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Alex M H Smith: We need to go back to basics and we need to think about what is a business, what is every single business on the planet I think I was trying to create X, but I acknowledge that really I've probably created Y.

Welcome to Superpowered, where I talk to people who've mastered their skills in the most demanding situations. They share what actually works, so you don't have to learn everything the hard way. My name is Rob D. Willis, and this week I'm talking to Alex Smith, strategist and founder of Basic Arts. Strategic thinking is a mindset that I feel we all need to avoid common pitfalls and to make better decisions too. Alex breaks down how to strip away all of that complexity and focus on what really matters.

If you haven't done so already, please make sure to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and get ready for this interview. with Alex Smith.

Rob D. Willis: Hi, Alex. Great to

have you here,

man.

Alex M H Smith: Great to [00:01:00] be here. Thanks a lot for inviting me on.

Rob D. Willis: Ah, thank you for writing your book, No Bullshit Strategy. It really caught my attention, and I remember a few weeks ago, sitting down and reading it in class. And I found myself nodding my head the whole way because it just strips away all that complexity that you usually get when it comes to strategy. But for listeners who don't know, you haven't read your book yet, could you just tell us a bit about yourself and what you do with

basic arts.

Alex M H Smith: Sure. I mean, so in a nutshell, what, what I'm trying to do, which I guess is the book is indicative of, not that I was really thinking about it this way when I wrote it is democratize strategy. Strategy is a discipline, which actually, to be honest, most people never think about, but it's a discipline that's very well established.

If you were to go somewhere like the boardroom of a fortune 500 company or Harvard business school, or this [00:02:00] kind of thing. They are thinking about it very much as a discreet discipline and thing to think about and do most businesses aren't doing that at all. I don't, I mean, I do know why it is. I've got lots of opinions on why it is, but like for, for, for various reasons, when you go below a certain size of business, and we're not talking like small, we're talking like below 500 million turnover kind of territory.

It just sort of vanishes, it vanishes as a concept it vanishes as something that people think about and it certainly vanishes as something that people understand, and so that is basically what I want to fix, and you know, I, my sort of, if you said what is my job, I suppose that I am a strategy consultant like so many people, but Over the last few years, the kind of the nature of that has changed where, you know, with I, with my audience on LinkedIn and the book and all this other stuff now, you know, moving more into a kind of dare I say, [00:03:00] influencer space than really that being the center of what I do more than the consultancy, although clearly the consultancy helps pay the bills.

Rob D. Willis: I think that first phase is important, though, because, as you're hinting at, a lot of people don't even necessarily see the need for strategy. They, and I kind of understand why we think of work as being sort of in the production line, hammering away, doing, producing something, and strategy can be, can sound a little bit, airy fairy, if I

may say that.

Alex M H Smith: Oh, beyond airy fairy, I mean, airy fairy or indeed bullshit, hence no bullshit strategy.

Rob D. Willis: Exactly. So for the listeners, could you just explain briefly what is a no bullshit

Alex M H Smith: strategy?

We need to go back to basics and we need to think about what is a business, what is every single business on the planet, whether you're a 13 year old girl selling friendship bracelets out of her bedroom [00:04:00] or you're sort of Halliburton, they all have an, one thing in common, and that is that they are essentially a system which is trying to generate value and then exchange that value for value.

Alex M H Smith: For other value money. And we also recognize that the more value you manage to create with your system, the more value you're going to collect. The reason that Apple is the world's richest company or are they, but you know, give or take is because they're the company that's managed to generate the highest amount of value.

So so a no bullshit strategy first and foremost is that now it's, it's quite, it's very difficult to do that because we have to understand that there are sort of two dimensions to value and they're basically described by supply and demand.

Alex M H Smith: So the. It's not enough to simply create something that people want. That's one half of the equation. That's the demand side of the equation. Okay, does my business create something that people want? But then there's the other side, there's the supply part of the equation, which is, does my business create something that people want, but which also they can only get from [00:05:00] me?

And that's where most businesses collapse, right? Most businesses, they make something that people want because they say, like, Oh, I don't know. We sell socks and we know that people want socks. So therefore we've, we are doing something that has value. The issue that they have is there's a billion other businesses that make socks.

And so in that scenario, there's, you aren't actually putting new value out there into the world. All you're doing is duplicating existing value. So really what every business needs to be doing is not only think is not only creating value. Every business needs to create, be creating unique value, or if you prefer to use this term, they need to be creating new value.

Just think about it very, very simply. If you had a business that created some form of value that no other business on the planet created. And obviously inherently, it's something that people want because if it wasn't, it wouldn't be valued. How difficult would it be to run that business? How difficult would it be to make money from that business?

I mean, of course, the money would just flow automatically because you've [00:06:00] basically got a captive market for the thing that you're selling. So, all of that like throat clearing and no bullshit strategy is just essentially figuring out a way to put new value out there into the market. And I can tell you that 99 plus percent of businesses.

Do not create any form of new value. And that is why they have to spend their time sweating and hustling and fighting and marketing and hiring and selling and doing all that kind of grafty stuff that we think is the stuff of business. But the truth is it's actually not the stuff of business. It's the stuff of a business that has no strategy.

