I spent over two decades as a CSO inside the institution and seven years as an independent consultant outside it. That gives me a clear view of what the walls were actually protecting and what they were quietly subsidizing.
For most of my career, being a good strategist was enough. The agency provided the identity. The department provided the container. The brief provided the urgency. The client provided the reason to exist. I never had to explain what a strategy was. The institution explained it.
What I didn’t see, until the walls started coming down, was how much of my authority was borrowed. The harder skill, the one nobody trained me for, wasn’t doing strategy. It was selling it to people who had no framework for what they were buying.
That is the new pressure. And two things arriving at once made it irreversible.
AI has collapsed the time it takes to get from nowhere to somewhere. A category scan, an audience portrait, a messaging platform, produced in minutes rather than weeks. And at the same time, the majority of experienced strategists now sit outside the agency system. It used to be a handful of senior independents operating outside the walls. Now it is most of us. More supply, faster substitutes, and a client base that can see both.
The strategy market is not collapsing.
It’s sorting.
On one side: specific intelligence, evidenced, named, and packaged in a form the market knows how to buy. On the other: intelligence that sounds strategic but carries no fingerprints. No field contact. No refusal. No consequence. No method.
The question is no longer whether you are smart. Almost everyone in this business is smart.
The question is: what does your intelligence become when the ad, the pitch, and the agency are no longer enough to contain it?
Here is what to do about it.
Most strategist bios say some version of: I help brands connect with culture.
That sentence is not wrong. It is just invisible. Three hundred people in any city could say it. It describes a room, not a mind.
Your job now is not to describe your role. It is to declare your belief.
Not: I understand brands and culture.
But: I believe brands are becoming more intelligent and less distinctive, and that most companies are solving the wrong problem.
That is a position. Positions can be trusted, hired, argued with, and remembered. Roles cannot.
The test: Could this sentence appear in 500 other LinkedIn profiles? If yes, it is not yours yet.
Nobody buys “strategy.” They buy relief from a specific pressure they have not been able to name themselves.
The CMO has content but no distinctiveness.
The founder has grown, but no story.
The agency has AI tools but no new operating rhythm.
The brand has data but no meaning. The category has become a wall of sameness no one knows how to climb.
Each of these is a real, payable problem. Generic strategy is none of them.
Complete this sentence before you write another proposal, bio, or positioning statement:
I help ________ when they are struggling with ________.
If the answer is “brands” and “connecting with culture,” start again.
AI does fluent synthesis better than most humans now. Stop competing there.
What it cannot do is develop field contact. Sit in the store and watch what people actually pick up. Read 400 reviews and find the sentence that appears in different forms across all of them. Interview the customer who left, not the one who stayed.
I recently ran interviews using synthetic respondents.
The problem becomes clear quickly.
The averaging kills everything that makes insight useful.
The color, the context, the individual emotion, the specific thing a person says that you didn’t expect.
What comes back is generic, nameless sludge. Fluent. Plausible. And completely devoid of the depth that changes a room.
Worse than that, it can change how you feel about people and their issues.
When humans become averaged outputs, you stop seeing them as individuals. That is not just a research problem. It is a strategic one.
The first ruination of strategy was when it stopped talking to people and used articles and proxies instead. AI accelerates that ruination. The antidote is the same as it always was. Go and talk to people. Nothing gives you insight, understanding, and authority like actually doing something.
The test: Could this insight only have come from someone doing the work?
A belief is the beginning. A method is what the market can buy.
Consider the gap:
I believe most mission statements are too vague to guide real decisions.
That is a belief. It is not yet actionable.
Here is the Mission-to-Agent Diagnostic, a 90-minute process that tests whether your strategy is specific enough for humans to act on and machines to protect.
That is a method. It has a name. It can be scoped, priced, repeated, and referred.
The strategists gaining ground right now are not the ones with the sharpest observations. They are the ones who turned their observations into something repeatable.
The test: Can someone describe what they would buy from you without using the word “strategy”?
Cultural intelligence without consequence is curation.
It is interesting. It does not change anything.
The pattern to break:
This is a cultural shift. Therefore, this brand should stop doing X, start doing Y, and protect Z.
The test: After every observation, can you complete the sentence, “Therefore, the smart move is...”?
Intelligence without a container evaporates.
Zoe Scaman is a useful example. She helps companies think about their futures, explaining what is happening and challenging them to consider what it means for them. What built her authority wasn’t an agency behind her name. It was her writing. A very distinctive point of view, expressed consistently, became the foundation for the business.
That is one container. But a point of view can take many forms. I created StratMonday as a forum where strategists gather to think and discuss the new skill sets the profession demands. Camp Thrive is its deeper extension, a more immersive version of the same gathering for those who want to go further. Both exist because the old containers, the agency, the department, the brief, are no longer sufficient to hold the conversation that needs to happen. Building the forum is itself a strategic act. It signals what you believe, attracts the people who share it, and creates a community that compounds over time.
The mistake is assuming the only options are agency job, freelance strategist, or posting on LinkedIn. Those are three containers. Two of them are shrinking.
The test: Can someone describe what they would receive from you, how often, and what it would cost?
The new market rewards people who name things precisely enough that others start using the name.
Hardwiring is an idea I came up with. It describes how companies encode their meaningful differences into their infrastructure, creating differences that endure and do not drift. It has a POV, a diagnostic, and case studies
The test: Can you build ideas that you can own?
A résumé says where you have been.
What the new market rewards is different.
It wants to know what you believe, what you refuse, what evidence you gather, what patterns you see, what language you own, what method you use, what decision you change, and what someone can actually buy from you.
The strategist who survives the current sorting will not be the one who says: I understand brands, culture, consumers, and media.
It will be the one who can say: Here’s what I believe about how those four things now interact. Here’s the pressure I solved. Here’s the evidence I gathered. Here’s the method I use. Here is the decision I changed. Here is what you can buy.
