Tom Lanktree

Principal: Upper Hand Strategy
Marketing strategies for business growth
US & Latin America
Ex- Conill, Saatchi&Saatchi, BrandThInc, Leo Burnett, JWT

[Tom Lanktree @TomLanktree]

While knowledge counts, the problem here seems to be less about subject matter knowledge and more about stultifying the capacity to think. "College Professors Say Incoming Students No Longer Understand Middle School Math and Science" - Futurism #SmartNews https://t.co/sM99cy8GF9

[Tom Lanktree @TomLanktree]

Some timely advice from developers of golf apparel brand Featherie: if you notice a gap for a product you would like to use yourself, start it and shape it from feedback. "A Teen Golfer Noticed a Problem the Entire Golf Industry Missed" - Inc. #SmartNews https://t.co/1E5kg9risE

[Tom Lanktree @TomLanktree]

Beautiful take on the body, energy and soul of the big apple!

[Nix 🕊 @startingfromnix]

oh to write about a city the way E.B White writes about New York

"There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was bom here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and its turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day. and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was bom somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something. Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last —

The city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s highstrung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal resdessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion."

[Tom Lanktree @TomLanktree]

Setting your next day’s goals at the close of the workday builds a moat staunching the flood of competing distractions from the moment you start the day. Limiting the number of goals to six eliminates laundry lists that create frustration because they aren’t done.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

Charles Schwab ran the largest steel company in the world.

He had access to every consultant, every system, every productivity tool available in 1918.

He said a 15-minute conversation with a man named Ivy Lee was the most valuable business advice he ever received.

He paid him $25,000 for it. The advice fit on an index card.

Ivy Lee was not famous. He was not a philosopher or a scientist or a professor at a prestigious institution. He was a productivity consultant who had spent years watching extremely capable people fail to do their most important work, and he had developed a precise theory about why.

The theory was not complicated. It was uncomfortable.

The reason most people never do their most important work is not that they lack time. It is that they never decide what their most important work actually is. They arrive each morning at a pile of tasks with roughly equal claim on their attention, choose based on whatever feels most urgent or easiest in that moment, and spend the day moving through a list that was never designed to move them forward. They are busy in a way that feels productive and accomplishes far less than it should.

Lee asked Schwab for 15 minutes with his executive team. Schwab agreed. Lee walked them through six steps. He asked them to try it for three months and pay him whatever they thought it was worth.

Here is the system.

At the end of every workday, write down the six most important things you need to accomplish tomorrow. Not ten. Not twenty. Six. If you cannot decide what matters enough to make that list, you have already identified the real problem.

Prioritize those six items in order of their true importance. Not urgency. Not ease. Importance. The thing that will matter most three months from now goes first, regardless of how uncomfortable it is to start.

When you arrive the next morning, begin immediately on item one. Work on it until it is finished. Do not touch item two until item one is complete. Do not check email. Do not attend to whatever walked through the door. Item one, until it is done.

Move through the list in order. If you reach the end of the day and items four, five, and six remain untouched, move them to the next day's list without guilt. They were not the most important things. The most important things got done.

Repeat this process every day for the rest of your working life.

That is the entire system. Six steps. Four minutes the night before. No app required. No morning ritual. No tracking software. An index card and a pen.

What Lee understood that most productivity systems miss entirely is that the bottleneck in human performance is almost never capacity. It is prioritization. The average knowledge worker has more than enough hours in the day to accomplish something significant. What they do not have is a forcing function that makes them decide, the night before, in a calm moment free from the noise of the incoming day, what significant actually means for them tomorrow.

The morning is the worst possible time to make this decision. The morning brings email and notifications and other people's priorities and the accumulated urgency of everything that did not get done yesterday. By the time most people have decided what to work on, an hour is gone and the decision was made by their inbox rather than by them.

Lee's method moves the decision to the evening, when the day's noise has settled and the mind can assess without distraction. The prioritization is done before the chaos begins. Which means the next morning, there is no decision to make. There is only execution.

The second insight embedded in the system is the single-tasking constraint. Item one, until it is finished. Not item one until something more urgent appears. Not item one until you have checked in on items two through six. Item one, finished, before anything else receives your attention.

This runs against every instinct that modern work has trained into people. The entire infrastructure of the contemporary workplace is designed to fragment attention. Email expects a response within hours. Slack expects a response within minutes. The open office assumes that any question is more important than whatever the person being asked is currently doing. The result is a workforce that is in constant motion and making almost no progress on anything that actually matters.

Lee's method is a direct refusal of this dynamic. It does not negotiate with urgency. It does not make exceptions for whoever shouts loudest. It asks you to decide, once, what matters most, and then protect that decision from everything that will try to override it the next morning.

Charles Schwab ran Bethlehem Steel. He had seven hundred employees. He had more operational complexity, more competing demands, more legitimate urgency than most people reading this will ever face.

He tried the system for three months.

