275: Magic Bullets. Founder’s Mindset. Fela Kuti.

Dear friends,

Today is the year’s last letter. We will gather here again on 18 January 2026.

It is ‘best books of 2025’ season.

My favourite lists are the Financial Times and NPR’s. NPR’s “Books We Love” is particularly cool because it is somewhat interactive and you can explore all the way back to 2013.

For the Pan-Africanists amongst us (i.e. all of us), Brittle Paper kindly highlighted the nine African authors included in Time Magazine’s Must Reads of 2025. Keep an eye on Brittle Paper as they ordinarily release a ‘best of Africa’ sometime during December.

Excitingly, the NYT’s ‘books to read in December’ included Cape-Town-born author (of everything – plays, books, award-winning short stories) Nadia Davids’ soon-to-be-released Cape Fever (You can read about her work here).

If you’ve recently subscribed or just fear a few weeks without strategy, soul, & self, here are 2025’s most popular newsletters:

1.  Babita Deokaran. Jeff Wicks. Friendship and Courage.
2. Quartermain’s Safari Camp. Think with the World. Act.
3. Stephen King and Strategy.
4. Culture that Works.
5. Lessons from Love and Fury.

 If you want to go further back, How to Be Effective, Part One and Part Two, were 2024’s most popular newsletters.

In today’s letter, we explore:

• How magic bullets can cure complexity.
• What 100 brushstrokes tell us about the founder’s mindset; and
• A podcast to feed your soul.

/strategy
In 1973, design professors Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber described a category of truly tricky challenges — they defy clear description, lack a point at which the problem can be declared solved, tend to be contested, have few instructive parallels, and tend to be linked to or symptomatic of other problems.

They called these problems ‘wicked’. Think crime or unemployment.

The world of strategy is the world of wicked problems.
Companies are living ecosystems operating in a complex ever-changing world; figuring out how to guide them is wicked indeed.
The complexity often results in overly theoretical strategies, not grounded in the realities, resources and capabilities of the business at hand, camouflaged in ultimately meaningless jargon.

(A great acid test is two simple questions: What does that mean? How do we translate that into consistent, intentional action?)

Sometimes, overwhelmed by and impatient with complexity, our strategies become exhortatory and declarative.

We think if we cut short the thinking work (which often is hard), and yell loudly, decisively, and often enough, change will come. Except, it mostly doesn’t.  

Good strategy enables change through action from where we are. The best strategy makes intuitive sense; one step logically follows the other.

How do we enable pragmatic, potentially transformative action in the face of this cognition-draining complexity? A wicked problem indeed.

Rittel and Webber wrote their article fifty-two years ago. Today, we might use the term polycrisis or VUCA – Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous – instead of wicked.
Whatever the label, we are conveying that what confronts us is so complex and interconnected that it is overwhelming; that we are uncertain where to begin or even if we could or should.

Doubt like that makes us feel helpless. Helplessness slows our actions, blunts our energy, makes us a little less inclined to dream or hope, and so, although we’re somewhere we don’t want to be, although we have a history of personal agency and impact, we start to feel a little despondent – “This can’t be changed!”.

There is another route.

In 1908, Paul Erhlich, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, coined the phrase “magic bullet” to describe chemical compounds that targeted specific disease-causing bacteria.

And, of course, we know that silver bullets kill werewolves.

However, in the context of these wicked, volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous polycrises, we are inclined to say – I definitely say it – there is no such thing as a silver bullet.

But remember, magic bullets kill werewolves.
Penicillin doesn’t give immortality. It does make certain infections disappear. In specific contexts, it is a magic silver bullet. And killing infection makes life less complex, makes life easier.

Which leads us to this – when we confront the wicked, volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous polycrises, our starting point cannot be the complexity. It overwhelms us.

We must uncover the specific, identifiable challenges and opportunities that will respond to a magic bullet.
When we do, we create space and release energy that makes the VUCA less VUCA, the wicked less wicked.

As you design your strategy for 2026, focus on the challenges you face. Understand what is beneath them and beneath them and beneath them. Keep asking “What causes that?” until you eventually unearth a werewolf – something that can be cured with a magic bullet; a problem contained and clear enough that explicit action will change it.

Each werewolf you slay makes the complex simpler.

(This week’s strategy was inspired by Tim Harford’s The Silver Bullet Fallacy).

//self
A recent FT article, The obsessive fascinations of Alec Cobbe, inspired a thought about being a founder.

Cobbe, amongst many other creative occupations, is the owner one of the world’s most important collections of pianos and harpsichords – more than 50 in total, including two belonging to Chopin and Johann Christian Bach’s piano, once used by Mozart.

In the kind of nonchalant aside made by those comfortable hanging with the truly wealthy, Jo Ellison, deputy editor of the FT Weekend, asking whether the Titian Venus and Adonis in Cobbe’s possession is indeed the work of the renaissance painter, writes, “Answer: most certainly, because there were more than 100 adjustments to the painting (revealed via X-ray), unlike the versions done by studio hands that invariably show none.”

Relentless fiddling, the mark of a master’s work. Copy-paste that of the studio, the employee.
You all know that Leonardo famously refused to hand over the Mona Lisa to its commissioner, Francesco del Giocondo. He worked on it – on and off – for sixteen years. It was with him when he died.

It struck me that this measure – how many adjustments were made to the original – of whether a painting is by the master or their studio is emblematic of the founder’s mindset. Founders always look for ways to improve their creation.

The most effective founders find ways that their ‘studios’ do more than cut-and-paste but too are able to adjust and improve. They encourage evolution and adaptation. They create systems and guardrails that foster it.
Cut-and-paste creates control but does not maintain value across the ages.
We, too, can embrace mastery.
In almost every moment, there is an opportunity to place our fingerprint on something, to adjust it, to make it uniquely us, to make it reflective of our own journey of mastery.

///soul
I am currently listening to a brilliant podcast series – Fela Kuti’s Fear No Man – created by journalist Jad Abumrad. There is so much to share from it, but it will have to wait until 2026.

For now, I am sharing it because:

1. Fela is unequivocally a master, the conjurer of Afrobeat, in turn inspired by funk and jazz, which in turn grew from older African musical structures. Each generation of master shaping new possibilities.
2. If you’ve got a road-trip ahead, it’ll make it shorter.
3. It is a reminder that, with intention, all our work can contain the seeds of revolution – there was a time before Fela became Fela, where he saw music as a way of making a living, rather than a way of loving; loving being a revolutionary act in a hostile world.

(Thank you to Africa in the World founder, Dele Olojede, for bringing this to my attention).

I am going to miss writing to you. In the weeks we’re away from each other, I am returning my attention to long-form writing.

There is a book or three struggling to fight their way free of the busyness of my coaching, writing and advisory practice.

Thank you for your ongoing support and encouragement. It is staggering to think that I have written this letter since January 2020 – six years! Alas, it still reaches fewer people than I would like, but I guess a founder’s ambition is never quite sated. Still, please do share it with people you love and respect. They can subscribe [here].

Best wishes

Karl
PS: You can learn about my executive coaching practice [here] and find me on LinkedIn. If you’re interested in creating space to strengthen your leadership team’s strategic, communication and reflective powers, I facilitate curated leadership journeys. The details are [here].