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.

Thank you for reading my updates. I write about growth. It was time to take my own medicine. So there’s a new blog and a new web presence.

Many of you have read my work for years. I appreciate all your comments about what’s useful—and what isn’t. Much of what I’ve learned has gone into the blog you’re seeing now: more frequent, shorter pieces covering a wider range of topics around growth and change.

We’ve also revamped my website. All new keynotes are now online, together with short clips and a new blog layout.

What hasn’t changed is the purpose of this blog: to spread ideas that work. Not all of them may. But I hope some will make a difference.

Thank you for reading—and for continuing to do so.

Yours,
Thomas

Brand are complicated. Managing brands is not.

In 1931, young Procter & Gamble manager Neil H. McElroy wrote a memo with the principles for how a “brand man” should do the job. Simplified, there were seven:

1. Measure success: track results by product and location.
2. Learn from success: study which activities have worked and try to apply those lessons to comparable markets.
3. Investigate and correct weak performance. Review past efforts, speak with customers and frontline partners, diagnose the problem, and develop a new plan. Secure management support, equip the sales team, stay involved through execution, and keep records.
4. Take full personal responsibility for all work.
5. Take full personal responsibility for all money spent.
6. Keep improving the product’s presentation.
7. Stay close to local teams. Meet regularly to identify what’s not working and learn what’s happening on the ground.

His principles helped define modern brand management.

McElroy wrote the memo because he believed in these principles—and to make the case for two additional staff. Today, we have too little of the former and too much of the latter.

Brands rarely fail because the team is too small. They fail when nobody studies success, confronts weak performance, takes personal responsibility, or stays close enough to the market to know what’s going on.

Brands are complicated.
The principles of managing them are not.

Sometimes, we invest more only to stand still.

The product gets more features, more colors, and more promotions. But when everything becomes a race, everyone works harder, yet no one necessarily creates more value.

China has that problem today. Relative to the size of its economy, it has 1.7 times as much productive capital as the United States or the EU. Yet the value it extracts from that capital is about 40% lower, the McKinsey Global Institute found. Chinese companies invest more and compete more fiercely, while many struggle to make money.

In China, people call this pattern neijuan—literally, “involution”: everyone works harder, yet the returns keep falling.

Neijuan isn’t just a Chinese phenomenon. It’s all around us:

• We post more on social media, while engagement declines.
• We make more things with AI, but most look the same.
• We collect more qualifications, yet each one is less valuable.
• We answer emails instantly, but don’t get more done.

Business theory has long told us that more competition is always good. Compete harder, innovate faster, work longer—to win the race.

But is it the right race?

Cirque du Soleil chose a different race. For decades, running a circus meant adding bigger acts, more animals, and more discounts. In 1984, Guy Laliberté and Gilles Ste-Croix decided not to enter that race. Instead, they eliminated animals, blended circus with theatre, and created Cirque du Soleil—a completely new experience that audiences were happy to pay a premium for.

Winning the race still matters. The smarter move is to choose a race where effort pays off.

When we choose a better race, involution becomes innovation.

Measuring the effectiveness of marketing isn’t easy, but with more than two-fifths of marketers suggesting it is their biggest skills gap, we have a major problem.

(I wrote this for Marketing Week).

“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half,” department store merchant John Wanamaker once said.

More than a century later, we have an update.

We increasingly know what works. But almost half of all marketers don’t.

Marketing Week’s latest Career & Salary Survey reads like a smack in the face. More than two-fifths of marketers (42.1%) say marketing effectiveness is their biggest knowledge gap— ahead of strategy (38.4%, equally concerning) and market research (25.8%).

Imagine a survey in which 42% of CFOs admitted that finance was their biggest knowledge gap. Or in which 42% of surgeons confessed that anatomy was the area they understood least. We would regard both professions as being in crisis.

This isn’t about pocket money. In many firms, marketing commands some of the largest budgets: millions, sometimes hundreds of millions, of dollars, euros and pounds.

