The job
Value creation isn’t new. It’s the job. This is what we mean by it, what we believe, and how we do it.
The job
Strategists have one job. Make the business worth more: to the people who buy from it, the people who work in it, and the people who will own it next. Everything else we produce, the deck, the campaign, the framework, is either in service of that job or in the way of it.
So, one more time, for the people at the back. Value creation isn’t new. It’s the job.
The market has caught up, and I’m glad of it. Jonny Bauer, who built brand strategy inside Blackstone’s portfolio and then left to found Fundamentalco, put the case in one line last November: “Most companies treat brand as a downstream marketing concern when it should be upstream strategic infrastructure.” A global investment manager backed his firm the same week. Brand as business driver now has capital behind it, and masterclasses, and ladders with the multiple at the top.
Good. It means the argument is over. What’s left is doing it, and doing it is where most of the industry still isn’t.
So here, as plainly as I can put it, is what we mean by the job at Industry Unlimited. Not because it’s new but because if someone read only one thing about our work before deciding whether to work with us, I’d want it to be this.
What we believe
Three things, in this order. The order is the point.
1. Start with what you believe
I learned the order of things from Dilys, my old boss and mentor, who has run Circus for the best part of thirty years. I’ve never found a reason to change it.
First, be clear about what the business believes and what it’s for in the world. Then make that belief the way the business runs: in what it sells and what it charges, in who it hires and how it treats them, in how it behaves when nobody’s watching. Only then do you talk. Expression comes last, and when the first two steps have been done properly it comes without strain, because there is something true to express.
Most of the industry runs the sequence backwards. It starts with the expression, works back to a positioning that justifies it, and never reaches the belief at all. That’s how you get a beautiful identity with nothing underneath it, and a purpose statement nobody in the pricing meeting has read.
So let’s be clear about what we mean and our starting point at Industry Unlimired.
The brand problem and the business problem are the same problem. Not aligned, not adjacent. The same.
Brand is how a business decides. What it makes. What it refuses. Who it’s prepared to disappoint. What it does on a customer’s worst day. Treat it as the filter the business decides through, not the wrapper it explains itself with, and it stops being a cost the business carries and becomes the lever it grows by.
That’s the first belief. The second is about who’s in the room when the deciding happens.
2. Windows and mirrors
In 1990 Rudine Sims Bishop, writing about children’s books, gave me the construct I’ve used in strategy ever since. A book can be a mirror, in which a child sees her own life reflected, or a window, through which she sees into a life unlike hers. Children who only ever get mirrors grow up thinking the world looks like them. Children who never get one grow up thinking they don’t count.
Boardrooms are mostly mirrors. One vantage point, however sharp, reflects one basket. The people a business exists for are rarely in the room when it decides: the customer on her worst day, the maker at the far end of the supply chain, the market three time zones away where the growth now is. A business that only ever sees itself decides for people it has never met, and then wonders why they don’t come back.
So I never wanted a one-woman band, and I didn’t want an agency. I wanted windows and mirrors built into the org chart.
Industry Unlimited is a founder, a studio of independent strategists and a network of correspondents whose lived experience is the source of their thinking, not a footnote to it.
People who don’t look, think or talk like me.
That isn’t a diversity policy. It’s where the insight comes from, and it’s a rigour: a mixed room can hold competing views and let the disagreement sharpen the result.
Inclusive teams make better decisions up to 87% of the time, particularly in complex scenarios (Deloitte).
Which brings us to the third belief, and the word everyone is using.
3. What we mean by value
When a business is sold, the price is usually set as a multiple: so many times what it earns. That multiple is what most people now mean by “value creation” and it’s where the industry’s attention has gone.
But the multiple is a result, it’s what you’re left with after years of deciding well.
It isn’t the thing itself.
The thing itself is the business’s ability to keep deciding well after the people who first decided have gone: the founder, the fund, the strategist. Money on its own can’t do that. A cheque doesn’t make a business decide better next year than it did this year. A brand built into how the business decides does, and that is the only kind of value that compounds.
That’s the business end of the definition, and it’s the end the industry has finally arrived at.
It’s half the job though.
The other half is what the business is worth to the people it exists for.
Oscar Wilde defined a cynic as someone who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, wrote a whole book warning that we’ve built an economy in which price has quietly become the only measure of value. Customers have noticed before business has. In one global study that followed the same group of shoppers from mid-2025 to mid-2026, the share who defined value as “a good price for acceptable quality” fell from 61% to 47%. The share who defined it as being sure a brand’s claim is true rose from 32% to 54%. For most people, “is it worth it?” and “do I believe them?” have become the same question. Business is still mostly pricing the badge.
