In Berlin there are a few wine bars operated on the honor system. Sounds like my kind of place, and something I’d like to incorporate with currentblend [coffee].

For the price of 1 euro (about $1.50), you rent yourself a glass and get to sample as many of the wines as you want. At the end of the night you throw some bills or coins into a big jar, the amount based on what you think is fair.

Mike Arauz knows digital strategy. Here’s an old excerpt I’ve had bookmarked for a while that I finally got around to re-reading. I’m posting the parts I want myself (and my clients) to remember.

Digital strategy should be a continuous and iterative process, informed by a steady flow of measurement and used to guide tactical adjustments in pursuit of the client’s primary online objective.

This thought was taken from Gavin Heaton’s two excellent posts last week about digital strategy.

Continuous Digital Strategy

Strategy is an ever-evolving process which is revisited across the lifecycle of any project. …each of these steps are to be touched on in rapid iteration in the planning, execution/implementation and evaluation phases of any project.

Strategy Drives Decisions

It is easy to think that once you have set your strategy, that a button is flicked and that the focus switches to execution/implementation. But this is rarely the case….The are always, always, competing priorities – and what may appear to be strategically necessary one day will be out of favour the next. This is frustrating, time consuming and expensive for all involved. The opportunity, however, is to focus on a flexible approach to strategy – and this means using strategy not as a way of aligning messaging or building a campaign or a brand. It means using strategy to drive decisions.

Via Ben Casnocha’s Delicious links, I found this article on Understanding your Muscles. The main concept of the article is about how research is showing that your body isn’t 600 individual muscles that you should train, but that the body is one large muscle with the fascia having more involvement than previously thought.

One of the concepts touched on in the article is this “do the little things right to have big results” theories I like so well.

They’re all part of his blast off the paint, not as coincidence, but as tiny adjustments that make a big difference in overall performance.

Additionally, there’s some thought surrounding what the definition of fit is. I think I agree.

…more important, the little nipper is limber, balanced, and able to match impulse with action. “You are fit if you can adapt to the demands of your environment with ease and imagination”

Time to rethink/re-strategize my workouts…

Malcom Gladwell delves into how underdogs can better compete with the favorites. While an interesting read, I pulled a couple selections that emphasize strategies that are based on very simple goals while remove all pre-existing notions and re-thinking the way things should be(have).

Ranadivé views this move from batch to real time as a sort of holy mission. The shift, to his mind, is one of kind, not just of degree. “We’ve been working with some airlines,” he said. “You know, when you get on a plane and your bag doesn’t, they actually know right away that it’s not there. But no one tells you, and a big part of that is that they don’t have all their information in one place. There are passenger systems that know where the passenger is. There are aircraft and maintenance systems that track where the plane is and what kind of shape it’s in. Then, there are baggage systems and ticketing systems—and they’re all separate. So you land, you wait at the baggage terminal, and it doesn’t show up.” Everything bad that happens in that scenario, Ranadivé maintains, happens because of the lag between the event (the luggage doesn’t make it onto the plane) and the response (the airline tells you that your luggage didn’t make the plane). The lag is why you’re angry. The lag is why you had to wait, fruitlessly, at baggage claim. The lag is why you vow never to fly that airline again. Put all the databases together, and there’s no lag. “What we can do is send you a text message the moment we know your bag didn’t make it,” Ranadivé said, “telling you we’ll ship it to your house.”

A few years ago, Ranadivé wrote a paper arguing that even the Federal Reserve ought to make its decisions in real time—not once every month or two. “Everything in the world is now real time,” he said. “So when a certain type of shoe isn’t selling at your corner shop, it’s not six months before the guy in China finds out. It’s almost instantaneous, thanks to my software. The world runs in real time, but government runs in batch. Every few months, it adjusts. Its mission is to keep the temperature comfortable in the economy, and, if you were to do things the government’s way in your house, then every few months you’d turn the heater either on or off, overheating or underheating your house.” Ranadivé argued that we ought to put the economic data that the Fed uses into a big stream, and write a computer program that sifts through those data, the moment they are collected, and make immediate, incremental adjustments to interest rates and the money supply. “It can all be automated,” he said. “Look, we’ve had only one soft landing since the Second World War. Basically, we’ve got it wrong every single time.”

