Total soccer

Reading an article about DayJet, a new air-taxi service, I was struck by this description of total soccer. I'm a huge soccer fan and have known about the legendary Dutch teams of the 1970's for many years, but I'd never seen total soccer described so eloquently, let alone in a non-soccer context.

Herriot offers another sports metaphor: "Total soccer," popularized by the Dutch in the 1970s, replaced brute-force attacks to the goal with continuous ball movement. "Moving straight to the goal is an excellent way to score, except for one slight problem--the other team," Herriot says. "They're a human version of Murphy's Law. In total soccer, you continually place the ball in a position with not the straightest but the greatest number of ways to reach the goal, the richest set of pathways."

"Each individual pathway may have a lower possibility of reaching the goal than a straight shot," Sawhill chimes in, "but the combinatorial multiplicity overwhelms the other team." The Dutch discovered that a better strategy was a series of good, seamlessly connected solutions rather than a single brittle one.

"The Dutch won a lot of games that way," Herriot adds. "It also created a different kind of player, a more agile, intelligent one. In some sense, we're teaching DayJet how to play total soccer."

In complexity lingo, a chart of all the pathways those Dutch teams exploited would be called a "fitness landscape," a sort of topographical map of every theoretical solution in which the best are visualized as peaks and the worst as deep valleys. "We're dealing with a problem where the problem specification itself is changing as you go along," Sawhill says. "You no longer want to find the best solution--you want to be living in a space of good solutions, so when the problem changes, you're still there." Fluidity is the greater goal than perfection.

I mean, obviously they are describing a "possession game" but the image of the soccer pitch as a topographical map is a very interesting one.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/115/open_features-flight-plan.html

Authenticity

Another good article in the May 2007 issue of Fast Company magazine on the appeal and risk of authenticity.

Under "What does it take to be authentic?" they wrote:

1. A sense of place


2. A strong point of view


3. Serving a larger purpose


4. Integrity

Update from June 2007:

A letter in the next issue (Jul/Aug 2007) not confusing a brand's "gesture" with its "raison d'etre."  The example given was for Abercrombie & Fitch.  If their mission is to make the most extraordinary gear for the most fascinating people when they do the most interesting things, then its gesture can evolve from making hunting gear for aristocrats who go on safari in Africa to surf wear for college coeds who go to Costa Rica for spring break.

Brand manager

The May 2007 issue of Wired magazine featured a story on Tim Kring, the creator of the TV series Heroes. Here's a quote:

A modern TV creator also has to think outside of the boobtube. "When I pitched Heroes, I knew an important element to getting on air was how it can incorporate the Internet," he says. "I'm sort of a student of television, and it doesn't take a genius to figure out that things are changing quickly. Production costs are going up. We're losing eyeballs. We have to reach people in other ways."

Which is why Heroes has recently introduced a female character who can physically interface with the Web. She's already a featured character in the tie-in webcomic, and she guides fans through an alternate-reality game, giving them codes so they can hunt for clues on MySpace pages and blogs purportedly written by the characters. (Kring and his team of superfriends have also set up 9thwonders.com, a site with illustrations, interviews, and message boards where fans can gather to dissect the previous week's episode.) "My job has changed from being in the writing and editing room," Kring says, with some surprise, "to managing a brand." Not bad for a guy who used to write dialog for a talking car.

Interesting that this TV show creator sees his job as a "brand manager" that cuts across platforms beyond TV -- MySpace, blogs, specialty websites, etc.