Then he sent Ivy Lee a check for $25,000 and a note saying it was the most valuable business advice he had ever received.

The system has not changed. The morning has not gotten less chaotic. The inbox has not gotten smaller.

The only variable that was ever under your control was what you decided the night before.

Six things. In order. Starting with the first.

The most valuable productivity advice in history is still free.

Most people will read it, find it obvious, and go back to checking email.

[Tom Lanktree @TomLanktree]

Collective nouns are a delightful trip into imagination applied to language.

[Maria Popova @themarginalian]

You may know “a murmuration of starlings,” but did you know that a group of crows is called “a murder” and peacocks “an ostentation”? How groups of birds got their names (thanks to a forgotten medieval woman), with magnificent vintage illustrations: https://t.co/TeUgNF9rq0

[Tom Lanktree @TomLanktree]

@dereklwalker I reckon it’s a bit like lightning. One can study it forever but few know how to crack it.

[Tom Lanktree @TomLanktree]

Lots to learn here. A big understated one is to have the humility to admit to not understanding how branding works, recognizing that it does, and the wisdom to avoid trying to explain it in your own words. When you don’t know something, you can hire help to explain it, or do it.

[Shabnam Parveen @shabnam_774]

🚨 In 2014, a Stanford lecture explained business competition better than most 2-year MBAs ever could.

Almost no one talks about it.

It came from Peter Thiel and instead of repeating textbook ideas, he flipped how we think about competition.

Watching it changes your perspective instantly.

He argues that competition is for losers. When you’re competing, you’re fighting for margins, attention, and survival. The real goal isn’t to win in a crowded market it’s to build something so unique that you don’t have to compete at all.

He also breaks down why monopolies drive real value. The best companies don’t play the same game they create their own. That’s where long-term profits and dominance come from.

And the biggest shift? Stop asking “how do I beat others?”
Start asking “what can I build that no one else can?”

That’s why this Stanford University lecture still stands out.

Because while most people are chasing competition…

Very few are building something truly different.

[Tom Lanktree @TomLanktree]

@dereklwalker That looks wicked good, I’m sure a good siesta will result.

[Tom Lanktree @TomLanktree]

How nice it is to watch a dispassionate conversation on current events while touching upon significant considerations like prudence, due process and unintended consequences when making decisions that affect the world and not just one’s direct interests.

[Justin Wolfers @JustinWolfers]

Join me for a Sunday morning podcast chat with my pal, Charlie Sykes. We dig into Iran, the economy, and everything. We spend a moment or two looking beyond the politics and economics, to the morality of it all. https://t.co/pmAsxFN1ye

[Tom Lanktree @TomLanktree]

@DougGarnett @JPCastlin Good stuff.

[Tom Lanktree @TomLanktree]

@Gladwell This is just so Miami it hurts.

[Tom Lanktree @TomLanktree]

For those who enjoy laughing while learning about the foibles of human behaviour or delight in hearing about oddities, there are few things that can match the delight of a chin wag with Ogilvy’s Rory Sutherland.

[Laurent Dieterich @lbx65]

Interview de @rorysutherland de près de de 2h30. A retenir : Le plus grand biais des entreprises n’est pas l’irrationalité des clients, mais la rationalité étroite des logiques business, de la data et du ROI : elles tuent la surprise, l’optionalité et donc l’innovation https://t.co/2ZoekqlNqS

[Tom Lanktree @TomLanktree]

@eaonp They should be handing out batons along with the score.

[Tom Lanktree @TomLanktree]

Compared to what, a lesson planners can learn from economists.

[Justin Wolfers @JustinWolfers]

The Dow was at 43,488 when Trump took office. It just hit 50,000.

So if you had invested $43,488 in the US, you would now have $50,000. But if you had invested the same amount in the rest of the world, you would now be worth $60,000.

Lemme explain
https://t.co/llY82v76vv

[Tom Lanktree @TomLanktree]

@davetrott Reminds me of your binary brief.

[Tom Lanktree @TomLanktree]

@DougGarnett It’s a bit like cutting out an airplane’s engines mid flight. It can glide for a while without consuming expensive fuel, but crashes eventually.

[Tom Lanktree @TomLanktree]

@miguelsantos12 @Maripuerta Interessante dato. Cómo se mide lá adopción?

[Tom Lanktree @TomLanktree]

Back in the days when shops trained their people. Lots to learn from this.

[Praveen Vaidyanathan @v_praveen]

Principles of Saatchi & Saatchi

via Andy Greenaway

[Tom Lanktree @TomLanktree]

@JuliaBramble Wouldn’t it be nice if all customer service support was just as funny as this.

[Tom Lanktree @TomLanktree]

Strength In Length: The Long Slogan Advantage - At a time when everyone says slogans should be short, here’s a contrarian POV from Positioning co- founder Al Ries writing in Branding Strategy Insider. He certainly can’t be accused of “blanding” here. https://t.co/D7p2IhAAvq