become more confident and capable while working with you, or whether they gradually become more cautious and disengaged.

Some of the most important lessons I've learned about leadership came from managers who demonstrated exactly what I didn't want to become.

Authority Doesn't Make You a Leader

One of the first things bad managers taught me is that having authority and being a leader are two very different things. A manager has a title, a reporting structure, and usually some degree of decision-making power. None of those things automatically make someone a leader, and having the ability to tell people what to do doesn't necessarily mean that people respect your judgment or trust your decisions.

I've worked with people who seemed to believe that because they were the manager, their opinion automatically carried more weight. Discussions became declarations, questions became challenges, and disagreement became something that needed to be corrected. Instead of seeing their position as a responsibility, they treated it as proof that they were right. The hierarchy became more important than the issue being discussed.

That approach can produce compliance, but compliance isn't the same as commitment. People can follow instructions because they have to while becoming increasingly disengaged from the person giving them. They can attend meetings, complete tasks, and meet deadlines while quietly deciding that there is no point in contributing ideas or challenging decisions. Eventually, the manager may have a team that appears very easy to manage, but only because everyone has learned that speaking honestly isn't worth the effort.

I've learned that a title gives you authority, but what you do with that authority determines whether you earn respect. A good manager doesn't need to constantly remind people that they're in charge. Their behavior should make their leadership obvious.

Micromanagement Doesn't Make People Better

One of the most frustrating management styles I've encountered is micromanagement. It usually begins with something that sounds reasonable. A manager wants visibility. They want to make sure the quality is good. They want to understand what is happening. None of those things are inherently problematic. The problem begins when visibility turns into control and control starts replacing trust.

I've experienced situations where someone was given responsibility for a project but wasn't actually given the freedom to manage it. Every decision needed approval, every piece of work was reviewed, and every small detail became an opportunity for intervention. Sometimes the manager wasn't even correcting something that was objectively wrong. They simply wanted the work done their way.

The result is predictable. When people realize that their judgment isn't trusted, they eventually stop using it. Why spend time thinking through a solution if you know the manager is going to change it anyway? Why take initiative if every decision requires approval? Why accept responsibility if you don't actually have the authority to make decisions?

I've learned that you cannot give someone responsibility while simultaneously taking away their ability to exercise judgment. If you hire someone because they're experienced and capable, you have to give them enough room to demonstrate that capability. Otherwise, you aren't developing an employee. You're training them to wait for instructions.

Good management requires involvement, but it also requires knowing when to step back. People need clear expectations, context, resources, and support. They don't need someone constantly standing over their shoulder.

If Everything Is Urgent, Nothing Is Important

I've worked with managers who seemed incapable of distinguishing between something that was genuinely important and something that had simply become urgent in their mind. Everything needed to happen immediately. Every email required a response. Every new request became the highest priority, even if another project had been identified as the priority the day before.

This creates a strange kind of workplace where everyone is constantly busy but very few people feel like they're making meaningful progress. Employees spend their time switching between tasks, responding to interruptions, and trying to figure out which of several supposedly critical priorities actually matters most.

I've learned that prioritization is one of the most important responsibilities a manager has. If everything is important, then nothing has been prioritized. A manager's job isn't simply to add more tasks to someone's workload. It is to help the team understand where its limited time and energy will have the greatest impact.

This becomes particularly important when priorities change. Businesses change, circumstances change, and sometimes something genuinely more important comes up. That's normal. The problem is when a manager constantly changes direction without acknowledging what has changed or what should now be deprioritized.

You can't keep adding new priorities without removing something else and expect people to maintain the same quality of work. Eventually, something breaks. Usually, it is the employee who gets blamed for not doing everything that was asked of them.

Poor Communication Creates Problems That Don't Need to Exist

Some of the worst workplace problems I've experienced weren't actually difficult problems. They were communication problems that could have been avoided with a five-minute conversation.

Someone wasn't told about a decision. A deadline changed but the person responsible didn't know. Two people received different instructions. An important piece of context was left out. A manager made an assumption that everyone else was supposed to understand without ever explaining it. Then, when the result wasn't what they expected, the person doing the work was questioned about why they hadn't known.

I've learned that managers often underestimate how much information they have simply because of their position. They are included in conversations that their teams aren't part of. They hear discussions about strategy, organizational changes, financial pressures, and priorities that may never reach the people responsible for executing the work.

If you have information that affects someone's ability to do their job, communicating that information is part of your responsibility. Employees cannot execute information they don't have, and they cannot consistently meet expectations that haven't been clearly explained.

One of the most frustrating things about poor management is being held accountable for information you were never given. It creates an environment where employees stop focusing on the actual work and start trying to anticipate what their manager might have meant. That's not productivity. That's guesswork.

Moving the Goalposts Destroys Trust

Another lesson I've learned from bad managers is how damaging it is when expectations change without acknowledgment. You can complete something according to the brief you were given, meet the deadline you were given, and follow the process you were instructed to follow, only to discover afterward that your manager expected something completely different.

Sometimes priorities genuinely change, and there is nothing wrong with that. The problem is pretending they didn't change. A good manager can say, "The situation has changed, so we need to approach this differently." That gives everyone an opportunity to adjust.

A bad manager can change the expectation and then behave as though that was always the expectation.

Over time, this destroys trust. Employees begin to realize that doing what they were asked doesn't necessarily mean they will be considered successful. They start trying to anticipate what the manager might want rather than simply executing the agreed plan. Every task becomes an exercise in reading between the lines.

That isn't a healthy way to work. People need to know that the rules of the game are reasonably stable. If something changes, tell them. If you change your mind, say so. Changing direction isn't a leadership failure. Failing to communicate the change is.

Don't Make People Afraid to Bring You Bad News

I've learned that you can tell a lot about a manager by what happens when something goes wrong. Does someone feel comfortable walking into their office and saying, "We have a problem," or does everyone immediately start trying to figure out how to hide it?

Bad managers often create environments where people are afraid of bad news. The irony is that this doesn't eliminate problems. It simply delays the moment when the manager finds out about them.

If someone notices that a campaign isn't working but is afraid to raise the issue, the organization may continue wasting money. If an employee realizes that a deadline is unrealistic but doesn't feel safe saying so, the deadline will eventually be missed. If someone makes a mistake and knows they'll be humiliated for admitting it, they may try to fix it quietly or hope nobody notices.

Fear is terrible for information flow.

Managers need accurate information to make good decisions. If employees only tell them what they think the manager wants to hear, then the manager is operating with incomplete information while believing they have a clear picture of what's happening.

I've learned that one of the most valuable things a manager can create is an environment where people can tell the truth, particularly when the truth is inconvenient. You want your employees to tell you about problems while they're still small enough to solve.

Credit Should Follow the Work

Few things are more demoralizing than doing the work and then watching someone else receive the recognition for it. I've seen managers who were very visible when things went well but somehow became difficult to find when things went wrong. They were happy to present their team's achievements to senior leadership, but the people who actually did the work were barely mentioned.

Over time, that changes how people behave. Employees begin to realize that doing excellent work doesn't necessarily mean they'll receive recognition for it. They become less willing to volunteer ideas, take initiative, or go beyond what is required. Eventually, some people decide that the safest approach is to do exactly what they're told and nothing more.

Good managers understand that making their team visible doesn't diminish them. If someone came up with an idea, give them credit. If someone led a project, let them present it. If someone solved a difficult problem, acknowledge their contribution.

I've always thought that one of the clearest signs of a confident manager is their willingness to make other people look good. You don't become less important because someone else gets recognized. In fact, your ability to help other people succeed is one of the most important things that makes you valuable as a manager.

Blame Is Not Accountability

Bad managers often talk about accountability, but what they actually practice is blame. When something goes wrong, their first question is often, "Who is responsible?" rather than, "What happened?"

Accountability is important. People should be responsible for their work and their decisions. But accountability isn't about finding someone to punish. It's about understanding what happened, determining what could have been done differently, and making sure the organization learns from the experience.

A blame-oriented culture creates defensive employees. People start saving emails, documenting conversations, avoiding risks, and worrying more about proving that something wasn't their fault than solving the actual problem. Eventually, everyone becomes more concerned with protecting themselves than improving the work.

Sometimes someone genuinely made a mistake. That's part of working with people. The question is what happens next.

A good manager can hold someone accountable while still asking whether the surrounding process contributed to the mistake. Were the instructions clear? Were the resources available? Was the timeline realistic? Did priorities conflict? Was there information the employee didn't have?

I've learned that the best managers don't avoid accountability. They simply understand that accountability is more useful when it leads to learning rather than fear.

Favoritism Is More Visible Than Managers Think

Managers often believe they are better at hiding favoritism than they actually are. Teams notice who gets the interesting projects, who receives more flexibility, whose mistakes are overlooked, who gets invited into certain conversations, and whose opinions seem to carry more weight.

Even when nobody says anything, people are paying attention.

Favoritism is particularly damaging because it changes people's understanding of how success works within an organization. If employees believe that performance, effort, and good judgment are rewarded, they are likely to invest in those things. If they believe that relationships with management matter more, they'll naturally start investing their energy somewhere else.

Fairness doesn't necessarily mean treating everyone identically. Different people have different responsibilities, strengths, needs, and circumstances. A manager can make different decisions for different employees and still be fair.

The problem is when people can't understand the principles behind those decisions.

Once employees believe that the system is unfair, motivation becomes much harder to maintain. Why work harder if the outcome appears to be determined by who you know rather than what you contribute?

You Don't Need to Win Every Conversation

Some managers treat every disagreement like a competition. They need the final word, they need to prove that they were right, and they need everyone else to accept their reasoning even when the decision itself isn't particularly important.

I've learned how exhausting this can be.

There are certainly times when a manager has to make the final decision. That's part of the role. But not every disagreement needs a winner. Sometimes two people simply see something differently. Sometimes the employee has information the manager doesn't have. Sometimes the manager has context the employee doesn't have. Sometimes the best answer comes from combining both perspectives.

The ability to say, "You may have a point," is an underrated management skill. So is the ability to say, "I was wrong."

I've learned that admitting a mistake doesn't make a manager look weak. In many cases, it makes them more credible. People don't expect their managers to be perfect. They expect them to be honest.

A manager who can change their mind when presented with better information is far more useful than one who protects their ego at the expense of a good decision.

Being Difficult Is Not the Same as Having High Standards

I've encountered managers who seemed to take pride in being difficult. They were demanding, difficult to please, and reluctant to praise anyone. They seemed to believe that pressure produced better work and that being tough was evidence of high standards.

It isn't.

High standards are about the quality of the work. Being difficult is about how you treat people while pursuing those standards.

You can expect excellent work without humiliating someone. You can challenge an employee without insulting them. You can reject an idea without making the person who proposed it feel incompetent. You can tell someone that something isn't good enough while still making it clear that you believe they are capable of doing better.

I've learned that some managers use "high standards" as an excuse for poor behavior because it sounds more professional than admitting that they don't know how to give constructive feedback.

There is nothing wrong with expecting people to do excellent work. In fact, good employees often appreciate high standards because they want to be proud of what they produce. But excellence doesn't require cruelty, and difficult behavior doesn't automatically make someone a demanding or effective leader.

When People Stop Talking, Pay Attention

One of the most interesting things I've noticed about bad management is that the warning signs aren't always obvious. Sometimes the biggest warning sign is silence.

People stop contributing in meetings. They stop suggesting ideas. They stop asking questions. They stop challenging decisions. They stop volunteering for projects. They do exactly what they're told and nothing more.

A manager might interpret this as a sign that the team is easy to manage. It may actually be a sign that the team has given up.

I've learned that engagement isn't simply about whether people show up and complete their tasks. It's also about whether they feel that their judgment matters. When people believe their ideas will be dismissed, they eventually stop offering them. When they believe their concerns won't be taken seriously, they eventually stop raising them. When they believe their effort won't be recognized, they eventually stop giving extra effort.

Silence can be mistaken for agreement, but it isn't always agreement. Sometimes it's resignation.

That's why good managers should pay attention not only to what people are saying, but also to what they have stopped saying.

Don't Confuse Loyalty With Silence

Bad managers sometimes say they want loyal employees, but what they really want is obedient employees. There's an important difference.

Loyalty doesn't mean agreeing with everything your manager says. It doesn't mean staying silent when something is wrong. It doesn't mean protecting a manager from information they don't want to hear.

In a healthy workplace, loyalty can actually include disagreement. You can care deeply about an organization and still believe that a particular decision is wrong. You can respect your manager and still challenge their thinking. You can be committed to the team while telling someone that you think the current approach isn't working.

I've learned that some of the most valuable employees are the ones willing to have uncomfortable conversations because they care enough about the work to do so.

A manager who interprets every disagreement as disloyalty will eventually surround themselves with people who know better than to speak honestly. At that point, the manager may feel very supported, but what they actually have is a team that has learned to keep its opinions to itself.

Your Team Is Watching What You Do

One of the biggest lessons bad managers taught me is that people pay far more attention to a manager's behavior than to their words.

You can tell your team that communication is important, but if you don't communicate, they'll notice. You can tell people that mistakes are acceptable, but if you punish the next person who makes one, they'll notice. You can talk about teamwork while taking credit for everyone's work, and they'll notice. You can talk about work-life balance while sending messages at all hours and expecting immediate responses, and they'll notice.

People believe behavior more than they believe policies.

That's why leadership is so difficult. You can't simply tell people what values matter. You demonstrate those values through your everyday decisions.

A manager who wants their team to communicate openly needs to communicate openly themselves. A manager who wants accountability needs to accept accountability. A manager who wants people to respect boundaries needs to respect them too.

Your team is always watching, even when you don't realize it.

Sometimes the Best Lesson Is Knowing When to Leave

Perhaps the hardest lesson bad managers have taught me is that not every situation can be fixed.

When you're invested in your work, it's easy to believe that if you work harder, communicate better, become more patient, or prove your value, eventually the situation will improve. Sometimes it does. Sometimes relationships change, managers grow, organizations recognize problems, and difficult periods pass.

But sometimes they don't.

There are situations where the culture is deeply embedded, leadership isn't interested in changing, or the relationship has deteriorated to the point where no amount of additional effort will make it healthy. I've learned that there is a point where staying doesn't demonstrate resilience. It simply means you've stopped listening to yourself.

Leaving a difficult environment isn't necessarily failure. Sometimes it's the most rational career decision you can make. You can learn from an experience without remaining in it indefinitely, and you can appreciate what a job gave you while still recognizing that it is no longer the right place for you.

Sometimes the most valuable thing a bad manager teaches you is what you will no longer accept in your next chapter.

The Manager You Don't Want to Become

Perhaps the most useful thing about working with bad managers is that they give you a very clear picture of what not to become. You learn not to micromanage people because you remember what it felt like to have someone constantly looking over your shoulder. You learn to communicate clearly because you remember how frustrating it was to work with incomplete information. You learn to give credit because you remember what it felt like when your work disappeared behind someone else's name. You learn to accept disagreement because you remember what happened when disagreement wasn't welcome.

Most importantly, you learn that management isn't primarily about having power over people. It's about having responsibility for the environment in which those people work.

I've had managers who taught me what leadership looks like, and I've had managers who taught me what it doesn't. I'm grateful for both experiences, although I certainly wouldn't want to repeat all of them. The good managers gave me examples worth following. The bad managers gave me boundaries worth remembering.

Over the years, I've started to think that your management philosophy is built from both experiences. You take the things you admired from the people who managed you well, and you consciously reject the behaviors that made you feel frustrated, undervalued, or powerless. Eventually, those experiences become part of your own understanding of what leadership should be.

You realize that you don't have to manage people the way you've been managed. You don't have to repeat the same patterns simply because they're familiar. You can choose to communicate differently, give people more trust, listen more carefully, recognize contributions, admit when you're wrong, and create an environment where people can disagree with you without worrying about the consequences.

That's perhaps the greatest lesson bad managers have given me. They have shown me that the way you treat people at work matters just as much as the work itself.

People may forget the campaigns, projects, presentations, meetings, targets, and deadlines. They may even forget exactly what you said to them. But they will probably remember whether they felt trusted or constantly monitored, respected or dismissed, supported or undermined.

They will remember whether working with you made them feel more capable or less capable.

And eventually, if you become responsible for managing other people, that becomes your responsibility.

The goal isn't to become a perfect manager. Nobody is. The goal is to be conscious of the effect you have on the people around you, to learn from your own mistakes, and to make sure that the people who work with you are better off for having done so.

I've learned a lot from good managers about the kind of leader I want to be. I've learned just as much from bad managers about the kind of leader I never want to become. And while the lessons from the good ones are easier to remember with gratitude, the lessons from the bad ones have probably stayed with me just as strongly.

Sometimes the best management lesson is not something someone tells you.

Sometimes it's the feeling you leave a workplace with, and the decision you make that you never want to make someone else feel that way.

Things I've Learned From Good Managers

2026-09-21T10:14:00.000+03:00

I've had quite a few managers throughout my career. Some were good, some were difficult, and some were memorable for reasons that had very little to do with management. I've worked with people who taught me exactly the kind of manager I wanted to become, and others who taught me exactly what I didn't want to become. After more than a decade of working across different organizations, industries, countries, and teams, I've realized that some of the most important lessons I've learned about leadership didn't come from books, courses, or management frameworks. They came from simply watching how good managers behaved.

The best managers I've worked with rarely taught me through grand speeches or carefully designed leadership philosophies. More often, they taught me through small, consistent things. They listened when I spoke. They trusted me with something important. They gave me room to figure things out. They told me when I'd done something well, but they also told me when I'd missed the mark. They didn't make every problem about themselves, and they didn't need to remind everyone that they were the person in charge.

Over time, I've come to believe that being a good manager isn't necessarily about being the smartest person in the room. It isn't about having all the answers, being charismatic, or knowing exactly what to do in every situation. Some of the best managers I've worked with were perfectly comfortable admitting when they didn't know something. What made them good was their ability to create an environment where other people could do their best work, develop their abilities, make mistakes, and gradually become more capable and confident.

That has probably been the most important lesson of all: good management is less about managing people's work and more about creating the conditions in which people can succeed.

You Don't Have to Prove That You're the Boss

One of the clearest differences I've noticed between good managers and insecure managers is how they handle authority. Insecure managers often seem to need everyone to know that they're in charge. They remind people of their position, insert themselves into conversations that don't necessarily require their involvement, control decisions that could easily be delegated, and sometimes confuse being respected with being feared. A disagreement can become a challenge to their authority, and a challenge to their authority can become something they feel they need to win.

Good managers don't seem to have that need. They understand that their position already gives them authority, and they don't need to constantly demonstrate it. Instead, they focus on what they can accomplish with that authority.

I've always respected managers who could walk into a room without needing to dominate it. They could listen to an idea from someone more junior without feeling threatened by it. They could change their mind without treating that change as a loss of status. They could say, "I don't know," without feeling that those three words somehow made them less capable.

There is a certain confidence in not needing to prove your importance. The best managers I've encountered weren't constantly trying to establish that they were the most important person in the room. They were often more interested in making sure everyone else had an opportunity to contribute. That is a very different kind of leadership, and I think it is one of the clearest signs that someone is genuinely comfortable in their role.

Trust People Before They Have Earned Your Complete Trust

There is a strange contradiction at the heart of management. You want people to prove that they're capable before giving them responsibility, but people often become capable because you gave them responsibility in the first place. If you wait until someone is completely ready before giving them an opportunity, you may never give them the opportunity at all.

Good managers understand this. They don't throw someone into the deep end without support, but they also don't keep someone in the shallow end forever because they're afraid of what might happen. At different points in my career, managers have trusted me with things I wasn't entirely sure I was ready for. Looking back, some of those opportunities became important turning points. I learned because I had to. I asked better questions because someone was relying on me. I became more confident because someone had already demonstrated confidence in me.

Of course, trust shouldn't be blind. Good managers pay attention to how people respond to responsibility. They give people opportunities, but they also provide context, support, and feedback. They don't simply say, "Figure it out," and disappear. There's a difference between throwing someone into a problem and giving someone ownership of a problem. The first can feel like abandonment. The second can feel like growth.

That distinction has stayed with me. When you give someone meaningful responsibility and enough support to succeed, you aren't just getting something done. You're helping that person develop a stronger sense of ownership and confidence. Sometimes the best way to discover what someone is capable of is to give them the opportunity to find out themselves.

Give People Room to Do Their Jobs

One of the hardest things for a manager to learn is that their way isn't necessarily the only way. If you've been successful at something, it can be tempting to assume that the methods that worked for you should work for everyone else. You start giving detailed instructions, rewriting people's work, becoming involved in every decision, and eventually trying to control every step of a process. At that point, you're no longer really managing people. You're managing their every move.

Good managers know when to step back. They explain what needs to be achieved, why it matters, what the constraints are, and then allow the person responsible for the work to determine how to get there. This becomes especially important when you're working with experienced people. If you've hired someone because they're good at marketing, design, finance, technology, operations, or any other discipline, it doesn't make much sense to spend your time telling them exactly how to do the job you hired them to do.

Good managers don't confuse visibility with control. They don't need to be copied on every email or included in every conversation just to feel involved. They care about outcomes, and they trust capable people to make decisions along the way.

I've learned that autonomy isn't the absence of management. In many cases, it is evidence of good management. When people know what is expected of them and feel trusted to deliver it, they don't need someone constantly looking over their shoulder. They can focus on doing the work rather than managing their manager.

Tell People When They're Doing Something Well

This sounds obvious, but it is surprisingly easy to forget. Many workplaces are structured around identifying problems. Something goes wrong, and suddenly everyone knows about it. A deadline is missed, a number is down, a client complains, or something wasn't done correctly, and attention immediately turns toward figuring out what happened.

When things go well, however, people often move on without saying much.

Good managers notice. They don't necessarily give constant praise or turn every small accomplishment into a celebration. They simply acknowledge good work. A sincere "That was well handled" can mean a lot, particularly when it is specific and genuine.

