john st. turns 25 soon.
Here's the only thing i'm certain of.
john st., the agency my partners and I started, turns 25 this July.
I haven't been there in a few years. Neither have the other four people who founded it. But I think about it often, not with nostalgia exactly. More with a sense of amazement. Partly about how much has changed but mostly about how much has not.
In 25 years, advertising has been through substantial upheaval. The arrival of cloud-based digital. Social. Programmatic. Mobile. AI. Every year brought a new revolution predicting the “end of advertising.”
And yet.
When I look at what genuinely made john st. work for two and a half decades, none of it was the technology. Or the service offering. Or “moving at the speed of culture” or any of the other tropes many agencies rely on to define themselves. Not even the work itself, as proud as I am of all of it.
As trite as it may sound, it was the people.
john st. was built on a founder culture. Five great partners (and friends) who in turn hired like-minded people.
We didn't set out to prove a theory. We just happened to build something that, years later, I recognized as a textbook example of what the American entrepreneur Jim Rohn called the Rule of Five: you are the average or in our case, the sum total, of the five people you spend the most time with.
The theory, briefly
Rohn's observation wasn't just motivational folklore. David McClelland at Harvard found that your "reference group," the people you habitually associate with, determines up to 95 per cent of your success or failure. The determining factor wasn't intelligence, strategy or market position. It was the people in your room.
Organizational scientists later formalized this as Upper Echelons Theory: the strategic choices and performance outcomes of any organization are a direct reflection of the values and capabilities of its leadership team.
Your company is, quite literally, the average of the people running it.
The five of us
What made the five of us work wasn't that we were alike. We weren't.
Angus and Stephen ran the creative department but approached it completely differently. Angus from language, logic, wit, the perfect line. Stephen from concept, design, feeling, visual perfection. Emily took strategy to a high art form, seeking the why behind the what, and never afraid to sell new thinking. Jane brought functional discipline, steadiness and commercial intelligence that made the whole thing a well-oiled machine. And I ran the business: the relationships, the growth, the decisions that weren't creative but mattered just as much.
Five distinct spirit animals. Five different worldviews. One shared standard for excellence and uniqueness.
A 2024 meta-analysis confirmed that leadership team diversity has a statistically significant impact on corporate performance, particularly in creative and innovation-driven sectors. Too much similarity in a leadership team creates what researchers call a "normative ceiling," a shared blind spot that limits how high the organization can go.
We didn't have that problem. We debated plenty, but then had a system for decision-making and action. And that turned out to be the point.
What's changed and what hasn't
There's no shortage of things to talk about in marketing right now.
AI as devil or a saviour. Measurement is folly or wisdom. The plethora of data and dearth of insight. Talk vs. action, The need to prove ROI before it’s all too late.
All of it matters. None of it changes this:
Your business will go exactly as far as the people around you can take it.
I've spent the years since john st. running organizations and advising leaders who are stuck, not because they lack strategy or the right tools, but because they haven't thought seriously about the composition of their inner circle. The people they've promoted. The advisors they've retained. The voices brought into the room when the hard decisions get made.
The Rule of Five isn’t a panacea, but can be an organizational design principle. And most leaders have never applied it intentionally.
A question worth chewing on.
Who are your five?
You don’t necessarily need to like them best (although in my case that certainly helped). They’re not necessarily the five most senior people in your organization. They are the five who can shape how you think, challenge how you behave and raise the ceiling on what you think is possible.
If you don't have a fast, clear answer, that's the work.
If you're wrestling with the composition of your team, your board or your advisory circle, I'd love to hear from you. It's exactly what Sense.Maker is built for.
Drop me a line: arthur@sensemaker.ca