When a woman spends $35,000 on ten days at Disney and refuses to show her face on camera, you’re not witnessing irrational consumer behavior. You’re seeing the culmination of a forty-year strategic plan to engineer adult superfans who defend price increases, accept declining quality, and organize their entire identity around a children’s brand. [Runtime: 32 […]

A video crossed my feed this week that perfectly captured something I’ve been wrestling with for months. It’s called How the Algorithm Hijacked Monkey’s Brain | Strategy Cinema On-Demand and it’s a brilliant parody about how YouTube’s algorithm turns genuine learning into an endless dopamine loop. “Monkey” (the protagonist) watches “How to Stay Focused,” then […]

StratCinema has been live for a few hours now, and I’ve been watching how people use it. Some of you dive straight into Big Mistakes. Others browse by mood—scanning for “provocative” or “analytical.” A few have already burned through twenty videos. This is exactly what I hoped for: real strategists using a real library in […]

A few weeks ago, I introduced StratCinema and the idea of strategic “off-season” learning—maintaining your edge through curated cases rather than formal coursework. Since then, I’ve gotten questions about how the site actually works. Fair enough. StratCinema is designed to be intuitive, but it’s also different from what you’re used to. So let me walk […]

Most strategists plateau between Levels 2 and 3. They recognize patterns in business cases. They can recall examples in meetings. But when asked to explain strategy clearly, teach their teams, or operationalize frameworks into working systems—they hit a wall. The gap isn’t talent or experience. It’s not knowing which phase of strategic development you’re in, […]

You’re on your fifth video. You’ve watched a company rise, pivot brilliantly, then collapse. You’ve seen patterns you recognize from your own work. You’ve thought, “Wait, that’s exactly what happened at my company.” But then a question creeps in: Am I actually learning anything, or am I just… watching stuff? It’s a fair question. Because […]

I’m writing this from Kingston, Jamaica, just after Hurricane Melissa passed through. When the power went out and work stopped, I found myself with something rare: unplanned time to think. Between recovering from the storm and waiting for things to return to normal, I kept returning to a question that’s been nagging at me for […]