The fallout is significant. A recent US study asked CEOs to give “A” grades to their marketers. About half earned one for overall trust. But only about 20% did so for driving growth. At a time when budgets are scrutinised, low confidence in marketing’s ability to create returns is bad news.

In the C-suite, the budget question is often surprisingly simple: does marketing create returns or not? If the answer is yes, money flows. If the answer is no—or “I’m not sure”—budgets get cut. Rightly so.

So what is going on?

To be fair, figuring out perfectly effective marketing is tricky. For context, as a marketer and at McKinsey, I’ve built marketing mix models for more than two decades. There are too many variables. The message, the media, the competitors, the economy, the product, pricing and distribution all interact at the same time. Precise measurement of everything is impossible—and always will be.

Luckily, marketers now have far better tools than ever before: neural networks, online direct-response statistics, first-party data and AI. There are also a gazillion courses on how to manage marketing more effectively.

Which is exactly why the survey result is so worrying.

If marketing effectiveness is still the profession’s biggest skills gap, despite all these advances, the problem is unlikely to be technology.

The bigger issue is training and apprenticeship.

Over the last decade, firms have hired armies of specialists for search, content, social media, analytics and whatever new platform appeared last week. At the same time, broader marketing training, mentorship and apprenticeship have become increasingly rare. Today, there are millions of marketers who have never left their cubicles to learn how the entire system works. We have created too many narrow experts on narrow career paths.

Marketing effectiveness isn’t about optimising TikTok. It’s about TikTok versus more distribution versus a 30% coupon.

When I walk into a marketing team, I can usually find the biggest leaks before lunch. Are we targeting the right people, in the right window? Is the message effective? Is the media mix balanced for reach, cost and quality? Is the execution consistent? Does the budget reach the market—or disappear into technology, consultants and overhead? This framework is deliberately simple. I know. I can do complex. But I’m often the first person to ask those questions.

Cracking marketing effectiveness takes time and practice. I’ve met CMOs in automotive, banking and consumer goods who have spent years building models, testing assumptions and refining decisions. Some say they can now predict up to 80% of outcomes. That’s impressive—and it didn’t happen overnight. Procter & Gamble spent decades codifying what works for its brands. There are no shortcuts.

None of this is new. We’ve known the fundamentals of marketing effectiveness for generations: better targeting, better messages, better media choices, greater consistency and smarter budget allocation.

The best marketers didn’t just wake up one day and become effective. They learned how the whole system works.

Too few marketers ever do.
And if you can’t manage the budget, you can’t lead the business.

Some of the greatest technological leaps gave us time. The telegraph saved the courier’s journey. The computer saved the bookkeeper’s calculations. The mobile phone saved countless small trips and searches.

Now AI is saving something bigger: whole working days.

42% of frontline employees who regularly use AI save eight hours a week—almost a full workday. In marketing, the figure is 60%. In IT, 53%. In human resources, 50%, Boston Consulting Group* found.

Then comes the consultants’ more interesting finding: “66% still receive limited or no guidance on what to do with the time they save, and more than half say they are not reinvesting time saved into more strategic work.”

We have invented a tool that gives us time back. And now we are waiting for someone to tell us what to do with it.

AI can save the time. AI can’t decide what the time is for.

The time is yours.

What will you do with that time?

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* Boston Consulting Group: AI at Work: Strategy Matters More Than Tools, June 2026

Earlier this year, I joined Jon Evans for a new podcast. We talked about practical ways to build stronger relationships with CFOs, act with more bravery, and avoid the “safe” behaviours that quietly kill careers.

Jon and I had a lot of fun recording it. I hope you enjoy it too.

You can listen to the podcast here.

Great ideas achieve nothing unless they’re executed.

Making change happen is hard. Many people have to be involved. Not everyone will agree. Being right isn’t enough.

Patrick Barwise and I wrote this booklet for exactly that problem: how to make things happen when you’re not the CEO.

I hope you’ll enjoy reading it.