Be in the room, even when you’re not

One clear version of what you mean. Hardened in four weeks .

In the Narrative Accelerator, you set the standard your team builds to: what you mean, drawn out and hardened.

You wake at 2am thinking about the thing they got wrong. By 4am you’re fixing it yourself. Again. Every time you step in, it gets harder for anyone else to carry what you mean. That feels like leadership. Most of it is tax.

Twenty minutes. Walk us through how you explain the company. We tell you the one place it breaks and what that’s costing you now. Not a rewrite.

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A quick test: ask three people on your team to explain the company. Count the versions.

  • Microsoft logo with four squares in a 2x2 grid, followed by the word 'Microsoft' in gray text.
  • Amazon logo with black background.
  • Google logo on a black background
  • AndPlus company logo in grey
  • AT&T logo with a globe symbol and the company name.
  • Deloitte logo in black and white.
  • Logo of the company FICO in black and gray text.
  • Electronic Arts (EA) logo on a grey background.
  • Logo of Product Marketing Community featuring a circular design with nodes and lines beside the text.
  • Oracle logo in gray on a black background.
  • Two black and white photographs of a bookshelf with various books and objects.
  • SAP logo with a shadow effect
  • The word 'zix' in gray lowercase letters on a black background.
  • A logo with the word 'APEX' in large gray capital letters, with a stylized 'E' featuring three horizontal bars.
  • A black and gray logo featuring a stylized mountain peak or arrowhead with a triangular shape and layered lines.
  • Logo with initials 'BP' and the name 'Benjamin Pedersen' underneath.
  • Logo for Cooper Compliance, featuring a black and white lightning bolt symbol and text for consulting and SharePoint applications.
  • Bold gray logo with the letters 'CRS' on a black background.
  • Logo for the game 'Game of Trades' featuring a chess knight piece.
  • A black and white logo featuring a circle with initials 'M' and 'I' and 'W' intertwined inside a vertical rectangle.
  • Surescripts logo in gray and black on a black background.
  • Logo with a spiral design and the word 'Teslasuit' beneath it.
  • Logo for Transitional Resources with a dove and the words "hope. opportunity. recovery."

You’re the only one working from the original.

Everyone else is working from a copy of a copy. Work goes out. It comes back close, technically right, and not what you meant. So you fix it, and you say the thing you’re sure you’ve said a dozen times, one more time.

You’ve tried to write it down. Everyone tells you to. It doesn’t take, and you assume you wrote it badly. You didn’t. What’s in your head isn’t specified clearly enough to be written down yet.

That’s the work. We draw the original out of your head, pressure-test it, and set it down in a form your team can decide from.

A man with short hair and a beard, wearing a black shirt, sits in front of a metallic curtain, looking directly at the camera with a thoughtful expression and hands clasped under his chin.

Radu Ranga, Brand leader, C1

“thank you for being such an incredible leader and force for clarity”

The fix starts with finding the one place what you mean gets lost.

Delegating harder. You can hand off the task without handing off the judgment. Work comes back technically right and you still rewrite it.

A Chief of Staff. Six months to learn how you think. Ambiguous authority by month fifteen. Gone at about two years, with the original in her head.

AI. Point it at your website and it returns a fluent summary of a copy of a copy. Once the original exists, AI is the fastest way to hold the line. Before that, it is the fastest way to multiply copies.

You’ve already tried the obvious fixes.

narrative proof

Thirteen buyers filled in a close-out survey when the work ended. Ten scored it nine or ten out of ten.

Microsoft’s CRM team reported 3.78x unique monthly page views and 7.35x page actions in the quarter after the rebuild.

Partner event registrations rose 40% after the IoT go-to-market playbook shipped.

Matthew Woodget in a blue suit giving a presentation to an audience in a conference room, with a large screen displaying an image of an octopus and a sign on a podium reading 'Architects of Growth in the Digital Era'.

Between Rounds

A short email newsletter for founders and CEOs whose company has outgrown the story it was built on. What breaks first when you stop being in every room, and how to tell whether it’s already happening to you.

useful for

  • Founders whose investors ask the same clarifying question twice

  • Teams that tell three versions of the same company

  • CEOs who are still the only person who can give the whole pitch