FOX’EM FOX

My internship took the form of a comprehensive, all-department apprenticeship—an unbelievably costly investment in recruits that could never be afforded today. Over several months, I became fascinated by the intricacy of overnight packaging, font selection, and cold typesetting. I breathed in the fumes of photography and learned the distinct scent of different finishes, papers, and glues.

Media planning and buying were made immersive by publishers’ parties; casting became one with copywriting; and the heady world of art direction became my Olympus.

My first strategic success resulted from the friction of this layout. The traditional order of things saw buttoned-up, three-piece-tailored account executives meet with clients, then return to brief the much more informal creative teams.

With the advantage of a training oversight that bridged all departments, I saw how much became lost in translation. Account executives didn’t speak creative, and creatives didn’t speak business. It may have helped billable hours, but it took forever for clients to be truly satisfied. Because I spoke both languages, I pitched both sides in true referee style and became the agency’s first Creative Coordinator.

From then until today, that fundamental truth has guided me: you must bridge the gap between concept and execution. I have always sought to innovate both internally and externally, exploring old adages and creating new ones.

We must recognize that word of mouth delivers with a two-edged tongue, and remember the old thrift of waste not, want not. In a noisy world, optimal focus means convincing ten percent of the people one hundred percent of the way. To do that, you must write images and visualize words, realizing the immense power hidden in generic terms.

Above all, we must be prepared for the shifting tides of communication. Today, stakeholders have become influencers. It is all in a word. If you do not employ a purposeful nomenclature—deploying terms like CatalystXcelerator or Difference Paths to define your own ground—the market will gladly define it for you.

Staying on Track

Sisyphus said it best: “Once we get this rolling in the right direction, there’s no limit to where momentum will take us.” An avid surfer, he also understood the importance of looking ahead and changing waves before momentum fades.

To find direction, however, you must first understand the topography of confusion. My own family’s heritage includes Glendurgan Garden in Cornwall, home to a historic, winding hedge maze. Throughout my career, that maze became a living metaphor—recalled vividly whenever I found myself inside the labyrinthine communication structures that large organizations tend to build around themselves.

I have also spent more time than I should admit trying, with myopic intensity, to untangle modern news cycles in search of a shred of unvarnished truth. You cannot find the center of any maze by following the crowd, nor can you discover truth by looking where everyone else is looking.

Much of modern industry still works through predictable cycles of repetition: new terminology wrapped around familiar thinking. Real transformation rarely comes from following momentum alone. It comes from recognizing emerging convergence early, identifying alternative “difference paths,” and aligning the right ecosystems, technologies, and influencers before markets become crowded by imitation.

Where there have always been trailblazers, we increasingly need seers. We need conceptual and mathematical thinking working together. Human intelligence and AI reasoning evolving in parallel. Strategic imagination applied simultaneously to both our physical and artificial worlds, whose futures are now irrevocably intertwined.

Our environment increasingly resembles a particle accelerator of intersecting systems: AI, connectivity, mobility, infrastructure, media, behavioral economics, and ecosystem influence all colliding at extraordinary speed.

Many organizations unintentionally narrow innovation potential by equating youth with adaptive thinking, despite the reality that pattern recognition, strategic foresight, and systems-level insight often deepen through experience.

I believe the future belongs to organizations capable of balancing innovation with clarity, acceleration with direction, data with imagination, and ecosystem scale with human relevance.

The Wall Street Journal

Challenges inspire. Changing perceptions of the WSJ from a stodgy business forum to a primary creative platform through Jim Johnston’s Creative Leaders campaign is legendary.

Fortunately for me, Jim prided himself on hiring youthful talent with doctoral-level backgrounds as an indication of ability to learn. Despite never completing a thesis, I somehow fit the bill and ended up as a very young Executive VP of Special Accounts—which really meant he had no finite role for me except occasional, disruptive support.

I traveled to WSJ events with Jim and listened as he debated with Dow Jones marketing, sales, and publishing leadership. Aside from being an Anglophile, Jim loved annotating and employing Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. An idle comment from me—“If I can’t remember what I thought, it’s not worth mentioning”—qualified as one of his added entries. From then forward, he looked for my opinion and creative input on multiple campaigns.

“All the cream. All the time” was my solution for a WSJ ad where our production department had trouble rendering a top-of-the-milk visual in black and white.

“It Works” was a tagline I arrived at after we had labored for months to find a fitting sign-off. (I don’t really like taglines any more than I like logos in boxes; they tend to confine.) Fortunately, however it was applied, “It Works” worked and is still in use decades later. If anyone instilled in me the importance of working through to distinction that made an on-brand difference, it was Jim.

That pursuit of distinction eventually required moving beyond single campaigns and into the orchestration of global third-party relations. In a hyper-connected economy, a creative strategist must act as the ultimate facilitator—bringing diverse ecosystems, international stakeholders, and brilliant minds together to shake hands on a shared vision.