People want to know that their work was seen. They want to know that the effort they put into something wasn't invisible. Recognition doesn't have to be elaborate, and it shouldn't feel manufactured. Sometimes a manager taking thirty seconds to tell someone that they appreciated how they handled a difficult situation can have more impact than a formal employee recognition program.

I've carried that lesson with me because I think people sometimes underestimate how little effort recognition requires compared with how much it can mean to the person receiving it. When someone does something well, tell them. Not because you're trying to manipulate them with praise, but because good work deserves to be noticed.

Feedback Should Help, Not Humiliate

Everyone needs feedback, including managers. The question is what happens when that feedback is difficult.

I've learned a lot from managers who could tell me that I'd made a mistake without making me feel like I was a mistake. That distinction matters. There is a way to be direct without being disrespectful, a way to challenge someone's thinking without attacking their intelligence, and a way to explain that something isn't good enough without making the person feel worthless.

Good managers separate the work from the person. They can say, "This isn't working," without communicating, explicitly or implicitly, "You aren't good." They don't avoid difficult conversations, but they understand that the purpose of feedback is to improve the work and help the person develop.

Good feedback also needs to be useful. If all you do is point out the problem, you've identified a problem. If you explain what needs to change, why it matters, and how the person can approach it differently next time, you've actually helped them improve.

The best feedback I've received wasn't necessarily the feedback I enjoyed hearing. Some of it was uncomfortable. But I could tell that the person giving it wanted me to become better rather than simply wanting to make sure I knew I'd made a mistake. That difference completely changes how feedback is received.

Don't Take Credit for Your Team's Work

I've always noticed how managers talk about their team's achievements. Some managers say, "We did this." Others say, "My team did this." And some somehow manage to make every accomplishment sound as though they personally did the work.

The good ones understand that leadership isn't a competition for credit.

When their team succeeds, they make sure the people who did the work are recognized. They don't disappear when something goes wrong and suddenly appear when it's time to present the results. They understand that their job is partly to create opportunities for other people to succeed and then make sure those people receive appropriate recognition.

There is something powerful about a manager who can say, "This was Sarah's idea," or "Mohammad led this project," and then let that person explain it. That doesn't diminish the manager. In fact, it demonstrates confidence. It shows that they are secure enough to make other people visible.

I've come to believe that a manager's reputation should grow because their team is successful, not because their team disappears behind them. If you consistently make other people look good, people will eventually recognize what you're doing. You don't have to take credit for every achievement to demonstrate that you're leading effectively.

Take Responsibility When Things Go Wrong

This is probably one of the biggest lessons I've learned from good managers. A manager has influence over a team, which means they also have some responsibility for what happens within that team.

When something goes wrong, the easiest response is to find someone to blame. Good managers resist that instinct. They ask what happened. Was the expectation clear? Was the person properly supported? Was the deadline realistic? Were there competing priorities? Did something change? Was there information the person didn't have? Did the manager fail to communicate something important?

Sometimes the answer really is that someone made a mistake. People make mistakes, and accountability matters. But good managers don't treat blame as the end of the investigation. They look at the system around the mistake and try to understand why it happened.

If the same problem keeps happening, perhaps the problem isn't individual incompetence. Perhaps the process is broken. Perhaps expectations aren't clear. Perhaps people are being asked to do too much with too little time or too few resources.

That doesn't mean accountability disappears. Quite the opposite. Good managers understand that accountability and blame aren't the same thing. Accountability asks, "What happened, what can we learn, and how do we prevent this from happening again?" Blame often stops at, "Whose fault is this?"

The first approach creates progress. The second often creates fear.

Don't Make People Guess What You Expect

One of the most frustrating experiences at work is trying to meet expectations that nobody has actually explained. You deliver something and discover that your manager wanted something different. You meet the deadline, only to discover that another deadline was apparently more important. You prioritize one project because it seems urgent, only to find out later that your manager considered something else the priority.

Good managers communicate expectations clearly. They don't assume that because something is obvious to them, it must be obvious to everyone else.

This becomes even more important as teams grow. A manager may have information that their employees don't have. They may understand organizational priorities, financial pressures, strategic changes, or internal considerations that aren't visible to the people doing the work.

If you want someone to make good decisions, give them enough context to make those decisions.

People shouldn't have to become mind readers to succeed at their jobs.

I've found that many workplace frustrations aren't actually caused by people being incapable of doing their jobs. They're caused by unclear expectations, poor communication, or priorities that constantly shift without explanation. A good manager doesn't eliminate all uncertainty, because that's impossible. But they do everything they can to make sure their team understands what matters and why.

Let People Disagree With You

I've learned more from managers who allowed disagreement than from managers who demanded agreement.

A good manager doesn't surround themselves with people who always say yes. They want people who will say, "I don't think that's going to work." They want someone who will point out the risk they haven't considered. They want people who can challenge assumptions without turning every disagreement into a personal conflict.

Of course, disagreement needs to be constructive. A team where everyone argues about everything isn't particularly effective either. But there should be room for different opinions, particularly when those opinions are based on experience or evidence.

I've always believed that if a manager is never challenged, they either have an unusually agreeable team or a team that doesn't feel comfortable challenging them. The second possibility should concern any leader.

You don't hire smart people so they can spend their time agreeing with you. You hire them because they bring knowledge, experience, creativity, and judgment that you don't necessarily have yourself. A good manager understands that disagreement can make a decision stronger.

Sometimes the manager will still make the final decision. That's part of the job. But people should be able to disagree without feeling that they have somehow damaged their relationship with their manager.

Don't Punish People for Being Honest

This is closely related to disagreement, but it goes deeper. People will tell you the truth when they believe the truth is safe.

If every bad piece of news is punished, eventually people learn to hide bad news. If employees are criticized for raising concerns, eventually they stop raising concerns. If people are made to feel stupid for asking questions, eventually they stop asking questions.

The manager may then think everything is going smoothly.

It isn't. They've simply stopped hearing about the problems.

Good managers create an environment where people can say, "I made a mistake," "I don't understand," "I disagree," or "I think we have a problem." That isn't weakness. It's information.

And managers need information much more than they need employees who pretend everything is fine.

I've seen how quickly a team can become cautious when people are afraid of the reaction they'll receive. Instead of experimenting, they play it safe. Instead of raising an issue early, they wait until it becomes unavoidable. Instead of asking for clarification, they guess.

Eventually, everyone spends more energy protecting themselves than doing their jobs.

Good managers understand that honesty is one of the most valuable things a team can give them, and they work hard not to punish people for providing it.

Understand That People Have Lives Outside Work

A good manager remembers that employees are people before they are employees. They have families, relationships, responsibilities, ambitions, worries, interests, and entire lives that exist outside the hours they spend working.

You don't need to know every detail of someone's personal life, and you don't need to be friends with your employees. But you should understand that the person sitting in front of you isn't a productivity machine.

Sometimes someone's performance changes because something is happening in their life. Sometimes someone needs flexibility. Sometimes someone is simply exhausted. Sometimes someone is dealing with something that has nothing to do with work but inevitably affects how they show up at work.

Good managers can't solve all of those problems, nor should they try. But they can recognize that people aren't perfectly consistent machines.

There is a difference between having standards and having no humanity. The best managers I've worked with managed to maintain both. They could hold people accountable while still treating them like human beings.

That balance is harder than it sounds, but it is one of the things that separates management from simply supervising people.

Treat Experienced People Like Experienced People

One of the fastest ways to frustrate a capable employee is to hire them for their expertise and then refuse to let them use it.

Experienced people don't need constant supervision. They need clarity, resources, context, and the freedom to apply their judgment. That doesn't mean they are always right. Experience doesn't make anyone infallible. But if you've hired someone because they know what they're doing, trust that knowledge.

I've always appreciated managers who were willing to say, "You know more about this than I do, so what do you recommend?" That sentence doesn't make the manager look weak. It makes them look smart.

Knowing when someone else has greater expertise is itself a leadership skill.

A good manager doesn't have to be the expert in everything their team does. Their responsibility is to build a team where the necessary expertise exists and then create an environment where that expertise can actually be used.

Micromanaging an experienced person doesn't make the organization safer. It often makes it slower.

Good Managers Make You Want to Become Better

Perhaps the biggest thing I've learned is that a good manager doesn't just help you perform better. They make you think differently about yourself.

They give you opportunities that stretch you. They encourage you to take on things that initially seem beyond your capabilities. They point out strengths you hadn't recognized. They challenge weaknesses without defining you by them. Eventually, you find yourself doing things you didn't think you could do.

Years later, you might not remember the exact conversation where a manager encouraged you to take on that project. You may not remember precisely what they said. But you remember that someone believed you could do it.

That's powerful.

I've had managers who influenced my career without necessarily realizing how much influence they had. Sometimes it was an opportunity. Sometimes it was a piece of advice. Sometimes it was simply someone giving me more responsibility than I expected to receive.

Good managers often don't realize how much their behavior stays with people.

The best ones aren't simply extracting performance from their employees. They're helping those employees become more capable versions of themselves.

You Don't Need to Have All the Answers

This may be one of the most important lessons of all. Managers are still learning. They make mistakes, change their minds, misunderstand situations, and sometimes make decisions that don't work.

The good ones don't pretend otherwise.

There's something reassuring about a manager who can say, "I'm not sure yet." It creates space for other people to contribute. It makes it easier for someone else to say, "I have an idea," or "I looked into this and found something that might help."

Leadership isn't about eliminating uncertainty. It's about helping people navigate it.

Sometimes the best thing a manager can say is, "I don't know, but let's figure it out."

That sentence can be much more useful than a confident answer that happens to be wrong.

I've learned that people don't necessarily expect their managers to know everything. What they want is someone who can make decisions, provide direction, listen to others, and stay calm when the answer isn't obvious.

There is a difference between confidence and certainty. Good managers don't need to pretend they have certainty in order to demonstrate confidence.

People Remember How You Made Them Feel

This is probably the lesson that has stayed with me the longest.

Years into your career, you won't remember every meeting. You won't remember every email, quarterly target, presentation, or performance review. But you'll remember the manager who trusted you when you weren't sure of yourself. You'll remember the manager who gave you a chance. You'll remember the person who told you that you were capable of more.

And unfortunately, you'll also remember the people who made you feel small.

Management has a human impact that doesn't always appear on performance reports. A manager can make someone more confident or less confident. They can make someone more ambitious or more cautious. They can make someone excited to come to work or quietly start looking for another job.

That's an enormous responsibility.

I've come to realize that managers often underestimate how much their behavior affects the people around them. A manager may forget a conversation within a few days, while the employee remembers it years later.

Sometimes the difference between someone staying stuck and taking the next step in their career is a manager saying, "I think you're ready."

That's why management matters.

The Managers We Become

One of the interesting things about having good managers is that you eventually start carrying pieces of them with you. You borrow their habits. You remember their advice. You copy the things they did well. Sometimes you find yourself responding to a situation and realize that you're using something you once learned from them.

That's probably one of the greatest compliments a manager can receive.

Not that their employee remembers their title or how many people reported to them, but that something about the way they worked became part of someone else's approach to work.

I've also learned that you don't have to copy everything a good manager did. Every person is different, every team is different, and every situation requires its own approach. The goal isn't to become the manager you once had. It's to understand what made them effective and figure out what that looks like in your own personality.

Because eventually, if you're lucky enough to manage people yourself, you inherit the same responsibility.

You get the opportunity to influence someone's career. You get to decide whether people feel trusted or monitored, supported or abandoned, challenged or discouraged, respected or diminished. You get to shape the environment in which someone spends a significant part of their life.

And you probably won't realize the full impact of those decisions while you're making them.

That's why I think good management is less about management techniques and more about awareness. Pay attention to people. Listen to them. Trust them. Give them clarity. Give them room. Tell them the truth. Give them credit. Take responsibility when things go wrong. And remember that the person you're managing might remember working with you for much longer than you remember managing them.

I've had managers who taught me what leadership looks like, and I've had others who taught me what it shouldn't look like. I'm grateful for both, because even the difficult experiences have helped me understand what I value in leadership.

But the good ones left me with something more valuable than a collection of management lessons. They showed me that work can be demanding without being dehumanizing, that authority doesn't have to come with ego, that accountability doesn't require humiliation, and that the best managers don't measure their success by how much control they have over a team.

They measure it by what happens to the people after they've worked with them.

What 16 Years of Global Marketing Taught Me About Culture

2026-09-17T10:16:00.000+03:00

I've spent sixteen years marketing across more than forty-five countries, for over a hundred and seventy-five clients, in markets that ranged from the Gulf to the Levant to Europe to North America. That kind of range does something to how you think. You start out believing marketing is a set of techniques you apply, and you slowly discover it's a set of techniques you apply differently depending on who's on the other end, and that the difference is not a detail. The difference is often the whole thing.

Culture is the word we use for that difference, and it's one of the most misunderstood forces in marketing. People treat it as a soft topic, a matter of translating your copy and swapping your imagery, a compliance checklist of things not to offend. That understanding is shallow enough to be dangerous, because it leads competent marketers to make confident, expensive mistakes. What follows is what working across all those markets actually taught me about culture, the lessons that only show up after you've gotten it wrong a few times and paid attention to why.

Culture is not a layer you add at the end

The most common and costly mistake I've watched happen, including early in my own career, is treating culture as the last step. You build the campaign, the strategy, the message, the creative, in your home context, and then at the end you "localize" it: translate the words, adjust the visuals, check it won't cause offense, and ship it. Culture, in this model, is a coat of paint applied over a finished structure.

This fails, and it fails in a specific way. When culture is an afterthought, the underlying campaign is still built on assumptions from wherever it was created, assumptions about what motivates people, what they value, how they make decisions, what they find aspirational or trustworthy or funny. Translating the words doesn't touch any of those buried assumptions. So you end up with a campaign that's linguistically local but psychologically foreign, technically correct and yet somehow off, and audiences feel that offness even when they can't name it. It reads as a brand that doesn't quite get them, that's speaking at them from somewhere else.

The lesson that took me years to fully absorb is that culture has to be present at the start, in the strategy itself, not applied at the end as decoration. What motivates this specific audience? How do they actually make this kind of decision? What do they genuinely value, and what merely sounds good in my home market but means little here? Those questions belong at the beginning, shaping the campaign from its foundation, not at the end as a translation exercise. Get culture in early and localization becomes natural. Bolt it on late and no amount of translation saves you.

Assuming similarity is more dangerous than assuming difference

When you enter a market that's obviously very different from your own, you're careful. You know you don't understand it, so you ask questions, do research, hire local expertise, move humbly. That caution protects you. The dangerous markets, counterintuitively, are the ones that seem similar to what you know, because the surface similarity lulls you into assuming the underneath is similar too, and it often isn't.

I've seen this repeatedly across regions that outsiders lump together. People talk about "the Middle East" or "the Arab world" as if it were one audience, when the differences between the Gulf and the Levant and North Africa are enormous, in wealth, dialect, media habits, religiosity, consumer behavior, and what resonates emotionally. A campaign built for one and assumed to work across all of them because they're "all Arab markets" is making exactly the similarity error. The surface commonality, shared language family, shared region, hides deep differences that decide whether the marketing lands or falls flat.

The same trap appears everywhere, not just in one region. Two markets that share a language, or a level of economic development, or a broad cultural category, can differ profoundly in the things that actually drive marketing outcomes. And because they look similar, the marketer doesn't do the careful work they'd instinctively do for an obviously foreign market. They assume, and the assumption is where they get hurt.

So the discipline I've learned is to be most careful precisely where I feel most comfortable. When a market seems familiar, that's the signal to check my assumptions harder, not relax them. Difference that announces itself is easy to respect. Difference that hides under surface similarity is what quietly breaks campaigns, because it walks right past your defenses.

The strongest connection is built from what people already value

Early on, I thought of cultural adaptation mostly defensively, as avoiding mistakes, not offending, not violating norms, staying out of trouble. That's a real and necessary part of the work, but it's the floor, not the ceiling, and staying at the floor means you only ever avoid harm without ever creating connection.

The deeper lesson is that culture isn't primarily a minefield to navigate; it's a source of genuine connection to build from. Every culture has things it deeply values, ways of seeing the world, moments that carry weight, relationships and ideas that matter. A brand that understands what an audience genuinely values, and builds from that rather than merely avoiding offense, can forge a connection far stronger than anything a culturally-neutral campaign achieves.

The Gulf offers a clear example in the rhythm of the year. A season like Ramadan isn't just a scheduling constraint to plan around or a sensitivity to handle carefully. Handled with real understanding, it's one of the most powerful moments for meaningful brand connection in the entire calendar, a time when certain values, generosity, family, reflection, community, are heightened, and a brand that speaks to those authentically can build genuine resonance. But that only works if you engage with what the moment actually means to people, rather than treating it opportunistically as a sales window with themed graphics. Audiences can tell the difference instantly between a brand that understands the moment and one that's exploiting it, and the cynical version does more harm than not showing up at all.

That's the pattern beneath the specific example. Cultural understanding used defensively keeps you safe. Cultural understanding used to genuinely connect, building from what people actually value, is where the real marketing power is. The brands that treat culture only as risk management leave the most valuable half of it on the table.

Language is never just translation

If there's one thing working across languages taught me, it's that language is never a simple translation problem, and treating it as one is one of the most visible ways a brand signals it doesn't really understand a market.

Take Arabic, which I've worked in extensively. There's Modern Standard Arabic, formal and universally understood but capable of feeling distant in consumer marketing. There are the dialects, Gulf, Levantine, Egyptian, Maghrebi, different enough that content feeling native in one can feel foreign in another. And there's the constant strategic question of when to use Arabic at all versus English, which shifts by market, by audience, by category, by the specific feeling you're trying to create. None of that is captured by "translate the copy." The choice of which language, which dialect, which register, for which audience and which purpose, is a strategic decision that shapes how the whole message lands.

The lazy approaches both fail in ways audiences notice. Running everything in English quietly signals the brand didn't think the local audience was worth speaking to properly. Machine-translating into stiff, formal text signals the same thing more loudly, that the brand did the minimum and didn't care enough to do it well. Both leave the audience feeling like an afterthought. Getting language right, choosing it deliberately and rendering it naturally, is not just about comprehension; it's a signal of respect, and audiences read that signal clearly.

This generalizes beyond Arabic to every market. Language carries culture inside it, connotations, register, humor, the difference between what's literally correct and what actually sounds like a human who belongs there. A phrase can translate perfectly and still feel wrong because it's not how people actually speak. The brands that treat language as a strategic, cultural decision rather than a mechanical conversion are the ones that sound native, and sounding native is a genuine competitive advantage in markets where most international competitors sound imported.

Trust and influence don't work the same way everywhere

One of the subtler lessons, and one that took real time to see, is that the fundamental mechanics of how people build trust and how they get influenced toward a decision differ meaningfully across cultures. And these mechanics sit underneath a lot of marketing theory that gets treated as universal when it isn't.

A great deal of mainstream marketing thinking is built on assumptions about an individualistic, relatively transactional buyer, someone making a fairly rational, solo decision, influenced through a predictable funnel. In many of the markets I've worked in, that model only partly fits. Personal relationships, community, family, word of mouth, and specific forms of social proof can carry far more weight than the individualistic model assumes. Decisions that the imported theory treats as personal are, in practice, social, shaped by family and community in ways the home-market playbook doesn't account for. How credibility accrues, who gets trusted and why, how influence actually flows, these vary, and the variation isn't cosmetic. It changes what marketing should actually do.

A campaign built on the assumption that the buyer is an isolated individual making a rational solo choice can simply miss the real social texture of how decisions get made in a given market. It's optimizing for a psychology that isn't the one operating. The correction isn't complicated in principle, study how trust and influence actually work in the specific market rather than importing your assumptions, but it requires the humility to question theory you'd absorbed as universal fact. That humility is hard precisely because the assumptions are invisible; you don't know you're carrying them until a market that works differently makes them visible by not responding the way the theory predicted.

Cultural fluency can't be faked, but it can be built

A tempting shortcut, when you know culture matters, is to try to fake fluency, to sprinkle in some local references, use a few phrases, gesture at understanding without actually having it. Audiences see through this immediately, and it backfires, because a brand that pretends to understand a culture it doesn't is more off-putting than one that's honestly an outsider. The performance of belonging, when it's hollow, reads as insulting.

But the encouraging lesson is that genuine cultural fluency, while it can't be faked, absolutely can be built. It comes from real engagement: spending time in a market, working with people who belong to it, listening to how audiences actually talk about their own lives, studying not just the rules but the values underneath them, and staying humble about the limits of your understanding. It's earned through attention and genuine curiosity over time, not acquired through a briefing document.

For a brand, this usually means genuinely involving people from the culture rather than deciding about them from outside. It means treating local expertise as central to the strategy, not as a translation service brought in at the end. It means listening more than assuming. The brands that build real fluency this way develop something competitors can't easily copy, an authentic understanding that shows up in a thousand small choices and adds up to a brand that feels like it genuinely belongs, rather than one visiting from elsewhere.

The universal underneath the particular

After enough years across enough markets, you might expect the lesson to be pure relativism, that everything is different everywhere and nothing transfers. But that's not quite what the experience taught me. Underneath the genuine and important cultural differences, there are some human universals, people everywhere want to be understood, respected, and spoken to as if they matter. What changes is how those universal needs express themselves and how you meet them, but the needs themselves are shared.

This matters because it saves cultural awareness from becoming paralysis. If every market were utterly alien, global marketing would be impossible, you'd start from zero every time. But that's not the reality. The reality is that certain deep human things are constant, and the work is understanding how they take specific shape in a specific culture. People everywhere respond to being genuinely understood. The question is what "being understood" looks like here, in this market, for these people, which is different from what it looks like there. The universal need is your anchor; the cultural expression is your craft.

So the posture that works isn't "everything is different, despair," and it isn't "people are all the same, so my home-market approach travels fine." It's something more disciplined: people share deep needs, and meeting those needs requires genuinely understanding how they're expressed in each specific context. That holds both truths at once, the universal and the particular, and it's the stance that lets you work across cultures without either flattening them into sameness or fragmenting them into unworkable chaos.

