WRITINGS / STRATEX — BY NAZ
STRATEX By Naz
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What a Migratory Bird Can Teach Us About Corporate Finance
The relationship between exploitation and exploration.
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All writings
What a Migratory Bird Can Teach Us About Corporate Finance
The relationship between exploitation and exploration.
What Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG) Can Teach You About Your Next Promotion
On mental availability, category entry points, and why being exceptionally good at your job may still leave you out of consideration.
Losers Pursue Success
Why fear of failure outlasts the desire to win
Professional Collector of Useless Knowledge
Why curiosity may actually be an options strategy
Physics, People, Relationships and Uncertainty
Sometimes the act of checking whether something is wrong is what makes something wrong.
When the Boss Doesn’t Explain Himself
A strange possibility: some leaders may get better thinking from their teams precisely because they do less of the thinking for them.
We Remember Everything and Archive Nothing
How sapiens built the largest memory system in history and created a new problem: making sense of what it remembers.
The Dollar’s Achilles Heel
The factory that fit on a man’s back
Some systems do not let you try again
What a theme park, a flight simulator, and a burst water main have in common
Why people who agree with each other still end up fighting
Comprehension asymmetry, how it compounds across people, minutes, and levels, and why it can be reduced but never removed
Being Right Faster Is Making Us Worse at Thinking
Grit Is Fit
Fit decides whether you start. Extraordinary hours decide where you finish.
What a French Sculptor Can Teach Us About LLMs
When Departments Go to War and Both Are Right
A football game in 1951, a Cold War experiment, and why the fight between your departments is never about the decision on the table
Someone Else Is Having Your Idea Right Now
Great ideas arrive in several minds at once. Winning belongs to whoever moves first.
The Missing Child Test
What missing-child posters know about advertising that brand strategy forgets.
Gravity Doesn’t Care What Your Religion Is
Why a billion people can recite a parable they heard once as children, and almost none can say what holds the moon in the sky.
Ask the Bees About Your Layoffs
The Org Chart Lies About the Company
Is your organizational chart a map of the wrong city?
DOCUPERTISE
A 40-page strategy in twenty minutes, and not one of them knows the market.
If Your People Are Replaceable, So Is Your Company
The Anatomy of a Great Creative Brief
Your Creative Brief Is Working Against You
The data on how the most foundational document in marketing became an obstacle to the work it was supposed to enable.
Off. Then On. Then Off Again.
The physics behind power cuts, and what they have to do with a Serbian inventor who died broke.
The Relevance Gap
The formula that governs product value also governs whether advice ever moves anyone. Part two of two
You Heard It. You Agreed. You Did Nothing.
Why the quality of advice almost never determines whether anyone acts on it.
The Number That Runs Ethiopian Television
Seventeen million households. One denominator. Four very different commercial realities.
They Called It a Civil War
What chimps in Uganda, the fall of Yugoslavia, and a decade at Microsoft reveal about how groups destroy themselves
The Blame Externalization Reflex
Do the societies that complain loudest about broken systems often look, up close, like the ones quietly building them?
The Salary Raise Math Problem
The raise you earned and the raise you needed are rarely the same number.
The Same War, Smaller
What if the conflict between your departments and the conflict between nations are the same thing at different magnifications
Built to Fade
Every company is born with a biological clock.
Cheap for Who?
AI filmmaking tools help studios reduce costs. For an individual creator, the same tools create costs that did not previously exist. The industry only discusses the first.
Rage Farming
Rage bait is not merely competing with thoughtful content for time and attention. It is recalibrating the neurological threshold that thoughtful content must clear before it can even be evaluated.
Why You Stop Going to the Gym and It Has Nothing to Do With Laziness
It is not willpower. It is a pricing problem. And the price your brain is checking is probably the wrong one.
ELEVATOR SLIDES
What smooth jazz can tell us about the future of your presentation deck
The Failure Franchise
Every entrepreneur says it. Almost none of them mean it. And the young person taking notes is paying the price.
Africa’s BPO Sector Is Running Out of Time to Build What AI Cannot Replace
The continent holds 2% of a $1.1 trillion market. The window to claim more of it is closing faster than most governments realize.
The Last Cognitive Revolution
Why Leaders Trust Strangers More Than the People Who Built the House
The most expensive thing an organization does is make its best people feel like the second-best option.
Why You Don’t Orgasm When You Learn Calculus
Evolution optimized pleasure for survival, not enlightenment. The asymmetry reveals everything about what your brain was actually built to do.
