Alex M H Smith: [00:00:00] A strategy that's been come up within six minutes can be as good or better as a strategy that's been come up with in six months.

Chris Kocek: Welcome to any insights yet, the podcast that explores the intersection of strategy, inspiration, and branding. I'm Chris Kocek. On today's episode, we explore the secrets of breakthrough strategy with Alex M H Smith, the author of No Bullshit Strategy. 

Arnold Schwarzenegger: Come on, don't bullshit me. 

Chris Kocek: I first found Alex on LinkedIn and was impressed by his no-nonsense, straightforward approach to building brands.

A self-admitted, self-taught strategist, Alex consistently cuts through the bullshit by using clear unpretentious language and fantastic examples that anybody can follow. As Alex sees it, the problem with most strategy is not that it's doing the wrong thing, but that it's doing nothing at all. Most strategy falls flat, he says, because most strategy hides behind unclear [00:01:00] language that fails to inspire action.

According to Alex, great strategy is deceptively simple, but it does require focus and a little bit of mischief. So how do you get to a great no bullshit strategy and what happens when competitors catch on and try to copy you? Well, that's where strategy becomes even more important and things get even more interesting.

Let's get into it. What is the difference between a bullshit strategy and a no bullshit strategy?

Alex M H Smith: Well, if you want the answer in one sentence, it's very, very simple. One results in massive action and the other doesn't because obviously what even is the point of strategy at all? It is nothing other than a prompt, or even better, a provocation to action.

So you know, you shall judge the tree by its fruits, you shall judge the strategy by its actions. I think we all know that most things that have the word [00:02:00] strategy attached to them do not result in any concrete action that happens as a consequence of that strategy. 

Chris Kocek: Why do you think so many people get it wrong or, or they say strategy and they mean something else?

Why do you think they can't get that right? 

Alex M H Smith: Well, I think one of the primary reasons is that the word is poorly defined and I don't get a lot of hate online, but such hate as I do get tends to come around the question of what is the definition of strategy, because I define it in a slightly wrong way, but I do that on purpose in order to make it easier for people to actually do something concrete with, because of course, the real definition of strategy is something like, I don't know, a pattern of actions in order to achieve a specific goal or something like that, which is essentially like saying the definition of a strategy is to have a good idea. There's nothing, there's no content there. So, people, they don't know what the thing is that they're creating, and so you get [00:03:00] all sorts of random things that people attach a badge of strategy to, because unlike, let's say a logo, everyone knows what a logo is, so of course, people just go and make logos. People don't have the same kind of concrete idea when it comes to a strategy. 

People generate strategies that don't actually have the quality of a strategy within them. It wasn't me who made this observation, I think it was maybe Richard Rumelt who said the issue with most strategies isn't that they're bad, it's that they aren't even strategies.

So if I narrow the definition to being all about the unique value that a business is able to deliver to the market, so what can you give people that they want but they can't get anywhere else? And then you find the way of doing that, of solving that riddle, that is your strategy. And going back to the original question about like a bullshit strategy.

Well, when people know what to do, they're more likely to ultimately do something, which is the whole point. 

Chris Kocek: That reminds me a lot of James Clear from Atomic Habits. He says, most [00:04:00] people, they think that they're lacking in motivation, what they're really lacking in is clarity. If you have clarity, it becomes very obvious what needs to happen next. I think that's very similar. 

Alex M H Smith: Yeah, very true. 

Chris Kocek: In your book, you say the market doesn't reward better, it only rewards different and in my growing up in the agency world, I was always told differentiate or die, and so in your experience, when you look at categories that have become commoditized or calcified or there's no differentiation, what's a good example, or two, of a category that's just gotten calcified, everybody looks the same?

Alex M H Smith: Well, I'll give you the textbook answer, even though lots of people will have heard it before then I'll give you a slightly more interesting one, the textbook one, and as people say, like if there was Nobel Prize for strategy, it would've been given to Southwest Airlines, which is the ultimate strategy case study because it has all of the ingredients of like sort of perfect strategy, including a very calcified, commodified market, which was the [00:05:00] airlines industry in, let's say, the eighties and back then all of the airlines were building their businesses around attracting business customers 'cause business customers was where all the money was.