The tension every global brand has to resolve

There's a genuine tension running underneath all of this that's worth naming directly, because every brand operating across cultures has to resolve it and there's no escaping it: the pull between global consistency and local adaptation.

On one side, a brand wants to be itself everywhere. Consistency is valuable, it builds recognition, it accumulates meaning, it means the brand stands for something coherent rather than shape-shifting into a different identity in every market. A brand that adapts so completely to each culture that it has no consistent core isn't really a global brand anymore; it's a collection of unrelated local brands sharing a name, and it forfeits the compounding value that consistency creates.

On the other side, everything I've described argues for deep local adaptation, meeting each market on its own cultural terms, which pulls against rigid global consistency. Push adaptation far enough and the brand fragments. Push consistency far enough and the brand feels foreign everywhere except home. Both extremes fail, and the failure modes are mirror images: the over-consistent brand is coherent but alien; the over-adapted brand is locally comfortable but globally meaningless.

The resolution I've come to, after navigating this across many markets, is that some things should stay constant and some things should flex, and the skill is knowing which is which. The brand's core, what it fundamentally stands for, its deepest values and identity, should generally stay consistent, because that's the thing that makes it a brand at all. But the expression of that core, how it's communicated, which values are emphasized, the language and tone and cultural entry point, should adapt to each market. One consistent identity, many culturally-fluent expressions of it. The soul stays the same; the way it shows up changes to fit who it's speaking to.

This is harder than either extreme, because it requires judgment about where the line sits rather than a simple rule. It's easier to mandate total global consistency, or to let every market do whatever it wants, than to hold a consistent core while genuinely adapting its expression. But that harder middle path is where global brands actually succeed. They're recognizably themselves everywhere, and they speak to each market as if they belong there. Achieving both at once is the real craft of global brand building, and it rests entirely on the cultural understanding this whole piece is about, because you can't adapt the expression well to a culture you don't genuinely understand.

What this means in practice

If I compress sixteen years across all those markets into practical guidance, it comes down to a handful of things.

Bring culture in at the start, as part of strategy, not at the end as translation. The whole campaign should be shaped by cultural understanding from its foundation, not decorated with it afterward.

Be most careful where you feel most comfortable. Surface similarity is more dangerous than obvious difference, because it walks past your caution. When a market seems familiar, check your assumptions harder, not less.

Use culture to connect, not just to avoid offense. Understanding what people genuinely value and building from it is where the real power is; merely avoiding mistakes is only the floor.

Treat language as a strategic, cultural decision, not a mechanical translation. Which language, dialect, and register, for whom and why, shapes how everything lands and signals how much you respect the audience.

Question the marketing theory you absorbed as universal, especially about how trust and influence work. Study how decisions actually get made in each market rather than importing assumptions that may not fit.

Build genuine cultural fluency rather than faking it, through real engagement, local expertise treated as central, and the humility to keep listening. It can't be shortcut, but it can be earned, and it becomes an advantage competitors can't copy.

And hold the universal and the particular together. People everywhere want to be understood and respected; the craft is understanding what that means, specifically, here.

The real lesson

The deepest thing sixteen years across forty-five countries taught me about culture is a shift in posture more than a set of tactics. Culture isn't an obstacle to global marketing, a complication to manage, a risk to contain. It's the actual substance of connecting with people who aren't exactly like you, which is what marketing across borders fundamentally is.

The marketers and brands who treat culture as friction to minimize, translate fast, avoid offense, move on, get shallow results and occasionally expensive failures. The ones who treat it as the heart of the work, who approach each market with genuine curiosity about what people there actually value and how they actually see the world, build something far stronger: brands that feel like they belong, that seem to genuinely understand the people they're talking to, that earn trust across lines that trip up their competitors.

That understanding is hard-won and can't be rushed. But it's also, in my experience, the most rewarding part of this work. Every market that's different from your own is a chance to understand people you didn't understand before, and to build something that genuinely resonates with them rather than talking past them. Do that across enough cultures and you stop seeing difference as a problem to solve. You start seeing it as the entire point.

What I Learned Being a Member of Junior Chamber International (JCI)

2026-09-14T09:29:00.000+03:00

Some of the most important lessons of my professional life didn't come from a job. They came from the years I spent as a member and leader in Junior Chamber International, an organization most people outside it have never heard of, and that quietly shaped how I think about leadership, responsibility, and what it means to actually get something done. I want to write about that, partly as a reflection on a formative chapter, and partly because the lessons turned out to be far more transferable than I expected when I first walked into a local meeting years ago.

JCI is a global organization of young active citizens, people who want to create positive change in their communities and develop themselves as leaders while doing it. I gave it a lot of years and a lot of energy. I served as National President of JCI Lebanon, went on to become Vice President for Africa and the Middle East overseeing organizations across nine countries, and trained at the JCI Leadership Academy in Japan along the way. That trajectory taught me things I've drawn on in every professional role since, and this is my attempt to set down what those things were.

You learn leadership by doing it, not by being taught it

The first and maybe deepest lesson is about how leadership is actually learned. Before JCI, I think I imagined leadership as something you studied, a set of principles and frameworks you absorbed and then applied. What JCI taught me is that leadership is a skill you build by doing it, badly at first, in a place safe enough to fail and learn.

This is the genius of an organization like JCI, though I didn't see it as genius at the time. It hands young people real responsibility, running projects, leading teams, managing budgets, organizing events, holding office, before they'd ever get that responsibility in their careers. You're leading actual people toward actual outcomes with actual stakes, but in an environment designed for growth rather than one where a mistake ends your career. You lead a project and it goes sideways, and you learn from the inside why it went sideways, in a way no course could teach you. You chair a meeting badly and feel it, and you get better. You take on something above your experience level and rise to it, or don't, and either way you learn something true about yourself.

I led things in JCI I'd never have been trusted to lead in a professional context at that age, and the responsibility itself was the teacher. By the time I took on senior professional roles, I'd already made and learned from a hundred leadership mistakes in a setting that let me make them. That head start was real, and it came entirely from doing rather than studying. The lesson generalizes: if you want to develop as a leader, seek out real responsibility early, in whatever setting will give it to you, and treat the inevitable failures as the curriculum rather than as evidence you're not ready.

Leading volunteers teaches you what actually motivates people

Here's a distinction that changed how I lead: in a job, you have authority. People report to you, you can direct them, and at some level they do the work because it's their job and you have a degree of formal power. In a volunteer organization like JCI, none of that exists. Nobody has to do anything. Every person is there by choice, giving their free time for no pay, and can walk away the moment it stops being worth it to them.

Leading in that environment forces you to learn what actually motivates people, because the usual levers are gone. You can't order a volunteer to do something. You can't threaten their paycheck. You can only lead through genuine influence: inspiring people, giving them purpose, making them feel valued, connecting the work to something they care about, and creating an environment they want to be part of. If you can't do those things, nobody follows, and the work simply doesn't happen.

This turned out to be one of the most valuable leadership educations I could have received, precisely because it stripped away the crutch of authority. When I moved into professional roles where I did have formal authority, I'd already learned to lead without relying on it, which made me a far better leader with it. Because the truth is that even in a job, the people who genuinely follow you, who bring their real effort and creativity rather than just their compliance, do so for the same reasons volunteers do: purpose, respect, belonging, inspiration. Authority gets you compliance. The things you learn leading volunteers get you commitment. And commitment is what actually produces good work.

If you've only ever led people who had to follow you, I'd genuinely recommend finding a context where you have to lead people who don't, a volunteer group, a community project, anything. It exposes whether you can actually lead, or whether you've been relying on the org chart the whole time.

Working across cultures builds something you can't get any other way

When I became Vice President for Africa and the Middle East, overseeing JCI organizations across nine countries, I got an education in cross-cultural leadership that would have taken years to acquire otherwise, and that I've drawn on constantly in my marketing career.

Coordinating across nine countries means confronting, daily, that the way things work in one place is not the way they work in another. What motivates people, how decisions get made, how meetings run, what's considered respectful, how you build trust, how you handle disagreement, all of it varied across the national organizations I was responsible for. A leadership approach that worked beautifully in one country could fall flat or even offend in another. I had to learn to adapt myself to each context while holding a coherent overall direction, which is one of the harder things a leader can be asked to do.

That experience taught me cross-cultural fluency in a way no amount of reading could. You learn that there's rarely one right way to do things, only ways that fit particular contexts. You learn to ask instead of assume, to listen for what's beneath the surface, to respect that people who do things differently from you usually have good reasons rooted in their own context. And you learn humility, the recognition that your own way of doing things is just one way, shaped by your own culture, not a universal standard everyone else should meet.

This lesson has been foundational for me as a marketer working across dozens of countries, but it's broader than marketing. In an increasingly connected world, the ability to work genuinely well across cultures, not just tolerate difference but understand and adapt to it, is one of the most valuable capacities a professional can have. JCI gave me that through direct, responsible experience, coordinating real people across real borders toward real goals, and I'm not sure where else I'd have gotten it so young.

Small groups of committed people genuinely do change things

There's a famous idea that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world, and that it's the only thing that ever has. JCI is where I watched that stop being a nice quote and become something I'd seen with my own eyes.

The projects we did weren't abstract. We identified real problems in our communities and did something about them, organizing, mobilizing, executing. I helped coordinate large-scale community action, including efforts that brought thousands of volunteers together to make a tangible, visible difference in a single day. Watching a group of ordinary young people, with no special power or resources, decide a thing should happen and then make it happen, taught me something about agency that I've never lost.

The lesson is about what's actually possible when committed people organize around a goal. It's easy to feel that the problems around you are too big, that you're too small to affect them, that change requires power or money or permission you don't have. JCI showed me repeatedly that this is often just a story we tell ourselves. A small group that genuinely commits, organizes well, and executes can accomplish far more than seems possible from the outside. Not everything, not every problem, but far more than the passive assumption of powerlessness suggests.

I've carried that into my professional life as a bias toward action and a skepticism of the belief that you need more resources or more authority before you can begin. Often you can just start, with the people and means you have, and accomplish something real. The belief that meaningful things require permission and abundant resources is frequently an excuse, and JCI cured me of it by showing me otherwise, over and over.

Service and self-development aren't opposites

One of the things I found most quietly profound about JCI is how it links serving others with developing yourself. The whole model is that you grow as a person and a leader by contributing to your community. You don't develop yourself in a classroom and then separately go help others; the helping is the developing. You become more capable, more confident, more skilled precisely through the act of taking on responsibility for something beyond yourself.

This reframed something for me. I think a lot of people treat self-development and service as separate, even competing, things, time spent helping others versus time spent advancing yourself. JCI's insight is that this is a false split. Some of the fastest personal growth happens in service of something larger than yourself, because that's when you stretch, take real responsibility, and are motivated to become more capable than you were. The stakes of doing something for others pull more out of you than doing something purely for yourself often does.

I've found this to be true well beyond JCI. The times I've grown most as a professional have usually been when I was responsible for something bigger than my own advancement, a team, a cause, an outcome that mattered to people beyond me. The growth came as a byproduct of the contribution. If you're looking to develop yourself, one of the most effective and least obvious paths is to take genuine responsibility for something that serves others. The development takes care of itself.

Networks built on shared purpose are different

I built a network through JCI that spans countries and continents, and it's a different kind of network than the ones you build purely professionally. The difference is what it's built on. Professional networking often forms around mutual usefulness, we might be able to help each other's careers. The connections I formed in JCI were built on shared purpose, we worked together on things we cared about, took on challenges side by side, and saw each other lead under real pressure.

Relationships built that way are deeper and more durable than transactional ones. When you've organized a project together, navigated a difficult situation as a team, seen how someone actually behaves when it's hard, you know them in a way that exchanging business cards never approaches. And those relationships persist, because they're rooted in genuine shared experience rather than in a calculation of mutual benefit that can expire the moment the usefulness does.

The broader lesson is about how to build relationships that actually matter. The strongest professional relationships I have weren't built by trying to network; they were built by doing meaningful work alongside people. Shared purpose and shared effort bond people in a way that deliberate networking can't manufacture. So if you want a real network, the counterintuitive advice is to stop networking and start doing things with people, take on projects together, contribute to shared causes, work alongside others toward something you both care about. The relationships that come out of that are worth incomparably more than the ones that come from working a room.

Structure and process matter more than I wanted to believe

Not every lesson was inspiring; some were just useful. JCI is a highly structured organization, with parliamentary procedure, formal roles, elections, established processes for how things get done. As a young person impatient to make things happen, I sometimes found the structure frustrating, all this process when we could just act.

Over time I came to appreciate why it existed and what it did. Structure and process, applied well, are what let an organization of volunteers actually function at scale, coordinate across many people and places, ensure fairness, and maintain continuity as people cycle through roles. The structure I'd found frustrating was often the thing making the coordination possible. Without it, a large volunteer organization would descend into chaos or depend entirely on a few individuals and collapse when they left.

The lesson I took, and it tempered my youthful impatience, is that process isn't the enemy of getting things done; good process is often what makes getting things done possible at scale. There's a real balance, too much process strangles action, but too little makes coordinated action impossible. Learning to work within structure, to use it rather than resent it, and to understand when it's serving the goal versus obstructing it, was a genuinely useful professional lesson. I'm still biased toward action, but I no longer mistake all structure for bureaucracy, because I've seen what structure makes possible.

What it all added up to

Looking back, my years in JCI were one of the most formative professional experiences I've had, and it took distance to fully see it. I learned leadership by doing it with real stakes in a place that let me fail and grow. I learned to lead people who didn't have to follow me, which taught me what actually motivates anyone. I built cross-cultural fluency by coordinating across nine countries. I saw firsthand what committed people can accomplish, which cured me of the belief that meaningful action requires permission and abundant resources. I learned that service and self-development are the same path, that the deepest networks are built on shared purpose, and that structure, used well, is what makes coordinated action possible.

None of these were taught to me in a lecture. All of them were learned by doing, in an organization designed to give young people real responsibility and let them grow into it. That's the thing I'd most want someone to take from this: the most valuable professional development often doesn't look like professional development at all. It looks like taking on responsibility for something you care about, alongside other people, in a context that lets you learn by doing. For me, that was JCI. For someone else it might be something entirely different. But the principle holds, you grow most by doing real things with real stakes for real people, and the lessons that come from that stay with you in a way that no amount of studying ever quite matches.

If you're early in your career and looking for where to grow fastest, my honest advice is to find that kind of context and throw yourself into it. The job will teach you some things. But responsibility taken on freely, in service of something larger than yourself, alongside people who share the purpose, will teach you things the job never will, and they'll turn out to be exactly the things that matter most.

Omnichannel Isn't More Channels. It's Channels That Talk to Each Other

2026-09-10T09:14:00.000+03:00

Somewhere along the way, "omnichannel" became a word marketers say to sound current without meaning much by it. It gets used interchangeably with "multichannel," slapped onto strategy decks, and treated as a synonym for "we're on a lot of platforms now." That confusion isn't just sloppy language. It's the reason a lot of brands invest heavily in being everywhere and still deliver a fragmented, forgettable experience that converts far below what it should.

So let me draw the line clearly, because the whole value of the idea lives in the distinction. Multichannel means you're present on many channels. Omnichannel means those channels actually talk to each other. One is about presence. The other is about coherence. And coherence, not presence, is what actually moves a customer from vaguely aware to genuinely convinced.

I've built both kinds of marketing operations, the impressive-looking multichannel setup that's really just five disconnected campaigns wearing a trench coat, and the genuinely connected system where each touchpoint knows about the others. The difference in results is not subtle. This piece is about what that difference actually is, why it matters more now than it used to, why most "omnichannel" efforts quietly fail, and how to build the real thing.

The distinction that everything hinges on

Picture a customer's week with your brand. On Monday they see your ad on Instagram. On Wednesday they get an email from you. On Friday they visit your website, and on Saturday they walk into your store or open your app.

In a multichannel world, those four touchpoints are strangers. The Instagram ad doesn't know the email exists. The email doesn't know they clicked the ad. The website greets them as if it's never seen them. The store or app has no idea any of the previous three happened. Each channel is doing its own job in its own silo, optimizing its own metrics, telling its own slightly different version of the story. From the brand's org chart, this looks fine, every channel is active and being managed. From the customer's actual experience, it's four disconnected encounters with what feels like four different companies that happen to share a logo.

In an omnichannel world, those same four touchpoints are one continuous conversation. The email reflects that they engaged with the ad. The website recognizes them and picks up where they left off. The store or app knows their history. The message and timing are consistent, and each touchpoint builds on the last instead of restarting from zero. From the customer's experience, it's one brand that seems to actually know them, remember them, and understand where they are in their decision.

That's the whole distinction, and it's not cosmetic. Multichannel scatters a customer's attention across disconnected encounters. Omnichannel compounds it into a single, building relationship. The number of channels can be identical. What changes is whether they're wired together.

Here's the test I use to tell which one a brand actually has, regardless of what their deck claims: can each channel see what the others are doing? If the answer is no, you have multichannel with good intentions, no matter how many platforms you're on. If the answer is yes, you have the beginnings of omnichannel, even if you're only on three.

Why this matters more now than it used to

You could argue that channel coordination was always a nice-to-have. What's changed is that it's become close to a requirement, for a few converging reasons.

Customers now expect to be remembered. The best digital experiences a person has, the ones that set their baseline expectation, are relentlessly personalized and continuous. They pick up their show on a different device exactly where they left off. Their shopping cart follows them across screens. That experience quietly reset what people expect from every brand. When your marketing forgets them between touchpoints, it doesn't just feel neutral, it feels worse than it used to, because the contrast with the experiences they're used to is sharper. Being forgotten now registers as a small friction, and friction costs conversion.

The number of touchpoints has exploded. It used to be a handful of channels. Now a single customer might encounter you across paid social on several platforms, search, email, SMS, WhatsApp, your website, your app, a physical location, a marketplace, a review site, and increasingly an AI assistant. The more touchpoints there are, the more chances there are for the experience to fragment, and the more valuable it becomes to hold them together. Coherence gets harder and more important at the same time, which is exactly the moment most brands need to get deliberate about it.

Attention is scarcer and trust is lower. People are more guarded and more distracted than they've ever been. A fragmented, repetitive, or contradictory experience across channels gives them easy reasons to disengage. A coherent one that clearly understands them earns a scarce commodity: the benefit of the doubt. In a low-trust environment, the brand that feels like it actually knows the customer has a real edge over the one that feels like a scattered set of ad placements.

The economics reward it. This is the unglamorous but decisive part. When channels are disconnected, spend leaks. You pay to reacquire people you already had. You show acquisition ads to existing customers. You send the wrong message to someone at the wrong stage because the channel sending it can't see what another channel already knows. When channels are connected, spend compounds instead of leaking, because each touchpoint is informed by the others and does the right job at the right moment. The same budget works harder purely because the channels stopped wasting each other's effort.

Put those together and the conclusion is straightforward: as touchpoints multiply and expectations rise, the brands that merely add channels fall further behind the brands that connect them. Being everywhere is now table stakes. Being coherent everywhere is the differentiator.

What genuine omnichannel feels like from the customer's side

It's worth staying on the customer's experience for a moment, because that's where the value actually lands and it's easy to lose in the operational detail.

When a brand's channels genuinely talk to each other, the customer doesn't consciously notice the machinery. What they notice is an absence of friction and a feeling of being understood. They don't have to re-explain themselves. They don't get pitched something they already bought. They don't see a beginner's message when they're already deep in consideration. The experience simply flows, each step aware of the last, and the cumulative effect is trust. The customer starts to feel that this brand gets them, and that feeling is worth more than any single clever campaign.

Contrast that with the fragmented version, which customers also notice, just negatively. They get an email welcoming them as new when they've been a customer for two years. They get retargeted with an ad for the exact product sitting in their order history. They tell your support channel something and your marketing channel clearly has no idea. Each of these is a small signal that the brand isn't really paying attention, that its left hand doesn't know what its right hand is doing. Individually minor, collectively corrosive. They erode the sense that you're dealing with one competent, attentive brand.

This is why I say omnichannel is about coherence, not presence. The customer doesn't reward you for being on many channels; they take that for granted. They reward you for the channels behaving like one brand that remembers them. And they quietly penalize the disconnection, even when they can't articulate why the experience felt off.

Why most "omnichannel" efforts actually fail

If the idea is this clear, why do so many brands that sincerely try to do omnichannel end up with expensive multichannel instead? In my experience, the failure is almost never a failure of intention or even of budget. It's structural, and it usually comes down to two things.

The real problem is data silos

The first and deepest reason is that the channels literally can't see each other's data. The email platform holds email data. The ads platforms hold ad data. The website analytics hold web data. The store or app holds transaction data. Each system knows its own slice and none of them share a complete picture of the customer. So even a well-meaning team can't make the channels talk to each other, because there's no common language, no single view of the customer for them to talk about.

This is why "omnichannel" so often stalls at the level of aspiration. You can want your channels to coordinate all day, but if the underlying data lives in separate boxes that don't connect, coordination is mechanically impossible. The customer who engaged on one channel is, to every other channel, a stranger, because the record of that engagement is trapped where it happened.

The fix, therefore, isn't a clever campaign. It's plumbing. You need a way to unify customer data across touchpoints, a single source of truth that stitches together the same person's activity wherever it happens, so that every channel can draw on a shared, complete picture. Without that foundation, everything else is decoration. This is unglamorous, it's the part nobody puts in the strategy deck, and it's the part that actually determines whether omnichannel is real or theater.

The deeper problem is organizational silos

But here's the part most discussions of omnichannel miss, and it's the more important one: the data silos are usually a symptom, and the disease is organizational.

In most companies, the channels are owned by different people or teams, each with their own data, their own tools, their own targets, and their own definition of success. The email team owns email and is measured on email metrics. The paid team owns paid and is measured on paid metrics. The retail or e-commerce team owns their surface and their numbers. Nobody owns the whole customer. And so the customer experiences precisely the gaps between those departments. The disconnection in the experience is a direct mirror of the disconnection in the org chart.

