Your decisions about allocating your personal time, energy, and talent ultimately shape your life’s strategy.

—Clay Christensen

Everything was just a wild guess. And it takes a while to get confident that you’re guessing pretty good.

—Jerry Seinfeld

Paul Buchheit:

My strategy can be reduced to two rules: 1) Find a way to make it fun and 2) If that fails, find a way to do something else.

Mine too.

I really like this idea of method designing. As I work on a project I find myself “getting into character” to fully understand and tackle the client’s needs. 

a way of ‘getting into character’ that consciously and subconsciously informs the design process (…) writing, curating, and doing strategic work. All these activities require the ability to process vast amounts of data (often media) fairly rapidly and synthesise into some new form

I love the amount of detail, thought, and planning that goes into something as (what seems) trivial as uniform design. The Oregon Ducks uniforms in the National Championship game were designed with speed in mind. Remember, the entire football program is designed around speed so why not make them appear faster with colors on their shins and a custom font to make the shoulders appear wider?

From the designers of the Ace Hotel in New York comes this blurb about design.

A hotel shouldn’t be about marketing. It’s the collection of a particular way of thinking, of curating, of comfort and escape. To create that, we try to find objects and ideas which are familiar yet idiosyncratic. It always come down to what’s personal.

Chip Kelly is the new Mike Leatch. Kelly runs a high-speed offense at Oregon and is rethinking the game a bit with his strategy. In some cases his approach is similar to Phil Jackson and how he lets his players find the flow and tempo of the game.

But in more traditional settings, what slows things down is the impulse of coaches to stop the action and be heard. To instruct and correct. Coaches­, after all, get into the business because they love a sport and want to see it played right. They have limited control during a game. Practice is when they can stop time and choreograph perfection. (…) It doesn’t happen at Oregon. Coaches sometimes pull players from the field for quick talks, but first they send in substitutes, and the plays keep on rolling. They look back at the films from each practice — identify mistakes — and then point them out in early-evening players’ meetings, which are also short.

London’s Mayor outlines his Culture Metropolis plan. PSFK has the quick hits of the plan (original here). I’d like to see all cities should put this paragraph about creativity and innovation in their plans.

The history of London shows that investment in ideas pays off in the long-term, not just for the city, or the country, but the entire world. This investment comes from a mixture of private and public sources, and we need both to continue. We should never be in a position where Londoners fear that it is too costly to have creative ideas. It is these ideas that bring prosperity, and this is not a time to be lowering our ambitions. London’s arts and cultural organisations already do a great job at fundraising, but they can’t be expected to defy the laws of economic gravity in a prolonged downturn and in the face of necessary austerity measures.  Creative thinking and innovation is vitally important to the health and wealth of this great city and that is exactly why I am advocating through my Cultural Strategy that continued support and investment in the creative economy is crucial to sustaining the wellbeing of London and the nation.

Too often I think an approach to defining strategy is all-inclusive. Usually it takes a definition of strategy and then people/systems to follow. As I was reading this article on Jurgen Klinsmann and his brief flirtation with the US Soccer team, I was struck by his thoughts on defining the US Soccer brand of play.

You just have to go ahead and define it and say: ‘This is what we are going to build. Do you buy into it?’ You won’t get everybody being on board. You will lose probably 20 or 30 percent on the way. And then you have to tell players or even staff people: ‘You have to move on. I have to get other people on board who believe in this system, who believe in this style of play.’

I believe this mentality to branding/strategy is one of the smarter approaches, but is used less frequently as there’s a large (and, many times, wasteful) effort to “gather consensus.”

the learning school also argues that virtually no strategy ever works as originally planned. The point, they say, is for the company to set off in one direction, learn from the response it gets from markets and competitors, and then adjust accordingly.

That’s from Ben Casnocha who is quoting The Lords of Strategy by Walter Kiechel.