…

“We followed soccer strategy in practice,” Ranadivé said. “I would make them run and run and run. I couldn’t teach them skills in that short period of time, and so all we did was make sure they were fit and had some basic understanding of the game. That’s why attitude plays such a big role in this, because you’re going to get tired.”

Redwood City’s strategy was built around the two deadlines that all basketball teams must meet in order to advance the ball. The first is the inbounds pass. When one team scores, a player from the other team takes the ball out of bounds and has five seconds to pass it to a teammate on the court. If that deadline is missed, the ball goes to the other team. Usually, that’s not an issue, because teams don’t contest the inbounds pass. They run back to their own end. Redwood City did not. Each girl on the team closely shadowed her counterpart. When some teams play the press, the defender plays behind the offensive player she’s guarding, to impede her once she catches the ball. The Redwood City girls, by contrast, played in front of their opponents, to prevent them from catching the inbounds pass in the first place. And they didn’t guard the player throwing the ball in. Why bother? Ranadivé used that extra player as a floater, who could serve as a second defender against the other team’s best player. “Think about football,” Ranadivé said. “The quarterback can run with the ball. He has the whole field to throw to, and it’s still damned difficult to complete a pass.” Basketball was harder. A smaller court. A five-second deadline. A heavier, bigger ball. As often as not, the teams Redwood City was playing against simply couldn’t make the inbounds pass within the five-second limit. Or the inbounding player, panicked by the thought that her five seconds were about to be up, would throw the ball away. Or her pass would be intercepted by one of the Redwood City players. Ranadivé’s girls were maniacal.

The second deadline requires a team to advance the ball across mid-court, into its opponent’s end, within ten seconds, and if Redwood City’s opponents met the first deadline the girls would turn their attention to the second. They would descend on the girl who caught the inbounds pass and “trap” her. Anjali was the designated trapper. She’d sprint over and double-team the dribbler, stretching her long arms high and wide. Maybe she’d steal the ball. Maybe the other player would throw it away in a panic—or get bottled up and stalled, so that the ref would end up blowing the whistle. “When we first started out, no one knew how to play defense or anything,” Anjali said. “So my dad said the whole game long, ‘Your job is to guard someone and make sure they never get the ball on inbounds plays.’ It’s the best feeling in the world to steal the ball from someone. We would press and steal, and do that over and over again. It made people so nervous. There were teams that were a lot better than us, that had been playing a long time, and we would beat them.”

I’m lifting this from Fightlinker, but I really like the detail went into in preparing for a fight with BJ Penn.

From Sports Illustrated:

I know a lot of doctors. It’s a fact. When somebody has flexible hips, normally he has a weak thoracic cage. His bones are weaker. It’s science. And with B.J., that’s the case. He has very flexible hips, so his core is weaker than somebody who has normal hips. That’s why I was attacking the body a lot. People, when they fight B.J., they try to hit the head. But B.J. has very thick skin and he moves his head very well and his reaction time is very fast. He can move his head standing up, but his body never moves. I was targeting the body a lot.

From ESPN:

Well, B.J. Penn is a very fast starter and he has very fast hands.  He’s got small shoulders if you look at him, like boxing shoulders.  So, I wanted to make the first couple rounds a wrestling match.  A lot of clinching.  A lot of moving around for him to carry my weight so the blood goes to his shoulders.  His shoulders would have been heavy.  His hands would not come out as fast as usual.  Then, after that, pick him apart standing later in the fight.

I was faking a lot, if you saw, because he has very fast reaction time, but a slow reset time.  All that, I’ve been studying.  When I do something, he reacts very fast.  Faster than I, faster than most fighters in the UFC.  But if I fake something, and he reacts – and the brain is just a muscle – he takes a lot of time to reset and to be able to react as fast for the first shot.  He had a very slow reset time, so my strategy was to fake him, make him react, and then attack him.