About

I have spent most of my life making true and boring things into stories that excite people, and also strategically showing why brands and leaders need to do this to build long term value and achieve their goals. I worked for the Wall Street Journal in Brussels, New York, London and Hong Kong from 2000 to 2010, a period that included Sept 11, the second digital boom and the global financial crisis. I learned that even the driest financial topic could be made interesting and that this was a moral act at a time when complex debt instruments and niche markets held the key to the political and personal fortunes of millions of people. They deserved to know what was happening as easily as possible.

At Google, I worked in Tokyo, Singapore and Mountain View as the Internet shifted to mobile, governments became skeptical of Big Tech and AI swallowed everything. As the speech writer for CEO Sundar Pichai, I saw how he could make the early leaps in AI seem urgent, important and human. In Asia, I saw how local journalists would ignore massive trends because they didn't fit the narratives their bosses cared about in HQ. Driving bigger, exciting narratives beyond Google that grabbed global attention became the easiest path to landing the stories we wanted to tell. In my last years at Google, I set up the Asia division of Google's first comms insights practice, which used new ways of recording long-term narrative shifts and mapping them to our comms efforts. These were far more efficient than standard marketing, comms coverage reports and political metrics for crisis decision making and long term success. I now consult on high-impact storytelling and narrative work for global brands and coach leaders to be clear and authentic for their teams, for their stakeholders and, most importantly, for themselves.

Experience

Robin grew up in the UK, before studying in the US for undergraduate and graduate school. He entered the Wall Street Journal in 2000 and rose to Assistant Managing Editor of the Wall Street Journal Europe by 2010. At Google, he worked as a speech writer and did executive comms for regional leads and the CEO, while also managing Google's Asia narrative in the international media. He wrote the talking and messaging for landmark moments like Lee Sedol’s Go match with AlphaGo in 2015 and Sundar Pichai’s I/O keynote in 2016 introducing the underpinnings of Google's AI transformation. In 2018, he ran operations and measurement for Google's Asia comms, creating new metrics that clarified strategic goals. He now lives in Madrid, teaches at the IESE business school in Barcelona and Madrid, and consults on executive comms and comms strategy for tech startups and global brands.