Mind Soup

For most of my life, I thought education was something you could document. You went to school, earned a degree, took a course, received a certification, and added it to your CV. The more qualifications you collected, the more evidence you had that you were learning and progressing. There was something reassuring about being able to point to a piece of paper and say, "I know this because I studied it." I still believe formal education has enormous value. My own education has shaped the way I think and has opened doors that might otherwise have remained closed. But after many years of working, changing roles, working across countries and cultures, managing people, dealing with difficult situations, and simply getting older, I've started to think that some of the most important things I've learned are precisely the things I could never put on my CV. There is no certification for learning how to deal with disappointment. There is no university degree for knowing when to s...

There's a particular kind of product that defeats most marketing: the one that's genuinely complex. Deep tech, a multi-feature platform, a service with real technical substance, a category so new it doesn't have a name yet. The people who built it understand it intimately, and that intimacy is exactly the problem. They can't see it the way a buyer sees it anymore, and so the marketing ends up either drowning the buyer in detail or flattening the product into something so simple it sounds like everything else. Getting this right, making a complex thing simple without making it stupid, is one of the hardest and most valuable skills in marketing. Over 16 years and a lot of clients across very different sectors, it's the problem I've been handed most often. Here's how I approach it. The two ways positioning fails Complex products tend to fail at positioning in one of two opposite directions, and it's worth naming both because the fix for one can push you ...

Some of the most meaningful communications work I've done has been for mission-driven organizations, non-profits, European Union programs, community initiatives, causes where the whole point is to move people to care and to act. And it's also some of the most ethically loaded work in all of marketing, because the raw material of the story is often a real person's hardship, and the line between telling their story and using them is thinner than most communicators admit. Get it right and you build genuine understanding and support for a cause that deserves it. Get it wrong and you've turned a human being into a prop, extracted their pain for your engagement metrics, and quietly reinforced the power imbalance you claim to be fighting. Having worked on communications for refugee protection, social justice programs, and grassroots mobilization, this is the tension I think about most. Here's how I try to navigate it. The extractive story and why it's so tempting Th...

There's a specific fear that stops a lot of marketing leaders from going all-in on AI, and it's a legitimate one. It goes like this: if I let my whole team use these tools freely, everything we publish will start to sound the same as everything everyone else publishes. The brand voice we spent years building will dissolve into that smooth, competent, faintly robotic tone that you can now recognize instantly across half the internet. The fear is real. But the answer is not to ban the tools, and it's not to let one person be the gatekeeper for everything. The answer is to roll AI out in a way that protects voice by design. Having done exactly this with my own team, here's how I think about it. Why AI erodes voice by default First, understand the mechanism, because you can't defend against a problem you don't understand. Large language models are trained to produce the most probable, most broadly acceptable response. That's their nature. Left to their defa...

I've spent much of my career marketing across the Middle East and North Africa, and I've watched a lot of global brands and international marketers arrive in the region with a playbook that worked beautifully everywhere else and then quietly underperform here. Not because the marketers were bad, they were often excellent, but because they treated MENA as a single translation exercise: take what works in the home market, swap the language, adjust the media plan, and go. MENA punishes that assumption. It's one of the most diverse, fast-moving, and misunderstood marketing environments in the world, and the things that make it distinctive are exactly the things a global playbook tends to flatten. Here's what those playbooks most often get wrong. Treating MENA as one market The first and most fundamental error is in the acronym itself. "MENA" groups together countries that differ enormously in wealth, media habits, dialect, religiosity, regulatory environment, c...

Every marketing team I speak to now uses AI in some form. Someone is drafting captions in ChatGPT, someone else is generating images, a third person is quietly pasting the quarterly numbers into a chatbot and asking it what to make of them. What almost none of these teams have is fluency. They have usage, which is a very different thing, and the gap between the two is where most of the value is either won or lost. I spent the past month deliberately closing that gap for myself and my team, working through Anthropic Academy's courses and then rolling the thinking out across how we actually work. What follows is what I've come to believe fluency means, why usage alone is a trap, and how a marketing leader can build the real thing. Usage is not fluency Here is the uncomfortable truth about how most marketers adopted AI: they treated it like a faster search engine or a junior copywriter who never sleeps. You ask, it answers, you paste the answer somewhere. That works for the ...

Over the years, as an official Meta trainer and through programs for Google, the British Council, the United Nations, the European Union, JCI, universities, and many others, I've trained more than 25,000 people in marketing and digital skills. That's a lot of rooms, a lot of workshops, a lot of watching the moment when something clicks for someone and the more common moment when it doesn't. Along the way I've formed some strong opinions about how marketers actually learn, as opposed to how we usually try to teach them. Most of what I believed at the start turned out to be wrong. Information is not the bottleneck When I started, I assumed my job was to transfer information. The learner didn't know how paid social worked; I knew; I would explain it clearly; now they'd know. Teaching as download. This is almost entirely wrong, and the internet proves it. Every technical fact I could teach in a workshop is available for free online, in more detail, at any hour. I...

Every time we travel, we bring something home with us. Sometimes it is a photograph. Sometimes it is a memory. Sometimes it is a new perspective that quietly changes the way we see the world. But what if the things we bring home could carry a deeper meaning? What if a simple bag, a handmade piece of paper, or a cup of coffee could tell the story of a person, a community, and a tradition that has survived for generations? In March 2025, I had the opportunity to accompany a group of students and faculty members from Illinois State University on a learning journey to Nepal focused on fair trade, human rights, and ethical production. Having worked in international programs for several years, I have seen many different forms of global engagement. But this experience offered a unique perspective: looking beyond the beauty of a destination and understanding the people, skills, and communities behind the products we often take for granted. Nepal is a country known for its breathtaking landscap...