And if you actually crack the code. You could kind of relax on a lot of that stuff. And there are businesses out there, believe it or not, who, who are in this situation.

Well, let's just go straight there then. Let's say there's an executive out there and they work for A company who is one of [00:07:00] many. The tech boom created a lot of quite similar companies. And a lot of those companies now need to find profitability. They need to find their market. We've kind of hinted at the signals, that just having to spend so much to get customers. Where should they start looking to find the unique value? Let's say they are a food delivery app or a, Scooter, e scooter app or whatever, where do they start looking for that unique or new value, do you think?

It's interesting the way that you frame the question there. So I would say that like, you can think there is actually a kind of a familiar a typical pattern that plays out in these situations, which is firstly, you've got the time when the company is founded and the founder has some idea, which will generally speaking nine times out of 10 be a very, very bad idea.

Alex M H Smith: Now just because it's a bad idea, it doesn't mean it won't work, but like you have to start somewhere. You have to have your initial gambits to just get the ball rolling. So you create this thing. [00:08:00] And then you have an experimentation period where let's call it the first year, the first one to five years of the business where essentially.

The question is, will this thing that I've created get traction? And you're basically doing, you're, you're being very reactive. You're being very experimental. You're just throwing shit at the wall, seeing what sticks. And basically, you know, if the business has got some form of value within it, the business will survive and it will get traction.

And if it doesn't, it will die. And so obviously a lot of businesses just die because the, because the initial concept just basically didn't deserve. To live. Now, let's say that you don't die, and let's say that your initial concept does survive and it does sort of prove itself in the market because that initial idea you had was probably not a very good idea.

You, what you typically find is that the reason that the business is surviving and the reason the business is growing is not something that you initially intended. So you thought that you created this business, a the [00:09:00] thing that you envisioned in your head, but when it actually went out there into the market, the market interpreted it.

quite differently and the market supported the business for kind of different reasons. So like to use like a tech example, when the guys first founded Airbnb, they actually thought of it as a business as a business networking service. So like, if there's a conference, people will go to town for that conference.

And then they will like stay in. They'll sort of share couches together and they'll meet new business contacts in that environment. And that was the kind of the, the heart of what the business was offering. Now, of course, we look back on that now and we know that isn't what was actually going on with Airbnb or where Airbnb's strength actually lay, but they had to have that initial idea just to get things cooking.

So that's very, very typical. But what matters then is that the founder. Or the, whoever's the executive in control has got the humility and perspective to stop and say, [00:10:00] right, what have I actually created here? I think I was trying to create X, but I acknowledge that really I've probably created Y. And can I discover what that thing is?

And so that's when you basically go into an exercise of identifying the sort of the accidental or unpredictable points of leverage and attraction in what you're doing, and you explore, well, what would it look like if we were to double down, triple down on these things and start to actually like go in the direction that the market is pulling.

Most, most founders never manage this because basically their ego doesn't allow them to accept that they, the thing they've created is not necessarily the thing they wanted to create, but it's extremely unusual for a person to kind of have a vision for a business. Create that business. And then the market agrees with the vision and everything sort of went according to plan.

That, I mean, I wouldn't say it never happens, but [00:11:00] that's super peculiar. And you look at the history of almost any given business. They had this stupid initial idea, experimentation, trying to get traction, and then sort of strategic double down moment where they realized what they were doing. And boom, off they rode into the sunset.

Rob D. Willis: Yeah, it's a far more resilient way of creating something. Just relying on your initial vision is relying on basically luck or an unfair advantage, which we can't always control. what what kind of, stage are the companies at who come to you? Like what's making them come to you? Are they the, the founders who are self aware enough and humble enough to say, maybe I'm wrong? What are they seeing

generally do you

Alex M H Smith: Self aware, I mean that is, you hit your nail on the head that the very first thing at the top of that kind of pyramid is self awareness on behalf of the founder. So, like it's to give you a funny thing. Occasionally I get [00:12:00] brought in by somebody who is not, or I get contacted by somebody who's not the founder or the chief exec.

Maybe they're the marketing director or the commercial director or any other, one of the other senior leadership people. I have not once, not once in my whole career ever converted one of those people. Prospects, because what invariably happens is you have your lovely chat with the marketing director or whoever it is, they get all the problems, they get everything we're talking about.

You then get in the room with the chief exec and the attitude of the chief exec is something like. Well, I don't even know why we're having this conversation. I know exactly what we're doing. What what what do you have to sell me? And I'm always like, whoa, whoa, nothing. Like, you know, I, if, if you, if, if that's true, then I have nothing to sell you and I have no way that I can help you.

You, you seem to know exactly what's going on and what you need to do. So I suggest you go out there and do it. Meanwhile, the marketing director or whoever is like crying in the background. But like that, that is that, that, that kind of like ego is the normal way that founders. Sort of [00:13:00] are largely, I think, because if your business is one of those ones that got traction and survived, that means that you're probably coming off the back of a few years of growth.

