The Strategy Inside Everything

A person has been able to receive the thoughts, emotions, intent transmitted by another across media. Maybe more amazingly, a person has been able to translate that transmission. Artistic transmissions are able to be sent by children to their parents, and across eons on cave walls. The most able are thought of as artists. The word 'artist' conjures tools, media, constructs. It might bring...

Shall we play a game? Sorry, couldn't resist and I know that only people over 40 will get the joke. Jamin Warren of Twofivesix has been working in gaming for long enough to see the influence of games come full circle. Before, games tried to capitalize on pop culture, like films (anyone played the ET game?) but for the past decade, games have become a source of influence of pop culture (see: Th...

You are no doubt familiar with some of the elements of dating apps that have become UX and pop culture staples. For some of you, you're all too familiar with the ways gamified UX features affect approach to dating. Dr. Katy Coduto can explain why. She's been researching dating apps and behaviors for years. A  researcher and Assistant Professor at Boston University (go Terriers!), she's b...

You've probably read or heard a lot about the plight of news in America, and specifically how local news has shrunk over the years. LION is an organization started to help more local groups successfully report their local news. Lisa Heyamoto, Programming Director, Membership Education at LION helps develop tools and training to help these local groups thrive. We talk about how they approach tools...

If you're interested in memes, this show is for you. Managing director at Literally Media and Editor in chief of Know Your Meme, Don Caldwell joins Adam to talk about how memes have evolved from the early days of the commercial internet and how they look like they'll change going forward. Don's been at Know Your Meme for some of the memes that pop in your head when you describe what memes mean, th...

Have you ever felt like you hit the wall? How did you get through it when you know stopping isn's a long term solution. Nishita Tamuly joins the show and talks about what's she has discovered about intention as a powerful force for overcoming burnout. She's joined by the one. The only. Kaitlin Maud-Moon (horn sound effect here).  Find Kaitlin at: https://kaitlinmaud.com/ Kaitlin - sincere tha...

How much time do you spend thinking about how you might perform better - at your job or in other areas of your life. Just in time for your new year's resolution, Dr. Carla Fowler is thinking about it for you. After leaving a pursuit of medicine, she realized she wanted to help people, but in a different way. She's gone on to build THAXA Executive Coaching. In this revealing conversation, she and A...

How do the skills you learn in one industry set you up for future career success in another? Both Ezra Englebardt and Matt Rainone started inside ad agencies working on planning and strategy. Now, they're both in house at CVS Health moving forward complex and occasionally sensitive comms efforts, using some of those same skills. In this conversation, you'll hear how they think about their time in...

How many times have you come up with an idea, and then you have no idea how to measure it to see if it's successful? Nick Bond writes (and thinks and dreams) about professional wrestling. While acknowledging that WWE promotes a scripted sport, which he describes as subjective, Nick identified a clever way to measure how wrestlers are performing over time. In this fast-moving conversation, Nick tal...

A new podcast from the makers of The Strategy Inside Everything.  How did the generation defined by hope become the enemy? Where do stories this big come from? And why does it matter? Introducing, in the demo. A new podcast about how stories of groups are created, subverted and destroyed. On the first season, experienced strategists and researchers Farrah Bostic and Adam Pierno pursue the origins...

Author Brooke Sellas (she's still getting used to that descriptor) has been leading and measuring conversations for years. As CEO of B Squared Media, she's developed a model for metrics that have meaning and help organizations understand what is happening and why. Instead of generic measures linked to 'engagement' she reports on a return on conversation that has elasticity to better capture the ne...

Ever wonder why a meme resonates with you so hard? Ever catch yourself realizing the dumb looping video you just giggled at and retweeted is actually a clever commentary on a common social convention? Ever apply library science skills to one of the largest meme data sets in the world? Okay, two out of three ain't bad. Amanda Brennan joins Adam to talk about her path into the world of internet cult...