This is why buying an expensive platform to "do omnichannel" so often disappoints. The technology can technically unify the data, but if the teams stay siloed, with separate goals and no shared ownership of the customer, they'll keep optimizing their own channels in their own directions and the experience stays fragmented. You've bought the ability to coordinate without building the will or the structure to actually do it. The tool sits there, underused, while the org keeps running the way it always did.

I've come to believe that the hardest part of omnichannel is not technical at all. It's getting an organization to agree on one shared view of the customer and shared goals across teams, so that the people running the channels are actually incentivized to coordinate rather than to win their own slice. Fix the org, and the technology serves it. Fix the technology while the org stays siloed, and you've bought expensive multichannel. The order matters enormously, and most brands get it backwards, they buy the platform first and hope the coordination follows. It rarely does.

How to actually build it

So what does building genuine omnichannel look like, in the right order? Here's how I approach it, and the sequence is deliberate because doing these steps out of order is exactly how the expensive failures happen.

Start with the customer, not the channels

The instinct is to start by listing your channels and asking how to connect them. That's the wrong starting point, because it centers the org's structure instead of the customer's experience. Start instead by mapping the customer's actual journey, the real sequence of moments where they encounter and interact with you, from first awareness through consideration, purchase, and beyond.

Once you can see the journey as the customer experiences it, the disconnections become obvious. You'll see where the handoffs between channels are jarring, where the customer has to repeat themselves, where one channel contradicts another, where the experience restarts instead of continuing. Those friction points are your actual work. You're not trying to connect channels for the sake of it; you're trying to smooth the specific seams where the customer's experience currently breaks. Starting from the journey keeps you honest about what's worth connecting and what isn't.

Fix the organization before the technology

This is the step everyone wants to skip and nobody should. Before choosing tools, get the humans aligned. That means establishing a shared view of the customer as a shared goal across teams, not a slogan but an actual, agreed objective that the channel owners are measured against together. It means someone, or some structure, being accountable for the whole customer experience rather than each person only for their channel. It means shared goals that reward coordination instead of channel-versus-channel competition for credit.

This is genuinely hard organizational work. It touches incentives, reporting lines, and territory, which is why it gets avoided in favor of buying software. But it's the step that determines whether everything downstream works. Aligned teams with mediocre tools will build a more coherent experience than siloed teams with the best platform on the market. Do this first.

Then unify the data

With the organization pointed in the same direction, unify the customer data so the channels have a shared source of truth to coordinate around. This is where the technology comes in, a way to stitch identity and activity across touchpoints so the same customer is recognizable everywhere and every channel can draw on the complete picture.

The specific tools matter less than the principle, and they change constantly anyway, so I won't anchor this to particular products. What matters is that you build a unified, shared view of the customer that every channel can access, rather than leaving the data trapped in per-channel boxes. Notice this comes after the organizational alignment, not before. The data infrastructure serves the coordinated intent; it doesn't create it. Build the plumbing to serve teams that already want to coordinate, and it gets used. Build it for teams that don't, and it gathers dust.

Design coordinated journeys, not just connected data

Unified data enables coordination, but you still have to design the coordination. This is where the craft comes in: building customer journeys where each touchpoint is deliberately informed by the others. The email that reflects the ad engagement. The website that recognizes the returning visitor and continues their experience. The retargeting that knows what stage someone is at and speaks to it, rather than blasting everyone the same message. The lifecycle flows across email, SMS, and messaging that respond to what the customer actually did.

The goal throughout is that every touchpoint does the right job at the right moment for that specific customer, because it can see where they are and what they've done. Done well, the channels stop competing and start relaying, each one handing the customer to the next with context intact. That relay is the actual product of omnichannel work, and it's what the customer feels as coherence.

Measure the customer, not just the channels

Finally, how you measure has to change, or you'll quietly slide back into multichannel. If every channel is measured only on its own isolated performance, every channel owner is incentivized to optimize their silo, which is exactly the behavior that fragments the experience. You have to measure the customer across channels, the whole journey, the coherent experience, the compounding effect, not just each channel's local numbers.

This is subtle and important. Channel-level metrics aren't wrong, but if they're all you measure, they pull the organization back toward silos, because they reward local optimization over global coherence. Adding measures that capture the cross-channel experience, and holding teams jointly accountable for them, is what keeps the whole system pointed at the customer rather than at channel-versus-channel scorekeeping. What you measure is what you get, and if you want coordination, you have to measure the coordinated outcome.

The payoff, stated plainly

Everything above is more work than simply adding channels. It requires organizational change, data infrastructure, deliberate journey design, and different measurement. So it's fair to ask what you actually get for it, in terms a business cares about.

You get spend that compounds instead of leaking. Connected channels stop wasting each other's effort, stop reacquiring people you already have, stop sending the wrong message at the wrong stage. The same budget produces more because it's coordinated. That's a hard, financial return, not a soft brand benefit.

You get higher conversion, because a coherent experience that meets the customer where they actually are moves them toward a decision more effectively than a scattered one that keeps restarting. Relevance and continuity convert better than repetition and disconnection.

You get trust and retention, because customers who feel understood and remembered stay, and a brand that behaves like one attentive entity rather than a set of disconnected placements earns loyalty that fragmented competitors can't easily match.

And you get durability, because a genuinely connected customer system is hard for competitors to copy. Anyone can buy ads on the same platforms you're on. Replicating an organization that's genuinely aligned around a unified customer, with the data and journeys to match, takes real structural commitment most competitors won't make. The presence is easy to copy. The coherence is not, which is exactly why it's worth building.

What about smaller teams and tighter budgets?

There's a fair objection to everything above: it sounds like something only a large brand with a big budget and a data team could pull off. If you're a small business or a lean team, does omnichannel even apply, or is it a luxury for companies with resources you don't have?

The reassuring answer is that omnichannel is a principle before it's a budget, and the principle scales down. The core idea, channels that talk to each other rather than operating as strangers, doesn't require enterprise software. It requires intent and coordination, and a small team actually has an advantage on both.

Consider what fragments a large organization: siloed teams, competing targets, data trapped in departmental boxes, nobody owning the whole customer. A small team often has none of those problems by default. When two people run all the channels, they can hold the whole customer in their heads. When one person sends the email and also manages the ads, coordination between those channels is just paying attention. The organizational silos that cripple big-company omnichannel simply don't exist yet at small scale. That's a genuine head start most small businesses don't realize they have.

So for a smaller operation, the move isn't to buy a big platform. It's to be deliberate about coherence with what you already have. Make sure the customer's experience across your handful of channels feels like one brand that remembers them. Keep your messaging consistent. Use even simple tools to recognize returning customers and avoid pitching people things they've already bought. Map your customer's actual journey across your few touchpoints and smooth the obvious seams. You can get most of the customer-experience benefit of omnichannel with modest tools and real attention, precisely because you don't have the organizational fragmentation to overcome first.

The trap for small businesses is the opposite one: growing the number of channels faster than the ability to coordinate them. It's tempting, as you grow, to keep adding platforms because being on more of them feels like progress. But if you add channels faster than you can connect them, you're building the exact fragmentation that plagues big companies, just earlier. Better to be genuinely coherent on four channels than scattered across nine. Grow your channel count and your ability to coordinate it together, not one ahead of the other.

The principle, then, is universal even though the tooling varies. Large or small, the question is the same: do your channels talk to each other? A small team can often answer yes more easily than a big one. They just have to choose coherence over the vanity of sheer presence, which is a discipline, not a budget line.

Where omnichannel is heading

The distinction at the heart of this piece, presence versus coherence, isn't going away. If anything, the forces shaping the next few years make it sharper and more consequential. A few directions worth watching.

The number of touchpoints will keep multiplying. New surfaces keep appearing where customers encounter brands, and each one is another place the experience can either cohere or fragment. As touchpoints proliferate, the gap between brands that connect them and brands that merely occupy them will widen. The coordination problem doesn't get easier as channels multiply; it gets harder, which means the brands that have built the muscle for it pull further ahead of those still adding channels without connecting them.

AI raises the ceiling on personalization. For years, true one-to-one personalization across channels was more aspiration than reality, most brands could personalize by broad segment at best. AI is making genuine real-time, individual-level personalization across touchpoints actually achievable rather than merely promised, tailoring message, timing, and channel to the specific person rather than the segment. But, and this is the crucial point, that capability is only as good as the unified customer data underneath it. AI personalization built on fragmented, siloed data just personalizes the fragmentation more precisely. The brands positioned to benefit from AI-driven personalization are exactly the ones that did the unglamorous work of unifying their customer view first. AI raises the ceiling, but only for those who built the foundation to reach it.

Discovery itself is fragmenting further. People increasingly begin their journeys in new places, including AI assistants and answer engines, adding touchpoints that most brands aren't yet structured to incorporate into a coherent experience. Each new mode of discovery is another channel that either joins the conversation or stands apart from it. The brands that treat each new surface as one more thing to connect, rather than one more isolated presence to maintain, will keep their coherence intact as the landscape keeps shifting.

The through-line across all of it is that the value of coherence rises as the environment fragments. Every force pushing toward more channels, more surfaces, more ways to encounter a brand, also raises the payoff for the brands that hold those encounters together and the cost for those that let them scatter. The specific channels and tools will keep changing. The advantage of being the brand whose channels genuinely talk to each other is durable, because it's rooted in something that doesn't change: customers reward the brand that seems to actually know them, and coordination is how you earn that at scale.

The reframe to hold onto

If you take one thing from all of this, let it be the reframe at the center, because it corrects the single most common and expensive misunderstanding in the field.

Omnichannel is not a channel count. Adding your seventh platform doesn't make you more omnichannel; it might make you less, if the seventh channel is just one more disconnected voice adding to the fragmentation. Omnichannel is a property of how your channels relate to each other, whether they're wired together into one coherent, customer-aware system or scattered into silos that happen to share a logo.

So the question to ask about your own marketing is not "how many channels are we on?" It's "do our channels actually talk to each other?" The first question flatters you and leads nowhere. The second is uncomfortable and leads to the real work. Most brands, if they answer the second question honestly, will find they've built impressive multichannel and called it omnichannel, and that the gap between the two is exactly where their conversion, their efficiency, and their customer trust are leaking away.

Being everywhere was the goal of the last era of marketing, and most brands have achieved it. Being coherent everywhere is the goal of this one, and most brands haven't started. That gap is the opportunity. The brands that close it, that do the unglamorous organizational and data work to make their channels genuinely talk to each other, won't just be present in more places than their competitors. They'll be the one brand in their category that actually seems to know the customer, and in a crowded, distrustful, fragmented market, that's the thing that wins.

More channels was never the point. Channels that talk to each other always was.

AEO Is the New SEO: How to Get Your Brand Cited by AI

2026-09-07T09:07:00.000+03:00

For twenty years, the question that governed digital marketing was simple: how do we rank on Google? Every content decision, every technical choice, every backlink chase came down to earning a higher position on a page of blue links. That world is not gone, but it is shrinking, and it's shrinking faster than most marketers have adjusted to.

The way people find information is splitting in two. Half of it still runs through the search box we know. The other half now runs through a conversation with an AI, someone types a question into ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, or Google's AI Overviews, and gets a synthesized answer that may never send them to a website at all. For a brand, the terrifying and clarifying fact is this: you can rank first on Google and still be completely invisible in the answer an AI gives to the exact question your business exists to solve.

This is the shift behind the alphabet soup of new acronyms, AEO, GEO, LLMO, AIO, that has flooded marketing LinkedIn over the past year. Underneath the jargon is a real and urgent change in how discovery works. I've been building this into my own work and my clients', and I want to lay out plainly what's actually happening, what these terms mean, what's genuinely new versus what's just SEO in a new outfit, and what you can practically do about it. This is a long read, because it's a real shift and it deserves more than a listicle.

The change that's actually happening

Start with the numbers, because they tell the story faster than any argument.

Traditional search behavior is changing in a way that directly threatens the old model. A growing share of Google searches now end without a click to any third-party website, because Google increasingly answers the query directly on the results page through AI Overviews and featured snippets. Ahrefs found that AI Overviews reduced click-through rates for top-ranking content substantially, a significant jump from the year before. The information the user wanted is delivered without them ever leaving the search page, which means the website that "ranked first" got the ranking but not the visitor.

At the same time, an enormous volume of information-seeking has moved off search engines entirely and into AI chat tools. ChatGPT processes billions of prompts a day, and a large share of those qualify as search, questions people would once have typed into Google and now type into a chatbot instead. Gartner has projected that traditional search volume will fall meaningfully over the next few years as this behavior spreads.

Put those two trends together and you get the core problem. Fewer people are clicking through from search, and more people are getting their answers from AI systems that may or may not mention you. The old goal, rank high and collect the click, is losing ground on both sides at once. The new goal is different: be the source the AI trusts, cites, and repeats.

This is not a distant future scenario. It's the present, and the brands that understand it early will bank a durable advantage before their competitors notice the ground has moved.

Decoding the acronyms: SEO, AEO, GEO and the rest

The terminology in this space is genuinely messy, and part of my job here is to cut through it, because the confusion is causing marketers to either panic or dismiss the whole thing. Let me define each term as clearly as I can, then tell you which distinctions actually matter.

SEO, Search Engine Optimization. The discipline you already know: optimizing your content and site so it ranks well in traditional search engine results. It's about earning position in the ranked list of links, driving organic clicks to your site. SEO is not dead and I'll return to why.

AEO, Answer Engine Optimization. Optimizing your content so it becomes the direct answer that "answer engines" serve, featured snippets, voice-assistant responses, Google's AI Overviews, and the answer boxes that sit above or in place of the old list of links. The goal shifts from "be a high-ranked option the user chooses among" to "be the single answer the machine gives."

GEO, Generative Engine Optimization. The newest term, focused specifically on generative AI tools, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and similar, where the system doesn't just extract one answer but stitches together a response from multiple sources. GEO is about making your content the material that generative engines draw on and cite when they compose their answers.

LLMO and AIO. Large Language Model Optimization and Artificial Intelligence Optimization are further variants, generally used as narrower or broader synonyms for the same underlying idea of being visible to and cited by AI systems.

Here's the honest truth the vendors selling you separate services won't lead with: there is no established consensus definition cleanly separating AEO, GEO, LLMO, and AIO. As of early 2026, even the academic literature hadn't settled on firm distinctions, and in practice the terms are used interchangeably across the industry. Different companies push different acronyms partly because each wants to own a piece of vocabulary.

So which should you care about? My view, and it's shared by a number of serious practitioners, is that the distinction between AEO and GEO is one of emphasis, not of separate disciplines. AEO leans toward being the cited, quotable answer. GEO leans toward shaping the broader generated response. But the work you do for one overwhelmingly serves the other. Splitting them into separate programs mostly wastes effort. I tend to lead with the term AEO, for a simple reason: "Answer Engine Optimization" clearly conveys what you're doing, optimizing to be the answer, whereas "Generative Engine Optimization" is more abstract and, awkwardly, GEO already means geography and geo-targeting in marketing, so it's a confusing acronym to own. But the label matters far less than the practice. Get the fundamentals right once and the acronym you chase stops mattering.

What's genuinely new, and what's just SEO wearing a new hat

There's a lot of hype in this space, and part of being useful rather than breathless is separating what has actually changed from what's being repackaged to sell you something.

What hasn't changed: the fundamentals of authority, relevance, and trust. AI systems, when they retrieve and cite sources, lean heavily on many of the same signals traditional search has always rewarded, is this content credible, is the source authoritative, does it genuinely address the query. If your SEO foundations are strong, clean site, quality content, real authority, you are already partway to being AI-visible. GEO and AEO expand SEO; they don't replace it. This is why "SEO is dead" is the wrong frame. SEO is the outer ring; AI optimization is a new inner ring built on the same foundations.

What genuinely is new: the target and the mechanics of how you win. Traditional SEO optimizes for a ranking position in a list. AI optimization targets being retrieved, trusted, and cited by a system that then speaks on your behalf, often without the user ever seeing your site. And the ranking factors are not identical. Research comparing what surfaces in Google versus what gets cited in ChatGPT has found a surprisingly small overlap. Analysts studying LLM citation behavior have found the factors that make content get cited by an AI differ meaningfully from what makes it rank in classical search. So this isn't purely old wine in new bottles. The foundations carry over, but there's a genuinely new layer of work on top, and pretending otherwise leaves citations on the table.

The reason this matters practically: a brand that assumes its existing SEO automatically covers AI visibility will underinvest in the new layer and quietly lose ground. And a brand that panics and abandons SEO to chase shiny AI tactics will kick out the foundation the whole thing stands on. The correct posture is "both, built together."

How AI systems actually choose what to cite

To optimize for AI citation, you have to understand, at least roughly, how these systems decide what to pull in. You don't need to be an engineer, but you need the mental model, because it explains every tactic that follows.

Most modern AI answer engines work in a retrieve-then-generate pattern. When you ask a question, the system doesn't invent the answer purely from memory. It retrieves relevant external content, real sources from the web, and then generates a response grounded in what it retrieved, often citing those sources. This is the same broad approach underlying retrieval-augmented generation: fetch relevant material, then compose an answer conditioned on it.

Two implications follow directly, and they shape everything.

First, to be cited, your content has to be retrievable and it has to be the kind of material the system finds worth pulling in for that query. That means being genuinely relevant, clearly structured, and credible enough to be selected from the pool of available sources. If the AI can't find you, or finds you but judges better sources exist, you're not in the answer.

Second, because the system stitches together an answer from what it retrieves, content that is clear, self-contained, and easy to extract accurately has a real edge. A dense, meandering page that buries its point is hard for a machine to quote correctly. A page that states things plainly, answers the actual question directly, and is structured so a specific passage cleanly addresses a specific query, is far easier for the system to lift and attribute. You are, in a real sense, writing to be quoted.

There's a sharper, slightly unsettling point buried in the research here too. Because these systems shape their answer from a small pool of retrieved sources, small changes in what gets retrieved can significantly redirect which brands appear in the final answer. That's a risk (it makes the system manipulable) but also an opportunity: the pool of well-optimized sources for many specific questions is still thin, so there's room to become the cited source before your category gets crowded.

The practical playbook: how to get your brand cited by AI

Now to the part you actually came for. Here's what genuinely moves the needle on AI visibility, drawn from current best practice and from what I'm seeing work. None of it is exotic. Most of it is doing familiar things with a new target in mind.

1. Answer real questions directly and completely

The single highest-leverage habit is to structure content around the actual questions your audience asks, and to answer them directly, early, and clearly. Not to bury the answer three scrolls down beneath preamble, but to state it plainly where both a human skimmer and a machine can find it fast.

This means thinking in terms of questions and answers, not just keywords. What does your buyer actually ask? Map those real questions, and make sure each one has a clear, self-contained answer somewhere in your content. Answer engines are, by definition, looking for answers. Give them clean ones.

Completeness matters alongside directness. Generative engines compose answers by drawing on sources that cover a topic thoroughly enough to be worth citing. Thin content that touches a topic lightly gives the system little to work with. Content that covers the subject with genuine depth and substance, so the model has real material to generate from, is far likelier to be pulled in. This is one place where the shift rewards quality: shallow content optimized purely for keywords is exactly what AI systems have least use for.

2. Structure content so machines can parse it

Clear structure has always helped SEO, but it's close to mandatory for AI citation. Systems that retrieve and quote content rely on being able to parse it cleanly.

Practically: use clear headings that signal what each section addresses. Use question-based subheadings where it fits, since they map directly to how people query. Employ structured formats, concise summaries, definition-style statements, well-organized lists where appropriate, so specific passages cleanly answer specific questions. Add schema markup and FAQ structuring, which help systems understand what your content is and which parts answer what. The goal throughout is to make it effortless for a machine to identify the passage that answers a given query and to quote it accurately.

There's a human benefit here too, which is why I like this work: content structured to be machine-parseable is usually also clearer and more useful for actual readers. You're not writing for robots at the expense of people. Clarity serves both.

3. Build genuine authority and trust signals

AI systems, like search engines before them, favor sources they can treat as credible. Being cited isn't only about format; it's about being the kind of source a system is willing to stake its answer on.

This is where much of your existing SEO and brand-building work pays off. Real expertise, demonstrated clearly. Author credibility and clear attribution. Citations and references that show your content is grounded. A consistent, trustworthy presence across the web rather than a single thin page. Mentions and signals from other credible sources. All the things that tell a system "this source is reliable" raise your odds of being the one cited. There's no shortcut around genuine authority here, which is, frankly, healthy for the discipline.

4. Be present across formats and platforms

Generative engines draw on a wide range of sources, and being present across multiple formats and platforms increases the chances you're in the pool for any given query.

That means not relying solely on your own website. It means being where these systems look: authoritative third-party sites, relevant platforms, structured data sources, the places that credible information about your category lives. Being referenced across the web, not just self-published on your own domain, is a strong signal and a wider net. This is also where earned media and being quoted as an expert connect directly to AI visibility, every credible mention of you across the web is another place a system might retrieve you from.

5. Keep your information consistent and current

AI systems are wary of contradictory or stale information, and they favor sources that are consistent about the facts. If your details, your positioning, your key facts, differ across the web, you're a less reliable source to cite. Keeping your information consistent across every place it appears, and keeping it current, strengthens your credibility as a source. This is unglamorous maintenance work, and it matters more than it used to.

6. Measure what you can, honestly

You can't manage what you can't see, and AI visibility is genuinely harder to measure than search rankings. But it's not immeasurable. A growing set of tools now monitors how brands are cited, referenced, or incorporated into AI-generated responses. You can track whether and how you appear when people ask AI systems the questions central to your business. You can watch your branded search and mentions as proxies. The measurement is less mature than SEO analytics, so be honest about that with yourself and your stakeholders, but "hard to measure" is not "ignore it."

Why this matters more for some businesses than others

I want to be straight rather than sell you universal urgency, because not every business faces this shift with equal intensity.

If your customers ask questions that AI is well-suited to answer, "how do I," "what's the best way to," "which option should I consider," then AI visibility is becoming central to whether you're discovered at all. Professional services, considered purchases, complex or research-heavy categories, anything where the buyer investigates before deciding, these are being reshaped fast, because the investigation increasingly happens in a conversation with an AI rather than across ten browser tabs.

