Book Brief: Be the Wayfinder
The Strategy-First Marketing Framework for Navigating Change
Brief Summary
Title: Be the Wayfinder: The Strategy-First Marketing Framework for Navigating Change
Author: Jeremy Harrison
Published: 2026 by River Grove Books
What it Teaches: Be the Wayfinder introduces the Wayfinder Framework, a process and a collection of tools built on four fundamentals that enables marketing practitioners and teams to become a strategic partner to business leaders.
When To Use It: While Be the Wayfinder is written by the owner of a marketing agency and is primarily written for marketing professionals, the lessons, tools, and approaches can be helpful to anyone seeking to provide strategic leadership.
Brief Review
The author of Be The Wayfinder kindly provided an advance reader’s copy of the book for my review.
A quarter of a century ago I was online editor and director of online business for Business Reform magazine. When I left that role, Jeremy Harrison stepped into my shoes. Over the next several years I enjoyed working with Jeremy for additional submissions I made to the magazine. A few years ago we reconnected again and I really enjoyed our conversation. Reading Be the Wayfinder further confirmed how similarly we are wired. Apparently Jeremy likes frameworks and tools as much as I do! Maybe that’s part of why I enjoyed this book so much.
Jeremy leads One Table Strategy, a marketing agency serving small to mid-sized businesses. In his business Jeremy has typically had two kinds of roles — strategists and craftspeople (my terms). The craftspeople are experts at what they do — copy writing, graphic design, etc. The strategists work with the clients to figure out how to apply those crafts to grow their business. The craftspeople work directly with clients, meeting their specific day-to-day needs under the long-term direction set with the strategists.
Recently, Jeremy has recognized a need to change that model. As AI and other factors have increased the level and rate of change, even in smaller businesses, those daily interactions between craftspeople and clients were becoming less about continued implementation along a set path and more about strategic issues challenging the status quo. Strategists were being brought into almost all client conversations. Even more significantly, AI tools were beginning to challenge the role and value of the craftspeople. If clients could use Nano Banana to create beautiful graphics and Claude to write compelling copy, why should they continue to pay for those services?
Out of that need for change, Jeremy and team developed the Wayfinder Framework. As he writes in the book’s introduction “In the age of AI, you become irreplaceable by mastering a new skill — guiding others through change.” He describes the job of the Wayfinder as “helping the organizations you serve adapt to constant change by facilitating the conversations where leaders see the problems, sort through the ideas, and prioritize what happens next.” I’ve never considered myself a “marketer”, but that describes what I’ve been doing for the past few decades. The disciplines of strategy and marketing are overlapping more and more all the time.
Specifically, Jeremy describes three levels of strategy: business strategy, marketing strategy, and content strategy. Each layer builds on the one before it. Unfortunately, the current dynamic environment is forcing business strategies to adapt more rapidly than most small to mid-sized business have ever had to manage. Without a sound business strategy, the marketing and content strategies will struggle to succeed. Since he defines the core of the business strategy as: what we sell, to whom, at what price, and how we differentiate, then the marketing strategists are well positioned to fill that gap.
The Wayfinder Framework has three main components:
- Four Fundamentals
- A Toolbox
- A Process
The core of the book is structured around the Four Fundamentals (with their corresponding tools) and the Process.
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The chapter introducing the four fundamentals starts with the four struggles that many companies are increasingly facing:
- Choppy Seas: In the midst of dramatic change, not everyone is rowing in the same direction.
- Overload: A small number of people are bearing most of the burden of keeping the business going.
- Reactive: Leaders feel the need to act quickly before they have time to figure out the best path forward.
- Flying Blind: Too often they make gut decisions because the needed data is not available.
The four fundamentals directly address each of these struggles and each relies on tools in the toolbox to make it systematic and repeatable:
- Focus (the first fundamental) gets everyone pulling in the same direction. The tool (One Table Focus) sets the business strategy.
- Team (fundamental #2) makes sure the right people are doing the right work. The tool is Nine Roles.
- Plan (#3) provides a clear, but adaptable, road map using a tool called The Wheel.
- Metrics (#4) provides visibility to Metrics That Matter (the corresponding tool).
The next four chapters walk through each of these fundamentals, teaching how to use the tools to help organizations and their leaders overcome the four struggles. Reading through these chapters, it was clear that many of these tools apply much more broadly than just to marketing. The questions asked in Focus are very similar to the questions I ask in my Six Questions book. The Nine Roles apply to almost any organization. Jeremy specifically points to Marketing and Sales metrics in the Metrics That Matter, but the same approach could be applied in any part of the business.
I know that, in addition to running One Table Strategy, Jeremy is also an EOS (Entrepreneurial Operating System) implementer, and the influence of EOS shows up several places in the Wayfinder Framework, but perhaps most directly in the Process covered in chapter 11 on meetings. EOS has two primary kinds of meetings, the Quarterly Meeting Pulse (setting direction) and the Weekly Meeting Pulse (dealing with issues). Jeremy calls these meetings The 90-Day Planning Meeting and The Team Huddle, but he adds a third kind of meeting — Big Issue Meetings, which perhaps echos the Ad Hoc Topical Meetings in Patrick Lencioni’s The Advantage model.
There’s more in the book, but hopefully that gives you a good view of the general landscape. The book closes with one chapter on what it takes to make the transition from a tactical craftsperson to a strategic Wayfinder, and another chapter with folks from Jeremy’s team telling their personal stories of making that transition.
Bottom Line
Be the Wayfinder is an enjoyable, well-written, and comprehensive guide to strategically leading organizations in our current disruptive age. It includes helpful tools, plenty of real-world small business stories, and a structured approach that is applicable well beyond marketing.
I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone working with leaders of small and mid-sized businesses.
