Your operating environment has changed radically. Atomizing customer segments, accelerating social innovation, infinite media channels, an inexhaustible supply of data and information flowing freely around the world, the dissolution of boundaries and conventional notions of value, and the onward march of technological change have made marketing more complex, more costly, and less effective for all industries. That comfortable mental furniture used as the centerpiece of brand management – the language of “branding”, “awareness”, “positioning”, and “message” that frames conventional thinking about marketing – is coming apart at the seams, unable to accommodate the seismic instability in your strategic landscape. The traditional calculus is obsolete.

This is what globalization really means: social, economic, and cultural processes are not impeded by geography or physical constraints, but cover the world as a single, interactive, simultaneous whole. Complexity increases. Diversity multiples. Differentiation explodes. Power shifts. New subcultures self-generate. The number of alternative choices becomes endless. It becomes more difficult to analyze, model, predict or control. The effect of all this economic and technological interconnectivity is interdependence....and it calls for a new way of looking at the human condition.

Dealing with multiple shifting paradigms calls for a whole new philosophy, a fresh approach to strategy defined in 21st-century terms. It will take different kinds of ideas from a different level of thinking. But how does a new strategic philosophy translate to competitive advantage in the trenches, where the 'ground truth' of more sales and a higher share price and better quarterly results is the reality to confront? Answering that big question can only come from a conversation that pushes the concept of creativity and the logic of leadership into an entirely new realm.