Mother, where’s the invention?

Frank Zappa had to add ‘of Invention’ to the name ‘The Mothers’.

He said it was out of necessity. (Think about it) Two great names for a band. Frank was creative. And very intelligent.

Apart from making unique music, he challenged ignorance wherever it confronted him.

After 25 years working inside boardrooms, war rooms, and occasional panic rooms. No matter how big or small the organisation, I observe that intelligence, not process, is the scarcest commodity.

Intelligence is closely related to creativity. They’re inseparable. Process is often the killer of critical thinking.

“You can't always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.” - Frank Zappa.

I actively pay to avoid ads. I also take notes, a growing log of inane advertising (if it breaks through), and never buy from that brand.

I’m far from alone in thinking that so much advertising, marketing, corporate communication and many product innovations are just bland copies of each other.

Agencies, consultants, and tech firms have spent decades refining processes and have mostly pieced them together with technology. Few major in creativity and intelligence.

Fewer and fewer ad campaigns are meaningful, strategies have become one-dimensional and tactical, and everything we read is thinly disguised computerised output.

AI happened, and it’s helpful, but we are having to suffer a stampede of innovation ignorance. There are numerous products, most of which are built on off-the-shelf chatbots or models with branded wrappers: infinite adaptation but zero invention.

Instead of putting a new body on the same engine (adding to the mountain of trash that drowns us in mediocrity), what about functional solutions unique to the challenge? You know, dealing with the reality of the physical world?

The world doesn’t need another ChatGPT in a branded hoodie.

“The computer can't tell you the emotional story. It can give you the exact mathematical design, but what's missing is the eyebrows.” - Frank Zappa.

The future must be built on intelligence, or I’m not going there, and for many, this will be a novel concept. We don’t need more predictable, generic thinking - we need thinking systems that connect the dots.

Understanding the connections between leadership intent, market noise, customer data, and commercial logic, so that decisions get better over time, not just faster. A continuity of insight. A durable strategic advantage. A system that can think with them. AI isn’t killing creativity or consulting. It’s exposing how little of either was happening in the first place.

It didn’t exist, so we've been building our invention (eyebrows) for over a decade. It means our clients will be able to interact with the strategies we’ve created together. So they can continue to think about how their business runs, competes, grows, and screws up.

A mother of an invention.

25 years of insight built on, and a dedicated AI layer built in. Clients have a dedicated, ongoing, real-time, always-learning brain for the business, only a bit less emotional, more honest, and definitely way more accurate.

The question is no longer whether AI will change business. It already has. A better question is whose intelligence are you building your future on?