So, it's a very obvious piece of logic to say, alright, business customers are the most profitable customers. Therefore, we will construct an airline to appeal to business customers, and then we will earn more money. But of course, when everybody does that, that doesn't work because that drives commodification.

So then, what Southwest basically come along and do is they essentially say, well, what if we were to actually just be terrible for business customers, what would that airline look like and who would that be for? And so it was almost like building an airline as a competitor to buses. Long story short, they create the low cost airlines category and they make a ton more profit than all of the other companies who are ostensibly chasing the more quote unquote profitable thing.

So that is the sort of the most clean and pure story that you'll find of this sort [00:06:00] of strategy dynamic that everyone is trying to do where you're trying to like take a market where it's become competitive, it's become clustered where everyone is fighting over the same territory and you are trying to create new territory that you can own all to yourself.

Now, of course, Southwest no longer owns the low cost space, but you know, they still had a pretty good run of it and they're still like a pretty successful business. So, you know, worked out well for them. You know, another less cliched example. In the world of energy drinks, obviously we all know what an energy drink is and what they look like, and you've got Red Bull, you've got Monster, Relentless, et cetera.

And I would actually say that although there's some incredible brands, especially Red Bull and Monster, it is also now quite a sort of done space. But what this one company did, this is in the UK and, this might, in the USA, this might be an old idea, but in the UK it was a new idea. 

There was a guy who's actually a truck driver. Truck drivers love energy drinks, for the obvious reason, keeps 'em going as they're doing those long drives through the night. The problem is, is that you've got these giant pint cans of Monster and they make you [00:07:00] need to go to the bathroom, which is not what you want when you're a truck driver. So, all he simply did was he took the same amount of caffeine you get in a monster, and he put it in a shot, I think he called, I think it's called Five Hour Energy, I think is the brand. It's a super basic brand, but the entire idea there is essentially an energy drink that doesn't make you need to piss and this has now become a really, really big, successful brand, all based on that anti-competitive pivot and showing that even in this most congested of markets, there is still a new thing that can be done and you say, wow, you know, this category is not done, none of these categories are necessarily done. 

Chris Kocek: Yeah, that's a brilliant example with Five Hour Energy. We do have it here in the States, and so what I'm hearing is that there are a couple of things in both of those examples. One with Southwest, they redefine their competitive set. They said, we're going up against buses, not other airlines. So that's a huge shift in perspective and then the second one is [00:08:00] identifying, in this case, it was a particular target market and you might say, oh, well maybe the target market isn't big enough, you know, are truck drivers big enough, but it led to this spark of an idea that, hey, you don't need to have a whole lot of liquid to get the energy that you need, so let's repackage it into something smaller. 

Alex M H Smith: In my book, I talk about a lot of different sort of, kind of, lateral thinking techniques in order to unlock these new forms of value and one of the big, big, big ones is redefining a competitive set. Just don't compete against the other brands that are nominally in your category, find a way to compete against a completely random other category where you're gonna have more leverage. That is a great, completely undervalued, little understood technique.

The second point I love, 'cause it's something I was thinking about just last week and I think it's really funny, which is targeting. Targeting, I think, is basically a lie because what you find, this might Byron Sharp, I'm pretty sure that this was one of the points that you made, which is that regardless of the targeting that you do, [00:09:00] everyone ultimately ends up selling if you look at the data to the same mishmash of people as everyone else.

So like, let's say you look across car brands and they all nominally have different targeting, but actually, ultimately, the split of people who they're selling to is always the same. We have a protein bar in the UK called Grenade, really, really successful brand. As you can tell by its name, it looks like something designed for 15-year-old boys, but it's 50% women who buy it.

What you see from this is, that like, the whole notion of targeting doesn't bear any relationship to who actually ends up buying the product, but it doesn't mean that it's a worthless exercise. What it does do, is it creates a more distinctive offering overall. 

