Executives attribute 44% of their company's market value to the reputation of the leader.
That reputation is made of what the market understands about them. Most leaders have never had it read accurately. So what the market understands is an accident: assembled from whatever they happened to say, in whatever order, to whoever was listening.
Company market value, as executives themselves attribute it
The actual reason this works
Innovation, excellence, purpose
What you decided against, and why
Lessons from a decade of building
The thing you know that the market has not caught up to
Five things I learned this quarter
The distinction only you draw
What your competitors also published
What makes you different is already real inside your company. It has no words yet. That gap, between what is true and what can be said, is where deals are lost and nobody records the cause.
71% of B2B marketers rate their own performance as strong at communicating a distinct position. 68% of buyers say the brands they encounter at work have very similar marketing and communications.
It is not that leaders fail to communicate. It is that they cannot hear how they land.
Dentsu B2B, Superpowers Index 2024, a global study of B2B buying behavior drawing on 14,000 interviews. Reported by Marketing Week, September 2024; primary report not yet obtained. These figures describe company brands, not individual leaders. The extension to the leader is an inference, and it is named as one.
Chief executives accept that their reputation is intertwined with their company's. They reject the personal branding as the way to improve it.
They still need what it was supposed to do. In an era of manufactured content, a person who is genuinely legible becomes rarer and worth more. Personal beats artificial.
Confetto and colleagues, International Journal of Business and Management, 13(12), 2018. Web survey of 93 chief executives of large companies in Italy. Small, single country, self-report. Their own account of what their reputation is made of names credibility and charisma.
Competent executive writing is now available to anyone. Instantly. No cost. That has already changed what a communications adviser is worth. The chief executives themselves have said so plainly. The figure below is the argument against hiring a writer.
An artificial intelligence writes an already-decided position beautifully. It cannot decide the position.
57% of chief executives would choose a custom-trained AI system over an elite human communications professional without AI support, to draft an important speech.
Anyone whose offer is better executive prose is standing in front of that number.
HarrisX with Ragan. 400 United States executives: 125 chief executives and 275 communications leaders. Fielded August to October 2025. In the same study, 30% said more than half their communications work was already being done by AI.
84% of senior communications professionals say the C-suite has sought their counsel more than in previous years, while 81% feel pressure to produce more with fewer resources.
Fewer production resources. More demand for judgment.
The market is separating the writing from the reading, and paying for the reading.
Cision with PRWeek, 2025 Comms Report. 310 senior communications and marketing communications professionals in the United States and Canada. Fielded 18 October to 20 November 2024.
Work produced with AI assistance is judged more creative individually, and measurably more similar collectively.
Every leader now holds the same instrument. So the instrument cannot be the difference. What it cannot supply is what has not yet been put into words.
Doshi and Hauser, Science Advances, 10(28), eadn5290, 2024.
An accurate reading of what you are actually building, rendered as the two or three claims your market cannot ignore. Written. In your voice. Built toward a specific room you are about to enter.
A raise. A new seat. Succession. A sale process. A board campaign. A market you have not entered. The architecture is finished when it is ready for that room.
Four sessions of ninety minutes across four to six weeks. You and me. Nobody else in the room.
What you think you are building, at length, in your own words, unguarded. Two things are being listened to at once: what you say, and the distance between how you speak and how you have been writing. That distance is usually where the material is.
What the market currently understands, evidenced from your published surfaces and from what others say about you. Then the divergence between the two accounts. This is the session in which you see something about yourself you did not know was visible.
Two or three, drafted between sessions and brought in. Tested against your resistance. This session has to contain real disagreement, because a claim you did not fight for will not survive a hostile room.
Locking the claims, the language that belongs to you, the language now closed to you, and how each claim behaves in the room you named.
There is no homework and nothing to draft. You talk. I work between sessions.
The reading is the work. The writing is what the reading produces.
Tell me what room you are enteringYou own the decision about how you are described
A communications function owns your voice
Something is coming that requires people to understand you before you walk in
No situation is coming that makes being misread expensive
What makes you different is real, and you have never put it into words
You want only reach, followers or leads
The claims will be yours: I bring drafts and you fight them
You want to hand it over entirely
If that last one is not appealing, this is the wrong engagement and I will say so.
Say what is comingAn architecture decays. You move: you decide something, lose something, enter a situation. The market moves: a competitor takes the language, an event changes what the claim means. Every new room is a fresh rendering decision, because the claims are stable but a board meeting, a keynote and an investor call are three different problems.
A continuing relationship is available: the architecture held accurate, and carried. Two working sessions a month. Written work that carries the claims. Contact between sessions without a meter.
It is offered once, at delivery, as a decision. It cannot be bought without the architecture, because without one there is nothing to hold.
The job underneath all of it is a single one: extract the real thinking out of a person who cannot articulate it themselves, then render it so their market cannot ignore it.
That is not a writing task. It is a reading. I have been doing it for 28 years.
Contributed to the narrative behind the largest artificial intelligence and Go-to-Market Intelligence event in Brazil.
2025 edition: 1,000+ attendees, NPS 96.Delivered at Université Paris Dauphine-PSL, Paris. December. 2025.
Leadership from the inside out, with Selima Sfar, at Université Paris Dauphine-PSL, Campus de Tunis. June. 2026.
A 40 to 50% increase in productivity, driven by greater clarity, faster decisions, and a significant reduction in insecurity.
Julia Farah, on her own engagement. One client, named and consented, describing her own experience. Not a controlled result.What is coming in the next six to twelve months that requires people to understand you before you walk in?
If you can name it, there is work here. Write to me and say what it is. Everything before the engagement is one conversation. 45 minutes. I will have read you before it starts.
Start here: name what is coming