And that can trick you because that can make you think, wow, my initial idea. Aren't I an absolute genius? Cause I had this idea, I made it. And then the business has grown and I know what's working. But of course it's a classic. What got you here won't get you there trap that those businesses fall into.

And so what they do is they, they hit a, they hit a ceiling. They plateau that initial prototype version of the business stops growing. It stops working. So to answer your question specifically, that is the most common time that I would be contacted where a business has had its initial sort of like growth burst.

It's proven itself to be a business of value. But basically the founders thinking, all right, we've gotten through that. What next, what [00:14:00] really are we, what really are we going to do and what's going to take us to, you know, the, the scale question is obviously different in different industries, but you know, for sake of argument, what's going to take us from being a 20 million business to a 500 million business or, or, or whatever the, the appropriate kind of ratio is.

Rob D. Willis: Well, let's just take that ratio. We don't have to go too in depth here, but I'm wondering what are the, the high level phases that you need to take them through? And what specifically that work looks like, whether it's facilitated workshops, whether it's surveys and market research, how do you go about guiding people through

that process?

Alex M H Smith: So I go about it in a fairly sort of unhelpful fashion from the point of view of. The podcast because it's the crux of what I do is I obviously absorb information about the biggest business to begin with, just so I understand vaguely what they do and about their market. You obviously got to get to a certain base [00:15:00] level of knowledge.

Then I kind of work on the principle that the business already has all of the information. That they need to make this decision. There isn't any new fact that they could dredge up that would kind of change everything because this this discipline. It's not about gathering new information. It's about looking at the information.

You already have in a different way. There's no, you know, I mean, I fully support. Doing research as part of this process, but quite honestly, it isn't necessary because really, the breakthrough is going to come from just have noticing something that was right in front of your face to begin with. And so that basically is like what I'm doing.

on a project. And in terms of process, the, where it most often happens is that I used to not do it this way, but now I just think, well, let's just cut to the chase. I'll get together with the chief exec or whoever the, the, the sort of like the, the owner of the project is in a sort of retreat style [00:16:00] environment.

So for like two or three days, half day, I wouldn't even call them workshops because we're not talking about like post it notes on a wall or any structure. I'll go like to go to a public sort of location, you know, a club, a bar, whatever, a that, that sort of environment. And you basically just like hang out and just chat about the business.

And because I obviously know what way to guide things. And when you sort of see a glimmer of like, Oh, that, that could be useful. That could be interesting. I can just naturally guide the chat until we kind of. Crack it basically. Now, obviously this is very, very dependent on my sort of intuitive understanding of what we're looking for.

But what I have done then with like my, my project, which is this sort of kind of my project, my, my product, which is this kind of at scale mass strategy development program, I had to obviously try and chunk that down into something. [00:17:00] That people can sort of follow themselves. So there is a chunked down process which I can talk to you about if you like.

But personally, I actually don't even use my own chunk down process because it's, it's a kind of, it's a sort of brute force approximation of what. I, if I'm doing consultancy work, I prefer to just do sort of organically or fluidly or whatever the word is.

Rob D. Willis: I find the same actually when I'm working with someone to find the story of what they're trying to communicate. It's usually quicker if I just sit down and talk through it with them. I love this idea of the retreat style setting. When did you first try that out? What led you to think about that as being a factor which might

influence the outcomes?

Alex M H Smith: actually always had a hunch, but I didn't have the balls to execute it. And it was actually a client who suggested it effectively giving me permission to do this. And I was like, [00:18:00] yes, thank you. Because they were a client from Canada. And and he said, And he said, you know, obviously just giving himself a sort of a vacation on the business.

He said, why don't I fly over and we'll spend three days together and just figure this out? And I was like, yes, that's exactly how we should do it. But like prior to that, I'd always been afraid because, because it has a really like unprofessional. Vibe to it, which is a hundred percent how it needs to be in order to do the work.

Well, but it makes it, it can make it a little bit sort of harder. I mean, actually this probably isn't even true. This is, I think this is just my own prejudice and my own kind of imposter syndrome or whatever, but I felt like it would make it harder to sell or to take seriously if he said, so yeah, basically, can you just like sort of pay me a hundred grand or whatever to just come and hang out for a couple of days, which is, there's obviously more to it than that, but that is kind of like how it looks

Rob D. Willis: if you say that's your job to people, they'd probably be very envious.

Alex M H Smith: And that is it. That is it. I mean, obviously there's pressure [00:19:00] on me in that, in that environment, what I would love to do, and I, and I still haven't had the courage to really push this, and I don't know if clients would pay for it, is to take it to another level where we actually find some like awesome destination, like a yacht off the coast of Sicily or whatever.

And we do it there. Because look, and of course, all paid for by the business. So that's like, so that's like doubly good because you are trying to create this sort of barriers down environment where that's very, very discursive, very, very, in some sense, off topic. There's a great. I think it's very famous, but I only saw it recently.

There's a great video, you can find it on YouTube of John Cleese doing a talk about the creative process as it pertains to businesses. And I only saw it like about six months ago. And it was incredible because it aligned with everything that I try and do and everything that I've sort of felt. This is the [00:20:00] sort of like way that I think it should work, but I would never quite have the confidence to, to kind of really codify it.

