Sony didn’t invent the PlayStation. Ken Kutaragi did. 3M didn’t invent the Post-it Note. Scientists Spencer Silver and Art Fry did. Google didn’t invent Gmail. Paul Buchheit did.

Companies don’t create growth. People do.

For decades, companies relied on a proven growth playbook: top-down management. Bestsellers like In Search of Excellence, Built to Last, and Good to Great had a comforting promise: leaders can build companies and steer growth top-down with clever strategies and replicable processes.

Unfortunately, in the decades after publication, the companies celebrated in these books barely outperformed the market, McKinsey found. Many, including Amoco, Circuit City, Kodak, and Kmart, went bankrupt, were acquired, or downsized.

Top-down worked, until it didn’t.

The old playbook was designed to control change, not respond to it. Today, top-down management simply can’t keep up. The faster the world moves, the harder it becomes for a handful of leaders at the top to see every opportunity.

What organizations need now is people who make growth happen without waiting to be told. People who act from the bottom up. Seth Godin called them “Linchpins.” Lois Kelly and Carmen Medina described them as “Good Rebels.” Adam Grant studied them as “Originals.” Different names for the same pattern: people who dare to challenge the status quo and make new ideas happen—against the Resistance.

A keynote speaker gets 25 minutes.

During those 25 minutes, hundreds of people stop working, producing, and selling. Add the cost of the venue, production, travel, and choosing the right speaker becomes a consequential decision.

I spoke with ten conference organizers about what separates a great keynote speaker from someone who merely owns a microphone. From what I have learned, here are eight tests for finding one:

• Real issues. A good keynote addresses one of the audience’s top two or three business or life priorities. Otherwise, people will start scrolling through their phones.
• Credibility. The business world is littered with “experts” who have assembled a talk from a few books. That can work. But a speaker with direct leadership experience or credible research—ideally their own—is far more likely to make an impact.
• Audience proximity. Listening to an astronaut or a wingsuit diver can be inspirational. But when the distance from the audience’s real life is too great, people go home inspired while thinking, “That’s not me.”
• Keynote speaking—not just speaking. Many people enjoy jumping onto a stage and talking, often slide by slide. Keynote speaking is different. As in an opera or a play, the speaker must hold the audience’s attention from the first second for 20 or even 45 minutes—through stories, strong transitions, surprises, pauses, and tension at exactly the right moments. This takes weeks of writing and rehearsing—and a speaker willing to make that investment.
• Fresh content. Even the best speakers can fall into the trap of repeating the same talk for years. It may still be powerful, but eventually it will bore both the audience and the speaker. A professional speaker researches the audience and meaningfully adapts the talk and creates at least one major piece of content for every event.
• Practical tips. Talks are nice. What people really want are two or three things they can apply tomorrow morning.
• Paid to perform. Plenty of speakers will come for free because they have a product or service to sell. That’s legitimate, but it creates an implicit tension. Their first priority may not be the conference—but themselves. Free speakers can add value, but mix them with professionals.
• Real feedback. Conferences and speakers know they may not work together again for months or years; few conferences hire the same speaker two years in a row. The best speakers don’t leave it there. They ask for honest feedback because they want the next keynote to be the best one they have ever given.

Many people can speak. Few can create a moment an audience remembers—and then turn that moment into action.

Every company wants growth. Far fewer know how to make it happen. On September 14, we are kicking off a new Marketing Leadership Masterclass. If you want growth for your team, your company, or your own career, take a look.

We built the Marketing Leadership Masterclass around a simple observation: most business schools teach people how to analyze growth. Very few teach them how to mobilize senior leaders and people across an organization to create it.

That is what the Masterclass Syl Saller and I created is about. Not more theory. Not another collection of clever frameworks. It is about turning ideas into action—and action into impact.

The program is a 12-week online sprint, but it doesn’t feel like a conventional online course. Participants work as a community. They debate real issues live, challenge one another, and solve problems together. For companies, we can tailor the challenges around their most pressing business issues. The learning doesn’t sit beside the work. It becomes part of the work.

Our mentors make the experience special. They are top marketers who contribute alongside demanding day jobs. Leading Chief Marketing Officers also join us for candid live debates about what it really takes to lead growth.

Take a look at the details here. Or message Olli. He will make the next steps easy.

Talking about growth is easy. Let’s make it happen.

People in business are scared. And the fear has a name: AI.

Every CEO is talking about AI. Every agency is suddenly an AI agency. And in private conversations, many people are freaking out.

In business, there has always been fear. Business attracts plenty of insecure overachievers: smart people who suspect everyone else knows more than they do. But the fear surrounding AI is bigger than anything I have seen before.

Remember digital? When it became a thing, everyone feared missing out. People scrambled to become ‘digital experts’. Along the way, companies pushed out experienced people to hire ‘digital natives’. It was marketing’s first great rush down the tool rabbit hole. It didn’t end well. Businesses moved down the funnel. Forget strategy. Now we had ‘performance marketing’ and little else.

