Friends,
As for many of you, the beginning of this year has been rather hectic for me. Between leaving the consultancy I co-founded for the unchartered waters of independency, launching a myriad of new projects, losing everyone’s favorite Murray and the seemingly endless pandemic, the past few months have been an emotional roller-coaster of awe.
However, I now finally feel as if things are starting to settle down at least a tiny bit, wherefore I thought that I would take the opportunity to discuss what lies in the weeks, months and even year ahead: a defined direction for future content and a members-only strategy network.
The Newsletter & The Book
As some have become aware, the main focus of my current work outside of client projects and column inches is an attempt, foolish as it may be, to build an entirely new framework for strategy.
The undertaking is long in the making; I have felt, as I am sure many of you have, a nagging feeling for years that something must be missing from the traditional strategic puzzle. For all the certainty, binarity and occasional hyperbole in established industry discourse, the organizational reality that I have faced throughout my career has always been the polar opposite. It is messy. It is blurry. It is not this thing or the other, it is both and neither. It is the meta and the mesa.
Some things work well sometimes. Other things work better other times. Nothing ever works all the time.
But while it is easy to revert back to analogies of horses and courses, the strategic stable has long remained rather small.
As I dug deeper into research, theory and practice, not least in order to challenge myself (the initial results of which can be seen in my e-book The 2021 Castlin Manifesto: Strategy in Polemy, obtainable via paid subscription to this newsletter), the evidence eventually became overwhelming. The thing that some had intuited but most had misunderstood, the lost piece, was the organizational impact of complexity in the scientific meaning of the word.
In fact, I currently believe that complexity theory is as paradigm-shifting in strategy as quantum mechanics was in physics. So, a couple of months ago, I decided together with Gary Forss to write a book about it and present our proposed solution (preliminarily scheduled to come to a fine bookstore and digital outlet near you in Q2 2022 or, for those who subscribe as “founders”, signed and delivered to your doorstep).
Therefore, while newsletter will continue to take a critical look at traditional strategic wisdom, every edition from now on will be tied - either loosely or firmly - to various aspects to be discussed in the yet untitled book. My hope is that it will allow me to dig much deeper and more consistently into topics that have a real effect on practical strategic work and, thus, provide not only tangible value but also actionable advice.
And on that note..
The Strategy in Praxis Exclusive Members-Only Closed Deluxe Hyper-Mega Super Duper Special Network (name possibly subject to change)
I am very fortunate in that I have thousands of subscribers and followers who are much smarter than I, which means that I can generally throw out questions, get brilliant answers, learn and improve. However, on social media platforms such as Twitter or LinkedIn, interesting conversations are too often derailed by people who have little to offer yet offer it very loudly, drive-by commentators without a care for context, salespeople and bots.
Consequently, by popular demand, I have decided to set up a closed discussion network to facilitate high-value conversations about strategic challenges. Partly to build towards greater knowledge, but also to create a collective support group of sorts for professional strategists.
As an early subscriber to this newsletter, you would of course receive a complimentary invitation - but what would be your platform of choice? Is there a service that you absolutely love, or maybe one that you wholly detest? Reach out to me on Twitter and let me know!
With plenty more to come, onwards and upwards
/JP