So let's go back to the Five Hour Energy thing. So yes, nominally, okay, the target of the idea is truck drivers, but then you, as you say, a person would think, oh, well, are there enough truck drivers out there? But actually in truth, I bet if you look at the purchase [00:10:00] profile of Five Hour Energy, truck drivers are not a big part of that consumer base. What they did is they used truck drivers as a sort of ideation tool to create this new product that actually has far broader and far harder to predict applications for a much wider group of people than they ever would've imagined. 

So it wouldn't remotely surprise me if Five Hour Energy, 25% of its sales were going to, I don't know, young mums or something completely random, because the targeting is just a way of creating a new idea, it's not a way of narrowing your consumer base, it's actually a way of broadening your consumer base. 

It's almost like the narrower you define your target, the more broader section of people you'll sell to, 'cause the narrower, and narrower you make it, the more and more distinctive you become and therefore the more and more people you attract. I mean, look, Red Bull Act as if their customers are all bloody professional BMX riders, and of course [00:11:00] they aren't, but no one ever looks at Red Bull and says, oh, well, you know, I'm not really an extreme sports athlete so I probably shouldn't be buying that. That isn't the way that people think. The whole targeting thing I think is fascinating 'cause it's sort of like, yeah, it's a, it's a useful lie that we tell ourselves to drive differentiation, but if you believe the lie, then you're gonna get in trouble 'cause you'll start saying things like, oh well we couldn't possibly do a product for truck drivers 'cause there aren't enough truck drivers out there. 

Chris Kocek: I love that counterintuitive thinking. In the US we have a product, uh, it's in pouches, it's called Gogo Squeez, there's just applesauce in pouches. I don't know if the Pouch Revolution has hit the UK for baby food. 

Alex M H Smith: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's done. Yeah. 

Chris Kocek: But I read somewhere that Gogo Squeez ended up being surprised that, to your point about who is the target audience, of course they were thinking originally for kids 'cause pouches and kids and baby food was very popular, but they found that more and more adults were eating them because they're [00:12:00] just a convenient, healthy, on-the-go snack, and I'm actually one of those adults, so after I work out, I always have a Gogo Squeez with me because it's 70 calories and it gives me the kind of sugar boost I need after a workout. 

Alex M H Smith: There you go. Yeah. Love it. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good example. 

Chris Kocek: You say in your book, the highest quality knowledge comes from observation, not number crunching, and I'm a big believer in the power of observation. In my book I say an insight is not an observation, an insight is not a data point, but I do still believe in the power of observation to lead to a breakthrough insight or, in your case, a breakthrough strategy.

What's an observation that you've had about consumer behavior that has then led to a killer strategy for one of your clients? 

Alex M H Smith: Well, so one thing that I think is good to sort of like clear upfront in terms of this difference between a data point and an observation is that one of the characteristics of a good observation is that it doesn't require any proof because it's just [00:13:00] self-evidently true, it's just something that people haven't really thought of or that they haven't noticed yet actually is the better way of putting it. Whereas like the thing with the data points is they aren't self-evident, they have to be proved by the data and that's why they're data and people have this like weird assumption in their heads that if it isn't data driven, then it can't be true, which is a little bit like saying, well, I don't have the data for whether or not the sky is blue, therefore the sky can't be blue. Like in people's ordinary lives they understand this, but in business they kind of go a bit funny. 

An example of a self-evident observation that actually then had massive implications for a business, one of my clients is the market leader for juice shots in the UK, so I'm sure that juice shots in the USA are quite a big thing and have been knocking around for a while, like in the UK they came a bit, they came a bit later and when they were building the business, they were sort of building the business as a juice brand conceived of themselves, as occupying the juice category and competing with other juice brands and a lot of their decisions were being driven by this sort of [00:14:00] self-conception of being juice. Until, you actually stop and think about it and you're like, okay, look, I get that a juice shot, like a ginger shot, whatever is made of juice, but just 'cause it's made of juice, it doesn't mean that from a consumer perspective and a behavior perspective, it actually is juice 'cause no one's going to the shelf and saying, hmm, shall I get this little juice shot, or shall I get this 300 milliliter orange juice? They're not the same thing, they just happen to have similar kind of components within them. The juice shots actually occupy a completely different category that's miles away in the store, which is actually quite a broad category, but we defined it as performance products, so, a brand that would be a good example would be Baraka. Do you have Baraka? Is that an American brand too? 

