🍣 Why strategy is a team sport


Hey friend – Rob here.

Old school ways of working: clients want the answer.

Modern ways of working: clients want options.

It's insane that so many places still refuse to accept this, or work with it.

The body language of doing so suggests they think clients are idiots.

When in fact, we see different market dynamics vs "the good old days":

  • Business structures are more complex
  • Timelines from brief to delivery are shorter
  • We operate on less clear information
  • More stakeholder input is needed along the way
  • Clients are probably better trained
  • Some might even be ex-agency

This does not mean agency responsibilities or processes aren't important.

It does mean they're not so exclusive that clients don't get to have a say in things.

It's one thing to have proper standards.

Quite another to be plain stubborn.

Strategy, if nothing else, is a team sport.

But our job isn't to execute every single play.

It's to effectively manage the players.

Keep swimming,

Rob

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Rob Estreitinho

Strategist, writer, maker

Whenever you're ready, here's 2 ways i can help you:

  1. ​Join the Salmon Crew. Access our private WhatsApp group, where you'll find a safe space to help you stop overthinking strategy. You'll get memes, questions, quotes and links, help from other smart folks, you can be a guest on future panels, and get to shape the future of Salmon Theory. Join smart minds from Leo Burnett, Genius Steals, System1, Flight Studio, VML, Miami Ad School, and more.
  2. ​Hire Salmon Labs. We help savvy brands swim upstream. From brand, comms and content strategy, to training on creativity and how to use AI, we like to do things in a fast and bespoke way. No fixed methodologies, moments of grand reveal or complicated language. Just pure shared problem solving.
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Salmon Theory

Helping savvy strategists swim upstream.

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