Outsourced Understanding
When everyone can produce the output, what happens to the people who never learned how?
YouTube Proved Television Right
Everybody knows short-form video is the future. Then a dataset shows up and says otherwise. Naturally, the internet loses its mind.
Everything You Already Knew (Five Minutes Ago You Didn’t)
Common sense might be the most confidently used and least examined concept in human conversation. Everyone claims to have it. Everyone accuses others of lacking it. Nobody defines it.
What I Learned About Leadership at Formula E
The difference between friction brakes and regenerative ones applies beyond the track.
The Content Obesity Epidemic
Your parents got hooked on fast food. You got hooked on fast content. Their grandchildren went organic. Yours will choose depth.
Your LinkedIn Profile Is 100,000 Years Old
Humans have decorated their bodies to signal status since we lived in caves. The substrate changed from skin to screen. The psychology didn't.
The Quickest Way To Feel Like An Expert
Welcome to the era of AI-Gregation. A perpetual machine where low-effort output meets low-effort judgment, and both sides feel righteous about it.
Why Mediocrity Scales & Mastery Doesn't
We’ve democratized the appearance of expertise without democratizing expertise itself. The bar for admiration was already low. We just handed everyone a ladder to step over it.
The First Agency Curse
Why brands and their first agencies almost always divorce within 12 months
Can You Swim Without Getting Wet?
On the inseparability of work and workplace politics
The Amnesia of Reasoning
Why you remember what you decided but not how you thought
African Time
Why your calendar means something different depending on where you grew up
The Boss Paradox
Why employees worship the leaders they hate and doubt the ones they love
The Executive’s Most Neglected Asset
Why the biology of sleep determines whether you’re making decisions or just guessing
The Gradient of Good Enough
On the difference between what is right and what is better
The Performance Review Tax
Performance reviews tell us more about the reviewer than the reviewed. The science confirms what everyone already suspects.
The Psychological Safety Paradox
Why psychological safety explains less than 2% of creative variance. How "Sapien Logic" rejects optimization and why threat rather than comfort is the only reliable engine of innovation.
Marketing Amnesia
Performance marketing wins in boardrooms not because it’s more accurate, but because it’s more legible.
The Penny Superman Problem
A good negotiation rarely feels like winning. It often feels like restraint. Like choosing not to cut the muscle even when you have the leverage.
How Netflix bought the steak and left the bill
Inside the financial engineering of the Warner Bros. acquisition
What Killed TV Is Now Going to Resurrect It
Distribution once destroyed television. That same distribution now struggles under its own abundance. The gatekeepers inherit what the liberators could not hold.
What Lunch Did to the Prisoner
Israeli judges, body budgets, and the science of why the feeling arrives before the seeing. You are building a world and calling it observation.
The Billion-Dollar Glitch: Why We Trust the Cartoon More Than the Human
A kid in Tokyo watches a robot cat. A kid in Lagos watches Supa Strikas. A kid in New York watches a mouse. None of them look real, yet all of them trigger the same ancient circuit in the brain.
Why China Can’t Make You Care
They can build anything. So why can’t they build a brand we love?
Why Unscripted Formats Dominate Ethiopia's TV Programming Grid
An explanation of why Ethiopian broadcasters rely on unscripted formats. The economics of airtime, advertiser behavior, and sequential drama make the grid look the way it does.
The Last Free Studios - Sony, Lionsgate & A24
The transition from many studios to a few platforms is not the natural evolution of entertainment. It is the financialization of attention.
How Television Changed Accounting
Television didn’t just entertain. It rewired investor psychology. It reshaped how businesses are judged. It exported a metric to industries far outside media.
Idealists Create Demand. Realists Serve It
Every industry advances because two very different instincts keep colliding. One pushes for what isn’t there yet, the other shapes what already works.
Why Film & Content Should Be the Next Venture Category
The creative economy didn't just benefit from Moore's Law. It created the market demand that justified Moore's Law continuing.
The More You Ask, The Less They Respond
A simple follow-up message seems harmless. But each time you reach out without a response, the power structure shifts. What starts as basic coordination becomes a hierarchy signal to your brain.
The CEO’s Wife Is In Your Marketing Meeting
Why everyone critiques creative work but nobody questions technical specifications
The Mathematics of Creativity
Why Your Brainstorming Sessions Are Statistically Doomed
The Math Behind Why Everyone Sounds Like a Corporate Robot (And How to Fix It)
When every sentence sounds the same, the math is to blame. Behind every clean paragraph is a chain of weighted guesses trying to sound human. The math works, but the distinctive voice disappears.