And it's sort of, and it's, and it's everything which most businesses. despise and try to avoid, which is what part of the reason why they're so bad at generating strategy. Because it's, it's almost like a list of everything that you're told not to do, which again, intuitively we should understand that obviously creativity comes from a, from a kind of a differentiated approach from normal work.

I mean, that, that should be obvious and yet somehow it kind of isn't obvious, is it?

Rob D. Willis: Yeah, I think people like the idea of the production line. They like a system, they like to

know what's going in, what's coming out, and it to be very guaranteed. And it has to take a certain amount of time. There must also sometimes be the sort of disbelief that you came up with this strategy or this idea so quickly.

Sometimes they kind of feel like the input needs to be equal [00:21:00] to The output, kind of Rory Sutherland, what he talks about in his book, it's those little changes sometimes that can have an enormous effect on the outcomes. Is that, I guess that's

how you see it. Yeah.

Alex M H Smith: Well, yeah, I mean, it's completely non linear because like

Because to have the, the breakthrough, so to speak, quite literally only takes a matter of seconds. And it's utterly unpredictable whether those seconds occur in the first 10 minutes, or even, or 10 months into the process. into the work. And that there's no reason whatsoever to think that the longer you do it, the more likely you are to arrive at the breakthrough.

That's actually probably the opposite of what is true. If you've been doing it for a certain amount of time, you start to wonder if there's actually anything even to sort of find which you do sometimes kind of have that issue, particularly if you're talking about a sort of struggling business that might have sort of kind of.

In [00:22:00] inherent, inherent problems. I mean, there's, there's a reason why we have this idea that this, this this concept of having ideas on the back of a napkin, like that, that's a kind of a meme or whatever, because it's true. And I, and. I sometimes like to sort of joke, like, the reason that ideas are on the back of a napkin is because they've happened out of the office.

They've happened in restaurants, bars, they've happened in places that have napkins, right? That's literally why they're on the back of a napkin. So the first step you should think is right, is like, right, am I actually like doing this work somewhere with napkins? Because if I'm not, how the hell am I ever going to have an idea?

So so yeah, it's, I mean, obviously Rory Sutherland, you know, he's very hot on all of this stuff. And and you, and it's just weird that people don't businesses don't do it. I mean, did you watch the TV show succession by the way?

Rob D. Willis: I did not.

Alex M H Smith: Oh, okay. Well, a lot of people obviously it's did. And it's, I would just say that it is the best.

[00:23:00] Demonstration of what real strategy looks like. Cause obviously it's about this sort of Rupert Murdoch esque character and his family, and they're always strategizing about the business, but the way that it shows the process is deeply, deeply true on many, many, many levels. But one of which is that the way that it actually happens is that they will be having a drink on the yacht.

At like 1145 PM and he will say, yeah, you know what, what we should do is X. And then that information will filter down through the business into the land of the boardrooms and the bean counters. And they will rationalize the decision, but the decision itself was happening. By the big boss with very, very little substantiation at 1145 PM on his yacht in the Caribbean, right?

So like, but most of us, we think it happens the reverse. We think that the solution bubbles up from the bean counters, but it doesn't. The, the, the solution [00:24:00] actually trickles down from intuition and then people can just rationalize it however they want at the kind of the more sort of professional level of the business.

Rob D. Willis: , I saw it or heard a conversation between Rick Rubin, one of his interviews, and he was talking about what the place of AI is. And he said that AI can basically do the doing, but it can't do the noticing, which is a word you used a little bit earlier. It is that innately human trait to notice a connection or something which is not logical, which has that disproportionate effect. It's very powerful. You do have some elements though. I mean, I know there's no strict process, but in your book, you talk about the context shift, the unexpected value and the contrarian approaches. My favorite was the context shift. And I was wondering, have you got a favorite example of that? Either From general

culture or [00:25:00] from your

Alex M H Smith: own work?

Just to address that, that, that issue of, like, you know, is there a process or is there not? There are certain people. You know, you're sort of Richard Branson, Steve jobs types who just get this in their bones and because it's the way that they think, and they never, ever have to read a single textbook, but they are obviously very, very rare.

Alex M H Smith: Everybody else, they need to basically train themselves to think this way. And they need to force themselves to think this way through. Frameworks and thought experiments and all the rest of it. So in that respect, of course, yes, there are processes that will, that will sort of shove your thinking in the right direction.

So those examples that you just gave are obviously examples of that. And there are examples of like, well, how do we actually kind of make these bold moves that, Create new value in the market. Like what we were talking about before. So context shift,

with that, with that one, it's basically about recognizing that the same thing, the same product, the same company [00:26:00] can provide different value depending on the moment or context that you are in. So there was one, I think back to like one project that I did, one of my clients here in the UK was was eat natural, the cereal bars.

And It actually, like, the Shortly after we did the work, they got bought by Ferrero who haven't, who like had their own agenda, obviously for the company and they haven't executed anything. So don't go looking for this for, for for evidence of this, but obviously, you know, it did enough to help the founder get the sale and.

