One of the main problems plaguing young strategists today is that they often get no chance to train in strategy.

They’re thrown into the fire because of a lack of resources, a lack of time, or a lack of care. It’s what pushes them out of our industry and into safer waters.

That’s why I created The Takeaway at Essence, a thought leadership program run by our juniors and overseen by me, designed to find the weird, the wild, the interesting, and push internal and external teams to greater heights. It was a program specifically focused on giving junior strategists the place to practice writing insights, finding weird shit and trying to make it all relevant to our long list of clients.

Essentially teaching them all of the core fundamentals that would not only serve them well in strategy, but would help them grow as humans. We covered everything from the metaverse, love, to found spaces to AI and more.

It started small in North America then grew to global proportions expanding to APAC and EMEA, running for half a decade and over 100 issues written by a team I couldn’t be more proud of.