Do you want to show up more creatively for your clients and your colleagues, your family, and your friends?
Do you want to default to thinking about opportunity versus focusing just on problems?
Discovering Hope is full of proactive steps you can take right now, to achieve a more positive mindset or to help maintain the positivity you already have
Getting Positive reveals that more optimism is close at hand
Why Strategists Have More to Gain Than To Fear From Generative ‘AI’
To be clear, I am no ‘Large Language Model’ ( ‘AI’) specialist, although I do intend to pursue a course to correct this fact! I have been talking with a number of you, who ‘are’ ‘AI experts, embedded as part of planning groups with the remit to:
“Operationalise the use, understanding and application of ‘AI’ to enhance more rapid pathways to strategic clarity and through it customer impact.”
My topline understanding, if you have several years of strategy experience under your belt, you’ve nothing ‘currently’ to fear from ‘AI.’ It is your questioning, your interpretation, your editorial oversight, your client reassurance, that is still needed. And what ‘AI’ can provide, can enhance your work. And, even if you are a junior strategist, you will position yourself as best you can if you ensure you learn from and how to optimise ‘AI,’ as shrinking strategy teams will continue to re-tool.
How ‘AI’ Might Help You
When teams are shrinking it is a valuable analyst and thinking partner – see Ethan Mollick’s two latest Substack posts about the impressive capabilities of the latest models and how that goes beyond the simple “AI assistant” idea. It can help you consider more options with a greater degree of realism – If synthesis of data can be speeded up, there is greater opportunity to focus on the soft skills/the nuances of customer interaction. ‘AI’ could for instance mirror your biases, used in a focused way, it could prevent reinforcement of those biases.
Is ‘AI’ a Career Threat? It’s evolving all the time, but at-the-moment, it’s a rapidly evolving aggregating machine, that thrives on using data and logic. Efficiency is not strategy. Any work area that requires more emotionally nuanced interaction will be work that continues to be human-focused.
Which jobs will be the first to go with ‘AI’…. Given ‘AI’ can trawl data from the whole web and synthesise it at hyper speed, any jobs that require aggregation and synthesis of information become vulnerable. Data gathering and analysis make basic research and media buying vulnerable.
Which Jobs Are ‘Relatively’ Safe Editorial oversight requires understanding of humans: Strategists providing empathy and judgement and creative directors.’ narratives that resonate with humans. While research can be automated, will it reveal outliers in understanding? The quality of up-to-date ‘in-person’ research will continue to have a role; Experiential Strategists bring together many parts of understanding human engagement and interaction, they will become even more important; Work seeking to persuade individuals or groups where logic alone isn’t enough/EQ needed; PR Specialists providing counsel directed specifically to influence human opinion.
Which Jobs Will We Humans ‘Want’ Human Interaction? (even if supported by ‘AI’) Even if ‘AI’ could do it well, there are areas of our lives we simply demand ‘direct human direction.’ Think human reassurance and interaction (versus diagnostics) ‘is a key part’ of wellness treatment; High Value purchases or high stakes such as crisis management will still require a level of human understanding of human reactions/require reassurance.
HOW MIGHT YOU ACT IN RELATION TO ‘AI?’
‘AI’ – Understand it/Invest in it – I f your employer hasn’t already provided training, do it yourself or request your employer invest in you completing a prompting course – Learning about LLM’s (large language models) and how to get the best out of them. Any great ‘qual’ researcher will probably be a natural, but one can always learn more.
Human Strength to ‘AI’ Weakness – Bolster your human skills: Emotional understanding/empathy, Relationship building skills/trust, Caring/Nurturing skills, Creative appreciation skills, Leadership/motivational skills. Also make yourself aware of evolving AI tools developed to analyze EQ. Consider reviewing https://www.receptiviti.com/
Adaptability Skills/AQ – This is just the beginning of ‘AI’ – If it freaks you out then perhaps what you fear is not ‘AI’ but uncertainty. The greatest bulwark against change, is your ability to adapt. Learn what it takes to become adaptable. Article attached. https://bit.ly/3DjAyCb
Big picture – ‘AI’ has and will transform lives for good and bad! From a business perspective, without being an expert, invest in understanding how ‘AI’ might help your work. Key, enhance your job security by understanding the chokepoints for creating or sustaining revenue and ‘AI’s impact there! For instance, maintaining ‘trust’ in client relationships is key to holding on to revenue and very much a human delivered capability, albeit back up by data/great performance, enhanced by ‘AI.’
What’s Happening With Freelance
As the business environment and the agency world in particular, seeks greater flexibility (for lots of reasons) in hiring, a record number of you are now freelancing/consulting.
Boon times for freelance were during the pandemic years where amid huge uncertainty, greatest flexibility was needed both by employers and employees alike.
These times – More time of uncertainty, but corporate focus while still seeking flexibility, cost control has greater importance, meaning?