If your business runs more on brand recognition, local presence, or channels other than search-based discovery, the shift matters but less acutely, and you have more time. The honest move is to assess where your actual customers are getting their information now, and to weight your investment accordingly, rather than either panicking or ignoring it because a blog told you to.

For most knowledge-driven and considered-purchase businesses, though, the direction is clear enough that starting now, while your category's pool of well-optimized sources is still thin, is a genuine advantage. The citations you bank early are hard for latecomers to displace.

The strategic shift underneath the tactics

Step back from the tactics and there's a deeper change in mindset worth naming, because it's the thing that will keep you oriented as the specific tools and acronyms keep shifting.

For two decades, the implicit goal of digital marketing was to capture the click, to get the visitor onto your property where you controlled the experience and could convert them. AI-mediated discovery breaks that model. Increasingly, the "experience" happens inside the AI's answer, on ground you don't own, and your brand may appear only as a cited source within it. That's uncomfortable, because it means giving up some control over how you're represented.

But there's a reframe that makes it workable. The goal shifts from "capture the click" to "be the trusted source." In an AI-mediated world, being the source the systems rely on, quote, and repeat is its own form of powerful presence. When someone asks an AI how to solve the problem your business solves, and the AI's answer is built partly on your content and names you as a source, you've earned something valuable, credibility conferred by a system the user trusts, even without a click.

This is, in a way, a return to fundamentals that the click-chasing era sometimes obscured. Be genuinely authoritative. Answer real questions honestly and well. Be the source people, and now machines, can rely on. The tactics change; that principle is durable. The brands that win the AI-search era won't be the ones that gamed an algorithm. They'll be the ones that became genuinely worth citing.

A concrete example: what this looks like in practice

Abstract principles are easy to nod along to and hard to act on, so let me make this concrete with a worked example. Imagine a firm that helps families manage inheritance and succession, a genuinely complex, trust-driven, research-heavy category, exactly the kind AI-mediated discovery is reshaping fastest.

In the old model, this firm's marketing goal was to rank on Google for terms like "inheritance planning" or "succession advisory." They'd publish keyword-optimized pages, chase backlinks, and try to climb the results for those phrases. When someone searched, they'd hopefully appear high enough to earn a click.

Now look at how the actual customer behaves today. A family facing a succession question increasingly doesn't type a keyword into Google. They ask an AI a real, specific, messy question in their own words: "How can a family pass down a business without being forced to sell assets to cover inheritance tax?" The AI retrieves relevant sources, composes an answer, and, crucially, may cite the firms whose content best addressed that exact question. If our firm isn't in that answer, they don't exist for that family, regardless of where they rank on Google's blue links.

So what does optimizing for that world look like concretely for this firm? It means identifying the real questions, the specific, in-their-own-words questions families and their advisors actually ask, and building genuinely thorough, clear content that answers each one directly. It means structuring that content so a specific passage cleanly answers "how do you cover inheritance tax without selling assets," in language a machine can lift and attribute accurately. It means establishing real authority: demonstrated expertise, clear authorship, references, consistency across the web, so an AI treats the firm as a source worth citing on this sensitive topic. And it means being present beyond their own site, in the credible places information about succession lives, so they're in the retrieval pool when the question comes up.

The payoff, when it works, is specific and powerful: when someone asks an AI how a family can protect assets through a succession, the answer is partly built on this firm's content and names them as a source. That's a warm, high-trust introduction to a family actively facing the exact problem the firm solves, delivered by a system the family already trusts, at the precise moment of need. No amount of ranking for a broad keyword matches the value of being the cited authority on the specific question.

That's the shift in miniature: from ranking for keywords to being the trusted answer to real questions. The same logic applies to almost any considered-purchase or knowledge-driven business. The category changes; the move doesn't.

The common mistakes to avoid

Because this space is new and noisy, there are predictable ways to get it wrong. I'd rather you sidestep them than learn them expensively.

Abandoning SEO to chase AI. The loudest mistake. "SEO is dead, it's all AI now" makes for a viral post and terrible strategy. AI systems lean on many of the same authority and relevance signals as traditional search, and traditional search still drives the majority of web traffic today. Kicking out your SEO foundation to chase AI visibility removes the ground the AI visibility stands on. Build the new layer on top of solid SEO, not instead of it.

Treating AEO and GEO as separate programs to buy separately. Vendors have an incentive to sell you distinct services for each acronym. But the underlying work overlaps enormously. If a tactic makes your content easier to quote accurately, it serves answer engines and generative engines alike. Splitting your effort into siloed programs mostly wastes money and attention. Do the fundamental work once; it serves all the acronyms.

Optimizing structure while neglecting substance. It's tempting to treat this as a purely technical formatting exercise, add schema, add FAQs, add headings, done. Structure genuinely helps, but AI systems are ultimately looking for credible, substantive answers. Beautifully structured thin content is still thin. The formatting makes good content findable and quotable; it can't rescue content that has nothing to say.

Trying to game it with tricks. Because the retrieval pool can be influenced, some will try manipulative shortcuts, keyword-stuffing for machines, injecting content designed to trick retrieval, and so on. Set aside the ethics for a moment and consider the durability: these systems are improving fast, and the research community is actively studying manipulation of generative engines as a governance problem. Tactics built to trick the system are fragile and will age badly. Genuine authority is the only thing that compounds. Build to be worth citing, not to fool the citer.

Ignoring it because it's hard to measure. AI visibility is harder to track than search rankings, and some marketers use that as an excuse to do nothing. But "harder to measure" is not "unmeasurable," and it's certainly not "unimportant." The tools are maturing, proxies exist, and the cost of waiting until measurement is perfect is a competitor banking citations while you hesitate.

Assuming it's someone else's problem. Finally, plenty of marketers file this under "interesting, but not urgent for us yet." For some businesses that's a defensible call. For many, especially knowledge-driven and considered-purchase ones, it's wishful thinking. The behavior change is already here. The question isn't whether AI-mediated discovery will matter to your category, but whether you'll be established as a trusted source before or after your competitors.

Where this is heading

Predicting specifics in a field moving this fast is a good way to look foolish later, so let me stick to the directions that seem robust rather than the details that will surely shift.

The share of discovery that runs through AI rather than traditional search will keep growing. Every major platform is integrating generative answers deeper into the core experience, and user behavior is following. The trend line is clear even if the exact slope is uncertain.

The terminology will keep churning, and you should hold it loosely. AEO, GEO, LLMO, AIO, and whatever gets coined next are largely describing the same underlying practice: being visible to and cited by AI systems. Don't get attached to an acronym or let vendors convince you each one is a separate discipline requiring a separate purchase. The fundamentals, be genuinely authoritative, answer real questions clearly, be structured and consistent and credible, are what persist under every relabeling.

Measurement will mature. Right now, tracking AI citation is where SEO analytics were in their early days, promising but rough. Expect the tooling to get considerably better, which will make the discipline more accountable and, frankly, more fundable inside organizations that need to see numbers before they invest.

And the tension between control and presence will define the strategic conversation. Brands are used to owning their message on their own properties. AI-mediated discovery means increasingly showing up inside answers you don't control, represented by a system's synthesis of your content. Learning to influence that without being able to dictate it, to be the trusted source rather than the controlling author, is the genuinely new strategic muscle this era demands. The brands that build it early will be comfortable in the AI-search world while their competitors are still fighting for control they've already lost.

What won't change is the deepest thing. Discovery has always ultimately rewarded being genuinely useful, credible, and worth pointing to. Search engines were an imperfect proxy for that; AI answer engines are a different imperfect proxy for the same underlying quality. The through-line across every era of digital discovery is that being genuinely the best answer to a real question, and being findable, eventually wins. The mechanics of "findable" keep changing. The value of being the best answer never has.

Where to start, if you do one thing

If all of this feels like a lot, here's the honest compression. You don't need to overhaul everything at once or buy five new tools with new acronyms. Start with one shift and build from there.

Take the ten most important questions your customers actually ask, the real ones, in their words, before they've heard of you, and make sure that for each one you have content that answers it directly, clearly, completely, and credibly. Structure it so both a human and a machine can find the answer in seconds. Make sure your facts are consistent wherever they appear. That single discipline, being genuinely the best, clearest, most trustworthy answer to the questions that matter in your category, is the foundation of everything else in AEO, GEO, and whatever the next acronym turns out to be.

The search box isn't disappearing tomorrow. But the way people discover, trust, and choose is splitting, and a growing share of it now runs through an AI that decides which sources to trust and repeat. You can treat that as a threat to be feared or a shift to get ahead of. The brands that treat it as the latter, and start doing the work now while the field is still open, are the ones that will be cited when it matters. The rest will keep optimizing for a page of links that fewer and fewer people ever click.

The new game isn't ranking. It's being the answer. Start writing to be quoted.

The Future of Marketing Belongs to Curious People

2026-09-03T12:57:00.000+03:00

Marketing has never been a profession where knowing everything was possible. There are too many industries, audiences, cultures, platforms, technologies, and behaviors changing at the same time. Yet there has always been a temptation in marketing to act as though we have already figured things out. We build frameworks, create best practices, develop playbooks, study case studies, and look for formulas that can be repeated. We want to know what works.

But the longer I work in marketing, the more I think the most valuable quality a marketer can have is not certainty. It is curiosity.

Curiosity is what makes you ask why a campaign worked instead of simply celebrating the results. It makes you question why customers behave differently in one market than another. It makes you wonder whether the strategy that worked last year still makes sense today. It makes you interested in what your audience is doing when they are not interacting with your brand. And perhaps most importantly, it keeps you learning when your existing knowledge is no longer enough.

I have worked across different industries, markets, and cultures throughout my career, and one thing that has become increasingly clear to me is that the best marketers are rarely the people who think they already have all the answers.

Marketing changes too quickly for certainty

The marketing industry has always changed quickly, but the pace has become difficult to ignore. Platforms rise and disappear. Algorithms change. Consumer habits evolve. New technologies reshape how people search, communicate, shop, and make decisions. A tactic that produced excellent results a few years ago can become ineffective without anyone necessarily doing anything wrong.

This creates a problem for marketers who rely too heavily on what worked before.

Experience is valuable, but experience can also become a trap. If you have spent ten years doing something successfully, it is natural to believe that you understand how it works. The danger comes when that confidence stops you from noticing that the environment around you has changed.

Curiosity provides a useful counterbalance. It allows you to respect your experience without becoming trapped by it. You can say, "This has worked for me before, but I want to understand whether it still makes sense now."

That question is increasingly important.

The best marketers are constantly asking why

Curious marketers do not simply look at what happened. They want to understand why it happened.

A campaign gets strong engagement, and they want to know what caused it. A campaign performs badly, and they want to understand what the audience did not respond to. A customer abandons a purchase, and they want to know what happened before that decision. A competitor suddenly starts gaining market share, and they want to understand what changed.

This sounds simple, but it can be surprisingly difficult because marketing teams are often under pressure to move quickly. There is always another campaign to launch, another report to prepare, and another deadline approaching. It can be easier to look at the numbers, write a few conclusions, and move on.

Curiosity makes you pause.

Instead of saying, "Our engagement increased by 30 percent," you start asking what actually caused the increase. Was it the creative? The audience? The timing? The message? The platform? Was there something happening culturally that made the content more relevant? Could the result be replicated, or was it a one-time event?

That extra layer of questioning is often where the useful insight lives.

Curiosity makes you a better researcher

Some of the strongest marketing ideas do not come from brainstorming sessions. They come from paying attention.

Read beyond your industry. Look at what people are talking about. Study competitors, but do not copy them. Talk to customers. Read reviews. Pay attention to complaints. Look at search behavior. Understand the culture surrounding your audience. Follow developments that might seem unrelated to marketing but could eventually change consumer behavior.

When I worked across MENA, for example, one of the most important lessons was that the region cannot simply be treated as one market. Language, culture, purchasing behavior, media habits, and social norms can vary considerably between countries. A campaign that performs well in one market may not have the same meaning somewhere else.

You only discover those differences if you are curious enough to look.

This is why I think research is often underestimated in marketing. People want the creative idea, but the quality of the idea is frequently determined by the quality of the observation that came before it.

The best question is sometimes the simplest one

One of the most valuable questions a marketer can ask is also one of the simplest: "Why?"

Why does the customer care about this?

Why are we communicating this message?

Why do we believe this audience will respond?

Why are we using this platform?

Why are we assuming the customer understands our product?

Why are we measuring this particular metric?

Why are we doing things this way?

Asking these questions can be uncomfortable because it exposes assumptions. Every organization develops them over time. Something was done a certain way because it worked once, so it became standard practice. Eventually, nobody remembers why it started.

Curious marketers are willing to challenge those assumptions without automatically assuming that everything currently being done is wrong.

There is an important difference between being skeptical and being curious. Skepticism can tell you that something does not make sense. Curiosity makes you want to understand what would make more sense instead.

AI makes curiosity even more important

The rise of AI has made this quality even more valuable.

AI can give marketers access to information, ideas, analysis, variations, and drafts faster than ever. It can help research a topic, summarize information, generate concepts, analyze data, and explore possibilities. That is going to change the role of marketers significantly.

But it also creates a new risk.

If everyone has access to a tool that can generate answers, the ability to ask better questions becomes more important.

AI can produce ten campaign concepts. The marketer still has to determine which one understands the audience. It can summarize customer feedback. The marketer still has to recognize the insight hidden inside it. It can generate an audience profile. The marketer still needs to understand whether that profile reflects real human behavior or simply a plausible description.

The technology increases the amount of information available to us. Curiosity determines whether we do anything useful with it.

Curiosity keeps you close to the customer

Marketing becomes dangerous when marketers spend too much time talking to other marketers.

We attend industry events, read marketing publications, follow marketing experts, discuss platform updates, and study what other brands are doing. All of that can be useful, but it is easy to become so immersed in marketing that we forget the person we are actually trying to reach.

Customers do not think in terms of engagement rates and conversion funnels. They have problems, preferences, frustrations, habits, budgets, relationships, responsibilities, and emotions. They do not necessarily care about the terminology marketers use to describe their behavior.

A curious marketer tries to understand the world from the customer's perspective rather than constantly forcing the customer into the marketer's framework.

That means listening more than talking. It means reading what customers actually write rather than relying entirely on what internal teams say customers think. It means paying attention to the language people use when they describe their problems.

Sometimes the best copywriter in your organization is the customer who left a three-star review.

You have to be willing to change your mind

Curiosity becomes especially valuable when it leads to uncertainty.

There is a certain pressure in professional environments to appear confident. Leaders are expected to have answers. Consultants are expected to know what to recommend. Marketers are expected to know their audiences.

But sometimes the most honest answer is, "I don't know yet."

That is not a weakness if it leads to better investigation.

A curious marketer is willing to say, "I thought this would work, but the data suggests otherwise." They are willing to abandon an idea they like because the audience does not respond to it. They are willing to admit that a competitor has done something better. They are willing to change their opinion when new information appears.

This is one of the reasons I think curiosity is closely connected to humility. You cannot remain curious if you are determined to always be right.

Experience should make you more curious, not less

As you gain experience, there is a temptation to become faster at recognizing patterns. That is one of the benefits of experience. You have seen similar problems before, so you can identify them more quickly.

But experienced marketers need to be careful not to assume that every new problem is an old problem wearing a different outfit.

Sometimes it is.

Sometimes it is not.

The best use of experience is not to stop asking questions. It is to know which questions are worth asking.

After working with more than 175 clients, I have seen many recurring marketing problems. I have also learned that the context around those problems can be completely different. The same recommendation can make sense for one organization and be completely wrong for another because the business model, audience, culture, resources, or objectives are different.

Experience gives you a starting point. Curiosity keeps you from treating that starting point as the destination.

Curiosity is a career advantage

Marketing skills can be learned. Platforms can be learned. Analytics tools can be learned. New technologies can be learned.

Curiosity makes you willing to keep learning all of them.

That matters because the marketer you need to be five years from now may be very different from the marketer you are today. Some of the tools you currently use may disappear. New channels will emerge. Customer behavior will change. Entire categories of marketing work may be transformed by AI.

The people who remain valuable will not necessarily be those who know every current tool. They will be the people who can learn what they need to know when they need to know it.

Curiosity creates that adaptability.

It gives you a reason to keep looking beyond what you already know.

The best marketing question is the one you have not asked yet

I do not think the future of marketing belongs to the people with the biggest budgets, the longest resumes, or the largest collection of certifications. Those things can certainly help, but they are not enough in an environment that changes as quickly as this one.

I think the future belongs to people who remain interested.

People who walk into a new market and want to understand it before trying to change it. People who talk to customers instead of assuming they know what customers want. People who question the brief when the brief does not make sense. People who look at data and then ask what the data is not telling them. People who experiment, learn, and adjust. People who can use new technology without becoming dependent on it.

Curiosity keeps you from becoming too comfortable with what you already know.

And in marketing, that may be one of the most important professional advantages you can have.

Because the moment you think you understand your audience completely, the market changes. The moment you think you have mastered the platform, the platform changes. The moment you think you know what works, something new comes along and challenges the assumption.

The answer is not to know everything.

It is to remain curious enough to keep learning.

AI Can Generate Content. It Can't Give You Something to Say

2026-08-31T11:41:00.000+03:00

We are living through a strange moment in the history of communication. We have reached a point where almost anyone can produce a polished article, social media post, email, presentation, or marketing campaign in seconds. The technology is impressive, and it is changing the way we work. But as AI becomes better at producing content, I think we are going to discover that producing content was never really the difficult part. The difficult part was always having something worth saying.

I have spent much of my career working in marketing and communications, where there is constant pressure to produce. There is always another campaign, another post, another newsletter, another blog, another presentation, and another idea that needs to be turned into something people can see. For years, the challenge was often finding enough time to create all of it. AI is changing that equation. It can help you move from an idea to a draft remarkably quickly. It can organize your thoughts, suggest angles, generate variations, summarize information, and help you get past the blank page. That is incredibly useful. But speed of production is not the same thing as depth of thought.

Content Is Not the Same as Ideas

One of the easiest mistakes to make with AI is confusing a large amount of content with a large amount of thinking. You can ask an AI system to give you ten LinkedIn posts about leadership, twenty blog ideas about marketing, fifty social media captions, or a month's worth of content, and it will probably give you exactly what you asked for. The results might even be well written.

But eventually, you have to ask yourself what the content is actually saying. If there is no original perspective behind it, you are essentially producing variations of things that have already been said thousands of times. The words may be different, but the underlying idea is familiar. That is why so much AI-generated content can feel strangely empty. It is grammatically correct, structurally sound, and often perfectly reasonable, yet there is nothing behind it that makes you stop and think, "I have never looked at it that way before."

The missing ingredient is usually not better writing. It is experience. It is curiosity. It is having spent enough time doing something to develop an opinion about it.

AI Has Not Lived Your Life

I can ask AI to write about leadership, and it can give me an excellent explanation of delegation, communication, accountability, and trust. It can draw from an enormous amount of information about what managers have experienced and what researchers have written about leadership. But it has never sat in a meeting where a decision went badly. It has never had to tell someone that their work was not good enough. It has never built a campaign with a limited budget and wondered whether the money would actually produce results. It has never worked across cultures where the same message can mean completely different things depending on the audience.

It can know about these experiences because humans have written about them. It can recognize patterns in what people have said, help you understand them, and even help you articulate an experience you have had yourself. But it does not have your experiences. That distinction matters because your experiences are one of the few things you have that cannot simply be copied from someone else.

After working with more than 175 clients across different industries, countries, and cultures, I have accumulated a lot of experiences that are difficult to separate from the way I think about marketing. The lessons I learned from those experiences are what give me something to say. The technology can help me communicate those lessons more effectively, but it cannot create the experiences that produced them.

The Advantage Is Shifting from Writing to Thinking

For a long time, being able to write well was a significant advantage. It still is, and I do not think good writing is becoming less valuable. But when technology can help almost anyone turn an idea into competent prose, the advantage begins to move further upstream.

What do you notice that other people do not? What have you learned that you did not expect to learn? What mistakes have changed the way you work? What opinions have you changed over time? What do you believe that you can actually defend? What have you experienced that gives you a perspective others cannot easily replicate?

Those questions become more valuable when content becomes easier to produce. If everyone has access to essentially the same tools, the tools themselves stop being the differentiator. Your thinking becomes the differentiator.

This is particularly relevant in marketing. We have always talked about the importance of having a point of view, but the rise of AI makes that point of view even more important. When anyone can generate ten versions of a campaign concept in seconds, the real question becomes whether anyone involved has a strong enough understanding of the audience, the market, the culture, and the business to know which concept is actually worth pursuing.

AI Can Make a Weak Idea Sound Convincing

There is another danger that comes with all of this. AI is very good at making things sound finished. That can create the illusion that an idea is better simply because it has been expressed clearly.

You can take a vague thought, give it to AI, and receive a beautifully structured article in return. The headings are logical, the transitions are smooth, and the conclusion sounds confident. The finished product can look much more developed than the original idea actually was.

That is where we need to be careful. Polished language can hide weak thinking. Sometimes what you actually need is not better writing. You need to go back and ask whether there is anything interesting underneath the writing at all.

A mediocre idea does not become a strong idea because you put it into better paragraphs. It becomes a strong idea when you think about it more deeply, connect it to something you have observed, challenge your own assumptions, or find a way of looking at the problem that other people have overlooked.

AI can make an idea sound intelligent. It cannot guarantee that the idea actually is.

The Best Use of AI May Be Helping You Say What You Already Mean

This is where I think AI is genuinely powerful. There are plenty of things I know I want to say but struggle to express clearly. Sometimes an idea exists in my head as a collection of observations rather than a coherent argument. I might know that something happened, know that it changed the way I think, and have a general sense of why it matters, but struggle to turn all of that into something another person can understand.

That is where AI can be incredibly useful. I can give it the messy version. I can explain what happened, what I think about it, what I am unsure about, and what point I am trying to make. It can help me organize those thoughts into something clearer and identify gaps in the argument. It can suggest ways of explaining something that I had struggled to articulate.

