Ideas That Shaped My Thinking
I’m often asked where my perspective on marketing, brand, growth, and AI comes from.
It’s shaped less by tactics and trends—and more by a set of ideas, frameworks, and mental models I’ve returned to over time. The books below have influenced how I think about systems, decision-making, customer behavior, and long-term growth.
This isn’t a comprehensive reading list.
It’s a curated set of ideas that consistently show up in my writing and work.
Strategy & Systems Thinking
These books shaped how I think about focus, tradeoffs, and why activity is not the same as strategy.
- Good Strategy / Bad Strategy — Richard Rumelt
This book fundamentally changed how I evaluate strategy. It reinforced that real strategy is about diagnosing the problem, making hard choices, and concentrating effort—not creating long lists of initiatives. - Playing to Win — A.G. Lafley & Roger Martin
This helped crystallize the idea that strategy is a series of explicit choices. I regularly come back to its “where to play / how to win” framework when evaluating marketing and growth decisions. - The Fifth Discipline — Peter Senge
This book shaped how I think about organizations as living systems. It influenced my focus on momentum, feedback loops, and why short-term fixes often create long-term problems.
Growth, Marketing & Economics
These books influenced how I think about demand, customer behavior, and why growth rarely comes from persuasion alone.
- How Brands Grow — Byron Sharp
This challenged many traditional assumptions about differentiation and loyalty. It pushed me to think more about availability, mental structures, and scale than messaging cleverness. - Competing Against Luck — Clayton Christensen
This reframed how I think about segmentation. Instead of demographics, it emphasized context, motivation, and the progress customers are trying to make. - The Long and the Short of It — Les Binet & Peter Field
This reinforced the importance of balancing short-term performance with long-term brand building. It heavily influenced how I think about portfolio marketing and sustainable growth.
Brand, Experience & Behavior
These ideas shaped how I think about brand as experience, memory, and behavior—not just messaging.
- Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman
This book provided a foundational lens for understanding how people actually make decisions. It shows up in how I think about friction, heuristics, and why “rational” marketing often fails. - The Experience Economy — B. Joseph Pine II & James H. Gilmore
This influenced my belief that experience itself is a differentiator. It helped frame experience as economic value, not just a layer added on top of products. - Building Strong Brands — David Aaker
Aaker’s work reinforced the importance of brand as a long-term asset. It shaped how I think about consistency, memory structures, and why brand strength compounds over time.
Technology, AI & Change
These books influenced how I think about AI not as magic—but as a force that reshapes economics, decision-making, and systems.
- Prediction Machines — Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb
This book helped demystify AI by framing it as a reduction in the cost of prediction. That lens heavily influences how I think about AI’s impact on marketing, decision-making, and scale. - The Age of AI — Henry Kissinger, Eric Schmidt, Daniel Huttenlocher
This broadened my thinking beyond tools and tactics to AI’s impact on power, institutions, and leadership. It reinforced why AI strategy must be tied to organizational values and governance. - Life 3.0 — Max Tegmark
This book pushed me to think long-term about intelligence and alignment. It’s influenced how I approach AI readiness with a mix of optimism and responsibility.
How These Ideas Show Up in My Writing
You’ll see these influences reflected in how I write about:
- Portfolio-level marketing strategy
- Momentum versus precision
- Brand as a system of signals
- AI-driven discovery and trust
- Measurement that reflects direction, not just activity
I’m less interested in tactics—and more interested in how systems behave over time.