STRAT_SCRAPS v149
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“Anu Atluru puts it perfectly in this short essay: “I have a theory that chasing things that scale makes you need therapy, and the therapy is pursuing things that can’t scale. I once wrote that every entrepreneur’s dream is to succeed at building an impossibly hard business and then finally open a local coffee shop to be happy.”
Atluru believes that there is something inherently unnatural about operating at the scale of large systems, which ultimately leads us back to human-scale endeavours. “Chasing scale strips you of some humanity. It puts your head too high up in the clouds. It removes you from what happens in the real world with real people. Pursuing something that can’t scale does the exact opposite: it grounds you. It’s a comforting and healing next act.”
Creative Thought doesn’t scale. this is the core reality with agency business that we refuse to acknowledge.
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Via this substack’s recent article about the big reset needed in planning:
Each of these has so much to unpack.
What I like about these problems is they are not abstract nor insurmountable.
Planning is in need of repair, but it is repairable.
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easiest to communicate ≠ most important to communicate.
Our job is identifying what is most important and how to best communicate it.
This ladders nicely to the respective roles of Strategy (what) and Creative (how) but is true beyond this industry
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a poem (that I’ve maybe shared before) that you should read.1
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“strategic management is less about managing people than managing connections between people.”
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this collection of “little things that aren’t little and feel like a hug” is a fuzzy read.
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this will always be worth including, no matter how many times I’ve included it before:
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sometimes saved clippings are more valuable because they have shed their original context…
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I think this was originally meant to refer to how to work with AI, but it also works as a framework for discussing new client work as a freelancer.
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Curious why companies keep raising costs?
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“Not the wrong people, but the wrong allocation of people.”
Such a small quote from such a big piece of writing that is absolutely worth the full read.
When Everything is Important But Nothing is Getting Done
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This is the kind of shit I love but also falls into the category of knowledge that will do you disservice as a planner;
“In Jameson’s terms, structuralism is “anti-substantialist.” It locates meaning in the difference between contrasting elements and not the thing in itself, so “substance is replaced by relationship,” and “all meanings are organized, following the pattern of phonology, in pairs of oppositions or determinate differences.”
Rob Horning, Neo Structuralism
WEEKLY MONSTER
I have an addiction to making new versions of websites and then never publishing them.
Btw, the private practice is now booking for August.
The Mad Farmer Poems, 2008