That does not mean AI came up with the idea. It helped me communicate it. There is an important difference between using AI to replace your thinking and using AI to extend your thinking. The first can make you dependent on the tool. The second can make you more effective.

For me, the most interesting relationship with AI is not "tell me what to say." It is closer to "help me figure out how to say what I am trying to say."

Originality Does Not Mean Inventing Something Nobody Has Ever Thought Of

There is also a common misconception that having something original to say means having a completely original idea that nobody has ever thought of before. That is almost impossible. Most interesting ideas are combinations of things that already exist. What makes them valuable is the way you connect them to your own experience, observations, and perspective.

Thousands of people have written about management, marketing, careers, leadership, travel, creativity, and personal growth. That does not mean there is nothing left to say about any of those subjects. If you have managed people across different cultures, worked through difficult organizational situations, made mistakes, changed your approach, and learned something specific from those experiences, you have a perspective worth sharing.

The topic itself does not have to be original. Your relationship with the topic can be.

That is also why I think personal writing becomes more interesting as you gain experience. When you are younger, you may feel that you have to come up with a completely new idea to have something worth saying. As you get older, you realize that your value often comes from being able to connect familiar ideas with experiences that are uniquely yours.

The Blank Page Is Not Always the Enemy

We have spent years trying to eliminate the blank page. AI makes that easier than ever. You can start with nothing and immediately have something. That is one of its greatest advantages, particularly for people who understand what they want to communicate but struggle with getting started.

But sometimes the blank page is useful. It forces you to sit with an idea. It forces you to decide what you actually believe. It forces you to distinguish between what you think and what you have simply heard other people say.

When you have to write something yourself, you cannot hide as easily behind polished language. You have to confront the quality of your own thinking. That process can be uncomfortable, but it is also where some of the best ideas come from.

I do not think we should romanticize struggling to write. There is no prize for spending three hours staring at an empty document when a tool could help you move forward in ten minutes. But there is value in having your own thoughts before asking a machine to help you express them.

The goal should not be to preserve the blank page for its own sake. The goal should be to make sure that when you fill it, you have something of your own to put there.

The Future Belongs to People Who Have Experiences, Not Just Content

As content becomes cheaper and easier to produce, I think lived experience will become more valuable. People will increasingly be surrounded by articles, posts, videos, newsletters, opinions, and AI-generated explanations. The problem will not be finding information. It will be deciding what deserves attention.

That creates an opportunity for people who have actually done things. Build something and talk about what went wrong. Manage a team and explain what surprised you. Change careers and write about what you learned. Work with people from different cultures and talk about what you misunderstood at first. Try something, fail at it, and explain what the failure taught you. Spend years in a particular industry and share the patterns you started noticing only after seeing the same problems repeatedly.

Those stories have value because they contain evidence of a life lived. They are not valuable simply because they are personal. They are valuable because experience gives you a perspective that cannot be generated from a prompt alone.

The more content we have, the more we are going to look for the person behind it. Who are they? What have they actually done? Why do they believe this? What have they seen that led them to this conclusion?

That is where credibility comes from.

Your Perspective Is the Product

This has changed the way I think about writing. I am less interested in asking myself, "What should I write about?" and more interested in asking, "What have I experienced that is worth thinking about?"

The second question leads somewhere much more interesting. It turns your career into a collection of stories. Your mistakes become lessons. Your changes of opinion become ideas. Your conversations become observations. Your successes become case studies. Even the things that did not work become material for understanding how you think.

You stop trying to manufacture content and start documenting perspective.

That is a very different approach to creating.

AI can help you with the words. It can help you find structure, challenge your assumptions, explore different angles, improve clarity, and make the process considerably faster. It can be an incredibly powerful creative partner, and I think we are only beginning to understand how much it will change the way we work.

But it cannot decide what matters to you. It cannot give you curiosity, conviction, lived experience, or a decade of mistakes. It cannot give you the strange conversation you had five years ago that suddenly makes sense today. It cannot give you the moment when something happened and changed the way you see your career, your industry, your relationships, or yourself.

Those things still have to come from you.

Perhaps that is why, in a world where everyone can suddenly become a content creator, the people worth listening to will not necessarily be the ones who produce the most content. They will be the ones who have spent enough time living, working, questioning, failing, learning, and paying attention to have developed a perspective of their own.

AI can generate content.

But it still cannot give you something to say.

The Things Nobody Tells You About Becoming a Manager

2026-08-28T12:35:00.000+03:00

Nobody really prepares you for becoming a manager. You can take leadership courses, read books about management, learn how to conduct performance reviews, delegate tasks, set goals, and run meetings. You can study every framework ever created about leadership. Then you become responsible for other people and realize that most of management has very little to do with frameworks. It is about people. It is about making decisions when you do not have all the information, giving feedback when you know it might hurt, protecting your team while still holding them accountable, and knowing when to step in and when to get out of the way. Perhaps most importantly, it is learning that being good at your job and being good at managing people are two very different things.

Your job changes completely

One of the biggest surprises is how quickly your definition of "work" changes. When you are an individual contributor, you are largely responsible for your own output. You can measure your productivity by what you create, finish, solve, or deliver. As a manager, your output becomes much less tangible. Your job is no longer to do everything yourself. Your job is to create an environment where other people can do their best work.

That means your calendar can be full of conversations that produce nothing you can put in a portfolio. You might spend an hour helping someone work through a problem, another resolving a disagreement, another discussing priorities, and another reviewing someone's work. You might spend part of the day explaining something you have explained before. At the end of the day, you can look at everything you did and wonder where the day went. But those conversations are the work. Helping people think more clearly, removing obstacles, creating alignment, and giving people the confidence to move forward are all part of the job, even when there is nothing tangible to show for them.

You have to stop being the person with all the answers

This is especially difficult when you became a manager because you were good at what you did. You were probably the person people went to when something needed to be solved. You built your reputation by being capable, reliable, and knowledgeable. Then suddenly, you are expected to stop solving everything yourself.

Your instinct will often be to jump in, fix the problem, and move on. But if you constantly do that, you create dependency rather than capability. A better manager does not always give the answer. Sometimes they ask, "What do you think we should do?" Sometimes they let someone make a decision they would have made differently. Sometimes they allow a person to struggle with a problem long enough to learn how to solve it themselves.

Your value as a manager is not measured by how many problems you personally solve. It is measured by how many problems your team eventually learns to solve without you. That can be a difficult transition because letting go of control can feel like lowering your standards. In reality, it can be one of the clearest signs that you are becoming a better manager.

Your team does not need another friend

You can care deeply about your team without trying to be everyone's friend. This is one of the hardest balances to find, particularly when you naturally value relationships and want the people around you to like you. But management sometimes requires you to make decisions that people will not like. You might have to say no, give difficult feedback, address poor performance, redistribute responsibilities, or make a decision that benefits the organization while frustrating someone on your team.

If your priority is always being liked, you will eventually avoid the conversations you need to have. That does not mean you should become distant or overly formal. The best managers I have encountered are often warm, approachable, and genuinely interested in the people they manage. But they also understand that their responsibility is not to make everyone happy. It is to create a healthy, productive environment where people understand expectations and can do their jobs well. Respect is ultimately more important than popularity.

Your mood affects the room

This is something I underestimated. When you are an individual contributor, having a bad day mostly affects you. When you are the manager, it can affect everyone around you. If you walk into a meeting frustrated, people notice. If you are unusually quiet, people wonder why. If you react badly to a mistake, people become more cautious the next time. If you constantly communicate that everything is urgent, eventually everything feels urgent.

You may not realize how much people watch you. Your team takes cues from your behavior, particularly when things go wrong. That does not mean managers have to pretend to be happy all the time or hide every difficult emotion. It means you have to become conscious of what you communicate through your behavior. A manager who panics when something goes wrong can unintentionally make a manageable problem feel like a crisis. A manager who stays calm and focuses on what needs to happen next can give the team the confidence to work through the same problem.

Leadership is often communicated without words.

You cannot protect everyone from everything

A good manager wants to protect their team. You want to shield people from unnecessary pressure, unreasonable requests, organizational politics, and chaos. But there is a limit. Sometimes the organization makes a decision you disagree with. Sometimes a deadline really is impossible. Sometimes a client is difficult. Sometimes someone on your team has to deal with the consequences of their own decisions.

You cannot remove every uncomfortable experience from someone's professional life. What you can do is make sure people do not have to navigate difficult situations alone. There is a difference between protecting your team and insulating them from reality. The first is leadership. The second can become a problem.

Part of being a manager is helping people develop the resilience and judgment they need to deal with situations that you cannot solve for them. You can advocate for your team without pretending that every challenge can be removed.

Delegation is harder than it sounds

Every management book tells you to delegate. Almost nobody tells you how uncomfortable it can feel. You know exactly how you would do something. You know the shortcuts, the mistakes to avoid, the details that matter, and probably how long the task should take. Then you give it to someone else and watch them do it differently.

Your first instinct might be to intervene. But different does not necessarily mean wrong. One of the hardest parts of delegation is accepting that the person you delegated to may not do the work exactly as you would. If the outcome is good, that may be enough.

Delegation is not simply about getting work off your plate. It is about giving someone else ownership. That means allowing them to make decisions, develop their own approach, and occasionally make mistakes. If you delegate something and then control every step of how it is done, you have not really delegated. You have simply created another version of yourself who needs your approval for everything.

Feedback is not a once-a-year event

One of the worst management habits is saving feedback for performance reviews. If someone is doing something well, tell them. If something needs to change, tell them. If someone is developing a new skill, tell them what you are noticing. Feedback works best when it is close to the behavior.

It should not feel like an ambush every six months when a manager suddenly presents a list of everything someone has done wrong. The best feedback conversations I have had, both giving and receiving, were usually simple and specific. They focused on what happened, why it mattered, and what could be done differently next time.

The more normal feedback becomes, the less threatening it feels. It becomes part of the relationship rather than an event that people dread. That also makes it easier to recognize good work. People should not have to wait for an annual review to discover that their manager appreciates what they are doing.

You will sometimes get it wrong

This may be the most important thing to understand. You will make bad hiring decisions. You will delegate poorly. You will give someone the wrong advice. You will misunderstand a situation. You will communicate badly. You will sometimes be too involved and sometimes not involved enough. You will make decisions that look right at the time and wrong in hindsight.

The mistake is not making mistakes. The mistake is becoming so attached to your authority that you cannot admit them. A manager saying, "I got that wrong," does not make them look weak. It makes them trustworthy. People do not expect managers to be perfect. They expect them to be accountable.

In fact, admitting mistakes can teach your team something valuable. It shows that being wrong is not catastrophic and that changing your mind when new information becomes available is a strength rather than a weakness. The manager who never admits a mistake creates a culture where everyone else learns to hide theirs.

Not everyone wants to grow in the same way

Another lesson that took me time to understand is that ambition looks different for different people. Some people want to become directors. Some want to manage teams. Some want to become experts in their field. Some want more responsibility. Others are perfectly happy becoming exceptionally good at their current role. Some people value stability more than career progression.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these choices. A manager's job is not to make everyone ambitious in the same way. It is to understand what motivates each person and help them succeed within their own goals, where possible. Your definition of success should not automatically become your team's definition of success.

Sometimes the best thing you can do for someone is help them grow into a bigger role. Other times, it is giving them the space and resources to become excellent at the role they already have. Good management starts with understanding the person rather than assuming everyone wants the same career path.

The hardest conversations are often the most important

Eventually, every manager has to have a conversation they would rather avoid. Someone is underperforming. Someone's behavior is affecting the team. Two people are not getting along. Expectations are not being met. Someone wants something you cannot give them.

The temptation is to delay the conversation and hope the situation fixes itself. It rarely does. In fact, difficult situations tend to become more difficult when they are ignored. Small problems become patterns, patterns become resentment, and eventually what could have been a relatively simple conversation becomes a much bigger issue.

You do not need to be harsh. You need to be clear. Kindness without clarity can become unfairness because the person may never understand that there is a problem until the consequences become serious. People deserve to know where they stand, even when the truth is uncomfortable.

Your team will remember you differently than you think

Years later, people probably will not remember every project you assigned them. They may not remember the meetings you had or the spreadsheets you reviewed. They may not even remember many of the decisions you made.

They will remember how you treated them.

They will remember whether you trusted them, whether you gave them opportunities, whether you listened, whether you gave them credit, whether you supported them when something went wrong, and whether you helped them become better at what they do. They will remember whether they felt comfortable bringing you a problem or whether they spent their time trying to avoid your reaction.

That is a much bigger responsibility than simply managing tasks. A manager can hit every KPI and still leave people feeling smaller than when they arrived. Another manager can build a team where people become more confident, capable, and independent over time. The second is probably leaving a much more meaningful legacy.

Becoming a manager is also learning to manage yourself

Perhaps the biggest lesson is that management exposes you to yourself. It exposes your impatience, your communication style, your insecurities, your need for control, your ability or inability to trust, your reaction to criticism, and your relationship with failure.

You can learn every management technique in the world, but eventually you still have to manage yourself. You have to understand what triggers you, how you communicate under pressure, when your instincts are useful, and when they are getting in the way. You have to learn how to separate your ego from your decisions and your personal preferences from what is actually best for the team.

Because your team does not just experience your decisions. They experience you.

Becoming a manager is not really about getting a bigger title. It is about taking responsibility for something much bigger than your own work. You are responsible for creating clarity when there is confusion, confidence when there is uncertainty, accountability when standards slip, and space for other people to grow.

Nobody tells you how difficult that can be. But nobody tells you how rewarding it can be either.

When you get it right, management stops being about being the person in charge. It becomes about helping other people become better than they were before they worked with you. And that, ultimately, is probably one of the most meaningful things a career can give you.

What 175+ Clients Taught Me About People

2026-08-24T12:25:00.000+03:00

Over the course of my career, I have worked with more than 175 clients across different industries, countries, cultures, and stages of growth. Some were large organizations with established teams and sophisticated processes. Others were small businesses where a handful of people were doing everything themselves. I have worked with founders, CEOs, marketing directors, entrepreneurs, government organizations, nonprofits, artists, educators, and people launching their very first business.

On paper, those clients had very little in common. Their industries were different, their budgets were different, and what they needed from me was rarely the same. But after working with that many people, you start to notice patterns.

The biggest thing I learned is that working in marketing is rarely just about marketing.

People hire you because they want more customers, better branding, stronger campaigns, more visibility, or better results. But underneath almost every business problem is a human problem. There is uncertainty, ego, ambition, fear, pressure, insecurity, excitement, and sometimes simply the need for someone to make sense of what feels overwhelming.

That has taught me a lot about people.

People usually know more than they think they do

One of the most interesting things I have learned is that clients often already know what is wrong.

They might come to you asking for a new website, a social media strategy, a rebrand, a campaign, or a complete marketing plan. After a few conversations, however, the real issue often becomes clear. They know which product is not selling. They know which part of the customer experience is frustrating people. They know their positioning is unclear. They know their team is struggling.

They sometimes just need someone outside the organization to help them articulate it.

Being an outsider can be valuable because you are not emotionally attached to the problem. You can ask the obvious question that everyone inside the company stopped asking months ago.

I have learned not to assume that my job is always to bring the answer. Sometimes my job is to help the client arrive at the answer they already had somewhere in their head.

Confidence and competence are not the same thing

Working with so many people has also changed the way I think about confidence.

Some of the most confident people I have worked with were not necessarily the most capable. And some of the smartest people were surprisingly hesitant to trust their own judgment.

There are people who walk into a meeting completely certain that they are right, even when the evidence says otherwise. There are also people who have built successful companies but still question whether they know what they are doing.

That distinction matters.

I have become much more interested in how someone thinks than how confidently they speak. A person who is willing to ask questions, consider new information, admit when they are wrong, and change direction is usually far more valuable than someone who always has an answer.

Experience has taught me that confidence can be performed. Curiosity is much harder to fake.

Everyone wants to feel understood

Whether someone is a CEO running a large organization or a founder working from a small office, they want to feel that someone understands what they are trying to accomplish.

This sounds obvious, but it is surprisingly easy to forget.

As marketers, we can become obsessed with audiences, analytics, platforms, funnels, conversion rates, engagement, and KPIs. All of those things matter. But before any of them, there is a person sitting across from you trying to explain what they want.

Sometimes what a client needs is not another presentation. They need you to listen carefully enough to understand what they are actually saying.

I have had conversations where the brief said one thing, but the conversation revealed something completely different. The better I became at listening, the better my work became.

Most people are not difficult. They are under pressure.

This is probably one of the most useful lessons I have learned.

Over the years, I have worked with people who were demanding, impatient, indecisive, overly critical, or difficult to communicate with. Earlier in my career, I might have taken some of that personally.

I don't as much anymore.

You never really know what is happening behind someone's behavior. A client who keeps changing their mind might be dealing with pressure from their own management. A founder who is obsessing over tiny details might be terrified of wasting the money they have invested. Someone who seems dismissive might simply be overwhelmed.

This does not mean every behavior should be excused. Boundaries still matter. Professionalism still matters. But understanding the person behind the behavior makes it easier to respond rather than react.

People rarely bring only their job into a meeting. They bring everything else with them too.

People want different things from success

Working across countries and cultures taught me that there is no universal definition of success.

For one client, success might mean doubling revenue. For another, it might mean building a respected brand. Someone else might care more about having enough freedom to spend time with their family. Another person might want recognition, influence, stability, or simply the ability to keep their business alive.

It is easy to assume that everyone wants what we want.

They don't.

That realization has made me much more careful about giving advice. A strategy can be objectively effective and still be wrong for the person sitting in front of you if it does not align with what they actually value.

People remember how you made working with you feel

Results matter. They absolutely do.

But after working with so many clients, I have realized that people also remember the experience of working with you.

They remember whether you answered when they needed you. Whether you made a complicated problem easier. Whether you listened. Whether you took responsibility when something went wrong. Whether you treated them with respect when things became difficult.

They also remember how you behaved when things went well.

A successful campaign is great. A strong strategy is valuable. But relationships are built through hundreds of small interactions that have nothing to do with the final report.

Some of the clients I remember most have nothing to do with the size of the project or the amount of money involved. I remember them because we worked well together, solved problems together, or simply had a good human connection.

Not every client is the right client

This took me longer to learn.

When you are building a career, it is tempting to say yes to everything. Every project looks like an opportunity. Every client could potentially lead to another client. Every payment feels important.

But experience changes your definition of opportunity.

A project can be financially attractive and still be a terrible fit. A famous client can look impressive on your CV while being exhausting to work with. A large budget does not automatically create a good partnership.

The best client relationships I have had were not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets. They were the ones where there was mutual trust, clear communication, realistic expectations, and respect for each other's expertise.

Eventually, you realize that saying no is also part of building a career.

People change, and so do you

When you work with someone for long enough, you sometimes get to see their evolution.

A small business becomes a larger company. A junior employee becomes a manager. A founder becomes a CEO. A struggling brand finds its identity. A person who once needed a lot of guidance becomes someone who confidently makes their own decisions.

But there is another side to that.

You change too.

Every client leaves something behind. Sometimes it is a new skill. Sometimes it is a different way of thinking. Sometimes it is a lesson about communication. Sometimes it is simply a reminder of the kind of person you want to be when you are on the other side of the table.

I started my career thinking that experience was mostly about accumulating knowledge.

I now think it is also about accumulating perspective.

The work is rarely just the work

After 175+ clients, I could probably list hundreds of lessons about marketing, branding, digital strategy, content, advertising, and business.

But the lessons I value most are the ones that have nothing to do with a marketing tactic.

People want to be heard. They want to be respected. They want to feel confident in their decisions. They want someone they can trust. They make mistakes. They change their minds. They get scared. They become ambitious. They surprise you. Sometimes they disappoint you. Sometimes they become friends.

And you do all of those things too.

That is probably what working with so many clients has taught me most. Behind every brief, every campaign, every meeting, every deadline, and every invoice is a person trying to make something work.

Once you understand that, you become better at working with people.

And, perhaps more importantly, you become better at being one.

Things I Changed My Mind About

2026-08-21T13:21:00.000+03:00

I've always found changing my mind slightly uncomfortable. There is a strange pressure, especially as you get older, to appear consistent. We are encouraged to have strong opinions, defend them confidently, and stand by what we said before. Changing your mind can sometimes look like weakness, indecision, or a lack of conviction. I've come to see it differently. Changing your mind is often evidence that you learned something.

Some of the opinions I had in my twenties feel almost foreign to me now. Others have simply become more nuanced. There are things I once considered extremely important that barely register anymore, and things I didn't understand at all that have become central to how I think about work and life. I'm sure I'll change my mind about many of these things again. That's probably the point.

I changed my mind about having a five-year plan

For a long time, I thought ambitious people were supposed to know where they were going. You picked a direction, established a few milestones, and worked backward from them. The idea was that if you were disciplined enough, you could more or less design your future.

I still believe in having goals. I just don't believe in pretending that you can predict your life accurately five years from now. Over the course of my career, some of the most interesting opportunities came from directions I couldn't have predicted. Jobs appeared that weren't part of the plan. Projects introduced me to people and industries I hadn't expected to work with. Circumstances changed. Priorities changed. I changed.

A five-year plan assumes that the person making the plan and the person executing it will have roughly the same interests, priorities, opportunities, and circumstances. They won't. I still think it's useful to have a direction, but I don't think you need a detailed map.

I changed my mind about job titles

I used to care much more about titles than I do now. There is something seductive about a good title. It feels like a public measurement of progress. Manager sounds better than Specialist. Director sounds better than Manager. Head of something sounds better still.

But after enough time in the workplace, you realize that titles are often less meaningful than the work attached to them. I've seen people with impressive titles who had very little influence, and people with relatively modest titles who were the person everyone relied on when something important needed to get done.

A title can tell you where someone sits on an organizational chart. It doesn't necessarily tell you how capable they are, how much they contribute, or how much responsibility they actually carry. These days, I'm much more interested in what someone does than what their email signature says.

