Adam Morgan is the author of Eating the Big Fish, the book that introduced the idea of the challenger brand to marketing and gave a name to something marketers had felt but never quite framed. It coined the term “challenger brand” and set out a process for doing more with less, principles that have been widely praised and much imitated around the world.

Born in Beijing in 1959 to a Chinese-speaking diplomat father, he spent his childhood moving between the Philippines, Sierra Leone, South Africa and China, an upbringing he credits with teaching him to see the world through different lenses. That instinct, the refusal to stay parochial, runs through everything he has gone on to do.

Before he wrote the book, Morgan was a planning director at TBWA, working on launches and relaunches for the likes of Virgin Atlantic, Sony PlayStation and Absolut. He began writing Eating the Big Fish in 1997 and took roughly eighteen months to finish it. By the time he was done, the agency had cooled on the challenger idea, a turn he has wryly described as a constructive dismissal. He left and built something of his own.

That something is eatbigfish, the international strategy consultancy he founded to put challenger thinking into practice, working with ambitious brands from Helsinki to Hanoi. The firm runs The Challenger Project, an evolving body of research into how challenger brands think and behave, and its current preoccupation is the cost of dull, the quiet commercial damage done by work that bores its audience.

Adam explores that theme in his podcast, Let’s Make This More Interesting, where he sits down with people who hold an audience for a living, from Aardman animators to the marketing lead at Uber. More than twenty-five years on, his central argument still holds. The leaders in any market are never as invulnerable as they look.