Personal Innovation
Most leaders are better than their story
Twenty years in B2B marketing taught me the same thing over and over. The people who got overlooked weren’t short on talent. They were short on a way to say what they were good at.
I write about closing that gap: getting clear on what you know, then making it visible in public.
One essay a week.
About a thousand people read it.
01 / Private expertise → public signal
The scene
02
The room where I stopped waiting
Early 2023. A meeting room in Switzerland, six months after ChatGPT landed. I was moderating a roundtable of senior leaders — people running teams of hundreds.
A head of communications at a company almost everyone would recognize leaned back and said he’d played with it a bit. Nothing meaningful yet.
The room nodded.
The most senior, most experienced, most expensive people in the building had quietly decided to wait. I’d been the guy in those rooms for twenty years. I knew exactly what waiting felt like.
I decided that afternoon: whatever group that is.
I’m not in it.
The belief
AI doesn’t replace clarity. It amplifies whatever’s already there.
If your thinking is sharp, it gets sharper. If your thinking is vague, AI scales the vagueness.
That’s why the advice to “use AI more” keeps failing. The tool was never the constraint. The constraint is whether you know what you actually think, and whether you can say it so someone else can repeat it.
Volume got cheap.
Judgment didn’t.
What I write about
Three ways to make experience visible
The work isn’t about producing more. It’s about finding the ideas only your experience could have produced—and giving them somewhere to compound.
Reclaim your edge
Figure out what you’re actually good at, separate from the job title that used to speak for you.
Turn it into proof
Getting the thinking out of your head and into something a stranger can judge.
Make it compound
Doing it on a schedule, so it adds up instead of restarting every quarter.
From the notebook
Recent essays
The Room Where the Answer Is One Degree Away
In 2022, TikTok creator Grace Africa arrived at VidCon with more than one million followers. Then she sat alone at her meet-and-greet. Not a shorter line than expected. No line. Zilch. Time reported that…
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Who I am
Hey, I’m Brian.
Born in Antigua, college in the US on a soccer scholarship, fifteen years in Germany after a six-month project went sideways in the best way. Hamburg. Two kids. One marathon.
Twenty years in B2B — sales first, then communications, then content. Hapag-Lloyd. Engel & Völkers. Head of Content Marketing at Staffbase.
Two layoffs taught me the thing I write about now: a title is a loan. It speaks for you right up until it doesn’t.
What others say
A reputation built in the work
“When I think about creative AND impactful, I think about Brian. His innovative approach to connecting with people has impressed me for the 15 years I have watched him work.”
Stuart Sandlin
President & CEO
Hapag-Lloyd North America
“Brian has that rare gift of both understanding how large, complex and global organizations work, while also understanding how digital can be applied to both grow and transform the business.”
Janus Boye
Founder
Boye & Company
If you’re here about your company
I run a B2B advisory called Trust Engine. Same problem, different scale — companies that are genuinely different and can’t get buyers to see it. I find what makes them different, prove it where buyers look, and put it to work in sales.