Issue #51: People, Presence, and PrioritiesRead this on my website I spent this past week in the United States. It was the first time I had been back for business for more than two years. My goal was pure business development, and the two events I attended (Restecher Capital Markets Day and IIEX NA Conference) did not disappoint. The advisory work I do is not an easy sell. I am not a growth hacker or brand whisperer or a traditional coach. Instead, I know how to help businesses do the hard...
8 days ago • 1 min read
Issue #50: No Touch. No ChoiceRead this on my website I am obsessed these days with AI, and it's not even because of all the things AI can do, which, even for people who are building AI tools, is impossible to keep up with. I am obsessed because I see the future of the industry I've worked in for the past 20+ years on the cusp of a change that will have a massive impact on a lot of people. I have spoken about the concept of no touch operations in different pieces I've written. Without...
15 days ago • 3 min read
Issue #49: Leadership Is Not the Opposite of ManagementRead this on my website Judging by what I see on LinkedIn and hear from real people, there’s a widely held belief that if you’re approachable, emotionally intelligent and not a tyrant, you’ll be a great manager. But being emotionally intelligent isn’t the same as being a good manager, and mistaking one for the other is where many emerging leaders go wrong. This week’s post was born of a conversation I had with a leader of one of my...
22 days ago • 4 min read
Issue #48: The Pros and Cons of ThinkingRead this on my website I started writing this at around 10pm my time on Friday night, which is awfully late for a newsletter that was supposed to go out in less than 11 hours. I had a conversation with someone late this afternoon, though, that compelled me to scrap this week's topic and write this. The call was just to catch up. We've known each other for several years. This person, who understand the industry back-to-front and subscribes to my...
28 days ago • 4 min read
Issue #47: A Stag, a Rabbit, and a Prisoner Walk Into a Bar 🦌🐇Read this on my website No one loves a leadership analogy drawn from current events more than I do. So let’s talk about those tariffs, shall we? Set aside the fact that even the free-market mandarins of Palo Alto—the former architects and seemingly last conservative-leaning defenders of Pax Americana, the Brooks Brothers–wearing scions of Stanford, the Hoover Institution itself—think Donald Trump’s tariffs are bonkers. Let’s just...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Issue 11. No-Touch Operations That's Not DIY ‘No-touch’ operations should be the goal of any research firm that wants to scale. Not low-touch. Not self-serve. Not a slick UI hiding a battalion of operators or an off-shore project team. Actual no-touch: work that runs on its own once the rules are set. There are precious few assets that firms in our space can build on their own. One of them is indomitable execution. Indomitable execution is not process efficiency. Process efficiency is good,...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Issue 10: Why Most Insights Platforms Don't Take Off 🚀 There are hundreds of “insights platforms” in market research. Most of them exist because founders subscribe to a kind of hopeful logic: A. The industry is worth tens of billions. B. Everyone agrees it’s messy and manual. C. Therefore, a tech solution will make me 🚀 🤑 D. Surely even a fraction of that is worth chasing, right? So they build a platform to solve what they believe is the industry’s core problem: inefficient access to...
about 1 month ago • 1 min read
Issue #46: The End of OperationsRead this on my website This past week, I released my new e-book entitled AI and the SaaS Mirage in Market Research: What Founders Should Build and Investors Should Back (get it here!). While the title speaks explicitly to business models, it reflects my belief that, even as the insights/data industry adopts AI across all functions, there is still a role to play for humans in the conduct of market research. But not all humans. Or maybe I should say not all...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read
Issue 9: The End of Operations This past week I released my new e-book entitled AI and the SaaS Mirage in Market Research: What Founders Should Build and What Investors Should Back (get it here!). While the title speaks explicitly to business models, it reflects my belief that, even as the insights/data industry adopts AI across all functions, there is still a role to play for humans in the conduct of market research. But not all humans. Or maybe I should say not all types of roles that are...
about 1 month ago • 2 min read