So so he's happy, but yes, the execution didn't fully happen, but it's a nice example of the principle. So eat naturally sort of like quote unquote, healthy sort of granola cereal bars, which of course, you know, when they were first developed back in like 1998, they were actually the first people on the market.

It was this relative to the other options on the market. They were very healthy, but obviously they're packed with sugar, glucose syrup, et [00:27:00] cetera. They aren't actually genuinely healthy at all. And over time, the the market change, new players came on the market, new bars, new healthy snacks who basically have rendered them extremely unhealthy relative to the other people in their segment.

So they lost all of their leverage and value because basically they became the most unhealthy, healthy snack effectively. But then when we actually did. We actually did do research on this project as well but we didn't even really need to do it because we, you could actually infer it anyway. What we started to see though was that the people who were buying these products, they have this vision in their head that their product was like for yoga mums and, and, and those sorts of people who are into kind of healthy snacks, but actually really almost all the products was being bought by like white van men.

Sort of traders, laborers, or maybe like nurses on their shift, that kind of thing. And it was actually a much more kind of like sort of, if we [00:28:00] can say this sort of working class kind of product than what the company thought that they were making. And. All these people who were buying it, they did consider it to be very healthy, but that's because they were actually framing it not against the other healthy snacks that they actually never even would buy or consider.

They were framing it as an alternative to a Snickers and obviously it is healthy in as an alternative to that and because actually the things so packed with sugar, it's actually a really. Plausible alternative to something like a Snickers because the product tastes incredible as well.

It would for something with so much sugar. And when you actually go around the stores, a lot of the retailers had already cottoned onto this because a lot of the retailers were starting to merchandise this product next to the Snickers and the Mars bars and all of the hardcore confectionery, they were not merchandising it in the place where.

Eat natural wanted it to be merchandised, which was in the healthy snacks section. And you even had this [00:29:00] situation where eat natural would say, what the hell are you doing? Why are you putting us next to the Snickers without realizing that the rate of sale next to the Snickers was far higher than the rate of sale in the healthy snacks section where people were like, why am I going to buy that thing?

So same product. Change the context change the context. It performs much better. They also, I remember they were by far the best selling product. Of of that type in vending machines. Again, basically wherever you found a real dirty sales. situation, vending machines, petrol stations, corner shops, eat natural was killing.

Whenever you went to somewhere like Waitrose or some like posh sort of healthy shop, eat natural was failing. And, and this was all because of this, of this sort of like context. So, so, so, so that's showing it. And so if you're a business, You, you can do very well to actually think about the, as your first port of call, like what are people [00:30:00] shopping for when they find our product?

So what is the thing that the person, every single purchase, it starts with the customer sort of. into a product category that they have in their head. And that's the kind of frame that the customer is bringing to the transaction. And most businesses don't realize that you can choose which one of those kind of shopping journeys.

To insert your product into, and it's very likely that there'll be another one that you haven't even thought about where if you inserted your product into that shopping journey, like the shopping journey of the trader buying a Mars bar for in that case, your product is going to perform much, much more effectively.

But most people don't think about that. Most people think that like their category is what it is and they don't actually have control over over that context.

Rob D. Willis: You said, [00:31:00] this is amazing. And it was really a big mindset shift for me. I'm wondering when did that mindset shift come for you? You said people like Branson and Jobs and so on, they're born like this. Do you feel that this is something that you had to learn? Or when did that aha moment come about strategy for you?

Alex M H Smith: That what I do has very much come from a position of sort of commercializing my personality, if you like, or commercializing my natural. Weirdness. And one thing that I discovered. Quite fairly recently is you, you know, you know the Myers Briggs test.

Rob D. Willis: yeah. Mm-hmm

Alex M H Smith: the second metric on that is like sensing versus intuiting versus intuiting, which broadly speaking is like, are you a detail thinker or are you a big, a zoom out, sort of big picture thinker and

Rob D. Willis: Mm-hmm

Alex M H Smith: for whatever reason, I bury the needle extremely hard.

[00:32:00] On the, the zoom out thinking rather than the zoom in thinking, which makes me borderline kind of learning difficulties with certain types of tasks. But then it means that there are other types of sort of tasks, anything that's about kind of like getting the gist of things and thinking in sweeping generalities, that's like my kind of position of comfort.

So for me, all of this stuff. And all this noticing type stuff is just the way that I kind of operate on a natural basis. So what that meant was that I like started to do this sort of work before I even knew what strategy was or what the word strategy meant, or before I was even actually really thinking, thinking of it as strategy.

And I was developing a lot of sort of theories and kind of like just observing businesses that I thought. were doing well or that I thought were cool or whatever and thinking, Oh, well, what is it about them that gives them this capacity? And then I would kind of just codify that thing that I'd [00:33:00] noticed.

And the whole time completely unbeknownst to me, I was basically just arriving at conclusions that had already been arrived at by like by sort of like strategy people and professors and whatever. Oh, and people like Drucker and Porter and whatnot, like 50, 60 years ago, I just wasn't remotely aware of any of this stuff I was going to creating my own sort of like, sort of rough approximation of the same thing, but these are all sort of kind of universal principles.

