Advanced technique
In 2012, as part of finishing my MBA, I worked with a group of fellow students on a study of healthcare technology in the U.S. and a few Nordic countries. It was a lot more fun than work, to be transparent. Walking to meet health tech experts in Helsinki, biking to meetings in Stockholm, as the cities and their populations shed layers to welcome bright summer days, was much more salient than any key finding.
Still, my mind hasn’t been able to escape a maze of thinking about a future of quantified self. For some time after finishing my thesis I thought about developing a sort of Mint.com for healthcare, a way to pull together a series of inputs like medical records, food consumption, fitness, and sleep to give us a richer understanding of what works for us on a deeply personal level. I still think it would create a ton of value and utility for normal people who can’t afford specialized care. Maybe I’ll pick the idea back up one day.
Either way, an approach to holistic understanding has been a quest for me since. It could be fueled by a bit of impostor syndrome and a desire to have an abundance of evidence that I know something. Of course, the strategist in me loves the way frameworks give you a plan to follow, in the form of a series of goals and starting points. These dives into deeper knowledge have popped up in a few places.
A few years ago I posted this take on money management. I’ve continued to refine it for myself as my goals have evolved, I’ve fixed habits, and new (bad) habits have emerged.
When I was at Mattel I spent a lot of time and energy working across teams to develop a holistic measurement framework — a way to understand what was actually impacting brand and revenue growth over different time horizons. The process reinforced how challenging, rare, and necessary that is for marketing orgs.
Personally, predictably, I’ve done this for my surfing. Surfing is uniquely difficult to practice. Wave predictability is relative; even the best wave pool can’t generate perfect replicas. And the real dirty secret of the sport is that the most important part is figuring out where to be when a wave comes in. Surf coach Doug Silva says that he doesn’t catch waves, but that waves catch him.
A few years ago, former professional surfer Brad Gerlach launched Wave Ki, a way to practice surfing on land. He talks you through the movement of the body and how to shift your weight from front foot to back, heel to toe. In the absence of getting reps on waves, getting them in my living room — kooky as it may feel — works remarkably well.
Late last year I shared some books I’ve read and loved related to doing the same for a strategy practice. We strategists also don’t get many reps, so studying technique from masters and practitioners has been critical to my evolution, and sustained interest in the work.
That’s also why this spring I took the 6-week Master of Advertising Effectiveness course. James Hurman offers a practical guide for how to think about the role of advertising in growth, building mental availability, the power of creative commitment (that is: spend, channels, duration), and setting clear objectives.
I have friends who have taken courses from and speak of highly of the IPA and Mark Ritson, and I plan to continue taking more classes to find new parts of my practice to improve.
The practices and measures that are valuable usually won’t be obvious from the outset. Of all the forms in Wave Ki, the one I’ve spent the most time with is the take-off. Getting to your feet with just the right timing and balance gives you the opportunity to seize every bit of speed a wave offers. Once you’ve gotten close to mastery of letting a wave catch you, learning, once again, to stand up with proper technique pays the highest dividends. It took a lot of learning to be open to getting back to basics.
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I write these posts, 3-MINUTE MONDAYS, every other week. My goal with them is to share a snippet of insight into how to do strategy, build teams, and grow. Comment here or message me on LinkedIn if you want to chat. — Ben
