Re: Centering.

In a truly provocative Fast Company article on VW having lost both its roadmap and the plot, big-picture corporate thinker Rita McGrath writes, “Cost cutting is not a strategy.”

I, of course, couldn’t resist adding a mental advertising-related margin note: it’s also a fine way to make your brand disappear. And damned efficiently at that.

All of which got me wondering if AK  could boil that thought down to headline brevity. Because in this business, you never really know until you know.

Well, maybe you do. Because this is what came back:

“It’s a retreat with a spreadsheet.”
“It’s how brands become invisible efficiently.”
“It’s budgeting your way into irrelevance.”
“It’s silence at a discount.”
“It’s the fastest way to save money nobody remembers you spent.”
“It’s surrender dressed as fiscal discipline.”

Bravo. Once again, AI proves it can generate copy that ranges all the way from the banal to the predictable and at least twice as fast as your average human copywriter.  

Undoubtedly faster.

So maybe we agree: if cost-cutting isn’t a strategy, neither is AI, at least not if the objective is maximizing the impact of what your brand says and how it shows up.

Should probably be no surprise: a hammer is a hammer is a tool.

But McGrath’s larger point is the one that kept me prompting: her view that we’re smack dab in the middle of a structural shift where “the old macro-financial order is giving way to something different.”

That “different” is a dematerializing economy—where value is less about physical assets and more about software, data, relationships, and other intangibles that don’t follow old school rules.
Which is precisely why it’s so “brutal” for companies still reverting to saved..
Her alternative to being disrupted out of existence: “strategic centering”  — identifying the most important opportunity, focusing resources against it, and getting all the people and all the horses pulling in the right direction.

Writ simply: choose a center. Organize around it.

I had to ask: what would an ad agency centered to be effective in McGrath’s bold new world look like?

Credit where due: this is where AI showed me something.

As a new North Star: creating and compounding customer demand around “consequential” market change.

As in a new remit: identifying the shifts that matter and deciding which to exploit for their clients.

As in a different structure: small, cross-functional teams instead of large, siloed account groups.

As in a new “product”: 360-degree creative “platforms” that extend, adapt, and stay coherent over time.

All of which points to something profound.

If value is increasingly coming from clarity, alignment, and focus, the answer isn’t to cut creative flesh, muscle, and bone. It’s to decide what matters and concentrate there.

Because for companies like VW and ad agencies alike, cost-cutting isn’t a strategy.

It’s what you do when you don’t have one.