History is repeating itself

SEO (search engine optimization) was yesterday. Hello GEO (generative engine optimization) and AEO (answer engine optimization). Today, everyone is taking an AI course. A whole generation is rushing down the next tool rabbit hole.

But people are missing the bigger story. AI is ending the knowledge economy as we know it, where success meant having the answers.

The knowledge economy went like this. We send you to school to memorise facts. We throw you a test. Get the answer right and you earn your A. Stack enough As and you earn your degree. Take more courses, get more degrees. These degrees become your ticket to a top job, where employers pay thousands for your knowledge. It’s how many people built careers in digital.

But AI has changed the economics of answers.

‘How do we make this banana-shaped car more aerodynamic?’ Here’s the answer. Cheap. ‘Which of these 10,000 images will perform best with our ad copy?’ Here’s the answer. Cheap. ‘How do we create an avatar that sells our product 24/7?’ Here’s the answer. Cheap.

Today, answers to complex questions appear in seconds. Instant. Cheap.

We can’t out-AI AI. We can no longer build careers on having the best answers. On knowing every AI tool. Success in the future comes from asking the best questions – just as great business leaders always have:

• What if beauty wasn’t about models? (Dove’s ‘Campaign for Real Beauty’.)
• What if everyone was an athlete? (Nike’s ‘Just Do It’.)
• What if honesty sold more cars than perfection? (Volkswagen’s ‘Think Small’.)
• What if an engagement ring became a social norm? (De Beers’ ‘A Diamond Is Forever’.)

These are difficult questions. The questions only we can ask.

Yahoo once tried to catalogue the internet — every book, every website — partly by hand. It became clumsy. Slow. Then Google came along and asked a better question: ‘How can we make the world’s information accessible and useful?’ Instead of lists, Google built an algorithm that scaled, learned and stayed simple. Google won because it asked the better question.

AI would have helped Yahoo catalogue the internet faster. Yahoo would still have lost, because it was solving the wrong problem.

AI will make everybody more productive. It will replace dull jobs — and interesting ones. And AI will churn out millions of answers, every day. AI is exceptionally good at average work for average people.

That’s why the most valuable skill in the AI age isn’t AI. It’s asking questions worth answering.

(I wrote a version of this for Marketing Week.)

The Swiss Army knife is a knife that collided with a toolbox. Someone added scissors, a screwdriver, a bottle opener, and a corkscrew. The knife was no longer merely a knife. It had become something new.

Many breakthrough ideas begin with existing world crashing into each other:

• Airbnb collided a hotel with a private home and an online marketplace.
• Slack collided chat rooms with email and a searchable knowledge base.
• The smartphone collided a phone with a music player and a computer.

But smashing two things together doesn’t automatically produce a great idea. A toaster combined with an umbrella would certainly be original, but pretty useless (I guess).

Creative collision needs a reason.

Tay Guan Hin has written a book about it. He argues that breakthrough ideas often emerge from tension: two things people want but find difficult to have at the same time. Travelers want comfort but also authenticity. People want more technology but fewer devices.

Once we understand the tension, we stop looking for better versions of the same thing. We stop studying other knives and start looking at toolboxes. We stop studying hotels and start looking at private homes. We start looking for answers in completely different worlds.

Most people ask:
“How can I improve this?”

Creative people ask:
“What else already exists that could resolve this tension?”

“Our budget was tiny, so we had to be creative.” That’s how a team explained its award-winning business success. They meant “tiny” as an excuse. It may have been the reason they won.

Many breakthroughs began with scarce resources:

• When Apollo 13’s oxygen tank exploded, the astronauts couldn’t fit the Command Module’s carbon dioxide filters into their Lunar Module’s life-support system. So they made an adapter from a plastic bag, cardboard, a spacesuit hose, and duct tape.
• Red Bull couldn’t outspend Coca-Cola, so it built a brand through extreme sports and funny little cartoons.
• Ukraine couldn’t match Russia’s massive navy, so it developed small sea drones, damaging or sinking vessels many times their size.
• Dollar Shave Club couldn’t afford a glossy launch campaign. It spent $4,500 on a funny video instead. The traffic crashed its website and generated 12,000 orders within 48 hours.

More resources make things easier. Scarce resources make us think harder.

Sometimes, smaller budgets lead to bigger idea.

Customer satisfaction lives in the gap between expectation and experience.

Last night, after a conference keynote, I had dinner. Someone had recommended the restaurant. I hesitated. $350 for dinner is steep, even on a special day. But it was a special day, so I went.

The welcome was warm. The view was stunning. Nine courses promised a memorable evening.

The first dish was nice. The second was nice-ish. The third was mediocre. Courses four and five were dull. By then, something was brewing inside me. Not the food.

Was I really spending a pile of money on an average meal? I could have eaten in a family restaurant. I could have wandered through a local food market. Instead, I had followed a recommendation and gone fancy.

