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Welcome to this week’s edition of Growth Mindset. What keeps surfacing for me lately isn’t a single theme, but a pattern: people quietly rebelling against the default settings of their industry. Whether it’s how we create, communicate, lead or prepare for an exit, more of the interesting work now comes from those willing to rethink the obvious. This week’s stories sit firmly in that space.

Enjoy!

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The tyranny of the optimised feed

We’re now fully into trend report season and Mintel’s 2026 consumer predictions captures a frustration many people now feel, which is that algorithms are making everything look the same. What began as personalisation has become a loop of safe, hyper-optimised choices – the kind that surface the predictable and bury the interesting. As the report neatly puts it, “virality is the antithesis to loyalty”. In other words, the things that succeed in the algorithm – fast hits, familiar formats, repeatable patterns – aren’t the things that make people stick around. The content and messaging that cuts through in 2026 won’t be perfectly optimised, says Mintel. It’ll contain moments of human surprise and the sort of creative rough edge no model can anticipate. Get the report here.

Ads that talk back

There’s a shift happening in digital advertising: the ad is moving off the webpage and into the conversation itself. A new standard called the Ad Context Protocol is being tested, and the idea is simple: in the future, ads won’t sit on web pages – they’ll sit inside AI conversations. Instead of tracking behaviour, the model listens to context. Ask an AI about setting up a café and it may surface an insurance offer; discuss bookkeeping and an accounting tool might appear. No cookies – just contextual relevance delivered by the agent itself. It’s a strange inversion: the AI becomes the media buyer, the broker and the publisher. Performance marketing expert Stefan Bardega’s LinkedIn post on the subject is worth a read.

The rise of the ‘authority entrepreneur’

A write-up from Chris Ducker’s Long-Haul Leader Summit in Cambridge has been doing the rounds this week, and it’s worth a look if you’re trying to build a business that’s known for its thinking, not just its services. The event gathered people who want to develop a clear point of view and turn it into something durable – frameworks, long-form pieces, ideas that carry weight. The emphasis was on depth over noise: taking the time to articulate what you stand for and building a body of work that reflects it. In a market where fast content is everywhere, the summit emphasised that authority comes from having something meaningful to say and saying it well.The Ask newsletter has the story.​

Does thought leadership pay off?

After all the talk about clarity, long-form thinking and building a business around a point of view, the obvious question is: does any of it move the needle commercially? A piece I spotted this week on the ROI of thought leadership tried to answer that, and the interesting part wasn’t the metrics – it was the definition of value. The strongest impact rarely shows up in clicks or impressions; it shows up in who starts paying attention. Thought leadership works when it changes the quality of conversations you’re pulled into, speeds up decisions or earns trust before you walk in the door. The piece’s real argument was simple: treat your ideas as strategic assets, not marketing collateral, and the commercial upside tends to follow. Find out more here.

The silent crisis in job quality

A new Gallup study of 18,000 US workers has emerged with a blunt finding: six in ten people don’t have what the researchers define as a “quality job”. Not in the vague HR sense, but in five measurable ways – financial security, safety, growth, autonomy and a say in how work is shaped. The gaps are huge: a quarter see no path to progression, more than half feel they have little influence over pay or tech decisions, and nearly a quarter report discrimination. What’s interesting for leaders is the link: quality jobs correlate with higher life satisfaction, better health and far greater retention. So there is a need, even in a tough market, to find a way to offer a greater employment experience. Read the report here.

Visibility as an M&A accelerant

A smart piece this week on M&A made a point that rarely appears in pitch decks: two companies with similar numbers can have wildly different acquisition outcomes depending on how well-known the founder is. Buyers move faster when they already have a sense of the person – from conferences, panels, LinkedIn posts, industry events. Pushing this executive visibility isn’t vanity – it’s friction reduction – and anyone who follows me on LinkedIn will know that it’s an approach I absolutely subscribe to. When founders are known in their industry, buyers feel they have a clearer sense of who they’re dealing with. That familiarity chops time out of a process. People respond sooner, conversations move past the basics and interest firms up more quickly. Read the article here.

The new labour market for attention

Recent news about top YouTuber MrBeast’s involvement with a clipping platform called Vyro hinted at a bigger shift in the creator economy. Short-form content has become so dominant that distribution is now its own job category. Thousands of people are being paid to carve long videos into micro-clips designed to ride the recommendation systems of TikTok, Reels and Shorts. It’s a strange inversion: the internet’s biggest creators produce the ideas, but the reach increasingly comes from an informal workforce optimising fragments of those ideas for the feed. Creativity is being atomised into tasks the algorithm knows how to reward – and a whole new market is forming around that gap. Get the lowdown on the latest creator hustle here.

The lost art of the briefing

I came across an interesting article recently suggesting that most organisations invest time writing briefs but almost none in delivering them – and that gap shows. It made the excellent point that while the briefing document sets the task, it’s the briefing itself that should create the energy to tackle it. The best teams don’t rely on emailed decks or two-minute run-throughs. They take time to make people feel the problem, not just understand it, because care is a far better motivator than instruction. When a briefing lands well, it changes the work, and the human act of framing a challenge with clarity and conviction can be a competitive edge. Find out how to give a better briefing here.

Bring the customer back into the room

One of the simplest tools for improving creative or product decisions is the empathy map – essentially a way of forcing a team to picture a real person rather than an abstract “user”. It sounds almost too basic, but many organisations skip this step. They brief from assumptions, not from what someone is genuinely dealing with in the moment you need to reach them: their concerns, distractions, expectations and pressures. By spending a little more time imagining a real human instead of a category, the work becomes clearer, more useful and much easier to get right. Find out how to create an empathy map for your customers here.

AI prompt of the week: post-acquisition integration

Many M&A deals fail to deliver their promised value – not because the numbers were wrong, but because the integration was fumbled. The first 100 days are critical: getting cultural alignment right, identifying quick wins that prove the deal's worth and preserving what made the acquisition valuable in the first place. Here’s some help with putting that system in place

Help me design a 100-day post-acquisition integration plan for [acquired company]. My context: [acquiring company description, acquisition rationale, key concerns]. Create a phased approach covering: cultural assessment and alignment strategy, key stakeholder identification and management plan, quick wins that demonstrate value to both teams, systems for preserving what made the acquisition valuable while achieving synergies, and early warning indicators that integration is going off track.

Why some sectors sell for far more than others

The spread in valuation multiples isn’t random – it’s a scoreboard for how the market rates future potential, stability and risk. High-growth sectors attract richer prices because buyers are paying for tomorrow, not today. Capital-intensive or cyclical industries tend to sit at the other end of the scale. Knowing where your sector sits – and what would justify an outlier price – is one of the simplest ways to anchor expectations before you think seriously about exit.

Drop me a line

That’s all for this week – thanks for reading. My inbox is always open for questions, contrarian takes and the occasional “am I crazy or does this actually make sense?” message. Always happy to help you think through what you’re building.

Cheers!
Adam

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