Leaders Insights
Analysis & insights
Daily articles in marketing, data, finance and AI, for leaders and those aiming for the top.
Marketing strategy
The unlikely origin of short-form video: how six seconds changed everything
Short-form video did not arrive fully formed from Silicon Valley's imagination. Its roots run through a stranger, more chaotic history than most marketing textbooks acknowledge.
Repositioning without losing your base: a CMO playbook
Repositioning a brand is one of the hardest moves a CMO can make: the market demands change, but your existing customers chose you for reasons you're about to revise. This playbook walks through how to shift brand meaning without alienating the people who built your revenue.
Measuring influencer ROI past vanity metrics: a CMO's playbook
Likes and follower counts tell you almost nothing about whether an influencer campaign moved your business forward. This playbook shows CMOs how to build a measurement framework that connects influencer spend to revenue, retention, and brand equity.
Product-led growth: what marketers actually need to understand
Product-led growth shifts the acquisition engine from the sales team to the product itself, but most marketing frameworks were not built for this model. Understanding the mechanics changes how CMOs think about spend, attribution, and the customer journey entirely.
First-party data strategy after third-party cookies: a CMO's execution playbook
The death of third-party cookies is no longer a future problem. This playbook gives CMOs a concrete sequence of steps to build a first-party data infrastructure that actually works.
Diversifying paid acquisition beyond Google and Meta: a practical playbook
Google and Meta still consume the majority of digital ad budgets, but that concentration is now a liability, not just a missed opportunity. This playbook walks through how to identify, test, and scale alternative paid channels without destabilising your existing performance baseline.
Data & AI strategy
Clean rooms in practice: a CDO's playbook for data collaboration without the risk
Data clean rooms promise the ability to share audience insights across company boundaries without exposing raw data. Here is a concrete sequence for CDOs who want to move from pilot anxiety to production-grade collaboration.
Internal data products: a field guide to the teams and companies worth studying
Platform thinking for internal data is no longer a theoretical aspiration, a small group of companies have built the real thing and their choices reveal what actually works. This field guide identifies the most instructive players, ranked by documented influence on how the industry thinks and builds.
Proving data ROI to the board: the contribution margin method explained
Most CDOs struggle to quantify the value of data investments in terms a CFO will accept. This article explains one specific method, contribution margin attribution, that makes the case in the language boards actually use.
Real-time streaming data: a CDO playbook for getting it right
Most organizations collect streaming data but few actually act on it fast enough to matter. This playbook gives CDOs a concrete sequence for building real-time data capability that delivers operational value, not just architectural complexity.
The data flywheel: how compounding data advantage actually works
The data flywheel is one of the most cited concepts in AI strategy and one of the least understood in practice. This article breaks down the actual mechanics so that CDOs can assess whether their organization is genuinely building one or just accumulating data.
How JPMorgan Chase built data contracts across 50+ domains
JPMorgan Chase's data mesh initiative forced the bank to confront a problem most large organizations prefer to defer: who actually owns a data product, and what obligations come with that ownership? Their approach to data contracts offers a detailed, replicable model for CDOs managing complex, federated data environments.
Finance strategy
CSRD reporting: from scramble to system
Most finance teams entering their first CSRD reporting cycle are still stitching together data from spreadsheets, sustainability teams, and supplier emails. This playbook walks CFOs through the steps to build a repeatable, audit-ready process before the next deadline hits.
IPO readiness: what it really takes
Most companies that attempt an IPO are not ready when they think they are. This article breaks down what IPO readiness actually means mechanically, where CFOs consistently underestimate the work, and how to tell whether your organisation can genuinely withstand the scrutiny of public markets.
Hedging FX and rate risk without gambling: what the consensus gets wrong
Most treasury teams treat derivatives as insurance policies and stop there. The real discipline is knowing which exposures are worth hedging at all, and at what cost to the business.
How Unilever rebuilt its budgeting process using zero-based principles
Unilever's adoption of zero-based budgeting starting in 2016 forced every cost line to earn its place each year rather than inherit it from the prior period. The mechanics, the results, and the limits of that approach carry concrete lessons for any CFO weighing a similar reset.
Pricing climate risk into capital allocation: a CFO's playbook
Climate risk is no longer a qualitative footnote in investment memos. This playbook shows CFOs how to quantify it, embed it in capital allocation processes, and avoid the analytical traps that make most attempts fall short.
The hidden drain: how M&A integration became the graveyard of deal value
Most M&A deals look good on paper right up until the moment they don't. The story of how practitioners learned where value actually disappears during integration is stranger, and more instructive, than the standard deal-room mythology suggests.
AI & LLMs in practice
Human oversight in agent workflows: a practical playbook
As AI agents take on multi-step, consequential work inside real business processes, the question of when and how humans intervene has become a design problem, not a policy one. This playbook gives you a concrete sequence for building oversight into agent workflows before something expensive goes wrong.
How Klarna rewired its support operations with disciplined prompt engineering
Klarna's AI deployment in customer support became one of the most cited cases of LLMs producing measurable operational results. The prompt discipline behind it offers concrete lessons that transfer well beyond fintech.
Reasoning models and when to use them: the hype is ahead of the practice
Reasoning models like OpenAI's o3 and Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking have captured attention by visibly "thinking through" problems before answering. The consensus says to use them everywhere you need accuracy, but that prescription is wrong in ways that will cost you money and slow your teams down.
The spreadsheet that embarrassed a CFO and changed how we measure AI
A major retailer celebrated millions in projected AI savings, then watched the number quietly shrink to almost nothing once someone counted the full cost. That moment, repeated across industries throughout the early 2020s, explains why measuring AI returns remains the most underrated skill in enterprise technology.
The EU AI Act for non-lawyers: a practical compliance playbook
The EU AI Act is now producing real obligations for companies deploying AI in Europe, and ignorance of the legal text is not a defence your board will accept. This playbook gives you a concrete sequence of steps to assess your exposure, assign ownership, and take action before regulators come looking.
Evaluating AI apps before you trust them: a practical playbook
Most teams adopt AI applications based on demos and vendor promises, then discover the gaps only after deploying them in production. This playbook gives you a structured sequence to test what actually matters before you commit budget, data, or workflows to any AI tool.