The waitress noticed. “How is everything?” she asked. The useless question no customer can ever answer.

In the friendliest possible way, I admitted that I was disappointed. Everything was fine. For $350, fine wasn’t fine.

Her boss appeared. Then his boss. They apologized, brought me several more equally average dishes, and offered me a discount. Eventually, I made peace with the restaurant. The food wasn’t great, but the people were lovely.

The bill arrived. I added a generous tip. None of this was the waitress’s fault. Then my phone lit up: “You have just paid $32.”

$32? I looked again and called the waitress back. Surely, I had underpaid. “No, sir,” she said. “It’s all correct.”

I had miscalculated the exchange rate. Spectacularly. The dinner had never cost $350. It cost $35—before the discount.

Suddenly, the view looked amazing, the service felt exceptional, the dishes became interesting. I had just eaten the best $35 dinner of my life.

I called the manager, confessed, and apologized to the team. The next day, I went back for dinner.

We usually think satisfaction comes from delivering more than people expect. And it does. But there is another way: ensuring people expect the right thing.

Borrowed opinions won’t make you smarter.

The internet gave everyone a voice. If you want to write a blog that 100,000 people read, you can. If you want to host a podcast that 100,000 people listen to, you can.

That is the good news.

The internet also gave a voice to people with inflated egos, shaky facts, and a good camera. They call themselves influencers. But if you look closer, many of their “facts” belong in the bin.

I call them BinFluencers.

BinFluencers create clutter and drown out the voices worth listening to. To get clicks, they need volume—five, ten, twenty hot takes every week. Every message has to feel fresh and surprising. But fresh and surprising aren’t the same as true.

You’ve heard these:
“Customer experience is the new currency!” Maybe. But tell that to the millions who line up for stripped-back service from Frontier and Ryanair just to save twenty bucks. Experience matters—until you ask people to pay for it.

“NFTs will change everything!” Really? For a while, every brand seemed to need its own NFT collection—digital collectibles recorded on a blockchain. When the market cooled, the gimmicks disappeared. That rare tennis-ball NFT you bought for hundreds now trades for twenty-five dollars.

If you take advice from a BinFluencer shouting market “truths” on TikTok, then repeat those ideas without thinking, you become a chatbot. Chatbots don’t build new things. Chatbots repeat—until one day they’re replaced by a better chatbot.

When your truth is borrowed, pressure breaks it. When your truth is earned, pressure makes it stronger.

Unfollow the BinFluencer crowd.

Learn from everyone. But believe only what survives your own thinking.

“I’m thinking of changing.”
Thinking feels like progress. Usually, it isn’t. Action is.

Change is difficult. For companies and for people. We are not merely choosing something new. We are letting go of something we built.

Who we are today is the result of circumstances and actions: the products we made, the jobs we took, the people we met. Action after action we have created results, relationships—and meaning.

Letting go of things means loss and uncertainty. So we think harder and make more plans, hoping to—one day—turn that idea into reality. That’s how ideas remain ideas.

Research tells us that change works differently: by taking action. By doing something new, learning from it—and making sense of it later. Herminia Ibarra has written a whole book about this: Working Identity.

Past actions created the system that feels familiar. New actions begin to create another one:

• Want your company to become more customer-focused? Meet one customer every day.
• Want to become an entrepreneur? Launch a small side business.
• Want to change careers? Line up five job interviews.

Then decide whether it’s for you.

Change is hard for a simple reason: we haven’t done the new thing yet. We are waiting to feel ready.
But readiness often arrives after we begin.

For change, do first.
Think later.

Even in dire markets, there can be growth. We just need to look one level deeper.

No sensible investor would put money into the toilet paper business. The market is sluggish. Margins are thin. Who Gives A Crap ignored that advice. Its UK business grew revenue by 13.5% last year and made a healthy profit, by selling eco-friendly toilet rolls directly to customers.

The toilet paper market wasn’t the opportunity. A particular kind of toilet paper, sold to particular people in a particular way, was.

Growth is granular.

When people try to explain why a company grows, they often start with global market conditions. That’s understandable. But not very useful. Global averages hide the very thing we are looking for: the sources of growth.

Go one level deeper. From the world market to sectors, industries, regions, categories, customers—and the picture changes. A shrinking market can have growing regions. A flat region can have growing categories. A mature category can have growing customer groups.

The authors of The Granularity of Growth found that broad industry growth explained little about why companies grow. But digging into subindustries and product categories by region explained nearly 65%. The closer they looked, the more growth they found.

NVIDIA just had another record year. So did the semiconductor market. Growing with the trend is easier.

But what to do when “the category is flat,” “the region is difficult,” or “the customer base is shrinking.” These statements may all be true. They are also averages.

Ask a better question: Which parts are still moving? The global snack business may look flat. XL dry-roasted peanuts in Nigeria may grow fast.

Growth often disappears when we look from a distance.
Move closer.