Serving up strategic cold-cuts in a world of lukewarm hot-takes / Strategy @ Quality Meats Creative:
Ever notice that Strategists, and especially the very good ones, are a bit weird? Well, here's why that is - and why its such a good thing...
"We need a new kind of approach to learning that shifts imagination from the periphery to the foundation of all knowledge" https://aeon.co/essays/why-we-need-a-new-kind-of-education-imagination-studies
It's maybe the reason why some of them love magical realism of Spanish American literature :)
Ben Shaw
1w
Love to know the prompt for these!
Sarah Hart ✤
1w
Empirical meets Esoteric! is this why I have a super organized asana board called visioning with all my meditation and journaling notes?! 😅 (and i just started creating ai images to capture the mental picture’s too )
gem barton
1w
Really nice. We should chat sometime. We would a lot to talk about 😀 especially my book ‘Experimental Realism’ from RIBA Publishing
Mark R.
1w
Every great strategist that I’ve met is a bit of a weirdo because you need to balance imagination and empiricism. That usually doesn’t exist in people, but it is fairly common after a certain intelligence level, eg .01%+. Let’s be honest if the planner isn’t in the top 2% of intelligence they won’t be a great one, and if they are at .01% you’re wasting your time in advertising. So the sweet spot is probably 1-.1%. Smart enough to be able to extract full understanding from the top .01% but not too smart that they can’t stand their co-workers. Also we have been encouraged to be weird because you have been found interesting (that was a really good story/observation) and useful (oh that angle really works I’ll talk to them about that). The best advice I got for what people look for in planners, high SAT (but not perfect) scores, low grades in college. You have the aptitude and you have an attitude. You become a professor if you’re .01%+ because you won’t be able to deal with most co-workers. I had the good fortune of meeting a lot of .01%+ in high school in national academic tournaments and realized I’m dumb by comparison.
How true is this, LinkedIn strats? I know only Joe. Are you all like this?
Ben Perreira
1w
In Truth, Lies and Advertising, Jon Steel had a take on weirdness being one of the essential skills of strategists. He expanded into it in a way I think you’d dig: “In the context of an advertising agency, the ability of planners to look at the same information as everyone else and see something different is invaluable. They need to be able to take information of all sorts, shuffle it around, and rearrange it in new patterns until something interesting emerges. While this skill is certainly not the exclusive province of planners, there are few good planners who do not possess it.”
David Helps
6h
True, this is our magic.. it scares others that this tension can allow left/right brain to co-exist. Meanwhile, we strategists find comfort in this happy place that the human brain is superbly designed for (and only excels at, if exercised regularly in both of these mind-gyms)
Chief Strategy Officer
1wGreat deck. Amazing- The art has reached new levels! Two questions- 1. Does everyone with strategist in their title need to balance these two forces- how much does this balance depend on the role you play as a strategist? 2. Is this nature or nurture- can it be taught- and if so- how do people learn? I know it's a lot, but it's Monday.