Business culture worships polish. Slides perfected until they shine. Decks reviewed ten times. Ideas rehearsed until every edge is gone.

The problem is simple. Perfect kills progress.

Rough ideas force a reaction. They provoke questions. They attract friction. That is where better ideas are born.

If your ideas look too polished, they are already too late. Ugly wins. Rough wins. Unfinished wins.

Most offsites are a joke. Same venue, same decks, same polite nodding. People leave with full notebooks and empty results.

If the best people can say afterwards is “it was nice to spend time together,” then stop pretending it was strategy. Call it what it is: a social outing dressed up as leadership.

A real offsite strips away roles, forces hard conversations, and demands decisions. It should feel uncomfortable. If nobody sweats, you wasted the trip.

Two days like that can reset a year. Everything else is just expensive theatre.

Everyone says they’re using AI. Most are using it wrong.

They polish copy while campaigns rot in approval hell. They generate pretty images while their data is still a mess. It’s like detailing a car with no engine.

The real drag on marketing isn’t creativity. It’s bottlenecks. Data prep that takes days. Approvals that crawl. Segmentation that needs three tools and a prayer.

The fastest teams use AI to kill those bottlenecks. That’s why they launch 3–4 times faster. Not through magic. Through subtraction.

Stop automating the fun parts. Start eliminating the slow parts.

“Don’t compete with AI, collaborate with it.” Sounds wise. It isn’t.

We call it collaboration, but most people are just acting as middle managers for machines. We prompt, it delivers. That’s not partnership, that’s supervision.

The real question isn’t how to collaborate with AI. It’s what work humans should stop doing entirely. Not because AI does it better, but because maybe the work itself is waste.

AI’s real opportunity isn’t more. It’s less. Less pointless reporting. Less polishing of things that never mattered. Less pretending that “collaboration” equals progress.

The future won’t belong to those who work with AI. It will belong to those who don’t need to.

I’ve spent years hoarding books on marketing, strategy, branding, AI, and leadership. Now I’m giving 170 of them away.

They’ve done their job for me. Some are full of notes and battle scars. Others barely touched. All of them shaped how I think.

One book per person. You cover shipping, I’ll send it. But here’s the deal: tell me which book you want and why. Because choosing the right next book is harder than buying another stack you’ll never read.

Knowledge isn’t meant to sit on my shelves. Your turn.

Another day, another buzzword. Now it’s “regenerative marketing.”

Sounds noble. Fix communities. Heal ecosystems. Be the good guys. Reality check: most companies won’t. They’ll slap the label on the same old tactics. Call customers a “community.” Run green campaigns while polluting. Talk about giving back while chasing quarterly targets.

The few brands that do it right, like Patagonia, Ecosia, Who Gives A Crap, didn’t just change their marketing. They built different businesses.

That’s the real test. If the model stays the same, “regenerative marketing” is just another scam with better PR.