Angelina in Paris vs Angelina in Manhattan
Every brand has a gravity field, an invisible pull shaped by perception.
Are You 1 in a Million?
Your Stone Age brain never agreed to live in a world with electricity, antibiotics, or the internet. It simply woke up one day in a reality where not using them meant starvation or irrelevance.
Corporate Arthritis
Companies that stay mobile treat coordination as a skill to develop, not an overhead to minimize. They should reward the people who work at the interfaces, not just the people who excel within silos.
We’re All FedEx Drivers Now—For Artificial Intelligence
Are we already volunteering to be replaced by turning ourselves into the infrastructure AI needs until it doesn’t need us anymore?
Your Body Runs On A Clock That Does Not Care About Your Calendar
We build calendars as if humans are machines with constant output. The body disagrees.
The Theatre of Judgment
There’s an unspoken sport in agency land. Agencies judging other agencies.
Measuring Hope
The IMF's five-year GDP forecasts miss by more than half what they're measuring. Not because economists are careless, but because the future doesn't follow models. It follows contingencies
The Agencies vs. The Shadow Client
In the age of AI, every creative meeting is a mirror facing another mirror.
You Don’t Know How You Do What You Do
Anyone can demand results. The real work is building the capacity in your team to achieve those results independently. And you can’t build capacity by just showing people the finish line.
How Averages Distort Reality For Media Buyers
Audiences don’t experience content as a seven-day average. They experience it in moments.
When Algorithms Arrive Before Adulthood- The Race Between TikTok and Tradition
Across Africa’s young societies, algorithms are shaping values faster than families and schools can respond.
Scaling Influence - The Statistical Limits of Ethiopia’s Social Media Giants
Ethiopia’s social media ecosystem has grown quickly. Behind the follower counts and viral moments lies a measurable ceiling, defined not by creativity but by mathematics.
What Happens When Your Best Investment Becomes Someone Else’s Asset - The Incubator’s Curse!
How Broadcasters Became Talent Incubators for YouTube - And Why They Can't Stop.
The Harsh Truth About Streaming in Africa - More Viewers, More Losses
Expensive bandwidth, low ARPU, and YouTube’s global subsidy machine expose the impossible economics facing African broadcasters.
The Book of Mixed Chapters - Why We Keep Misreading Each Other
The most emotionally intelligent people aren't those who read others perfectly. They're those who remain aware that everyone is carrying chapters from books they've never read.
The Courage to Contextualize
Even accomplished professionals can mistake pride for professional duty when what’s actually needed is the courage to contextualize.
The Cassandra Complex— How We Judge Ideas by Their Messengers
Why the best insights often come from the most unlikely sources—and why we’re hardwired to judge truth by its packaging.
From Project Management to Character Management: Why People, Not Plans, Determine Success
The time has come to acknowledge what every seasoned manager knows but few dare to say: projects fail because of people, not processes.
Why Most Reject Logic
Logic is threatening to power because to obey data is to admit instinct was wrong. Few leaders rise through the ranks to hand decisions to a spreadsheet.
How Much of History Is Just Chance?
One red cow nearly sparked holy war. One wrong turn helped trigger World War I. The accidents of history are constant. What matters is how we frame them, and how those frames ripple outward.
Locusts, People, and the Puzzle of Behavior
Human brains are the raw matter of culture. Out of them came mathematics, science, governance, and technology. But those same brains struggle to use the advanced products of culture.
On Confidence, Doubt, and the Order of Things
What begins in uncertainty, when tested, matures into confidence.
Limit Work In Progress.
Just getting started is not as sexy as it sounds.
Shortcut Creatures Always Win
Accuracy without viability is fragile. Adaptiveness without accuracy is reckless.
Stop Designing For The Wrong Audience
The real customer is not the consumer. It’s the approver!
- STRATEX — BY NAZ
Expanding emotional knowledge and what contemporary neuroscience can tell us
- STRATEX — BY NAZ
In digital advertising, repetition is a feature—not a flaw.
- STRATEX — BY NAZ
The Invisible Curve. How Innate Talent Reveals Itself Through Experience
- STRATEX — BY NAZ
The Great Delusion
- STRATEX — BY NAZ
YouTube Has Trained Us to Hate Ads Even More Than TV Ever Did