Chris Kocek: I'm not familiar with it. 

Alex M H Smith: It's kind of like fizzy tablets that you put in water that kind of like when you have a hangover, that kind of thing, right? Or even you could put paracetamol into this category, or even to an extent, energy drinks, basically all these sort of like pseudo medicinal products that [00:15:00] people have when they're feeling a bit crap and you know, they aren't quite to the point of like, you know, taking medicine, but they're trying to kind of pep themselves up. This is a category that's got nothing to do with juice and when you then start to realize that this is the way that people buy these products and this is what people using these products for, it's sort of self-evident that the fact that viewing the company as a juice company, it was just a total red herring, that the company actually doesn't really have any sort of commonalities with juice at all, other than the fact that it also squeezes fruit in order to build its solution. The consequences for that, as you then develop the strategy of the business and the business overall are huge. It changes the way that the business is branded. It changes where the business is merchandised. It changes the pathway of new products. Like, you do not need any data for this. This is just like something which is so clearly obviously true, but, for whatever reason, at that time the company hadn't noticed it and there are loads of things like that the companies haven't noticed, and every [00:16:00] great strategy, that I can think of, when you tell it to people after the fact, it sounds like, of course that was a good idea. Yes, part of that is hindsight, but it isn't completely hindsight, a big part of it is just because these are built on readily observable truths that people just happened not to have noticed. It's the classic, why did it take them so long to put wheels on luggage kind of thing. Like what is the data point that provokes someone to put wheels on luggage? There is no bloody data point, but just once you see it, you can't unsee it and so every business, I think in the strategy development process, they need to be finding that thing that once seen, you can't unsee it.

I've never been in a situation where the high sophistication data side of the equation was essential to the process. 

Chris Kocek: Lucky you. 

Alex M H Smith: Well, yeah, I wouldn't say that it does never happen. I suppose that is an important caveat. Uh, it's never happened to me. [00:17:00] 

Chris Kocek: Yeah. I've, I've been in far too many meetings where there's a great observation that's shared, sometimes by me even and then, you know, there's that, ah, that nervousness, right, of oh, but if we put so much energy and effort into this one observation, how do we know that it's true? And, you know, you say, well look around you like refute it if it's not true. Or find something else, but that need to have the data.

There's an expression, what is it, verify with data kind of thing and that can be helpful, but, it can slow down the process and I think these days with more and more businesses looking for that competitive edge quickly, if you don't move quickly, you might lose the opportunity because then somebody else takes it.

Alex M H Smith: Yeah. I mean there's a whole massive tangent we could go down there, but yeah, the speed is very important and I actually think that refreshingly quite a lot of the industry is waking up to the dirty truth, which is, that actually the type of stuff that we're talking about and strategy development and all the rest of it, it [00:18:00] actually doesn't take a long time.

You actually don't need to do a year, of like, research and thinking and eight months of dah, dah, dah in order to spit out a pretty bloody, lukewarm idea at the end of it. I'm not saying that that is a bad process to do, but what I am saying is that, in principle, a strategy that's been come up within six minutes can be as good or better as a strategy that's been come up with in six months. 

It can be and just being aware of this non-linear relationship between sort of like rigor and outcome, that is absolute nonsense. You really could fart out a billion dollar idea on the back of a napkin while drunk, you know, that can happen. So, you know, I think we need to be intellectually honest about that and I think companies in general who don't see that set themselves up to your point, to be in a pretty non advantageous position.

Chris Kocek: In terms of competitors, in your book, [00:19:00] you say great strategies produce companies which have no direct competitors at all. You guys have out there, I think Uber and Lyft, there's Airbnb here in the States, we have also VRBO or “vrbo,” there's Gatorade versus Powerade. What do you do with a brand, who, they're the first to market, so they abide by the principle you've talked about, but then copycat competitors come in and they start making commoditized claims.

