A.I.
What Ableton taught us about AI and the future of coding
In 2001, Ableton turned bedroom producers into festival headliners. Now vibe coding is doing the same for software. The parallels run deeper than you'd think.
Creative Business
Lessons from starting things that worked, flopped, and taught more than any MBA. The messy reality of building creative ventures - decisions, mindsets, and the bits nobody warns you about.
I've started things that worked, things that flopped, and things that taught me more than any MBA could. These pieces are about the messy reality of building creative ventures - the decisions, the mindsets, and the bits nobody warns you about.
Start Here
The essential reads on creative business
Best of...
Making it in America: What international founders & creatives actually need to know
The cultural paradoxes, identity costs, and hidden rules nobody explains
Best of...
The Creative Technologist comeback
How a misunderstood role from the digital agency era is becoming essential for the AI age
Best of...
The McCartney Method: Mastering the Magic of Audience Connection
Paul McCartney’s secret to staying timeless: meticulous details, unforgettable fan moments, and a generosity that creates magic every show.
Best of...
7 ways to improve a conference speaking proposal
I’ve just finished evaluating proposals for SXSW 2025. Here are 7 things that separate the standouts from the rest.
Best of...
5 Founder Types
Which one are you?
How-To Guides
Practical playbooks for building your business
Creative Business
How to run a retrospective that actually works
Six months after a project you can barely remember what you learned. Here's a one-hour framework that fixes that - using conversation, transcription, and AI to capture the insights that usually vanish.
How-To Guides
What I've learned from evaluating 1000+ SXSW proposals
Every year, I find myself deep in proposal evaluation mode. Fortune 100 CEOs, ambitious VPs, indie strategists, even actors and
Future Of Work
An antidote to AI tinnitus
Sam Altman says agency and adaptability will be extremely valuable. But what does cultivating them actually look like?
Creative Business
Lemon automation: How Chick-fil-A processes 20% of America's lemons... and what it means for your career
The unexpected career insights hidden in a chicken restaurant's remarkable lemon-squeezing operation
Best of...
The McCartney Method: Mastering the Magic of Audience Connection
Paul McCartney’s secret to staying timeless: meticulous details, unforgettable fan moments, and a generosity that creates magic every show.
Creative Business
Two ways to define 'Good Enough'
Ever found yourself endlessly tweaking a project, chasing that elusive perfection? Yeah, me too. But here's a thought.
Battle Scars
Hard-won lessons from entrepreneurial endeavours
Building something creative?
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All Posts
Everything on creative business and entrepreneurship
Coaching
Coaching: Stories can lead to solutions
A coaching client came to me to discuss a challenge they had at work.
This client works in an executive
Entrepreneurial Endeavours
5 x Why, 5 x Who
You may have heard about the 5 Whys [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5_Whys].
It was originally developed at
Stage Left
Design Thinking: Culture and Contraceptives
One of the first initiatives the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation launched in
Africa was supplying contraception to women who
Mindsets & Growth
The Gallery
It’s time for your next show.
Take a moment to see in your mind’s eye a spacious, empty
Portfolio Career
Managing the feeling of being scattered
A feeling of being scattered is pretty common for people seeking to carve out
their own path, especially those with
Entrepreneurial Endeavours
Employee of the Month
It’s really easy to let our inner critic run riot.
The negative self-talk, the comparison trap, that nagging feeling
Entrepreneurial Endeavours
The key to spreading your ideas
In last week’s episode of his Akimbo podcast, Seth Godin tells a story about
blue tit birds.
You can
Coaching
Trust, Lock-in and Switching Costs for Coaches, Consultants, and Advisors
This is post is about lock-in.
Let’s get the Urban Dictionary definition out of the way first (it’s
Entrepreneurial Endeavours
What do they remember you by?
Positioning, Storytelling and Epitaphs for building a network and career
One of the inevitable obligations for celebrities launching a new
Portfolio Career
When is it hard to do, or easy to finish?
This can often be the case for freelancers doing work for a client.
Hard to do as it’s not
Stage Left
Why Penn & Teller ignored the audience
One of Penn Jillette’s least favourite terms in show business is ’this works’.
It’s easy to let the
Future Of Work
Location Arbitrage
*
Go back 15 years or so and this was only a serious day to day consideration if
you were an
Podcast
Tickets Podcast: Adobe's Andrea Rosen on creativity and the future of work
Listen now:
Apple Podcasts
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/tickets/id1336642615?mt=2&uo=4]|Castbox
[https://castbox.
Podcast
Tickets Podcast: Betaworks’ James Cooper on building products, brands, and communities
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Listen now:
Apple Podcasts
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/tickets/id1336642615?mt=2&uo=4] | Castbox
[https:
Entrepreneurial Endeavours
Knowing what's more trouble than it's worth
A friend was recently given a cheesemaking class as a gift.
The class focused on how to make the soft
The Tension
What kind of artist are you?
Finding out with three lines, a few dots, and a long-sleeved shirt
Note: I found this post in my drafts
Podcast
4 Podcast Trends for 2019
A few hunches I have for the world of podcasting in the coming 12 months.
1. Awards Shows: Podcasting categories
Mindsets & Growth
Two quick tips on Trend Spotting
This quote from Beth Comstock is a nice heuristic for spotting emerging trends.
Another way of looking at this is