What you need to know:

• Too many leaders and companies are exhibiting “nervous reactivity to noise” and shorttermism off the back of seismic technology disruption and post-Covid hangover forces, according to 30-year strategy expert and agency and media industry veteran, David Fish.
• It’s leading to focus on the wrong things and jump at shadows, thereby missing strategic opportunities for change.
• Failing to recognise the universal truths of strategy – knowing your audience and taking people on the journey, not just throwing them your final answer – are also major inhibitors for every strategy approach, and are especially apparent in clientagency relationships for Fish.
• Having joined as a mentor in the newly launched Global Mentorship venture founded by former GroupM chief and exMcDonald’s CMO, Mark Lollback, Fish is hoping to help mentees reset their thinking and mindsets using these direct experiences he’s had building strategy in the media, marketing and agency ecosystem.
• “Mentoring shouldn’t be about the answer, it should be about gaining perspective to find the answer,” Fish said.  

Far too many leaders and companies are exhibiting “nervous reactivity to noise” off the back of seismic technology disruption and post-Covid hangover forces. And it’s leading many up the garden path of focusing on the wrong things and missing strategic opportunities for change.

That’s the view of former agency and media strategy chief and managing director, David Fish, who recently caught up with Mi3 to discuss all things strategy, mentoring and building leadership across the media, agency and marketing ecosystem.

The one-time Initiative chief strategy officer and MD of Media Lab has just signed up as one of an inaugural 28 mentors to the new Global Mentorship venture founded by former GroupM chief and ex-McDonald’s CMO, Mark Lollback. As reported by Mi3, Global Mentorship is a new business model connecting a handpicked, global assortment of experienced leaders and executives with mentees wanting to find someone externally willing to advise and support them professionally with discretion.

Originally from the UK, Fish has a hefty 30 years’ experience in strategy as well as managing director positions both the media and agency ecosystem. Notable roles in Australia included national strategy director for SCA, MD APAC for Dentsu Aegis Activations, chief strategy officer for Initiative, MD of Media Lab and chief client and business partner at GroupM. He’s now a strategy and leadership coach and author.

Short-termism rife

According to Fish, strategy approaches in the evolving world of work remain woefully short term – and it’s leading to a whopping big case of “jumping at shadows”.

“I don’t just mean the quarterly reporting cycle, which is a genuine challenge. They’re really struggling to think 6-12 months and they’re almost paralysed by the rate of change,” Fish commented. “In my view, 12 months is a forecast, not an ambition.

“If we look at what people want in the future of work and the challenge facing businesses, we all want a greater sense of belonging. People want to know the work they’re doing contributes to something more than just what work they’re doing. That doesn’t have to be a business saving the world, it’s that there needs to be meaning in the work. When it’s not clear where we’re going, it’s hard for leaders to attach that to meaningful work. We have this real challenge in short-term business thinking, with a need for people to understand how their work is contributing to more than just what they’re doing. It’s a very interesting conflict playing out.”

Covid indeed trained us to be short term as “we’d wait for the 11am premier update to decide on what we were going to do that day”, Fish said. “In many instances we haven’t recovered from that. We haven’t reset the mindset to go back to 3-5-year windows. Leaders will say they’ve broadened their thinking – yes, from 24 hours to six months. That’s not broad enough.”

The second inhibitor to successful strategy right now is what Fish labelled ‘nervous reactivity to noise’. “There’s more of that than I’ve ever seen before,” he claimed.

“It’s distracting really senior teams on things that are not that important. And they’re missing some of the big strategic plays. I hear and see a lot of leadership teams spending way too much time on things like hybrid work policies, when their businesses are being disrupted by new entrants and technology. Hybrid work is first on the list, while disruption is the fourth. It’s the wrong way around. There is a lot of nervous reactivity to jumping at shadows.”

The third input into modern strategy is heavier focus on execution. And translating big thinking already out there into the people doing the work.

“I’m starting to see many leaders reprioritise time to how we translate thinking into effective change within the business: Who is going to do the work, how are they going to do the work? That has been a big gap that’s starting to be addressed. There is less big, strategic projects and more of ‘we have the thinking, but nothing is changing, so what are we doing about that’,” Fish said.

The universal truths of strategy in marketing, media and agencies

Direct, firsthand experience of strategy from a marketing, media and agency industry perspective – literally, the good, bad and ugly – is something Fish is planning to directly bring into his mentorship. He cites the combination of trust, relationships, experience and agility within the Global Mentorship platform as the power behind the program.

