Martyn Rhisiart Jones

Madrid, 24th January 2026

Introduction

These are five common goodstrat laws that everyone should be aware of.

“Martyn Rhisiart Jones… Writes dry, merciless takedowns of data/AI/strategy hype at goodstrat.com.

Believes most corporate decks deserve the bin and most buzzwords deserve worse.

Occasionally drops canon: the Martyn Rhisiart Jones Effect, GoodStrat Law, Celtic Domination Principle, Georgie Lovering Razor, Valley Commando Principle…

Mostly here to remind everyone that clarity still cuts deeper than PowerPoint.”

The Martyn Rhisiart Jones Effect

The phenomenon whereby prolonged exposure to unvarnished, hype-resistant commentary on data / AI / strategy causes readers to:

• Gradually lose tolerance for vague buzzword salad

• Start demanding actual evidence, outcomes and mechanics instead of slide-deck poetry

• Experience mild but permanent irritation when people say “synergistic AI-driven transformation” with a straight face

The GoodStrat Law

The GoodStrat Law is the First Law of Thermodynamics version for bullshit in organisations:

• Bullshit cannot be created or destroyed, it can only be transformed or relocated.
• When a company finally admits the lakehouse / data mesh / citizen-AI / GenAI-agent-swarms initiative is not delivering → the bullshit doesn’t vanish.
  It simply shape-shifts and reappears somewhere else: rebranded as “responsible AI governance framework phase 2”, or “agentic retrieval orchestration platform”, or quietly migrated into next year’s OKRs under “foundational data culture enablement”.
• When leadership kills one sacred-cow project after a $14M proof-of-concept death march → the political energy, vendor promises, and internal champions don’t evaporate.
  They metastasise into the next deck, the next RFP, the next “strategic imperative” town-hall slide titled “Unlocking Value in a Post-LLM World™”.
• Corollary (GoodStrat’s Zeroth Amendment): The total volume of organisational bullshit remains roughly constant unless massive external force is applied (e.g. Chapter 11, activist investor, new CEO who actually reads balance sheets, or, rarely , a board that fires people for failure instead of promoting them).
• In practice this means:
• Every time you see a vendor webinar titled “Why [Previous Hype Thing] Failed & How [New Hype Thing] Fixes It Forever”, you’re watching a perfect, closed-cycle bullshit transformation event.
• Every time an exec says “we’re doubling down on X after learning from Y”, what they actually mean is “we spent a fortune on Y, got nothing, and now need to justify spending another fortune on X so nobody asks awkward questions about Y”.
• It’s conservation of organisational delusion. No energy (budget/headcount/attention) is ever truly lost — it’s merely conserved in ever more creative forms of vapourware, deckware, and hopeware.

So next time your feed lights up with “The Death of [2025 Buzzword]” followed immediately by “The Rise of [2026 Buzzword]”, just nod sagely and mutter:”Ah yes… GoodStrat’s Law in action. The bullshit abideth forever.”

The Celtic Domination Principle

The Celtic Domination Principle is the distilled, battle-hardened ethos that turns underdog defiance into asymmetric victory, whether on ancient battlefields, modern comment threads, or corporate strategy decks. It’s not about having the biggest army, budget, or follower count. It’s about making your presence so viscerally unavoidable and your point so lethally memorable that the opposition ends up fighting ghosts of your words long after you’ve logged off.Core formulation (tongue still in cheek, but the edge is real):

“Dominate not by overwhelming force, but by refusing to be dismissible.”

In operational terms, it breaks down like this:

1. Clarity as a Weapon
   Say the uncomfortable truth in language so plain and barbed that people can’t un-hear it or safely paraphrase it into corporate mush. No hedging, no “synergies may include”, no passive voice. When they try to soften your sentence in the reply-all, it just highlights how much sharper yours was.
2. Cultural Stubbornness as Multiplier
   Lean into the inherited refusal to code-switch into polite beige. The principle draws power from the historical fact that Celtic societies never really bought the Roman/English/corporate “civilise yourself or perish” memo. You don’t assimilate, you make assimilation feel like surrender. Result: your critics start sounding like they’re arguing with an entire lineage.
3. The One-Liner Killshot
   A single, perfectly aimed sentence can collapse an entire 47-slide narrative. Example archetype: vendor tweets some AI-hype gospel → you reply with 18 words that make their whole thread feel like it was ghostwritten by a committee of buzzword generators. They delete, mute, or quote-tweet in rage, all of which counts as domination.
4. Recursive Infection
   Victory is sealed when your phrases start appearing in enemy mouths without attribution. “This is classic [your vibe] nonsense” becomes their shorthand for “I have no real counter but I need to signal disdain”. At that point, you’ve colonised their mental vocabulary. Full spectrum dominance achieved.
5. The Long Game Asymmetry
   They bring quarterly OKRs and vendor-funded webinars. You bring ancestral spite calibrated over centuries, plus the ability to wait. Bullshit has half-lives; a good Celtic one-liner is effectively immortal. Their hype cycle ends; your irritation endures.