So like anybody can notice them, use that, use that noticing word. But obviously like most people, they don't bother noticing them for themselves. They just read a book and they're like, Oh yeah, that's right. I just never happened to read the book. And it was only like. Fairly recently, like four or five years ago, that like somebody pointed out that they said They looked at like a talk that I did and they said, Oh, that talk, it's just like blue ocean strategy.

And I was like, what the hell is blue ocean strategy? And like, [00:34:00] bearing in mind here, I was this sort of strategy consultant, so to speak, and I'd never even heard of what is probably the best and most famous book in the whole field. That is how clueless I was. And I went to read blue ocean strategy and I was like, shit, everyone's going to think that I've just ripped off this book because like, I actually got all these things I thought with these really original insights, I was like, Actually, no, they're just like.

Common sense to anyone who's done like an MBA or who's ever like even bothered to read a book So it was a very weird process for me. But then that ultimately is what gave me my kind of Edge is that I, because I sort of reverse engineered my way into these ideas, I developed a very different vocabulary around them, a very different way of talking about them.

So the underlying principle is the same and it's universal, but it just so happens, as we were talking about at the outset, that most founders do not do not want to read and will never read a book [00:35:00] like blue ocean strategy much as they should. So they want a, you know, they want a kind of spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down.

And that's where, like, I've sort of got my territory and uncovered my own strategy, if you like, by realizing that I had a way of talking about these things, which most founders prefer to the formal Harvard business school way of talking about what are fundamentally the same issues.

Rob D. Willis: Yeah. I'm wondering how you got into that phase though, this clueless phase. You are a marketer before. What did that experience have, maybe what impact did that experience have on how you came into the, the strategy world, even if by

chance.

Alex M H Smith: So I was working for an experiential marketing agency. Like most of the work was like product sampling and stuff like that. So it wasn't like the sexier end of marketing or [00:36:00] advertising, but they did have some good clients. And I was like a pretty mediocre account manager, you know, doing like stock sheets for like yogurt roadshows and stuff like that.

And somehow I cottoned on to this. Idea that in big, sexy, creative agencies like, you know, BVH and Wyden and Kennedy and whatever, they did this thing called strategy, which like wasn't creative, but it also wasn't account handling. So I knew I couldn't go and be a creative because I didn't have, I couldn't use like, you know, illustrator or whatever.

I didn't want to be an account handler. And I was like, Oh, cool. So there's this thing that's sort of in between these things. And because in the experiential world, you know, you don't need anything. So overblown a strategy. This agency and none of this agency's competitors had a strategy department. So I said to the boss, Hey, why don't you let me set up the strategy department?

And then we can say to all the clients that we do strategy too. And our work is strategic versus being unstrategic. And again, [00:37:00] I was just, I didn't know what this meant. I knew that it sort of meant kind of rationalizing the creative work, but that was about as far as it went. And because there was no downside really for the agency, he let me do it.

And essentially the way that I did it, which I actually believe is basically the way it works in all agencies, but they would never admit it is that essentially really, it was like creative, come up with a bunch of ideas from the client's brief, and then I basically just like. Rationalize why this idea is a good idea.

And then if one of the ideas I can rationalize better than the other ideas, we just say that that's the idea. And we just pretend that we started with the rationale and then came up with the creative. But of course we all know it happens the other way around. And then I would go into the pitch and I would give this sort of like song and dance number about, you know, with the insight and all that.

And then it would lead to the creative idea, but this was like super, super effective actually way of doing it. So this is how I sort of learned strategy because at the end of the day, it is [00:38:00] ultimately just rationalization for what you're going to do. That's all it ever is. It's just the reason going back to the decision thing is the reason that you chose to do X rather than Y.

And so that's, so then I was this sort of like strategy, the head of the strategy department, a department of one then basically how I sort of transitioned into the ball kind of like business strategy is, I then started to notice. And there's that noticing again. I was like, well, look, sometimes we get a client who really doesn't need any of this thinking because the thing that they're selling is so kind of great.

That it just sort of sells itself. And what we're talking about here fundamentally is a is a business that's got very high levels of, of new or unique value to it. So it doesn't need all this creative spin and smoke and mirrors from an agency to make its thing looks good because the thing is good.

And I was like, wow, I'd be really interested. Wouldn't it be cool to help companies become more like that [00:39:00] than just doing this kind of lipstick on a pig campaign stuff, which agencies are doing.

So again, this is where I started to develop all of my, so I was looking at brands that I thought were cool, like, and in particular brands who don't do any sort of advertising at all.

I was really into them. So that's brands like lush Tesla monster, you know, those those kinds of brands. And I was just developing my body of work from that. And then eventually I sort of took the plunge to go out there and try and sell that sort of theory. And at the first I called it make, make interesting companies, not interesting advertising.

That was kind of like my tagline. And. On the subject of like your first idea being a crap idea that actually didn't really work. The underlying thinking was good, but the, but the kind of the way that I was taking it to market, it didn't really work. Because I was taking, doing it from a kind of advertising lens and obviously chief executives aren't sitting there all day thinking in an, through an advertising lens.