Freelance opportunities have in the last year been fewer, shorter in duration and harder to land. Why?
Agencies and companies have been trying to save money. They have done this by seeking to reduce freelance as a proportion of payroll as although it provides flexibility, arguably it’s expensive (when used extensively) relative to full-time hiring.
Future trajectory – Freelance in time will regain greater momentum particularly against a backdrop of greater uncertainty in the business environment. That said, there are and will be even more of you seeking (for different reasons) to freelance, placing downward pressure on freelance rates.
Happy to talk with any of you about the market, where greater opportunity may be, where to target, how you might position yourself etcetera.
Happy hunting,
All happiness,
Stuart
The Beyond Employee
Based on my understanding of career happiness (I’ll leave others to define success) there are some obvious things to get on top of, noteworthy:
Keep learning, (Tech’ yes, but soft skills are more critical than ever, none more so than empathetic ability) learn to be adaptable, focus on relationships, but also key, find time to get perspective, both to understand trends but also to keep in a good mental space!
One other factor to focus on here, personal agency. This is you needing to strategise for you! What are your goals? If you know the answer, you’ll know what your dream working scenario is. Know this and then you’ll know what experience, expertise and connections deficits you have and what you need to work on. Why is this important?
The reality in 2025, we’re all one relationship away from a good or bad year. From making money or not. From working for someone else or not.
If you are currently an employee, what I want to communicate, you should start thinking of youself right now, as self employed. Yes deliver as employee, but also make your employer, ‘work for you.’ Consciously make connections and get experience with a mind to working for yourself. This way, it will be a softer landing when change comes for you.
Agency consolidation is not a new thing neither is job insecuity, but as one accelerates, so does the other. Start to adjust your mindset to it and in so doing you’ll be better prepared to build as a ‘beyond employee.’
All happiness,
Live to Work? Work to Live? (an ode to ‘time well spent.’)
(three minute read)
It’s a choice, many are not prepared to make
Didn’t know they could
Some don’t have a choice of labor
Some like their work, all the time!
Out of work – Feeling daunted feeling scared
In work – Exhilarated but for others, trapped.
The route to sanity, happiness even
The clarity of purpose
Of attainable dreams at and away from work
Yes, knowing what you want
Understand your values, your strengths, your goals
You tell your story better
You live your time with vigor
Thanksgiving provides respite
Temporarily, we are kinder, more prepared to give
and to forgive
Give yourself a gift of reflection and perspective
Think about things..Get in to it
Are you blindly on a hamster wheel to nowhere
It’s time to be the sentient being you were made to be
It’s time to think about what matters
Time to think, what gives and where you don’t
Time to recognise time is precious
There are things you need to do.
Job Searching Woes – Who is technology working for?
(five minute read)
Technology is amazing and can enable but used primarily for the purposes of efficiency/short-term profit with disregard for human impact, it will have the opposite effect – It will disenable and in so doing, lose the benefits automation bring whilst creating many frustrated people.
Your experience when looking for either freelance or full-time work has to be better than it is.
We have to move away from the feeling that the odds are stacked against us. Whether it’s the algorithms that exclude or tied agents who will only recommend one company/agency, the one they work for.
The application of technology in advertising and marketing today makes having someone on your side in the job search, more important than ever.
And the whole process of getting work needs to be less transactional.
The experience of getting a job/work, should not feel like a job!
There is a way forward. A number of you I have already discussed it with.
For those frustrated with the way things are currently ‘working’ when looking for work either as a freelancer or full-time job seeker, let’s talk.
Stuart
Short Termism and Job Security – What You Should Do
(five minute read)
Short termism. What are we talking about? A focus on short term results and driving that, short term thinking, systems, practices, environments, all focused on the end of year bonus. What does this mean for you?
Transactional Relationships – All of you that have consulted for any time understand a more transactional approach to making money. Anyone that knows anyone understands that the agency world on the whole, regards all employees as expendable very often even when they have performed, short terms results are preeminent.
What should you do in the midst of short termism?
1. Mindset change – If you haven’t already done it, don’t assume constancy, security (however professionally effective you are or your connections might be). Seriously!
2. Have options – Always keep your options lined up, as chances are, you will need them and if not, you’re prepared.
3. Niche – Yes, be a generalist, but devlelop a niche, core expertise that limits your competition and ability to be replaced by it.
4. Relationships = Internal ones are important but being the client’s ‘go to person’ is crucial, if you want to be the ‘last person standing.’
5. Money deliverer – Everything is very short term, so if you’re more a big picture thinker, you have to translate that/communicate it’s pathway in to short terms results (as well as longer term payback).
Finally, you need someone that’s independent that’s on your side, in and out of full-time work. I have a new ‘agent’ led approach, which you might want to hear about.
My best,
Stuart