“Mentoring shouldn’t be about the answer, it should be about gaining perspective to find the answer,” he said.  

So how does the strategy expert see strategy showing up in the marketing and agency context?

“The big gap I see with strategic failure – and I can put up my hand and say I’ve learnt this from direct experience – is you don’t take people on the journey. This is a universal problem; whether you are a CEO, at an agency talking to your client, or whether you’re a client working and presenting internally,” Fish said.

“There’s a tendency – agencies are way worse at this, though clients aren’t much better – to go with the ‘ta-da’ moment, here’s the answer. But in getting to the answer, you have done a lot of work. You’ve brought things in and ruled things out for good, valid reasons. The point of strategy is to make a valid choice between two or more viable options, based on some form of rigour and experience. Ideally, the more rigour and experience, the better the strategy.

“But when you’re on the receiving end of that and haven’t been on that journey… you have missed all of that. What you then get is this frustrating barrage of questions on things you think you’ve answered. That can create quite a lot of tension; it’s a strategic tussle where you’re on different pages.”

According to Fish, there’s an art to landing a strategic story. It starts by leading with the concept, then unpacking the detail.

“That’s proven to increase both our recall and understanding based on how our brain processes and stores information,” he said. “We love going into detail and laddering up to a witty conclusion and it doesn’t work. We lose people in all the detail. There’s this fear if I tell you the answer, you won’t listen to how I got to it, which is complete rubbish. It actually works the other way around – understand the point then unpack how we got there.”

The second big strategy faux pas for Fish is losing sight of the audience. “So often it’s clear upfront, but over time, all semblance and connection to who this is for, or who it should impact, or who is going to do the work – a really important part of the strategy – is how do we go from great thinking to commercial execution. All of that gets lost,” he claimed. “When we do that, we lose the value of the work.”

The answer is making sure you’re always clear on who this is for, with the impact and audience you’re trying to achieve connection with front and centre.

“That simple ‘where is your audience, where are they going for dinner tonight, it’s probably not Aria or Café Sydney, and what’s their means of getting to work?’ – that thinking can get lost as the strategy evolves,” Fish said. “I have hundreds of client examples where they’ve said to me, I don’t get the work and I’ve replied brilliant, you’re not the audience; it’s not about you getting the work, it’s about understanding this work will impact your audience.”

An example from Fish’s career was a campaign targeting 18-year-old girls drinking Archers Schnapps in bars in the UK with a sugar-free variant of the alcoholic drink.

“It became a bit of a challenge with the marketing director, because the conversation was grounded in ‘I can’t’,” Fish said.  “You should always evaluate strategy and ideas that come through it through the eyes of the audience, not as yourself. If I’m not the customer, I shouldn’t be evaluating through the ‘I’ lens, it should be through the audience lens.”

Adding to the challenge is what Fish sees as an overly rational approach to marketing. “It’s still a human buying the product in 99 per cent of the cases and we’re trying to influence people,” he said.

“We connect through emotion, make buying decisions through emotion, we have needs we want fulfilled. The role of marketing is still all about those things. Yet we’ve become incredibly rational in our decision making, informed by numbers, average behaviours and analysing to the nth degree on where the money should go and what should the behaviour be, forgetting that human piece.

“If you looked at old-school strategy, it was all based on behaviour, research, focus groups and watching people, ethnographics. Now, the new school is led by the numbers. Somewhere in the middle is the sweet spot.”

Mentoring and feedback

What Fish hopes to do through the new Global Mentorship mentoring program is give people an opportunity to gain in-the-moment, rather than reflective feedback, enabling them to grow and reset mindsets around the topic of strategy, but also much more.

“We move at such a pace, people don’t give you honest feedback. I wrote a book about presenting strategic ideas last year, and there is a chapter about feedback and basically why your ideas won’t win. I call it ‘why people don’t call the baby ugly’,” he commented.

“In a mentoring context, it’s about having check-ins that are brutally honest and reflective of the environment you’re going into that will never give you feedback. This perspective piece is also about honesty without agenda. In an external relationship, the agenda is to help the person grow. That’s the thing we have both agreed on and are coming together to discuss. You do what you need to do, apply the tools you have and experience and style of mentoring to get to that outcome, as opposed to a bit of feedback but not enough to get ahead of me.”