via

At McKinsey Blog

What struck me most is that Anna Wintour’s real power isn’t instinct. It’s proximity.

Leaders lose their edge the moment they stop touching real life. She never did. Early walks, street-level curiosity, conversations outside the bubble. Instinct only works when you stay close enough to feel the world changing before the metrics can capture it.

Her take on mentorship is the part companies should pay attention to. She hires for humanity, not pedigree. She treats talent as an ecosystem, not a hierarchy. That is how culture gets built, not managed.

In an era obsessed with dashboards and quarterly certainty, it’s refreshing to see a reminder that relevance is emotional first, measurable second.

The future belongs to leaders who are present enough to notice what others overlook.

How the collapse of legacy networks marks the true end of the advertising era

There are days when something new begins and there are days when something old finally dies. What happened this week belongs to the second category.

Three networks that shaped generations, gone in a single announcement.
FCB.
DDB.
MullenLowe.
Names that weren’t just brands, but buildings, rituals, mentors, the places where people grew up professionally and found parts of themselves. I worked for two of them.

Now retired.
Absorbed.
Erased like a line item on a balance sheet.

We can call it restructuring, consolidation, efficiency.
But if we’re honest, it feels like a funeral.

Behind every acronym were decades of work, late-night breakthroughs, creative wars, impossible deadlines, department feuds, inside jokes, culture.
People built their identity inside these networks.
Walking into those offices meant entering a world with its own grammar, its own gravity.

When names like that disappears, something inside the industry goes quiet.

But this moment isn’t just emotional.
It is structural.
It is the kind of shift that marks the end of one logic and the beginning of another.

The old logic said creativity was the engine.
That ideas were the center of gravity.
That networks were empires, and talent was the currency.

The new logic doesn’t care about empires.
It cares about infrastructure.

What’s emerging now is something closer to an operating system than an agency model.
A machine where creative, media, data, production, commerce, identity, and AI all run through one spine.
Seamless.
Global.
Faster than any culture team can match.

In this world, creativity isn’t the engine.
It’s a module.
Plug-in, plug-out.
Optimised, measured, automated.

That’s the shift no one wants to name and while we debate punctuation, tone, or whether someone wrote something with AI, thousands of people are losing the work identities they spent years building.

Ten thousand roles gone in a year.
Ten thousand careers disrupted.
Ten thousand people caught between nostalgia and a future they didn’t ask for.

We don’t have the emotional vocabulary for these moments.
When a place you belonged to vanishes, it doesn’t feel like a corporate update.
It feels like something personal has gone missing.

The emails stop.
The Slack channels disappear.
The logo is replaced, and something in your chest recognises the loss long before the industry does.

But buried under the grief is another truth:
Something enormous is being born.

A new species of holding company.
AI-native.
Infrastructure-first.
Powered by identity data, automated workflows, and decision engines that move faster than any human team.

This isn’t the future we were promised.
But it’s the future that’s arriving and the question is no longer whether creativity survives.It’s where creativity migrates.

Because it will migrate.
It always does.
It moves toward whoever can actually hold it.
Sometimes that’s a network.
More often, it’s the people who still believe in ideas that move culture rather than dashboards.

The next creative frontier might not happen under giant acronyms at all.
It might take shape in independents, micro-studios, small tribes, hybrid teams that refuse to let automation swallow imagination.

This moment is the hinge.
On one side, memory.
On the other, machinery and all of us stand in the middle, trying to make sense of what disappeared and what wants to emerge.

What matters now isn’t just the obituary of what we lost.
What matters is who has the courage to build what comes next.

We didn’t just lose networks.
We lost a chapter of ourselves.
Now the work begins: writing the next one.

Image via @adweek