I was just thinking of it that way because that's the world that I was coming from. [00:40:00] So it took a while for me to kind of realize, Well, this whole kind of like making a company. Is so sort of intrinsically interesting that it doesn't need to do advertising. That's just strategy. That's just business strategy.

Right. But it took me years to realize that, that these were the same thing.

Rob D. Willis: I love how the noticing is coming up all the way and I've got to just go a step further back as well. Think about that times as a student, times as you know, at school and so on. How did that very intuitive way of looking at the world show up? Do you think?

Alex M H Smith: I was very, very unconscious of it until

the latter days of my kind of head of strategy at this agency, when I started to realize, Oh, I can do this sort of like better than other people can do it, but you know, my, like my first job was I I, [00:41:00] I mean, I, I didn't do like, you know, I was like pretty good in school, but nothing out of the ordinary and then the same in like university, I did American studies just so I could have the year abroad.

So again, there was, there was, there was nothing showing up there and then, because both of my parents were accountants, the first job I did, I, I did was I went to work for EY and it was a complete and utter epic failure. And it was obviously like, ironically, you know, to that sort of zoom in versus zoom out thinking like there are certain jobs that are zoom in jobs.

Being a scientist is a zoom in job. Being an accountant is a zoom in job. So I initially started with the most zoom in unsuited job I could possibly do. So little wonder that it was like such a car crash. So I wasn't remotely tuned in to myself in any way. And I think that this. People don't in general, obviously like myself included, people, they tend to follow the [00:42:00] path that for whatever reason that they copy, right?

So they follow a path that they've copied from what they've seen or what they consider to be, in some sense, admirable. And that path that they're going to follow, the likelihood that it actually fits with who they are is very, very low. Just because you're attracted by something or you think something's good, it doesn't actually mean it corresponds to your self.

And so people obviously end up routinely in scenarios where they're really badly fitted because they're trying to be, Another person or an archetype that they, for whatever reason, admire. Now, I never thought that being an accountant was this sort of cool, aspirational thing, but obviously I did it because that's what my parents did.

And it's, and those are good companies and great grad scheme. And, you know, it's just how you. It's just what you assume you're going to do coming out of a sort of coming out of a sort of university as a sort of person like me, it wasn't, I didn't think about what I was going to do. It was just, that's obviously [00:43:00] just what I did.

And then. The only reason I moved into marketing on the subject of you just copy whatever you think is kind of cool is because did you ever see the movie? What women want with Mel Gibson?

Rob D. Willis: Yes.

Alex M H Smith: Absolutely love that movie. And I particularly love the kind of the work environment that That he works in an advertising agency, Mel Gibson's character.

And the whole thing, I just thought like, that just looks great. And so this is why you know, and I, I couldn't get a job in like a sexy ad agency, unfortunately, that was just like impossible. So I had to just sort of find other ways into marketing first with L'Oreal, which was another. Huge failure.

And then, and then with this experiential marketing agency, which was the sort of as close as I could get to the what women want dream. So, but I was, again, I was, I wasn't doing any of this because it suited me. I was just doing it because I was just copying. Whatever had been put in front of my face.[00:44:00]

And I think that's what we all do. We just copy what's been put in front of our face.

Rob D. Willis: On that note, I'd love to ask a question I asked every guest. If you were to turn this journey from copying to forging your own way as the no bullshit strategist, if you'd write a another business book about this journey, what would you call it?

Alex M H Smith: I think by it, my instinctive reaction is I would call it have a damn opinion if I had to have my silver bullet for all of this and the re and the thing that really screws people is that. The vast, I mean, I'm thinking in particular sort of founders and CEOs here, but it probably applies more broadly than that.

Most people do not have a single opinion. They think they do, but really what they call opinions is just a more, a sort of more forcefully worded version of the status quo. [00:45:00] Anybody who ever sort of creates anything of real meaning, it starts with them having a legitimate disagreeable opinion. By which I mean.

an opinion where another person could, in good faith, disagree with that. Like, Tim Ferriss's entire career was built on the idea, you can get by only working four hours a week. Everything else was downstream of that. Brene Brown's entire career was built on the back of, if you show your vulnerability, it will make you more powerful.

Joe Rogan, Said podcasts should be over three hours long. Steve jobs said, I actually think that software should be closed source, not open source, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. There's always an opinion that triggers everything. And and. And people, they just don't have one. And without that, you're never going to get kind of the ball rolling and you're never going to actually know what you really think [00:46:00] because you only have second hand Points of view.

Rob D. Willis: Awesome. I love it. You got to write that

book, man.

Yeah, it should be quite good actually.

Just a couple of rapid fire questions. . So I know you don't really like books about strategy, but is there one book on strategy apart from your own that you think is worth reading?

Alex M H Smith: I mean, they, I mean like understanding Michael Porter, blue Ocean Strategy, you know, these are, these are all like good books and they are all worth reading. A hundred percent. The one, the only one that I really, I mean I don't really sort of like them as books, but they are, the information in them is really good.

The only one that I really sort of like as a book is zero to one by Peter Teel. That, that one is, that is a nice book.

