Geography Is Not Destiny

Geography has often been treated as a proxy for credibility.

Certain postcodes have become shorthand for ambition, sophistication and influence. Certain cities have accumulated the institutions, capital, networks and talent that make them appear almost inevitable as centres of serious business. Mayfair. Manhattan. Washington. Geneva. Singapore.

If you wanted to build an organisation of consequence, the conventional wisdom was simple: go where the consequence already exists.

There is logic to that thinking. Proximity matters, networks matter, access matters, capital tends to cluster, expertise tends to cluster, institutions tend to cluster. The people who make decisions often congregate in the same places, creating ecosystems that reinforce themselves over generations.

There is a problem with confusing proximity to power with possession of it.

Geography is not destiny.

For an increasingly connected, increasingly decentralised global economy, the assumption that exceptional strategic capability must emerge from traditional centres of influence is becoming increasingly difficult to defend.

I know this because I am building a firm that was never supposed to fit that assumption, Marriott Communications was founded in Sunderland.

Not London. Not New York. Not one of the established capitals of global consultancy or corporate influence.

Sunderland.

That was never an accident, and it was never intended to be a limitation. The ambition was always to build an independent firm with the intellectual ambition, commercial sophistication and international outlook to work beyond the geography in which it was founded, and it is this distinction that matters.

There is a tendency to romanticise regional entrepreneurship as though the achievement lies simply in building something outside London, but I don’t think that’s the point.

The objective is not to build something good for a regional firm, the objective is to build something that is simply good.

Something that can stand on its thinking, something that can compete on judgement, expertise, creativity, strategic capability and results rather than a postcode.

The real question is not where an organisation is based, the real question is what it knows, who it can reach, how it thinks and what it can influence.

Business has spent decades assigning an implicit premium to proximity.

A headquarters in a recognised financial centre signals scale, an office in a global capital signals access, and a prestigious address creates an immediate association with credibility before a single conversation has taken place.

There is nothing inherently wrong with this. Perception matters and signalling matters. In many industries, being physically close to clients, investors, policymakers, institutions and talent creates genuine commercial advantage.

The world has changed faster than many of our assumptions about it.

A strategic adviser can sit in Sunderland and brief a client in Washington, or a technology company can be founded in Newcastle and sell globally. An investment firm can identify opportunities across continents without maintaining a physical presence in every market, and a specialist team can assemble expertise across five countries before its competitors have finished scheduling a meeting.

Information travels instantly, capital travels quickly, talent is increasingly distributed, and relationships are no longer constrained by the radius of a boardroom. Yet institutional prestige often remains geographically concentrated.

This creates an interesting contradiction, where we have built an economy in which capability can be distributed globally while continuing to judge capability through the lens of where it is concentrated physically. That is increasingly inefficient.

For sophisticated organisations, the question should not be whether an adviser sits within a particular postcode. It should be whether that adviser can understand the environment in which the organisation operates, identify what matters within it, challenge assumptions, connect disparate signals and provide counsel that changes the quality of a decision.

That is a very different proposition.

The traditional map of influence was relatively straightforward.

Power sat in capitals, business sat in financial centres, institutions sat in established cities, and expertise followed them.

The contemporary map is considerably more complicated.

A policy decision made in Brussels can alter the strategy of a company headquartered in California. A conflict thousands of miles away can reshape energy prices in Europe. A regulatory development in Washington can affect technology businesses operating across Asia. A cultural movement emerging from a city that few corporate leaders could locate on a map can influence consumer behaviour globally.

Influence increasingly moves through networks rather than through places, that does not mean geography has become irrelevant, it means geography has become one variable among many.

The most strategically valuable perspective may not always come from someone sitting closest to the institution making the decision. Sometimes it comes from someone who can see the institution, the market, the political environment and the wider system simultaneously.

Distance can create perspective.

A firm outside the traditional centres of influence can sometimes see patterns that become invisible to organisations operating entirely within them, that is not an argument for provincialism, it is, however, an argument for perspective.

For businesses built in regions such as the North East of England, this distinction carries particular weight.

The region has spent decades wrestling with an uncomfortable perception: that ambition has to be exported before it can be recognised - talent leaves, businesses relocate, headquarters gravitate elsewhere.

Young entrepreneurs are encouraged, explicitly or implicitly, to look South if they want to build something significant, and the result is a self-reinforcing cycle.

If the most ambitious people leave, the ecosystem loses ambition. If the ecosystem loses ambition, fewer ambitious businesses are built. If fewer ambitious businesses are built, the assumption that serious businesses cannot emerge there becomes easier to maintain.

