About
I am a senior marketing and business-transformation operator — twenty-five years across the world's two largest marketing communications groups, leading some of their largest and most complex client relationships across the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia.
The work has been the same shape throughout: take responsibility for a multi-market, multi-discipline client engagement at scale; design the operating model that holds it together; build the team that runs it; deliver against commercial targets while shifting the underlying capability of the organisation. The categories have varied — automotive, consumer health, beverages, telecommunications, consumer packaged goods. The structural problem has not.
Most recently, I led the WPP relationship with Colgate-Palmolive out of New York: a $200M+ engagement orchestrating more than 1,000 people worldwide across media, creative, production, data, technology, commerce, CRM, and enterprise transformation. Part of that work was designing the global content supply chain, a modular, AI-enabled production system. The headline number was efficiency, 30–35% on production spend. The number was real. It was also not the point.
What the seat actually gave me was a view from inside the largest content machine in the category as the ground moved. I watched the projected layer — the aesthetic, the language, the production craft the discipline had spent thirty years learning to charge for — commodify in real time. Efficiency was what the machine was built to chase. It was the wrong prize. Producing the deflating layer more cheaply is still producing the deflating layer. The institution underneath — the accumulated context and judgement that AI cannot reach from outside — was the thing actually worth building, and almost nothing in the operating model was designed to compound it.
Seeing that, from that seat, is what made both threads of this work inevitable for me.
I had spent two decades watching senior operators carry the entire invisible context of their organisations on their own nervous systems. I was watching it happen to myself. Then I watched AI begin to deflate the cognitive labour I was being paid for. The two problems are the same problem. The personal practice that addresses it became Compounding.
I had also spent two decades watching brand, as a source of competitive advantage, eroded by platform pressure and now industrialised into commodity by AI. I was watching enterprises retrofit AI into the operating models they already had, polishing the surface while the institution underneath dissolved. The two problems are the same problem at a different altitude. The institutional practice that addresses it became The Compounding Enterprise.
Both practices share a diagnosis: AI is structurally deflationary, and the work of building anything that compounds against it is genuinely different from the work most operators and enterprises are doing.
Before all of this: BA (Hons) Geography, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 1996. Born and educated in England. Lived and worked in London, Cape Town, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Manila, Singapore, and New York. Currently based in the New York metropolitan area.
The fastest way to reach me is [email protected].