It was supposed to be my sellout moment. After 20 years as a journalist, a job for which I regularly took home more satisfaction than income, I was ready for the less stressful, more lucrative life of an editorial consultant, ghostwriter or whatever you call the invisible army of ex-reporters who anonymously help brands and business leaders produce the content that most writers don’t want to take credit for anyway. 

For the most part, I got what I expected. Media forecasts so dense with jargon not even intelligibility could escape. Thought leadership columns about the value of diversity from CEOs who insisted that POC could mean only proof of concept. Decarbonization reports for massive global organizations designed to silence environmentalists for another year by weaponizing their own language against them. 

Unsurprisingly, this new gig had me feeling a bit cynical. Given the opportunity to speak directly to consumers, unfiltered by skeptical news media or the confines of paid advertising, most companies were choosing either to bore them with buzzwords or mollify them with insincerity. 

Then Alain Sylvain reached out. Alain and I had met in 2015, when I was editor-in-chief of an advertising trade magazine, and he was founder and CEO of a young but thriving strategy and innovation consultancy. We hadn’t spoken in about five years when he emailed me with an unusual proposition: He wanted me to help his company, Sylvain, write an impact report. 

My cynicism alarm went off immediately. In the for-profit world, big brands typically used impact reports to ensure socially conscious customers and ESG investors that they were minimizing negative impacts on the world. Other than ego or marketing, what possible reason could a small consultancy with 50 employees, no physical product or supply chain to speak of and a carbon footprint the size of a rabbit’s foot have to produce an impact report?

Imagine my surprise when I discovered the truth: Alain was sincerely conflicted about the impact that his company, and the consulting industry, were having on the world. As his own success grew—and the industry’s complicit role in the opioid epidemic, job insecurity and other social plagues became clear—Alain grew increasingly obsessed with making sure his own company was, to quote its mission statement, “leveraging the might of corporations to serve the greater good.” Maybe it was being the son of immigrants or a fellow member of Gen X—the last generation to internalize the concept of selling out—but Alain seemed genuinely fearful of trading his idealism for profits, of losing touch with his soul in his pursuit of corporate success.

It was the same attitude he brought to Sylvain’s vast catalog of content. I can count on one hand, with fingers left over, the number of clients who have given me the note “more poetry here!” over the years. Or “this sounds too corporate.” But I would need several more hands to count all the times I’ve gotten such notes from Alain. He wanted his company’s content to sing, to provoke and uplift his audience through sincerity, wit and surprising turns of phrase. 

Such was Alain’s faith in the power of language that his company produced more content in the form of reports, podcasts, newsletters and presentations than many consultancies twice the size. Alain himself became well known for his entertaining and thought-provoking talks at tech and innovation conferences around the world. Though the lion’s share of this content was never designed to directly generate revenue, Alain never stopped investing in it or trying to make it better—not by corporate standards, but by the standards of everyday, human readers. 

Over lunch last January, I suggested to Alain that maybe Sylvain produced more content than was absolutely necessary. He didn’t disagree, but he also listed the many ways his company directly benefited from the attention and engagement generated by all that high-quality content—including Kyu’s purchase of a majority stake in Sylvain in 2022. After that, the conversation faded amid the excitement of an ambitious new writing project that, sadly, we will never finish. 

In the weeks since Alain’s death at 47 years old, I have struggled to articulate the reason I feel such profound loss. It sounds crass to say a man’s passing deprived me of a really good client. But Alain was a genuine pleasure to write for. Plenty of business leaders today believe in the power of content, but few understand what makes it powerful. Alain was never afraid to mix business and poetry, which made him a success and a blessing of a client. I lost a man who inspired me to turn away from cynicism, and I’m not sure I ever gave him credit.