I changed my mind about saying yes to every opportunity

Earlier in my career, I thought opportunities were things you were supposed to take. If someone offered you an interesting project, a new client, a better role, or an opportunity to work with someone impressive, the instinct was to say yes before somebody else did. There was a certain logic to it. Early in your career, you need experience, you need to meet people, and you need to learn. Saying yes can create opportunities you couldn't have planned for.

But eventually, saying yes to everything becomes its own problem. Every yes consumes something: time, attention, energy, and focus. As you become more experienced, your most valuable resource isn't necessarily your ability to do more. It's your ability to decide what deserves your attention.

I've learned that an opportunity can be genuinely good and still be wrong for you. That's a surprisingly important distinction. Not every interesting project needs to become your project, and not every door that opens needs to be walked through.

I changed my mind about specialization

For a long time, I thought the safest career strategy was to become exceptionally good at one thing. Specialization makes sense. The more specific your expertise becomes, the more valuable it can be. In a world where everyone is competing for attention, being known for something is useful.

But my own career went in the opposite direction. I've moved between marketing, communications, growth, strategy, content, digital, consulting, management, and different industries. For a while, I worried that this made my career look scattered.

Eventually, I realized that the different pieces were connected. Understanding marketing made me better at growth. Working with different businesses made me better at strategy. Working across cultures made me better at communication. Managing people made me better at understanding how organizations actually work.

I've become less interested in being the world's best person at one narrow thing and more interested in being someone who can walk into an unfamiliar problem and figure out how to make sense of it. That may not be traditional specialization, but it's a skill too.

I changed my mind about productivity

I used to think being productive meant doing more. More emails answered, more projects completed, more meetings attended, and more tasks crossed off the list. There is an entire industry built around convincing us that the solution to having too much to do is becoming better at doing things.

I'm less convinced.

At some point, you realize that you can become extremely efficient at doing things that don't actually matter. The more senior you become, the more important the question becomes: should this be done at all?

I've started to think of productivity less as maximizing output and more as protecting attention. Some of the best work I've done has happened when I had enough uninterrupted time to think. Some of the worst decisions I've made happened when I was moving quickly simply because everything felt urgent.

Being busy can create the feeling of progress without necessarily producing it. I wish I'd understood that earlier.

I changed my mind about networking

I used to think networking meant meeting people who could help your career. That made the whole concept feel transactional. You meet someone, exchange contact details, connect on LinkedIn, and occasionally message them while wondering somewhere in the back of your mind whether the relationship might eventually lead to a job, a client, or an introduction.

I don't think about networking that way anymore.

The most valuable professional relationships I've built rarely started with a calculation about what the other person could do for me. They started because we enjoyed talking to each other, worked well together, were curious about similar things, or simply helped each other when we could.

Some relationships have lasted for years without either person ever needing anything from the other. That's probably a better definition of networking. Build relationships with people you actually like and respect, and the professional value tends to follow naturally.

I changed my mind about money

Money matters. I don't think pretending otherwise is particularly useful. Financial security gives you choices. It can reduce stress, create independence, allow you to help people you care about, and give you the ability to walk away from situations that aren't right for you.

But I used to think that earning more money would automatically make me feel more successful. It doesn't.

At some point, you start asking what the additional money is actually buying you. More freedom? Great. More security? Valuable. More options? Absolutely. But if you're simply exchanging more of your time, energy, and peace of mind for a larger number in a bank account, the calculation becomes more complicated.

I've become much more interested in the relationship between money and freedom than money and status. Those are not the same thing.

I changed my mind about being right

This one took me longer than it should have. I used to enjoy being right. I think most intelligent people do, at least to some extent. There is satisfaction in having the correct answer, especially when you had to argue for it.

But being right isn't always the most useful outcome.

Sometimes the person with the best idea isn't the person who explains it most forcefully. Sometimes you need to let someone reach a conclusion themselves. Sometimes you need to accept that your original idea wasn't as good as you thought. And sometimes two people can have different perspectives without one of them being stupid or wrong.

Experience has made me less interested in winning arguments and more interested in understanding why someone sees things differently. I haven't completely mastered this one, but I'm better at it than I used to be.

I changed my mind about success

This might be the biggest one.

I used to have a fairly conventional idea of success. Build a strong career, earn more, take on bigger responsibilities, work with better-known companies, and keep moving forward. There's nothing wrong with any of that.

But eventually, I started asking a different question: forward toward what?

A career can keep progressing indefinitely. There is always another title, another salary, another company, and another goal. If you're not careful, you can spend your entire life achieving things without ever stopping to ask whether you actually wanted them.

My definition of success has become much more personal. I want to do interesting work, keep learning, have enough financial freedom to make decisions without constantly worrying about money, work with people I respect, have time outside of work, and have the freedom to change direction when something no longer makes sense.

That definition probably wouldn't have impressed my younger self very much. Today, it sounds pretty good.

I changed my mind about certainty

I used to think confidence meant knowing what you were doing. Now I think confidence can sometimes mean knowing that you don't.

There is a difference between being uncertain and being incapable. You can be very good at what you do and still not know what comes next. You can make a thoughtful decision without knowing whether it will work. You can start something without having the entire journey figured out.

Some of the biggest changes in my life happened when I didn't have a clear answer. I've become more comfortable with that, not because uncertainty became less uncomfortable, but because I've learned that certainty is often an illusion anyway.

I changed my mind about changing my mind

Perhaps that's the biggest lesson.

I used to think changing your mind meant that your previous opinion was wrong. Now I think it can simply mean that you have more information.

The person I was ten years ago made decisions with the knowledge, experience, priorities, and circumstances he had at the time. I don't need to be embarrassed by the things he believed. He didn't know what I know now. And ten years from now, I may look back at some of the things I believe today and think the same thing about myself.

That's okay.

I'd rather be someone who can say, "I used to think that, but I don't anymore," than someone who protects an old opinion simply because admitting that they've changed feels uncomfortable.

Maybe growing up is partly the process of becoming less attached to being the person you thought you were supposed to be. You learn, you experience things, you make mistakes, you see more of the world, and you meet people who challenge your assumptions. Eventually, you change your mind.

I don't think that's inconsistency. I think that's education.

The Education You Can't Put on a CV

2026-08-18T18:02:56.389+03:00

For most of my life, I thought education was something you could document. You went to school, earned a degree, took a course, received a certification, and added it to your CV. The more qualifications you collected, the more evidence you had that you were learning and progressing. There was something reassuring about being able to point to a piece of paper and say, "I know this because I studied it."

I still believe formal education has enormous value. My own education has shaped the way I think and has opened doors that might otherwise have remained closed. But after many years of working, changing roles, working across countries and cultures, managing people, dealing with difficult situations, and simply getting older, I've started to think that some of the most important things I've learned are precisely the things I could never put on my CV.

There is no certification for learning how to deal with disappointment. There is no university degree for knowing when to speak and when it is better to listen. There is no professional qualification for recognizing a bad working environment before you've spent too much time in it. And there is certainly no LinkedIn badge for learning how to become comfortable with uncertainty.

Yet these lessons have probably shaped the person I am today more than many of the qualifications I can list under "Education."

The people who educate us without knowing it

Over the course of a career, you meet an enormous number of people. Some become mentors, some become colleagues, some become friends, and some simply pass through your professional life for a short period of time. What I've come to appreciate is that almost all of them leave you with something, whether they intend to or not.

I've learned a great deal from good managers. I've learned how much trust can change the way a team works and how powerful it can be when someone gives you responsibility without constantly looking over your shoulder. I've also learned from difficult managers, although those lessons tend to be harder to appreciate at the time. Sometimes the most useful thing a bad manager can teach you is exactly what kind of manager you don't want to become.

I've worked with people who were exceptionally talented but difficult to work with, and others who weren't necessarily the most technically impressive people in the room but made everyone around them better. That distinction has stayed with me. Competence matters, but so does character. Intelligence matters, but so does empathy. Being able to do something exceptionally well is valuable, but knowing how to bring other people along with you is an entirely different skill.

None of those lessons appear on a CV.

You can write "leadership experience" under a job title, but that doesn't tell someone how you actually behave when a project goes wrong or when someone on your team makes a mistake. You can list "team management," but that doesn't tell anyone whether the people who worked for you felt trusted, supported, or respected.

Those are things you learn through experience, and often through watching other people.

Failure teaches differently

A CV is naturally designed to make failure invisible. We list the successful campaigns, the major clients, the awards, the promotions, the measurable results, and the projects we're proud of. We rarely include the ideas that didn't work, the decisions we got wrong, or the opportunities we should have approached differently.

That's understandable. A CV is a professional document, not a diary.

But if I were trying to understand someone's actual education, I would want to know about those things.

I've made mistakes throughout my career. I've underestimated projects, misjudged situations, trusted the wrong people, said yes when I should have said no, and occasionally spent far too much time trying to make something work simply because I didn't want to admit that it wasn't working.

At the time, none of these experiences felt educational. They felt frustrating, expensive, embarrassing, or disappointing. The lesson usually came later.

You can read about risk management, but nothing teaches you about risk quite like making a decision and living with the consequences. You can study communication, but nothing teaches you about communication quite like realizing that something you thought was perfectly clear was understood completely differently by the person sitting across from you. You can take a leadership course, but nothing quite prepares you for the responsibility of having other people's work depend on the decisions you make.

Failure has a way of removing the theory from the equation.

It forces you to pay attention.

Travel can be an education too

Some of the most valuable lessons I've learned have come from working and traveling across different countries and cultures. Spending time outside the environment you consider normal has a way of exposing assumptions you didn't even realize you had.

I've worked across the Middle East and North Africa for much of my career, and one of the things that experience has taught me is that context matters enormously. In marketing, we often talk about localization as if it is a fairly straightforward process. Take something that worked in one market, translate it, change a few visuals, adjust the targeting, and launch it somewhere else.

Real life doesn't work that way.

People aren't simply audiences waiting to receive messages. Culture influences how people interpret those messages, how they make decisions, how they build trust, how they respond to authority, how they interact with brands, and what they consider persuasive.

The same principle applies outside marketing. Spending time in another country can make you realize that the way you think about work, family, ambition, success, time, hospitality, or even happiness is not universal. It's simply the version you've become accustomed to.

That realization can be uncomfortable, but it is also incredibly valuable.

Sometimes education is simply discovering that your way isn't the only way.

You learn what you don't want

When you're younger, you tend to think education is about figuring out what you want to become. You choose a field of study, start a career, set goals, and gradually try to move toward some version of success.

With enough experience, I think you also become educated in what you don't want.

There are workplaces I wouldn't want to recreate. There are management styles I wouldn't want to adopt. There are professional relationships I now recognize as unhealthy much earlier than I would have in the past. There are opportunities that look impressive on paper but no longer appeal to me simply because I've learned what they actually require.

This kind of knowledge is rarely celebrated.

Nobody announces that they've successfully eliminated three possible career paths from consideration. Nobody puts "learned what kind of environment makes me unhappy" on LinkedIn.

But knowing what you don't want can be just as important as knowing what you do.

In fact, sometimes it is easier to move forward once you've stopped trying to convince yourself that something is right for you simply because it looks good from the outside.

Time gives you an education that no course can provide

There are things I understand now that I couldn't have understood ten or fifteen years ago, even if someone had tried to explain them to me.

That's one of the frustrating things about experience. Sometimes you can't shortcut it.

Someone can tell you that not every opportunity is a good opportunity, but you might not truly understand it until you've accepted a few that looked attractive and discovered that the cost was much higher than the benefit.

Someone can tell you that your job isn't your identity, and you might agree with them intellectually. Then one day your circumstances at work change and you suddenly realize how much of your sense of self had become connected to a company, a position, a team, or simply the feeling of being needed.

Someone can tell you that you shouldn't compare your career to other people's careers, but it's difficult not to when you see someone you started with becoming an executive while you're questioning your own direction.

Eventually, time turns advice into understanding.

That may be one of the biggest differences between information and wisdom. Information can be given to you. Wisdom usually has to be experienced.

The education of knowing yourself

Perhaps the most important education I've received has been learning how I actually operate.

I've learned what motivates me and what drains me. I've learned which environments bring out my best work and which ones make me less effective. I've learned that I need a certain amount of variety and intellectual stimulation to stay engaged. I've learned that I enjoy solving problems more than simply maintaining systems that already work.

I've also learned that some of the things I once thought were important aren't as important to me anymore.

That's an interesting part of getting older. Your definition of success changes.

When you're starting out, success can be about getting the right job, earning more money, gaining a better title, or working for a recognizable company. Later, you might start valuing autonomy, interesting work, good people, flexibility, peace of mind, or simply having enough time and energy left for the rest of your life.

None of these preferences are necessarily better than the others. They're just different.

The important part is knowing your own definition instead of automatically adopting somebody else's.

Your CV tells a very incomplete story

I've always found CVs slightly strange when you think about what they're actually trying to accomplish. A few pages are supposed to summarize years, sometimes decades, of someone's professional life.

We list the companies we've worked for, the positions we've held, the degrees we've earned, the skills we've developed, and the accomplishments we're proud of. All of that is useful information, but it still tells only a fraction of the story.

A CV doesn't tell you about the project that taught someone resilience. It doesn't tell you about the manager who changed the way they think about leadership. It doesn't tell you about the difficult year that forced them to reconsider what they actually wanted from their career. It doesn't tell you about the failure that made them better at making decisions or the colleague who taught them how much a good team can matter.

It also doesn't tell you how someone behaves when things go wrong.

And that, in my experience, can be more revealing than almost anything else.

I remember people I've worked with less for the titles on their CVs than for how they behaved under pressure, how they treated people, whether they listened, whether they took responsibility, whether they shared credit, and whether they made the people around them better.

Those qualities are difficult to quantify.

They are also difficult to fake over a long period of time.

We never really stop being students

Perhaps I've become less interested in collecting qualifications because I've become more interested in collecting understanding.

There is a difference.

Qualifications can prove that you completed something. Understanding changes how you behave.

The education that matters most to me now happens everywhere. It happens in conversations, in mistakes, in unfamiliar places, in difficult projects, in relationships, in moments of uncertainty, and sometimes in simply paying attention to what happens around me.

Every job has taught me something. Every country I've spent time in has challenged some assumption. Every difficult situation has given me information about how I respond under pressure. Every person I've worked with has, in some way, shown me something about leadership, communication, ambition, patience, or myself.

I don't think formal education stops being important. I just don't think it is where education ends.

The most valuable things I've learned are often the things I can't prove I studied.

I can't put "learned how to deal with disappointment" on my CV. I can't list "became comfortable with uncertainty" as a professional certification. I can't add "learned when to walk away" under skills.

But those lessons come with me everywhere.

And perhaps that's the point.

A CV records what you've done. Your life reveals what you've learned.

How to Position a Complex Product Simply, Without Dumbing It Down

2026-08-14T14:36:50.383+03:00

There's a particular kind of product that defeats most marketing: the one that's genuinely complex. Deep tech, a multi-feature platform, a service with real technical substance, a category so new it doesn't have a name yet. The people who built it understand it intimately, and that intimacy is exactly the problem. They can't see it the way a buyer sees it anymore, and so the marketing ends up either drowning the buyer in detail or flattening the product into something so simple it sounds like everything else.

Getting this right, making a complex thing simple without making it stupid, is one of the hardest and most valuable skills in marketing. Over 16 years and a lot of clients across very different sectors, it's the problem I've been handed most often. Here's how I approach it.

The two ways positioning fails

Complex products tend to fail at positioning in one of two opposite directions, and it's worth naming both because the fix for one can push you into the other.

The first failure is the feature dump. The team is proud of everything the product does, so they try to communicate all of it. The website becomes a catalogue. The pitch becomes a list. The buyer, who arrived with one problem they wanted solved, has to wade through everything the product can do to find the one thing they came for, and usually gives up. Complexity in the product becomes complexity in the message, and complexity in the message loses.

The second failure is the empty simplification. Someone recognizes the feature dump is bad and overcorrects into vagueness. "We help businesses grow." "The future of work." "Powered by AI." These are simple, but they're simple the way water is simple: no substance, no shape, indistinguishable from a hundred competitors saying the same nothing. The product's real, hard-won distinctiveness gets sanded off in the name of accessibility.

The skill is finding the narrow path between these two, simple enough to grasp instantly, specific enough to mean something and to be unmistakably yours.

Start with the buyer's existing problem, not the product's features

The single most important move is to stop starting from the product.

The team's instinct is always to explain what the product is and does. But a buyer doesn't wake up wanting your product. They wake up with a problem, a frustration, a job they're trying to get done. The way in is to lead with something they already care about before they've ever heard of you, and only then connect it to what you offer.

I test every candidate message against one question: does the customer already care about this, before we entered the picture? If the message is about a feature, the answer is almost always no, they don't care about your feature, they care about their problem. If the message names their problem accurately, they lean in, because you've shown you understand their world. Positioning that leads with the buyer's existing problem earns the right to then explain how you solve it. Positioning that leads with features never gets that far.

This is counterintuitive for technical teams because the features are the part they find interesting. But the buyer's interest and the builder's interest are rarely the same, and the message has to serve the buyer's.

Find the one thing, then let the rest support it

A complex product does many things. Positioning requires choosing one thing to lead with anyway.

This feels like a loss to the team, like you're hiding the product's richness. You're not. You're giving the buyer a door. Once they walk through the door, drawn by the one thing that maps to their most pressing problem, they'll discover the depth. But they won't discover any of it if the entrance is a wall of everything.

Choosing the one thing is hard because it means subordinating features the team loves. The discipline is to ask which single capability, if the buyer understood only that, would most make them want to know more. That's the lead. Everything else becomes supporting evidence, revealed in sequence rather than dumped at once. The product doesn't get simpler. The path into it does.

Use the buyer's language, not the builder's

Complex products come wrapped in the language of the people who built them: technical terms, internal names, category jargon, acronyms. That language is precise and useful internally. Externally, it's often a barrier.

The fix isn't to strip out all specificity, that's the empty-simplification trap again. It's to translate the substance into the words the buyer actually uses for their own problem. The underlying idea stays sophisticated; the expression meets the buyer where they are. You're not lowering the ceiling of the product, you're widening the door.

A useful practice is to listen to how buyers describe their problem in their own words, in sales calls, in support tickets, in the language they use when they don't know you're listening for it, and to build the message from that vocabulary rather than from the internal deck. The gap between how a company talks about its product and how customers talk about their problem is where a lot of marketing quietly fails.

Simple is not the same as short

One clarification worth making, because it trips people up: simplifying a complex product doesn't mean saying less. It means saying the right thing in the right order.

A well-positioned complex product might still need a fair amount of explanation. The difference is that a well-positioned one explains itself in a sequence a human can follow: here's the problem you have, here's the one core way we solve it, here's the proof, here's the depth for those who want it. A badly-positioned one presents everything simultaneously and lets the buyer sort it out. Same information, completely different outcome, purely because of structure and sequence.

Simplicity is about the reader's experience of understanding, not about word count. Sometimes the simplest thing you can do for a reader is give them one more sentence that makes everything before it click.

The test for whether you've got it right

Here's how I know positioning is working: someone outside the company, hearing it for the first time, can accurately explain the product back to you, and wants to know more.

Both halves matter. If they can explain it back but don't care, you've been clear but not compelling, you nailed the simplicity and missed the buyer's problem. If they're intrigued but can't actually say what the product does, you've been evocative but empty, all mood and no substance. When someone can both restate it correctly and feels pulled to learn more, you've found the narrow path: simple enough to grasp, specific enough to matter.

Why this is worth the effort

Positioning a complex product well is slow, frustrating work. It means arguing with people who love their features about which one to lead with. It means resisting both the urge to say everything and the urge to say nothing. It means doing the unglamorous work of learning how buyers actually talk.

But it's some of the highest-leverage work in marketing, because everything downstream depends on it. Every ad, every page, every sales conversation either compounds a clear position or fights against a muddy one. Get the positioning right and the rest of the marketing gets easier and cheaper. Get it wrong and no amount of budget rescues you, you're just paying to broadcast confusion more widely.

The complexity of the product is not the enemy. Unmanaged complexity in the message is. Your job isn't to make the product simple. It's to make the way in simple, and to trust the buyer to find the depth once they've walked through the door.

Storytelling for Mission-Driven Organizations: Telling Impact Without Exploiting It

2026-08-11T15:06:00.000+03:00

Some of the most meaningful communications work I've done has been for mission-driven organizations, non-profits, European Union programs, community initiatives, causes where the whole point is to move people to care and to act. And it's also some of the most ethically loaded work in all of marketing, because the raw material of the story is often a real person's hardship, and the line between telling their story and using them is thinner than most communicators admit.

Get it right and you build genuine understanding and support for a cause that deserves it. Get it wrong and you've turned a human being into a prop, extracted their pain for your engagement metrics, and quietly reinforced the power imbalance you claim to be fighting. Having worked on communications for refugee protection, social justice programs, and grassroots mobilization, this is the tension I think about most. Here's how I try to navigate it.

The extractive story and why it's so tempting

There's a template for mission-driven storytelling that works, in the narrow sense of generating clicks and donations, and is quietly corrosive. You've seen it a thousand times: the single suffering individual, usually photographed at their lowest moment, their dignity secondary to their usefulness as an emotional trigger. The story is built to make the viewer feel something strong enough to act, and the subject is the instrument for producing that feeling.

It's tempting because it works in the short term. Suffering, vividly depicted, moves people. The metrics respond. And so the incentive in mission-driven communications constantly pulls toward the most extractive version of the story, the one that most efficiently converts a person's hardship into an audience's emotion.

The problem is what it costs, even when it "works." It strips the subject of agency, presenting them purely as a victim to be saved rather than a person with their own capability and voice. It reinforces a narrative where the audience is the powerful helper and the subject is the helpless recipient, which is often exactly the dynamic the cause is trying to change. And it treats consent and dignity as obstacles to the story rather than requirements of telling it honestly. You can raise money this way. You can also do real harm while doing it.

Let the subject be the hero, not the prop

The single most important shift is about who the story is really about, and who has agency in it.

