Being my own Director: Matthew Hook

My story...after taking my own medicine

My name is Matthew Hook. I’m a strategist. And my professional mission is to help people to find strategic clarity.

When you are clear where you are going, you can achieve incredible things.

As organisations, as teams, as people.

Strategic clarity is the single best source of energy to push things forwards.

When I unlock it, it’s one of my favourite feelings in the world.

But all the time, work is becoming more complex; and clear, aligned thinking is getting harder and harder. That feeling of slow progress can be so frustrating.

I’ve been on a search for strategic clarity throughout my career. And I think I’m always getting better at it!

Chapter 1: The first 18 years of my working life were spent as a strategist and business leader in a big marketing services group, Dentsu, in the UK, US and globally. My work was incredibly diverse, but it boiled down to two things: providing the strategy to digitise massive brands, whilst also wrestling with the operational transformation of my own business. I learnt from experience how easy it is to disconnect the why and the what, from the how. I emerged with a passion to create real strategic clarity that works in the real world.

Chapter 2: For the last five years, I’ve been an independent strategic consultant at Hook Strategy, running collaborative sprints with both businesses and not-for-profits to clarify their strategies, and their stories. That’s given me great confidence in the power of focus. Confusion can build for years and years, accumulating wasted time and missed opportunities. With the right people, listened to properly, and a fast, focused process, people can find clarity quickly, together.

Chapter 3: Throughout that period, I’ve always wanted to spread that instinct for strategic clarity, to make it self-sustaining. That’s what’s brought me to LookUP, a business designed to help people and organisations to turn inspiration into action. To thrive, the world needs better, visions of the future, more unified communities, and more compelling stories. All those things depend on more people creating more clarity in more places. And I want to be a part of giving people the inspiration and frameworks to create clarity that is self-sustaining.

In summary: So that’s my mission – the search for strategic clarity.

Clarity that works in the real world.

Clarity that people can find quickly, together.

Clarity that is self-sustaining.

Hopefully I can help you to find the strategic clarity you need.

If this was the first thing you’ve read this month, what I am trying to do here is to Be the Director of my own story…and you can learn more about that here…

Behind the scenes: using the framework!

Like anyone who is reading this, I don’t always tell my story in the same way. But after many, many tries (particularly in the last month!) I’ve started to settle on something. Which is what you see above.

Because I’ve realised that whilst my audience is pretty wide, my core listener is most likely someone in a position of responsibility, who might need some kind of support in untangling a knotty problem.

So that’s who I am building for.

The framework I used to build my story for them is the StoryBoard.

Hopefully this description will give a sense of how it works - but if you want the proper walk through, you’ll need to sign up as a paid subscriber and read here…

Let’s get started!

My Point of Jeopardy

Every project I work on, every product I build, has a different outcome.

But they all come from a similar emotional tension. And emotional tensions build good jeopardy.

Knowing what you are doing, and getting it done, feels great. Confusion is a black hole that draws in effort, energy, motivation, resources.

I know that I know how to help people who feel that feeling. So that’s always where I start.

My Character

Strategy can feel ever-so-technical, and ever-so-sophisticated. My own writing and thinking can go that way, pretty often!

But that’s not what makes people buy into me, rather than another strategist or partner. So I need to be clear on my role.

Where I excel (when I excel) is because I am able to reduce things to the bottom line – but without making people feel like I am trampling all over them, or ignoring their expertise.

So, I try to write and speak as an ‘empathetic clarifier’ – simple, confident, experienced…but showing my desire to listen, and build a partnership.

Story Arc

This is one of the things I vary the most. But the two I generally settle for one of two: a quest for clarity, or killing the monster of confusion.

They are mirror images of each other, so it’s not hard to flex. In a public forum, or a new relationship, I probably tend to the quest. If I’m selling harder / later in the process, I might get more about killing the monster.

In both cases, I’ve really tried to distil three incredibly varied and divergent lives into one picture, with three chapters.

For me this is the hardest part of the exercise – personally I quite like long stories, and there’s a lot in each one of these chapters. But nowadays, it’s a rare person who wants to hear that in reality my 18-year career at Dentsu involved about 8 different brands, pretty much every marketing discipline there is, periods of feast and a frustrating period of famine…they want to know, quite reasonably: ‘why is that relevant to me’.

If you know me, I’d be interested to know what you think about how I’ve done it!

Editor’s Notes

Like lots of people at my stage of life, the reality of my life and my journey is much more complex, and much messier, than this neat little introductory story might suggest. One day maybe I’ll write the long version. But I’m trying to stay focused on what you might need to know.

There’s all kinds of things I’m really proud of, and would like to tell you more about, if we meet. You wouldn’t get from this that I’m really excited about playing music and writing songs; about writing, both fiction and non-fiction; about working with charities in the mental health and disability space; about philosophy, history and politics.

Hopefully none of those things would be massively surprising, or discordant with what you’ve read here.

I’ve also got some interesting autobiographical details, about my upbringing and education, some of the struggles I’ve overcome, some of the beliefs and values that have become entrenched as a result.

But whilst I’m happy to share some of those things with people I know well, they aren’t really part of my professional narrative. They involve other people, and I’d rather not speak on other people’s behalf, and to avoid that tangled knot I focus on what’s public.

The Director’s Cut

I’ve spent the last 5 years selling myself, through a brand that’s my name, so this wasn’t a fresh exercise for me.

And whilst my background may be very strategic/academic, my family background is much more sales and entrepreneurial, so whilst I may not be big into revealing my innermost turmoil, I’m actually pretty comfortable with the idea of selling my skills. (And if I still was, three years in America killed that off.)

What I’ve learnt this month is that it can always better, tighter, and clearer. Thinking it through more feels like it is both doing myself justice, and giving due respect to my audience, and their time.

Hopefully you feel the same too!

It’s been great to focus all month on StoryTelling for professional brands, helping people to stop, LookUP and think about how to Be the Director of their own story.

If you haven signed up yet, you can do so below…and if you haven’t signed up to the paid subscription, then take a look - you’ll get access to our library of Expert Interviews, a guided walk-through of our StoryBoard framework, and access to our live events.

Next month will see a deep-dive into the Future.

How can you turn your annual planning into a Big Reset?

The month will be packed with inspiration and helpful frameworks for action. We look forward to sharing it with you!