Fresh Paint

Fresh Paint is Blue Spoon's essay series in strategy criticism. Written by John G. Singer, each piece takes a live business event — a selloff, a merger, a turnaround plan, a chief executive's letter — and argues with the position underneath it, using the public record and the company's own documents.

Architecture has critics. Film has critics. Corporate strategy has analysts, which is a different job. An analyst asks whether the company will hit the number. Criticism asks whether the number is the right thing to be counting — and who decided that, and how long ago, and what it now costs to keep believing it.

The standing target is the bubble factory: press releases from public relations departments that distract and disguise and do little more than sustain a dysfunctional status quo. Healthcare, pharma, technology services, advertising, finance — wherever an industry has stopped questioning its own premise and started optimizing inside it.

The capacity to see, say, sell and sustain with system vision is a rich vein to mine for originality. Some of what appears here is later developed into articles for more formal publications.