Week 40 | Joe Burns on More of the Good Shit. Less of the Bullshit.
Producing strategy is not the most important part of what we do.
I came across Joe while scrolling LinkedIn a year ago. He already had 20,000 followers hooked on the beautifully designed strategy decks he shared (all while serving as the Head of Strategy at Quality Meats).
I quickly became a fan.
So when Joe agreed to write a guest post for Weekly Brand Strategist, I was over the moon. Without further ado, here is Joe.
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1 SKILL TO LEARN
Producing strategy is a very important part of what we do as strategists.
But weirdly, it is not the most important part of what we do.
The most fundamental, and also slipperiest and trickiest part of being a strategist lies in creating the conditions where good strategic thinking can even happen. And then also protecting those conditions from being systematically obliterated by decks, briefs, and junior account managers popping up 36 minutes before a presentation and asking “can you do some set up slides” for a load of creative work you’ve never seen before.
You see, in most agencies, there’s a natural gravity that pulls everything downwards toward the visible and billable, no matter how high you climb you always get sucked towards the stuff that lives on a drive or gets presented in a client meeting.
For us strategists, that means your day to day will be dragged to the planning outputs, briefs, decks, and client deliverables. It sounds annoying that this stuff sucks up your job, but that’s just how agencies work. Ultimately it’s how we appear useful to people that may or may not really understand what we do and it’s how we get paid by clients. So it is important.
But left unchecked, the downward pull of gravity does two things:
It lowers the standard of strategic thinking.
It traps smart people in a cycle of busyness that is counterproductive.
The worst thing you can do when you’re up against that is try harder. You will just burn out and end up hating your job.
Instead, the trick is to design how your time gets spent, so more of it can go toward the less easy to see, but actually more valuable part of the job. The stuff that involves thinking about what to do, rather than just making decks.
In other words: this guide is designed to help you stop running your job like a task list and to give you some tools that can get you to start treating it like a system.
1 ACTION TO TAKE
Here’s the practical bit of advice. Do a “Good Shit / Bullshit” audit of your work.
Take all the things you do as a strategist and plot them on two axes:
Time Efficiency (How much time does it take to do this)
Aggregate Value (How much value does this work deliver over the course of it’s lifespan)
Grind. Takes forever. Means nothing.
This is where strategy goes to die.
Examples:
Premature deck flow and endless fiddling.
50-slide internal briefings.
Fluffily rewriting a client brief because it “doesn’t quite sing.”
Creative shepherding that is mostly just personal control issues.
Grind is high effort, low aggregate value. If you’re exhausted and unfulfilled at the same time, this is probably where you are spending too much of your day.
Filler. The little stuff that just… exists.
This is the admin layer of your job.
Filling in the client’s proprietary template because “we have to use it.”
Communication overhead.
Status decks.
Admin bloat.
Filler keeps the lights on. But it has low value and should take very little time.
Craft. Demanding, but with a payoff.
Now we’re getting somewhere.
Craft is bespoke, high-effort, high-value work.
Synthesizing research into a sharp Point of View.
Building a long-term brand platform.
Writing the presentation that actually shifts the client’s thinking.
This takes time. And it should take time.
Good Shit². Maximum output. Minimum effort.
This is the quadrant people often overlook.
High aggregate value. High time efficiency.
Low effort. Massive multiplier.
Examples:
The one killer slide that reframes the entire problem.
A tissue session 48 hours after the brief that unlocks the big idea.
A smart reframe that makes the rest of the work obvious.
Writing the line everyone ends up using for the next 18 months.
This is what it feels like when you’re properly operating as a strategist.
If we’re honest, most of your time is not here.
What To Do With This (Without Becoming Insufferable)
Squish the Grind
Identify your repeat offenders. Templatize them. Outsource them. Kill them.
Ask the question: If I stopped doing this, would anything bad actually happen? If the answer is “not really,” congratulations; you’ve found bullshit.
Cap the Filler
Do not let low-value work grow simply because it is easy to justify. The trick here is to cap time on this stuff rather than treat it as a task list. E.g. say ‘i’m going to spend one hour doing as much of this template as i can’.
Elevate the Craft
Build things to last. If you’re writing a POV, can it be used to anchor multiple projects? If you’ve built a model, can you codify it and reuse it for other things?
If you’ve done a deep dive on Gen Z, can it become a living field guide across several clients? Durability increases aggregate value.Protect the Good Shit²
This is the big one. Free up time so you can operate here. Block it out in your calendar. The highest-value work in strategy is often the least legible. Which means no one else will ever protect it for you. So you have to.
1 QUOTE TO INSPIRE
“Confidence comes from preparation.” — John Wooden
MAJOR thanks to Joe. You can find him on LinkedIn or subscribe his Substack.
Next week, I have a really big surprise for you that I am so excited about. Be watching your inboxes for that.
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By Alex Mason · Thousands of Subscribers