At some point, someone has to break the cycle, and I believe independent businesses can be a part of doing that.

Not by pretending the North East is London, it isn’t, and nor should it be.

The region has its own industrial history, commercial strengths, cultural identity, institutions, talent and opportunities. Its future should not depend upon becoming a replica of somewhere else.

The ambition should be to build organisations that can operate from here and beyond here.

When I think about the future of Marriott Communications, I am not particularly interested in proving that a Sunderland-based firm can become a larger Sunderland-based firm.

The more interesting ambition is to prove that a globally minded advisory firm can be built from Sunderland in the first place, and that means developing capability that travels, intelligence that can be applied across markets, strategic counsel that is relevant to boards regardless of where they are headquartered, an understanding of reputation that extends beyond media relations into organisational risk, an understanding of influence that encompasses public affairs, institutions, stakeholders and geopolitical realities, a network that is international even when the headquarters is not, and a standard of thinking that does not become smaller simply because the postcode is different.

That is the distinction between regional ambition and globally relevant ambition.

Regional ambition asks how far a business can grow within its geography, global ambition asks what the business can contribute beyond it.

The latter is what interests me.

There is a broader lesson here for the organisations that consume advisory services.

The largest businesses in the world increasingly operate across jurisdictions, cultures, regulatory environments and political systems, and their problems rarely belong neatly to one geography.

Yet organisations can still fall into the trap of buying proximity rather than perspective, wherein they choose advisers because they are familiar, they have the right address, they are already in the room, and everyone else uses them.

Those are understandable procurement decisions, but they are not necessarily strategic ones.

The most valuable adviser is not always the person who has spent the longest time inside the established ecosystem, sometimes it is the person who has enough distance from that ecosystem to question its assumptions. Sometimes it is the independent firm whose size gives its senior people proximity to the problem rather than layers of account management, or it is the adviser who can connect politics, reputation, intelligence, communications and commercial strategy when traditional professional silos cannot.

The point is not that smaller or regional firms are inherently better, they are not.

The point is that geography is a poor substitute for judgement, and sophisticated organisations should know the difference.

There is another reason this matters.

Artificial intelligence is accelerating the decentralisation of knowledge. Expertise that once required physical proximity to particular institutions can increasingly be accessed, analysed and shared remotely. Teams can collaborate across borders in real time, data can be interpreted from anywhere, intelligence can be assembled from multiple markets simultaneously.

At the same time, the premium on human judgement is increasing.

When information becomes abundant, interpretation becomes valuable; when access becomes easier, discernment becomes more important; when everyone can produce something, the distinction becomes who knows what should be produced, why it matters and what consequences it may create.

That is precisely where advisory firms have to earn their place.

The future does not belong exclusively to the organisations closest to power, it belongs to the organisations capable of understanding power.

There is a temptation, particularly for entrepreneurs outside established centres, to spend too much time proving that they belong.

I have come to believe that this is the wrong objective. The objective is not to persuade someone that Sunderland deserves to sit alongside London. The objective is to build something whose quality makes the comparison less relevant.

That is a much harder task, it requires discipline, it requires resisting the temptation to use geography as either an excuse or a marketing device, it requires building capability before claiming scale, it requires developing relationships beyond the immediate ecosystem, and it requires understanding that international ambition is not created by putting the word “global” on a website. It is created through the quality of the work, the sophistication of the thinking, the strength of the network and the ability to operate credibly across different environments.

It also requires patience, because institutions are rarely disrupted by a single announcement, they are disrupted by accumulated evidence. One client, one relationship, one piece of work, one international conversation, one decision made differently, one firm that refuses to accept that its postcode should define the ceiling above it.

Looking back at the development of Marriott Communications, I no longer see the decision to build the firm in Sunderland as where the business began, I see it as evidence.

Evidence that globally ambitious advisory firms do not have to emerge from Mayfair or Manhattan, that strategic counsel can be built outside traditional centres of influence, that expertise does not become less valuable because it originates somewhere unexpected.

Perhaps most importantly, evidence that geography should never become destiny.

The world does not need every ambitious organisation to move to the same cities, it needs ambitious organisations to build where they are, think beyond where they are, and create enough value that the world has to pay attention.

The next generation of influential firms may not all come from the places we have historically been taught to look, some will emerge from established centres, others will emerge from places that have spent decades being told that serious ambition belongs elsewhere.

The difference will not ultimately be the postcode, it will be the thinking; and that is a far more interesting future.