You can't tell the difference between Gatorade and Powerade in most ads, in my opinion. What do you do to help a brand when copycats come in and make those commoditized claims, 

Alex M H Smith: The very, very pithy answer to this is, if you can be copied, then you deserve to be copied, because that means that in whatever way, shape, or form, you just haven't built a sufficient moat around the business, which probably means that you do not have a sufficient strategy. So, for the most part, in this scenario, if someone's being copied, it's just because they don't have a [00:20:00] strategy, so that's quite easy because then you're, it is just like anyone else, you're just like, okay, well fine, let's develop a strategy. 

Now, what's slightly more tricky is businesses that are actually highly strategic, but get kind of encroached on anyway. Going back to Southwest example, you know, greatest strategic organization in history, arguably, but like they now are just another low cost airline. So with those situations, I think there are two main points I'd make. The first point is that the process of strategic execution is an unfolding, which takes place over a very long period of time.

You can move to your, sort of, version one of your strategic business quite quickly, but you need to keep on borrowing in the direction of that strategy more and more and more until you've overdelivered to such an obscene degree that it would be completely impossible for anyone to take claim on your part of the market because you've executed to a completely copyable degree.

So to give you a couple of examples of that, like IKEA. [00:21:00] Okay, look, obviously you can get furniture from other places, but to all intents and purposes, IKEA have no real competitors for what it is that they do. The non-consideration of other options, for the most part is the real definition of no competitors, not can I technically buy a similar product elsewhere? And how have IKEA done that? Well, IKEA have built a value chain, which is completely tailored to their strategy, completely uncopyable over the course of like five decades. Like, you couldn't just go out tomorrow and just make another IKEA because they have pushed on the same strategy, harder and harder and harder every year for five decades until they become this singular organization that you just cannot double up.

Chris Kocek: One of the things I've been thinking about lately with regard to strategy is trying as best as possible to own a word. Right? So the Dove campaign for real “beauty,” [00:22:00] Kit Kat is all about taking a “break,” Red Bull is all about “energy” or or “energy that gives you wings.” Do you ever focus on that with your clients? Do you focus on, hey, let's narrow this down to one word and we're gonna go deeper and deeper and deeper into that word? 

Alex M H Smith: I don't explicitly talk about one word, although I do agree that it's an interesting technique, which maybe I should dabble with more, but it is essentially the same thing as the second half of the answer to your question about the companies that get encroached on the first half is if you execute with sufficient aggression over a long enough period of time, then just no one's gonna be able to copy the business model but then the other half of it is, obviously this is where brand takes over.

So brand is your way of sort of holding differentiation when the truth of the differentiation has gone away. If you execute aggressively, if you claim your advantage as the first people who are kind of [00:23:00] like really pushing this strategy, and then you pull that through to your, sort of, brand profile and owning that space, at least in people's minds.

When as will happen over time, you start to lose a grip on the technical side of the strategy, and you could make a case to say that a piece of flat pack furniture from somewhere else is the same as a piece of flat back furniture from IKEA. It won't matter because you'll have already claimed the space, you've already won and you already then have that kind of certain amount of automatic uncontested traffic to your business.

I'm not a fan of using brand as your primary differentiation lever in the first place. I think it's a bit lazy and difficult but using brand to keep your differentiation over the long term, well, that's a no brainer. IKEA and Red Bull to use those examples don't just have uncontestable business [00:24:00] models, they have uncontestable brands as a result, also, of that same long term commitment. 

Chris Kocek: Do you have a favorite question or two that you like to ask every client when you're just starting out with them? 

Alex M H Smith: Yeah, so I often, one of the first things I do is I just send them an email that's literally just a list of questions, just kind of get the ball rolling and I kind of do these differently every time, depending on the business but I guess there are some that recur. So one that I like, which you've always got to sort of begin with, is a question that's along the lines of what's the difference between the idealized version of the business that you put out there to the world and what the business actually does, and how the business actually makes money?

Because, those two things, there can be like a really big gap, and you've got to start with total honesty, you've gotta start with the truth because how successful you're gonna be is really just determined by how closely you can align to reality. So, [00:25:00] you've gotta get the client to basically paint their business in a really unflattering light, because in other words, you've gotta get 'em to paint it in the true light, no more space for propaganda internally within this process. 

So that's one that I like and then I also like, one of my classics, is to simply ask them what disagreements do they have with their competitors or with their category at large? To be honest, very, very few have got a good answer to this, which is one of the problems that they have strategically. 

