Respect Your Kryptonite

Every significant decision in my career looked like a mistake at the time. Nokia after Coca-Cola. Agency after client. China after everything.

I've started to think that was the point.

M. Night Shyamalan's Unbreakable is an underrated film that I love. A genuinely fresh take on the superhero genre built around a deceptively simple philosophical idea: the world maintains balance. For every extraordinary strength, there is an equal and opposite vulnerability. David Dunn is physically indestructible and Elijah Price, or Mr. Glass, is the precise opposite. Bones that shatter if he sneezes wrong.

Kryptonite, of course, is Superman's version of the same principle. Not a flaw. A counterweight. The universe insisting on equilibrium.

I am a long long way from being a superhero. But this idea planted itself in me early. And when I look back at the decisions that actually shaped my career, almost every one of them was a deliberate walk towards something that frightened me. Not away from it. Towards my kryptonite.

My first real encounter with my kryptonite was at Unilever, one of the great marketing companies, one of the best possible places to begin after finishing my studies.

Very early on, I understood who the natural adversary of the marketing function was going to be: the CFO. Not personally. Institutionally. The CFO spoke a different language. They saw what I believed in such as brand investment, long-term equity building, the machinery of consumer trust as a cost line. Opex. Not an investment. A liability to be managed downward when times got tight.

I could see exactly how this was going to go if I let it.

So I enrolled in post-graduate studies in Applied Finance. Part-time, while working. Not because I wanted to become a CFO. Because I wanted to walk into a budget meeting and speak his language back to him. To argue for marketing investment in the terms that the CFO and the board actually understood.

I respected my kryptonite. And it changed what I was capable of.

I didn't recognise it as a pattern at the time. It only looks like one in retrospect.

At Coca-Cola, I held local market leadership roles across Australia, New Zealand and then Indonesia. Good roles. Comfortable. But I was increasingly frustrated by the quality of thinking arriving from the Global team. Here's where most people would complain quietly and stay put.

Instead, I joined the Global team in Atlanta. I moved towards the source of the frustration.

After nine years at Coca-Cola and thirteens years in CPG, the only category I'd ever known, I left for Nokia. A handset business. Consumer electronics. Completely different physics, completely different commercial model, completely different customer relationship. Everything I thought I knew needed translating.

Then from handsets to the operator side, joining Orange. The same consumer sitting at the intersection of both worlds, but a fundamentally different vantage point on them.

Then in 2009, the biggest jump. Client side to agency side. Seventeen years of brand building and I still felt I was missing half the picture. I wasn't going to understand the client-agency relationship properly from only one side of it. So I crossed the floor. And if that wasn't enough of a deep end, the role was leading Saatchi & Saatchi in China. A market where I did not yet speak the language (neither Mandarin, nor creativity), in a business model I'd never operated, in a cultural context that rewarded everything I hadn't built.

It worked out. Not without difficulty. But it worked out.

When I co-founded Simbioniq, I wasn't making a calculated entrepreneurial bet. I was doing the same thing again.

I had spent recent years observing AI from the outside. Writing about it. Commenting on what it might mean for the industry. And I could feel the same pattern emerging: here was something that could define the next chapter of marketing and strategy, and I was at risk of becoming an informed spectator rather than a practitioner.

So I stepped into it. Not to be an observer of AI in market research and strategy. To be an owner of it. To build patent-pending technology in a space I didn't fully understand yet, surrounded by people who knew things I didn't.

My most recent walk towards kryptonite.

I want to be honest about something. This narrative has a survivor bias problem if I let it become too neat.

I made plenty of mistakes in every one of these transitions. Many many. Some moves took longer than they should have to come good. Some relationships that should have flourished didn't, because I was still learning the new environment while trying to lead within it, where I genuinely wasn't sure I'd made the right call. Especially moments in China where the gap between what I knew and what the situation required felt uncomfortably and just massively wide.

The successes were sufficient to offset the failures. But the failures were real.

What I can say is this: I was never preparing for an AI world. I was never building a career with some grand strategic design. That's just convenient retelling. I was responding, each time, to a specific discomfort. A specific gap between what I knew and what I felt I needed to know.

In 2019, David Epstein published Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialised World. His core argument is counterintuitive but well-evidenced: in complex, unpredictable domains where the rules shift and past patterns don't reliably repeat, leaders who have deliberately sampled across disciplines consistently outperform narrow specialists. He calls intense early specialisation the "Tiger Woods path," and argues that most leadership challenges reward what he calls the "Roger Federer path" where broader, more varied early experience that builds cognitive flexibility rather than just depth.

Epstein's book was published six years ago. The compression hitting marketing leadership right now is precisely the kind of wicked, unpredictable domain he was describing. And yet most career development advice still optimises for depth over range.

The dominant model for the last decade has been the T-shaped leader. Deep expertise in one vertical. Reasonable working knowledge across adjacent disciplines. It was a sensible response to increasing specialisation, and it remains better than the I-shaped alternative, the brilliant specialist who goes quiet the moment the conversation moves outside their lane.

But The Great Compression rewards something more demanding.

Not a T. A comb.

Multiple areas of genuine fluency. Finance and brand strategy. Client-side and agency-side. Digital and traditional. Market research and AI architecture. Each transition you've made deliberately, not because the opportunity was obvious, but because the gap was uncomfortable and it becomes another tooth in the comb. Each one adds structural strength. And when the environment shifts, as it is shifting right now, the comb holds while the T bends.

The recently stated McKinsey preference for humanities backgrounds in this AI world is the same observation dressed in different clothes. What they mean is range. The ability to think across disciplines, to translate between domains, to hold complexity without forcing it into the framework you already know.

There's a version of this question that is purely personal: What is the capability you avoid because it feels foreign? The conversation you don't initiate because it's outside your comfort? The discipline you dismiss because it's "not your area"?

But there's also a structural version that matters more for leaders right now.

In the next eighteen months, AI will require marketing leaders to have working fluency in areas that felt safely technical until very recently: data architecture, model evaluation, attribution methodology, platform economics. The CMOs who spent the last decade delegating all of that to specialists are about to feel exactly what I felt sitting across from that CFO at Unilever.

Outflanked in the language of the thing that controls the budget.

Three places to start:

1. Name it.

Identify the specific domain that consistently makes you feel like an outsider in your own organisation. Not the broad category. The specific thing: the moment in the meeting where you go quiet.

2. Find the minimum viable fluency.

You don't need a PhD. You need enough understanding to ask intelligent questions, to detect when you're being managed, to have a point of view. One course. One practitioner relationship. One structured commitment to understand the fundamentals. You're not trying to add a new vertical overnight. You're adding a tooth to the comb.

3. Walk towards it before you have to run.

The leaders making the most progress on AI fluency right now are not the ones in crisis. They're the ones who decided eighteen months ago to get uncomfortable while it was still optional.

The world does maintain balance. Every strength has its counterweight. Every capability has its blind spot.

Everyone has their kryptonite. The question is whether you're managing around it or walking towards it.

Every significant decision in my career looked like a mistake at the time. I've started to think that was exactly right.

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry's table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. First published 19 February 2026 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.