If you are a regular listener to this show, you probably make plans for a living. Ever feel like the job stalls out in Google Slides? Like, you work on the thinking but seeing it take flight is never quite right? Aric Wood of XPLANE gets strategies airborne for a living. He wrote a book, called The Strategy Activation Playbook, which Adam dug so much while preparing for this conversation, that he...

Ever meet someone and feel like you've known them your whole life? This episode captures that feeling in real time. The amazing Kaitlin Maud Moon was kind enough to join the show to talk to Adam about her non-linear career path and the inspiration for her pursuit of a degree beyond that work. She's thoughtful about how each body of work informs and enhances the other, and how she tapped into a pla...

Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at co:collective, Neil Parker joins Adam to talk about his experience in corporate strategy and how it's informed his thinking about brands. As context changes, brands change. As the meta context changes, the needs for brands to exist change. His perspective as a consultant provides an outlook unique in the world of brand strategy, as he considers how brand ma...

Katie Dreke has a lot of experience helping people get above the bar. Better thinking, better work, better outcomes. In agencies and global brands, she has tested ways to get people to feel and do their best work. In this conversation, Katie and I explore the conditions that help people perform and some of the specifics Katie has tried in her career at Nike, Adidas and others.  If you haven't...

Before all this talk of "quiet quitting," Joey Camire noticed people just tapping out of their work and other responsibilities. He realized there was something big going on, something beyond apathy and approaching nihilism. With waves of bad news, how can we reach people to reengage them, and apply meaning where they may have lost it? This conversation touches on ways we put humanity first, and ma...

When Adrian Ho founded Zeus Jones, he had a vision to be a partner that would help solve deeper business problems than the ad agencies in which he got his start. Over time, the firm did just that. Seeing there was more to do to drive change in the world, through business, he and Zeus Jones launched the Demos investment fund to support startups innovating towards a better world. After knowing Adria...

I was wondering about role models, especially in the type of work where people are being assigned to do things that they have never done. I didn't have to look far to find the excellent book Mirror Thinking, and its author, Fiona Murden. She is an Organizational Psychologist and the founder of Aroka Ltd. She joined me to talk about how we learn by taking cues from people who set an aspirational ex...

Aggregator platforms are always talking about finding new content relevant for you; Netflix, Google, Amazon, Spotify. David C. Lowery has spent a lifetime figuring out first-hand how to find and curate audiences for his own bands, Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker, and now teaching all he’s learned as a Senior Lecturer at University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business. He breaks down how audienc...

The initial prompt for this conversation was "What would you accomplish at your job if you had no fear of losing it?" Sara Lobkovich is the perfect person to respond. She not only helps organizations identify and navigate positive change, but she's been challenging her perception of fear in activities like climbing and motorcycling her whole life. What follows is an honest, raw conversation with s...

Dr. Timothy Summers is Executive Director of Product Development of Digital Trust and Lead of Pocket initiative at Arizona State University and CEO at Summers & Company. He has the knowledge and expertise that would make some people tough for laypeople to understand. But he approaches problem solving and opportunities with practicality that is energizing. I took this opportunity to ask him abo...

At the end of every episode of How I Built It, host Guy Raz asks extremely successful founders whether hard work and smarts played as much of a role as luck. Andy Nairn is the founder of Lucky Generals. He's been paying attention to the role that luck plays in life and brand success, since before stumbling on that name almost ten years ago. Now he's written a book, Go Luck Yourself , to put the st...

Like many of our guests, Craig Elimeliah thinks a lot about things. But he's thinking a lot about a lot of things, and trying to assemble the pieces to understand patterns. From his early start studying the Talmud, through finding his way in the early commercial web, he's developed a passion for understanding the end user. Now, he's leading teams and passing on that obsession with cross-discipline...

After years of traditional strategy training at shops VMLY&R and PHD, Sanya Deshpande was inspried by the offering of Oura Ring. She talks about what elements of her experience have served her in this new world, and what she's had to learn and help create.  You can find Sanya on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sanyadeshpande/ The Strategy Inside Everything is the podcast for people...