Really, companies are falling over themselves backwards to agree with each other, but to see who agrees more. They think that service is important, well, we think that service is really important, you know, it all becomes like that and then when you ask clients, how do you disagree with competitors? Oh, they'll give you some god awful non-answer, like, our competitors think it's okay to rip off their customers, but we don't and it's like, this is bollocks, you know, this is self-serving nonsense. The only disagreements that actually are of [00:26:00] use are good faith disagreements where they think one really legitimate thing, but then we think something which is also really legitimate, but which is the opposite.

That's where strategic leverage starts to come in, and very, very few people actually have an answer to that question, but if they do, then it's super valuable. 

Chris Kocek: What's a good disagreement that you've heard in your time working with brands when you ask that question.

Alex M H Smith: I cannot think of a single one where they just shot back with a good one. People just don't do it. But I can give you a sort of hypothetical example of a good disagreement. I mean, even with my own business and my own sort of like strategy, without getting into all of that, if you think that I'm in competition with other strategy consultants or strategy consultancies, one of the main ways that I disagree with them is that I actually don't think it's particularly important that you get the definition of the word strategy right.

In my view, it's better to be a bit wrong, [00:27:00] but to actually make something happen than it is to be right, but, it actually lowers the chance of something happening. I'm pretty sure that there are people out there who think that I'm a complete charlatan because it's like, well, that's not really strategy kind of thing and my response to them is, you are absolutely right and I completely respect that viewpoint, and I actually don't have a single quibble with it, I'm just taking a different approach. You do your thing and there'll be clients out there who dig that and I'll do my thing, and there'll be clients out there who dig that and, and what's the problem? That is a good faith disagreement. 

Chris Kocek: It's a very interesting exercise, a good approach for brands. 

Alright, we're going into the speed round now. These are quick questions, somewhat quick answers, depending on how deep you want to go, but what was your favorite subject in school? 

Alex M H Smith: Oh probably art because it was the one that felt less like work, but I was probably best at English.

But that doesn't mean that I necessarily liked it, but it was probably like the most natural one. 

Chris Kocek: And what did you study in college? 

Alex M H Smith: Oh, you'll laugh. [00:28:00] I studied American studies 'cause I wanted that sweet year abroad, which I got in University of Illinois and it was amazing and it was worth the other three years of complete wasted time.

Chris Kocek: That's fascinating. 

Is there a brand whose work you admire or that you think to yourself I wish I'd come up with that? 

Alex M H Smith: I'm sure there are loads, but the one that immediately jumps to mind is, a slight little bit of preamble, I think that the founding idea for every single brand is totally stupid, like you look back to the initial idea behind every single business and it's always something that on paper I would've said, oh nah, that's not interesting, why would I bother doing that? Which of course is why I'm not this super successful founder and these other guys are 'cause, you know, they took a chance on a bad idea. 

There's only one brand where I think if I'd heard the idea before it was created, I would've been like that idea alone is worth a billion dollars, no question and that is Tinder. 

I think [00:29:00] that the swiping mechanism, which of course now all of the dating apps use, swiping left, swiping right, is such an unbelievably elegant solution to, in that market's case, the problem of rejection and reaching out to people and them not replying and all the rest of it.

I just think it is the single best business idea ever 'cause I cannot conceive of a way that that idea would've failed and it's the only thing that I can think of that I would say that about. 

Chris Kocek: Excellent. Uh, what is the most recent good book you've read? Could be fiction, could be nonfiction.

Alex M H Smith: Well, it's a, it sounds like a made up answer, but you've just hit me at the time where it actually happens to be true, which is, I just finished, it's called The Matter With Things by Iain McGilchrist, and it's like a 2000 page, double volume, very dense book on essentially the nature of reality. So, it's a real, like, tosser’s answer to sound intelligent, but it actually happens [00:30:00] that I finally finished the bastard a couple of weeks ago and I mean, it is, like absolutely incredible, you know, at at times hard going and definitely could have been done with being only a thousand pages rather than 2000 pages, but it's actually very pertinent to a lot of the stuff we've been talking about and a lot of strategy stuff because a lot of it is a very deep explanation of why intuitive thinking is actually more accurate and powerful and true than logical  thinking. So, there's lots of interesting stuff about that in there. 