Rob D. Willis: Are there any podcasts you're enjoying at the moment?

Alex M H Smith: Mostly it's rubbish, isn't it? Mostly I just listened to football podcasts.

Rob D. Willis: Perfectly acceptable, what's a good

one for that?

Alex M H Smith: Oh, and then when there's, it's even more pathetic. And then I just listened to the subset [00:47:00] of Manchester United football podcasts.

Rob D. Willis: okay, good

man. You've alienated part of the audience, but never mind. What is the most common BS in strategy that you see?

Alex M H Smith: it's not a very original answer, but that's because it's just so pervasive is goals as strategy saying like our strategy is to double in turnover by 2030 or something. I mean, obviously, yeah, I shouldn't really need to explain what's wrong with that.

Rob D. Willis: And last one. When you're sitting down with your clients, is there a particular question that you always ask them that usually leads somewhere

interesting?

Alex M H Smith: It's funny, actually, because there are a whole bunch of questions that I always ask. Mostly, I ask them on a sort of questionnaire before actually sitting down, just to get the juices flowing. However, you said that always leads to an interesting territory. [00:48:00] And actually, what's funny is that, like, no matter how interesting a question I ask, Invariably, they managed to give uninteresting answers, at least the at least the first time round.

So I would not actually say that any of these questions are out of the box effective. People will contort themselves wildly. To avoid saying something interesting. But just, but I, but that's not a satisfying answer. So to just, so to just give you a, so to just give you an answer, I would say, let's go for,

in what areas would you be willing to admit that your competitors. Are unambiguously better than you

Rob D. Willis: Oh, that

is a good one.

Alex M H Smith: Now, unfortunately, the answer that you'll normally get is something, is something like, oh, well, they're, they're better at ripping off their customers than we are. And I'm like, for God's sake. [00:49:00] But you see what I mean? This is the, this, these are the inbuilt mental blocks. That is so hard to overcome. If you think that that is a legitimate answer to that question, but like, that is the, those are the sort of layers that we have to peel off.

Rob D. Willis: Okay, that's really, I'm going to give some thought to that about my own business for sure, but let's finish with the listener challenge. So in this part of the pod, we give listeners a exercise or a ritual that they can try out over the next week to get a little bit of your superpower. Alex, what have you got for us?

Alex M H Smith: So writing online in public is a superpower, like but Everybody should do this, but, but, but the big crucial thing is do not do it as marketing. Do not think to yourself, Oh, I'm doing some social media marketing here. Maybe that will happen as a by product. That is, that, that is the huge error that people make.

You need to think of it. And everybody should do this as a form of essentially [00:50:00] kind of public journaling. And this is about develop what I said about developing an opinion and, and, and knowing your own mind. So sit down right in your industry, right? I'm taking this in a professional sphere, right? 20 opinions that you have about your, your industry, your category Whatever the best that you can do.

And of course, a lot of them are going to be kind of like sort of rehashed opinions, but just, just get 20 things down on paper. Then choose either X or LinkedIn, or maybe at a pinch, if it fits your industry. a forum like a subreddit or something as your as your, your platform for doing this. And then you literally just like each one of those 20 opinions, you just write a post about it.

Just text only no pictures. Don't try and be clever. You just write like, basically here's what I think and here's why, here's why I think it. And don't sit there thinking about like, how can I Turn this into [00:51:00] sort of lead gen, because then you'll, the thing will completely collapse. Just got to write the opinion.

Then of course you can watch and see, all right, well, which of these gets more reaction than others? And again, you're not trying to grow an audience. When I say more reaction, it might be your normal post gets two likes. This post got seven likes. That's very, very, very meaningful signal. And then you can go back and you can just sort of essentially just keep on writing that post in five different ways, the same fundamental point, just in different ways.

And each time you're going to get clearer on your voice, you're going to get clearer on your articulation, and you're actually going to develop a thesis. Which is yours. And from this point, good things start to happen. And, and who knows, maybe you will also grow an audience and you get marketing value out of it.

Like I say, you'll only get marketing value if you don't think about it as marketing.

Rob D. Willis: Awesome, great tip. On that note, where [00:52:00] can people go to find out more about you?

Alex M H Smith: So There's the website is basic arts ARTS org for some unknown reason. That's what I picked when I first set it up. Add on there, you can subscribe to the newsletter. That's probably the best, the best thing to do. And you get my ultimate strategy document template, totally free as well. But then obviously I'm putting out a lot of stuff on social media, in particular, LinkedIn, where you can find me, Alex, M H Smith.

You obviously have to do the MH cause Alex Smith is impossible to find. Or as well on Instagram and X also Alex MH Smith. And that's where I'm just pumping out the content.

Rob D. Willis: Awesome stuff. I'll be sure to link to all of that as well as to your book No Bullshit

Strategy in

Alex M H Smith: Oh, of course. Yes. By the book, by the book, I forget. I always forget it even exists. It's weird. It's so sort of like far from my consciousness.

Rob D. Willis: it's good. It's a good one and definitely worth the read. Alex, thank you for coming on the

show.

Alex M H Smith: Thanks a lot.

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