In an extractive story, the subject is passive: something happened to them, and now they need rescuing, and the audience (or the organization) is the one who acts. In an honest story, the subject is the one with agency: they are navigating a hard situation with their own resourcefulness, and the organization's role is to support what they're already doing, not to save them.

This isn't a cosmetic change of framing. It changes what you go looking for when you gather the story. Instead of hunting for the moment of maximum helplessness, you're looking for the person's own initiative, their choices, their capability, the thing they're building or protecting or fighting for. The hardship is real and it belongs in the story, but it's the context, not the point. The point is the human being acting within it.

I saw this clearly in the EU work I did around the response to the Syrian crisis. The easy story was pure suffering. The honest and more powerful story included how people were rebuilding, organizing, holding communities together under impossible conditions. That version respects the subject and, not coincidentally, is often more compelling, because agency is more interesting than helplessness.

Consent is not a formality

In extractive storytelling, consent is a signature on a release form, gathered as quickly as possible so the content can be used. In honest storytelling, consent is an ongoing, informed understanding of how someone's story will be told and where it will appear.

That means being genuinely clear with people about what you're doing. Do they understand this will be public? Do they understand how it might be used, and by whom, and for how long? Would they be comfortable if their own community saw it? Are they consenting freely, or is there an implicit power imbalance, they need the organization's help, so how freely can they really say no?

These questions are inconvenient. They slow the work down and sometimes they mean you can't use the most powerful piece of content because the person, fully understanding, wouldn't want it out there. Honoring that is the whole job. A story told about someone, without their genuine understanding and consent, is not their story anymore. It's something taken from them.

Accuracy and dignity over drama

There's constant pressure in mission-driven communications to heighten, to make the story a little more dramatic, the situation a little more dire, the contrast a little sharper, because drama drives response. This pressure has to be resisted, on two grounds.

The first is simple honesty. Exaggerating someone's circumstances for effect is lying, even when it's in service of a good cause. The cause doesn't need your embellishment, and the moment you're caught embellishing, you've handed ammunition to everyone who wants to discredit the work.

The second is dignity. A person is more than the worst thing that's happened to them, and reducing them to it, cropping out their ordinary humanity to leave only the tragedy, is its own small violence. Honest storytelling holds the whole person: their hardship and their humor, their need and their capability, their situation and their self. That fuller picture is both more truthful and, again, more moving, because we recognize a full human being in a way we don't recognize a symbol of suffering.

The audience-balancing problem

Mission-driven organizations usually have to speak to several audiences at once, and this complicates the ethics further. There's the donor, who needs to understand impact and feel their support matters. There's the policymaker, who responds to evidence and scale. There's the public, who needs the story made emotionally real. And there's the community the work serves, who will also, increasingly, see how they're being portrayed.

That last audience is the one extractive storytelling forgets, and the one honest storytelling keeps central. A good test: would the person in the story, and their community, feel respected if they saw how you'd told it? If the answer is no, if the donor-facing version would embarrass or diminish the very people it's about, then you've drifted into extraction, however well the fundraising performs.

Balancing these audiences means one core narrative told with integrity, then adapted in emphasis, not a respectful version for the community and an exploitative version for donors. The story doesn't get two moralities depending on who's reading.

Why the harder path is the right one

Everything I've described makes mission-driven storytelling slower, more constrained, and sometimes less immediately effective at generating a response than the extractive alternative. That's real, and I won't pretend otherwise.

But the extractive path has a cost that doesn't show up in this quarter's metrics. It erodes the trust of the communities you serve, who notice how they're portrayed. It reinforces the exact power dynamics the mission usually exists to challenge. And it treats the people at the heart of the work as means rather than ends, which for a values-driven organization is a contradiction at the core.

The honest path, letting the subject be the hero, treating consent as real, choosing accuracy and dignity over drama, keeping the served community as a central audience, is harder and it is the work. Done well, it doesn't just avoid harm. It tells a truer, more human story, and true human stories, in my experience, are the ones that actually move people to care in a way that lasts.

The measure of good mission-driven communications isn't only how much response it generates. It's whether the people whose stories you told would recognize themselves in your telling, and feel it was theirs.

How to Roll Out AI Across a Marketing Team Without Losing Your Brand Voice

2026-08-03T14:15:44.808+03:00

There's a specific fear that stops a lot of marketing leaders from going all-in on AI, and it's a legitimate one. It goes like this: if I let my whole team use these tools freely, everything we publish will start to sound the same as everything everyone else publishes. The brand voice we spent years building will dissolve into that smooth, competent, faintly robotic tone that you can now recognize instantly across half the internet.

The fear is real. But the answer is not to ban the
tools, and it's not to let one person be the gatekeeper for everything. The answer is to roll AI out in a way that protects voice by design. Having done exactly this with my own team, here's how I think about it.

Why AI erodes voice by default

First, understand the mechanism, because you can't defend against a problem you don't understand.

Large language models are trained to produce the most probable, most broadly acceptable response. That's their nature. Left to their defaults, they pull everything toward an average: grammatically clean, inoffensive, structurally predictable, and completely generic. This average is fine if your goal is "acceptable." It is fatal if your goal is a brand that sounds like itself.

A distinctive brand voice is, almost by definition, a departure from the average. It has specific rhythms, a particular vocabulary, opinions it will and won't express, a way of being warm or blunt or playful that isn't the default setting for anything. When a marketer takes AI's default output and publishes it lightly edited, they are publishing the average and quietly abandoning the distinctiveness.

So the erosion isn't a malfunction. It's the tool working exactly as designed, in a direction opposite to what a brand needs. Your rollout has to actively push back against that pull.

Define the voice before you scale the tool

Here's the uncomfortable prerequisite: you can't protect a voice you haven't defined. Many teams discover, when they try to brief AI on their brand voice, that they've never actually articulated it. It lived in one or two people's instincts. That was survivable when those people wrote everything. It's not survivable when the whole team is generating content at speed with a tool that defaults to generic.

So the first step in an AI rollout is not about AI at all. It's writing down what the voice actually is, in a way specific enough to brief a machine. Not "friendly and professional," which means nothing, but the real texture: the words you use and the words you never use, whether you're formal or conversational, how long your sentences run, whether you use humor and what kind, the feeling a reader should have. If you can hand that document to a new team member and to an AI and get recognizably on-brand output from both, you've defined it well enough.

This work pays off far beyond AI. But AI is what forces you to finally do it, because the cost of not doing it becomes visible immediately.

Give the team the voice, not just the tools

Once the voice is defined, the rollout centers on one principle: everyone who uses AI to produce brand content should be briefing it with the voice every time.

In practice, that means building shared prompt scaffolding, a standard way of describing the brand, the audience, and the constraints, that anyone on the team can drop into their work. Rather than each person inventing their own brief and getting inconsistent results, the team starts from a shared foundation that already encodes the voice. Individual tasks vary, but the voice layer stays constant.

The goal is that AI becomes a tool for producing more of your voice, faster, rather than a tool for producing generic content that then has to be laboriously rewritten into your voice. Those are very different workflows. The first is a genuine multiplier. The second is often slower than just writing it yourself.

Keep humans where judgment lives

A responsible rollout is clear about where AI stops. Not as a restriction on the tool, but as the guardrail that lets you use it confidently everywhere else.

For my team, the line sits at final judgment and public accountability. AI can draft, restructure, generate options, summarize, and get us past the blank page. What it doesn't do is have the final say on anything that carries the brand's name in public. A human reads every customer-facing piece with fresh eyes, specifically checking two things: is this accurate, and does this sound like us? Those are the two failure modes AI is most prone to, confident inaccuracy and voice drift, so those are exactly where human attention concentrates.

This isn't about distrust of the team. It's about matching the tool to what it's good at. AI is a superb accelerator and a poor final authority. Design the workflow around that reality and you get the speed without the risks.

Make it safe to learn in the open

The cultural piece is as important as the technical one, and it's the part most rollouts neglect.

People are strange about AI use. Some treat it as a slightly shameful shortcut and hide it. Others over-rely on it and won't admit that either. Both instincts kill team learning, because the whole benefit of a team, as opposed to a collection of individuals, is that what one person learns, everyone can use.

The fix is to make AI use completely normal and completely visible. When someone finds a prompt that produces genuinely on-brand output, they share it, and it becomes everyone's starting point. When someone gets burned by a confidently wrong output, they share that too, and everyone learns where the tool is dangerous. As the leader, the most useful thing you can do is share your own fumbles openly. Nothing gives a team permission to learn like watching the person in charge admit the tool got something wrong for them and explain how they caught it.

Watch for the drift

Even with all this in place, voice drift is a slow leak rather than a sudden break, so you have to watch for it deliberately.

Every so often, read a stretch of your recent published content as if you were an outsider. Does it still sound like you, or has it quietly slid toward the competent average? Are there tics creeping in, the same sentence structures, the same transitional phrases, the tells that content was lightly-edited AI? If you catch drift early, it's a quick correction. If you let it run for a year, you look up and the brand doesn't sound like itself anymore and nobody can quite say when that happened.

Treat voice as something you maintain, not something you set once. The tool's gravitational pull toward generic is constant, so your correction has to be ongoing too.

The payoff

Done well, an AI rollout doesn't cost you your brand voice. It does the opposite: it forces you to define your voice precisely, gives your whole team the means to produce it consistently, and frees up the hours previously spent on first drafts so people can put more care into the judgment that actually differentiates you.

The teams that lose their voice to AI aren't losing it because they adopted the tool. They're losing it because they adopted the tool without deciding what they sounded like first, and without building the habits that protect it. Decide the voice, brief it every time, keep humans on final judgment, and learn in the open. Do that, and AI makes your brand more itself, not less.

Marketing in the MENA Region: What Global Playbooks Get Wrong

2026-07-30T20:18:25.705+03:00

I've spent much of my career marketing across the Middle East and North Africa, and I've watched a lot of global brands and international marketers arrive in the region with a playbook that worked beautifully everywhere else and then quietly underperform here. Not because the marketers were bad, they were often excellent, but because they treated MENA as a single translation exercise: take what works in the home market, swap the language, adjust the media plan, and go.

MENA punishes that assumption. It's one of the most diverse, fast-moving, and misunderstood marketing environments in the world, and the things that make it distinctive are exactly the things a global playbook tends to flatten. Here's what those playbooks most often get wrong.

Treating MENA as one market

The first and most fundamental error is in the acronym itself. "MENA" groups together countries that differ enormously in wealth, media habits, dialect, religiosity, regulatory environment, consumer behavior, and digital maturity. A campaign built for the Gulf can land completely differently in the Levant or North Africa. Purchasing power, platform preferences, the role of Arabic versus English, the tone that reads as aspirational versus alienating, all of these shift as you move across the region.

A global marketer who says "our MENA strategy" the way they'd say "our German strategy" has already made a category error. The UAE and Saudi Arabia alone are distinct markets with distinct consumer psychologies, and that's before you reach Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, and the rest. The brands that succeed here treat MENA as a portfolio of related but genuinely different markets, and localize accordingly. The ones that struggle build one regional campaign and wonder why it only works in one country.

Getting Arabic wrong, or ignoring it

Language in this region is not a simple translation problem, and treating it as one is one of the most visible mistakes global brands make.

There's Modern Standard Arabic, which is formal and universally understood but can feel distant in consumer marketing. Then there are the dialects, Gulf, Levantine, Egyptian, Maghrebi, which differ enough that content feeling native in one can feel foreign in another. And there's the constant question of when to use Arabic at all versus English, which varies by market, by audience, by category, and by the specific feeling you're trying to create.

The lazy global approach is to run English everywhere, or to machine-translate into stiff Modern Standard Arabic and call it localized. Both leave value on the table. English-only marketing quietly signals that the brand didn't think the local audience was worth speaking to properly. Bad Arabic signals the same thing more loudly. Getting this right, knowing which language, which dialect, which register, for which audience and which purpose, is a genuine competitive advantage in a region where many international competitors get it wrong. It's also, incidentally, where a marketer who genuinely understands the region and its languages adds disproportionate value.

Underestimating digital sophistication

There's a persistent, outdated assumption that MENA is a digitally lagging region. The opposite is true in much of it. The Gulf in particular has among the highest social media and smartphone penetration rates in the world, and consumers here are extremely digitally sophisticated, early adopters, heavy users, comfortable across platforms that global marketers sometimes underweight.

Platform preferences also don't map neatly onto Western assumptions. The mix of what matters, and how each platform is actually used, differs from the home-market defaults a global playbook encodes. A marketer who assumes the regional audience is behind, or who ports over a platform strategy built for a different market's habits, misreads the environment badly. The audience here is often ahead, not behind, and they notice when a brand treats them as an afterthought.

Misjudging cultural and religious context

Global campaigns frequently stumble on cultural and religious context, sometimes in small ways that erode trust and occasionally in large ways that cause real damage.

This isn't only about the obvious pitfalls. It's about a hundred smaller judgments: the rhythm of the year and how occasions like Ramadan reshape consumer behavior and media consumption, the values that resonate versus those that quietly repel, the humor that lands versus the humor that offends, the imagery and family structures and social norms that a home-market creative team wouldn't think twice about but that read very differently here.

The brands that do this well don't treat cultural context as a compliance checklist of things to avoid. They treat it as a source of genuine connection, understanding what the audience actually values and building from there. Ramadan, for instance, isn't just a scheduling constraint; handled with real understanding rather than opportunism, it's one of the most powerful moments for meaningful brand connection in the entire calendar. Handled cynically, as many brands do, it reads as hollow and gets noticed as such.

Assuming trust and influence work the same way

How trust is built and how purchase decisions are influenced can differ here from the home-market model, and global playbooks often import their assumptions unexamined.

Personal relationships, community, word of mouth, and specific forms of social proof can carry more weight in parts of this region than the more individualistic, transactional models that underpin a lot of Western marketing theory. Influencer dynamics, the role of family and community in decisions, the way credibility accrues, these don't always follow the imported template. A campaign built on the assumption that the buyer is an isolated individual making a rational solo decision can miss the actual social texture of how choices get made here.

The correction isn't complicated in principle, it's to study how trust and influence actually operate in the specific market rather than assuming they operate as they do at home, but it requires the humility to check the assumption in the first place, which a confident global playbook tends not to do.

What the successful approach looks like

The brands and marketers who succeed in MENA share a few habits, and none of them is exotic. They're just the habits that a one-size-fits-all playbook skips.

They localize genuinely, treating each market as its own thing rather than as a translated version of a central campaign. They invest in real language and cultural fluency rather than machine translation and stereotype. They respect the audience's digital sophistication instead of talking down to it. They engage with cultural and religious context as an opportunity for connection rather than a minefield to tiptoe through. And they build on how trust actually works here rather than importing an assumption about how it works elsewhere.

Underneath all of it is a single shift in posture: from "how do we adapt our global campaign for MENA" to "what does this specific market actually need and value, and how do we build from that." The first posture treats the region as a destination for an existing message. The second treats it as a place with its own logic worth understanding on its own terms.

The opportunity in getting it right

Here's the encouraging part. Because so many global brands get MENA wrong, getting it right is a genuine advantage rather than merely table stakes. In a region where a lot of international marketing feels imported, generic, or slightly off, the brand that feels genuinely native, that speaks the right language in the right register, respects the context, and understands the audience, stands out sharply.

MENA is not a hard market because it's backward or closed. It's a demanding market because it's diverse, sophisticated, and quick to notice when a brand hasn't done the work. That demand is exactly the opportunity. The marketers who treat the region with the seriousness and specificity it deserves don't just avoid the failures of the global playbook, they build something their less-attentive competitors can't easily copy: a real relationship with an audience that knows the difference.

What "AI Fluency" Actually Means for a Marketing Team

2026-07-28T17:50:00.000+03:00

Every marketing team I speak to now uses AI in some form. Someone is drafting captions in ChatGPT, someone else is generating images, a third person is quietly pasting the quarterly numbers into a chatbot and asking it what to make of them. What almost none of these teams have is fluency. They have usage, which is a very different thing, and the gap between the two is where most of the value is either won or lost.

I spent the past month deliberately closing that gap for myself and my team, working through Anthropic Academy's courses and then rolling the thinking out across how we actually work. What follows is what I've come to believe fluency means, why usage alone is a trap, and how a marketing leader can build the real thing.

Usage is not fluency

Here is the uncomfortable truth about how most marketers adopted AI: they treated it like a faster search engine or a junior copywriter who never sleeps. You ask, it answers, you paste the answer somewhere. That works for the shallowest tasks and fails quietly on everything that matters.

The failure is quiet because the output always looks finished. AI writes in complete sentences with confidence, so a weak result and a strong result are visually indistinguishable. A marketer using AI without fluency can't reliably tell which one they've got. They ship the confident-sounding paragraph, the slightly-wrong statistic, the on-brand-but-generic campaign line, and they never know what they missed because the tool never signals doubt.

Fluency is the ability to tell the difference. It's knowing what to delegate, how to describe what you want, how to judge what comes back, and when to stop trusting it entirely. That's a skill, and like any skill it has to be built deliberately rather than absorbed by osmosis.

The four things a fluent marketer can do

Through the courses I've studied, I've come to think of AI fluency as four distinct capabilities, and a team is only as strong as its weakest one.

Delegation. Knowing which tasks are worth handing to AI in the first place. Not everything should be. Fluency means recognizing that AI is excellent at generating variations, summarizing long inputs, restructuring existing material, and getting you past a blank page, and that it's weak at genuine judgment, at knowing your customer, and at anything where being confidently wrong is expensive. A fluent marketer delegates the first category eagerly and guards the second.

Description. The quality of what you get back is mostly determined by the quality of what you ask for. This is where prompt engineering lives, though I dislike how mystical that term has become. In practice it's just clear briefing: context, audience, constraints, examples of good and bad, the format you want. The same skill that makes you good at briefing a junior team member or an agency makes you good at describing a task to AI. Marketers who can't brief a human can't brief a model.

Discernment. Reading the output critically instead of gratefully. This is the capability most teams lack entirely. It means checking the claim, questioning the framing, noticing when the tone has drifted off-brand, catching the plausible-but-invented detail. Discernment is harder with AI than with a human colleague, because a human junior signals uncertainty and AI never does. You have to supply the doubt yourself.

Diligence. Owning the result. Once AI has helped produce something, a fluent marketer takes full responsibility for it as if they'd written every word, because in the ways that matter, they're the one publishing it. That means final human review on anything customer-facing, real accountability for accuracy, and never using "the AI wrote it" as an excuse for something going out wrong.

Why this matters more for marketing than most functions

Marketing is unusually exposed to the risks of AI-without-fluency, for a few reasons.

Our output is public. A finance team using AI badly produces a wrong number in an internal spreadsheet that someone eventually catches. A marketing team using AI badly publishes it to the world with the brand's name on it. The blast radius of a confident mistake is larger.

Our work is about voice, and voice is exactly what generic AI erodes. The whole point of a brand is that it sounds like itself and not like everyone else. Unmanaged AI pulls every brand toward the same smooth, competent, forgettable middle. Fluency is what lets you use the tool for speed while protecting the distinctiveness that makes the brand worth anything.

And our field moves fast enough that the tools genuinely change what's possible every few months. A team that's fluent adapts to each new capability quickly because they understand the underlying skill. A team that just memorized a workflow has to relearn from scratch every time the tool shifts.

Building fluency across a team, not just in yourself

Here's the mistake I was determined to avoid: becoming the one person on the team who can use these tools well while everyone else stays stuck at copy-paste. That's not leadership, it's a bottleneck. The value of AI in marketing shows up when the whole team works fluently, not when one person does.

So the rollout has to be deliberate. A few things I've found matter.

Teach the judgment, not just the tools. It's tempting to run a training session that's really just a tour of features. That produces usage, not fluency. The more valuable session teaches people how to tell a good output from a bad one, how to brief well, and when not to trust the tool. The features change; the judgment transfers.

Make it safe to be a beginner. People hide their AI use when they think it's either cheating or a sign they can't do the work themselves. That secrecy kills team learning, because nobody shares what's working. Naming AI use as normal and expected, and sharing your own fumbles openly, does more for adoption than any policy document.

Build shared standards for where AI stops. A fluent team agrees on the lines: what always gets human review, what never gets pasted into a tool for privacy reasons, what has to be fact-checked before it ships. These aren't restrictions on the tool so much as the guardrails that let you use it confidently.

Treat it as ongoing, not a one-off. The single training session that "covers AI" is already out of date by the next quarter. Fluency is a practice you keep sharpening, not a box you tick.

What the first month of building fluency actually looked like

To make this concrete rather than abstract, here is roughly how the shift played out in practice, because the theory only matters if it changes the daily work.

The first change was in briefing. Before, requests to AI were one-liners: "write five captions for this post." The output was five interchangeable captions, all fine, none memorable. Once the team started briefing properly, who the audience is, what the brand sounds like, what to avoid, one strong example of a caption we'd been proud of, the output moved from usable to genuinely good. Same tool, radically better result, purely because the description improved.

The second change was in review. We stopped treating AI output as a finished draft and started treating it as a first draft from a fast but overconfident collaborator. Every customer-facing piece now gets read with the specific question, "what has this got subtly wrong, and where has it drifted off our voice?" That single habit caught more problems than any amount of prompt-tweaking.

The third change was cultural. People stopped pretending they weren't using AI and started sharing what worked. One person's good prompt became everyone's starting point. The team's collective fluency rose faster than any individual's would have alone, precisely because the learning was shared rather than hoarded.

None of this required new software. It required treating AI as a skill to develop rather than a gadget to deploy.

Where this leaves us

AI is not going to replace marketers. But marketers who are fluent, who know what to hand over, how to ask, how to judge, and how to own the result, are going to comfortably outwork the ones who are merely using the same tools without the judgment to steer them.

The difference won't show up in whether a team uses AI. Nearly all of them do now. It'll show up in whether the work is sharp or generic, accurate or confidently wrong, unmistakably theirs or indistinguishable from everyone else's. That difference is fluency, and it's buildable. It just has to be built on purpose.

If you're leading a team and thinking about this seriously, start with the judgment, not the tools. The tools will change again by the time you finish reading this. The judgment is what lasts.