Chris Kocek: And finally, what is a piece of advice that someone gave you that you still remember to this day that influences your work in strategy? 

Alex M H Smith: It wasn't a piece of advice in terms of sort of words, but I think about it all the time and I would, actually yes, I'm gonna go so far to say, I would attribute a hundred percent of my success to it, which is when I was setting up this strategy department in [00:31:00] this agency that I was working for, bearing in mind, I knew nothing about strategy, had no experience, I was completely making it up and there was no one in the agency who had any experience with strategy either.

So, you know, I could literally just, whatever I said it was, is what it was. What they did do, however, just to sort of round, smooth off some of the rough edges is they got an experienced strategy consultant to come in and just give me, literally just like a couple of days of sort of mentorship and to sort of essentially say to the agency as a whole, including me, who is gonna be responsible for it, what is strategy. Everything I'm sure was great, but, the thing that really stuck with me is he got up and he did this presentation with PowerPoint and all that the PowerPoint slides were, they were just blank slides and then just in Calibri or whatever the default font was, he just bashed, you know, a word or a sentence or whatever onto the slide maybe then like with another arrow, bashed to it. There was no template, there was no adornment, there was [00:32:00] nothing, just these like brutally raw slides that he had just like started with a complete blank sheet of paper and just like, I'm just gonna, what do I wanna say on this slide, I'll put that there, that there, that's what I'm gonna talk about onto the next one and at the time, the idea that you could make presentations in such a brutal and direct way, it changed everything about the way I did presentations and because I think that fundamentally like ideas are only as good as the sell of the idea.

In fact, I saw a tweet the other day, which I half agree with, which was saying there's no such thing as a good idea or a bad idea, there are just people who are good at selling ideas and people who aren't good at selling ideas, and the actual idea itself is completely random, so I kind of believe that and the way that he did these slides, I built my entire sort of communication method on these slides because to see this person who was very successful and senior, and he came in and presented in such a raw and stripped [00:33:00] back and unprofessional quote unquote way, and it actually made the impact of what he was saying 10 times higher than if it had seemed somehow official or whatever.

I mean, you know, you can trace the thread from that all the way through to no bullshit strategy and everything else, you know, I can see the slides now, they were ugly things of beauty, 

Chris Kocek: Ugly things of beauty. I love that. My history teacher in high school would say, we're gonna use the KISS method, which is keep it simple, stupid.

Alex M H Smith: Yep, easier said than done, easier said than done, isn't it? Yeah, I mean you don't come across it very often and what it does do, which is the beauty of it, is that if you are gonna be that raw, well what you're saying, damn well, better be interesting because it, you are putting a hundred percent of the pressure on the content and the content alone.

Chris Kocek: I love it. No bullshit, keep it simple. Thank you so much for your time, Alex, really appreciate it. 

Alex M H Smith: Yeah, thanks a lot. It was fun.[00:34:00] 

Chris Kocek: Thanks again to our guest, Alex M H Smith. Make sure you check out his book No Bullshit Strategy on Amazon or wherever you like to buy amazing books. If you want to connect with Alex, you can find him on LinkedIn at Alex M H Smith, or you can visit his website basicarts.org, where you can sign up for his newsletter The hidden path, which will give you a new strategic idea each week that will help you and your organization create massive value. 

If you're looking for even more ideas and inspiration, be sure to check out my own newsletter, Light Bulb at chriskocek.com/newsletter, every Thursday I share three “Aha!” moments that are guaranteed to inspire your next project creative briefing or campaign.

Or check out my latest book Any Insights Yet, connect the dots, create new categories, transform your business. If you enjoyed today's episode, please give us five stars on your favorite podcast platform and share it with friends, [00:35:00] family, clients, colleagues, even your enemies. 

Special thanks to Michael Osborne at 14th Street Studios for producing this episode and thank you to Megan Palmer for additional editing and production support. Until next time, keep looking for patterns, finding contradictions, and asking what if more often.