So when WE say value, we mean three things at once and we refuse to choose between them.
- For the business: the capacity to keep deciding well, which is what an acquirer is really paying for.
- For the customer: trust that holds on their worst day, and a reason to come back that isn’t a discount. Emotional value, long before financial.
- For the people in and around the business: colleagues who know what they’re for; makers, suppliers and communities whose contribution is counted rather than extracted. Social value, which the economist Mariana Mazzucato taught us to tell from the other kind: most of what’s sold as value creation is value moved from somewhere else. We’re only interested in value made.
The third isn’t philanthropy, it’s where the first two come from.
One of my enduring heroes, E.F. Schumacher, asked how much is enough and a generation that can’t afford a house has started answering him.
My children were raised on one instruction, repeated for years: we are all brothers and sisters. Not a sentiment, a job description. It holds for businesses too. The ones that treat colleagues and customers as kin make different decisions in the pricing meeting, and those decisions compound into the multiple everyone else is chasing.
How we do it
Two products and a set of terms. Each one exists because of a belief above.
Engine Room: where the business decides
Engine Room is our business transformation sprint. Six to ten weeks, one conversation, in which the business decides what it’s for, where it plays, what it builds and what it stops. It exists because of a simple observation about where value actually lives.
Most of a company’s value lives as instinct. It’s in the founder’s head, and in how the best people decide on a good day. It is real, it is the reason the business works, and it is uninsured. It walks out of the building with the founder, gets diluted by the fund and is lost on the next CMO.
The job is to codify it before that happens. Instinct into thesis: what we believe, who it’s for, why we’re the only ones who can. Thesis into playbook: what we make, what we charge, what we won’t do, with a name and a date against each. Playbook into the way the business runs: the pricing meeting, the hiring call, the front line. The test of whether it’s worked is simple. A new hire can make the right call without asking.
Two weeks ago we were in a room at the Rosewood in Amsterdam with a founder who has never once said “value creation” and has built more of it than most who teach it. She didn’t need the phrase, she needed the instinct made transferable, so the business keeps deciding the way she decides when she isn’t in the room. That is what moving from charismatic leadership to institutional trust actually means. It’s a writing job as much as a strategy job, and it’s the part most strategy never reaches, because it lives in the decisions, not the deck.
That is what an Engine Room sprint does. Business strategy and brand strategy run as one sprint, not two workstreams translated into each other at the end.
We’ve run the sprint inside a university and inside a 335-year-old financial institution, and the format held in both. It leaves as an operating system the whole business can run on, not a deck.
Native Tongue: where the world comes in
Native Tongue is our field-report publication. Named strategists, Mumbai to Mexico City, writing from the markets and lives they live in, on the human themes that move money. It exists because of the second belief: a business can’t decide well for people it can’t see.
The growth has moved. It’s in developing and emerging markets now, in lives a London boardroom cannot see from where it sits, while most strategy is still looking at London. Panels can’t fix this. Platforms can’t. A model trained on the mirror can’t. The only thing that can is a person who lives there, in the room, with the standing to disagree.
So Native Tongue isn’t trend reports. It’s windows. The person who did the thinking gets their name on it, is paid first and takes a share of what it earns. Those are the terms, and the terms are the culture.
One product tells a business what’s true out there. The other turns it into what the business does next. Insight without a decision mechanism is a deck. Decisions without the world in the room are a mirror.
Terms and conditions — working with us
There’s no office to visit. A working day is a client’s boardroom in the morning and a call with Mumbai or Jakarta in the afternoon. Growth here is network, not headcount.
A few terms, so you know before you call.
- The decision-maker is in the room. We don’t work through a layer that reports upwards. If the person who can say yes isn’t there, the sprint doesn’t start.
- One sprint, not two workstreams. Business and brand are one conversation.
- Chemistry is paid for. We’ll meet anyone. We won’t think for free, because the thinking is the product.
- A name and a date against every decision. Strategy nobody owns isn’t strategy. It’s a wish.
- What we won’t do gets written down too. The list of what a business refuses is as much a part of its operating system as the list of what it sells.
The dream brief is one of three.
- A founder about to leave the building.
- A business with a story it has never written down.
- A global brand that needs a market seen from inside it.
If you’re one of those, we would love to talk.
Just the job
We get it. Everyone’s selling something. So are we; but hopefully very clearly. There are two products with names on them above.
Nothing radical. Just the job.
Done with rigour, done in many tongues, done where it counts.
We look forward to meeting you.
