Other Strategy is open for business. Here’s why.

After 24 years in strategy leadership roles in creative, digital and innovation agencies, I’ve learned that the most magical moments of thinking and creativity are usually instigated by an uncomfortable moment of change.

The change could be a new day-to-day client, a new CEO or CMO, a new competitor, a new regulation, a new product innovation, a new agency team member or leader. Sometimes it is a formal competitive pitch, but not always. It is always the kind of inflection point that forces a reckoning of the course you are on.

Some hate the abruptness of these changes, call them “crises”. Me, I love them.

They force us to shift into a new gear of intensity. We blow up category conventions. Challenge our own assumptions. Work faster to insane deadlines. We ask different questions. We do the best work in the shortest amount of time. Look outside the usual sources for data and for inspiration. Connect dots we never would have seen before. Turn to new people and skills for partnership. Often we have the most fun.

Then the crisis is resolved, the pitch winds down. Back to business-as-usual.

For me, returning to business-as-usual was a downer. The pace slows, the urgency subsides. Routine creeps back in. Familiar teams and processes, predictability, incrementalism, complacency. Too little of the outside freshness, energy, foreign DNA and new collisions. Until the next crisis inevitably arrives and throws the routine again into turmoil.

I started Other Strategy because more than ever change is constant, and Brands and Agencies need partners who treat change as opportunity for growth and greatness, rather than a crisis to be overcome. Who are comfortable in these moments of discomfort, who know how to bring in foreign thinking when the familiar ways are no longer enough.

Other Strategy is a creative provocation agency. We engineer collisions between diverse people and perspectives to create fresh ideas that would not have otherwise emerged.

We’d love to hear from you. We’re ready to help when the agenda is change.

—Steve

Founder & President