Manifestations in the wild:

• Turning “data mesh” into a punchline that lingers years later.
• Making execs hesitate before typing “transformation” because they know someone will think of you and smirk.
• Watching critics adopt your framing (“that’s just more GoodStrat-adjacent contrarianism”) as an unwitting admission that the meme has spread.

It’s less a principle than a blood memory: the dragon doesn’t need to roar if staring unblinking is enough to make the other side blink first.

So when the next lakehouse evangelist drops a thread of 12 indisputable benefits, just remember:Celtic Domination isn’t won in the first exchange. It’s won when they quote you in anger six months later, and still can’t shake the feeling they lost.

The Georgie Lovering Razor

The Georgie Lovering Razor is the merciless, no-nonsense heuristic for slicing through performative moral posturing, selective outrage, and virtue-signalling bullshit in data, strategy, politics, or any discourse where people clutch pearls for clout rather than principle.

Core formulation: “If the horror only becomes visible when the victims don’t match your preferred geopolitical aesthetic, then the horror was never the point, the team jersey was.

“Or, in shorter, sharper form:”

Outrage is only sincere when it’s applied symmetrically. Anything less is just fandom with extra steps.”How it cuts in practice:

• A thread screams about civilian casualties in one conflict → silence or excuses on identical (or worse) casualties in another. Razor applied: the moral injury is conditional on who did it / who suffered it. Discard the post as noise.
• Company proclaims “we’re committed to ethical AI / diversity / sustainability” → but only when the PR camera is rolling, or only against easy targets. Razor: the commitment is cosmetic; real ethics don’t come with selective toggles.
• Survey shock-horror about “X% don’t know Fact Y” framed as proof of national moral degeneracy → but the same sloppy recall in allied countries gets a polite pass. Razor: it’s not about historical literacy; it’s about weaponising ignorance to smear the out-group.
• Leadership “stands against hate” after one incident → but crickets on others that hit closer to home or inconvenience allies. Razor: solidarity is conditional; the principle is negotiable.

The Razor doesn’t deny real atrocities or asymmetries in scale/power. It simply demands consistency: if your moral battery only charges for certain flags, certain victims, or certain headlines, then you’re not operating on ethics, you’re operating on tribal aesthetics. Georgie Lovering (whoever she may be in the lore, perhaps a fictional sharp-tongued auntie who called out double standards over tea) would have none of it.

Apply it liberally:

• When the next viral “how can they support X?” post drops, ask: Do they support equivalent Y when the sides are flipped? If no → straight razor to the thread. Into the bin with the hypocrisy.

It’s the anti-pearl-clutch Occam’s Razor: the simplest explanation for inconsistent outrage is not sudden moral awakening, it’s just cheerleading dressed in ethical clothing.So next time someone wails selectively about evil / ignorance / suffering, whisper: “Georgie Lovering Razor says: check the jersey. If it only fits one team, it’s not morality, it’s merchandise.”Canon updated. The blade stays sharp

The Valley Commando Principle

The Valley Commando Principle: “Move fast and break things, but only if you can rebrand the breakage as ‘disruption for good’. Otherwise, pivot to ‘sustainable positive impact’ and post a reflective Medium essay.

Key tactics:

• Hoodie = moral immunity
• Ship extractive → unicorn → backlash → “foundation” announcement → virtue rinse → repeat
• Scale beats ethics until regulators arrive, then “we’re listening™”
• Founder redemption arc: ship mess → confess growth → emerge heroic
• When it implodes: “new chapter focused on long-term value creation” (code for “we’re out of runway but still the protagonists”)

In short: Break boldly, apologise performatively, reframe relentlessly, never stop being the hero of your own story.Valley Commando doctrine: They’re not conquering, they’re just aggressively “helping” the world help itself. …..

Summary

• Martyn Rhisiart Jones Effect
  Prolonged exposure to your no-BS commentary builds permanent immunity to buzzwords, slide-deck poetry, and “synergistic AI transformation” nonsense, leaving people irritated by corporate fluff forever.
• GoodStrat Law
  Organisational bullshit is conserved: it cannot be destroyed, only transformed or relocated. Kill one hype initiative → it reappears rebranded as “phase 2 governance” or the next vendor RFP. Total volume stays roughly constant.
• Celtic Domination Principle
  Dominate asymmetrically by refusing to be dismissible. Weaponise brutal clarity, cultural stubbornness, and lethal one-liners so sharp that opponents quote you in rage months later, you’ve won when your framing infects their vocabulary.
• Georgie Lovering Razor
  Outrage is only sincere when applied symmetrically. If horror/victim outrage flips depending on flags, jerseys, or geopolitics, it’s not ethics, it’s tribal fandom with extra steps. Slice away selective pearl-clutching.
• Valley Commando Principle
  Move fast and break things, but reframe breakage as “disruption for good.” Ship extractive → unicorn → backlash → virtue-pivot (“foundation”, Medium growth essay) → repeat. Hoodie = moral immunity; founder redemption arc always available. Break boldly, apologise performatively, stay the hero.

In one line: a toolkit for cutting through hype, hypocrisy, and performative disruption while refusing to play nice or code-switch into beige.

Apply liberally. The dragon doesn’t roar, it just refuses to blink.

Many thanks for reading.

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