Times of rest are a strategic goldmine.

Strategy requires all kinds of executive functions to fire at once, and sometimes a resting brain is the most effective for that kind of synchronized mental labor. So while you play this holiday, let your subconscious work.

Start by thinking of the landscape that will meet you in 2024. It will have a hundred surprises and pivots, but behind them all will be a singular challenge.

And you probably already know what that challenge is.

For some brands it may be the need for deep community, while for others it may be positioning or to to create a sense of order. 

The fact is that despite all the incremental frictions that will crop up, big challenges like these will be at the base of everything. And if you already know what the challenge is, you might as well let your brain work on it while you rest this holiday season. 

We've gathered some of our most popular pieces from 2023 and organized them by brand challenge. Choose your adventure below, and let your subconscious do the heavy lifting.

#1. For the CMO that needs a breakthrough opportunity:
How to Bend the Will of the Market
Temporal Competitive Analysis

#2. For the CEO that needs to own the culture of a category:
Invisible Culture
The 4 Phases of Culture Brands

#3. For the brand owner that needs to predict the future:
The Noetic Future of Culture and Brands
Drawing Wisdom From the Weird

#4. For the strategist that needs to find the lever in the system:
The 14 New Rules of Brand Strategy
How To Unlock Your Strategic Mind

#5: For the researcher that needs to change a belief or behavior:
Bridging the Identity Gap
The Power of User Worldviews


[BONUS] I lied a little. Our #1 most read post by far this year was the announcement of Exposure Therapy last week. If you haven't checked it out, you should. It's a guided community for strategists that will open up your world. 

Overheating Machines

Here's what we've been consuming.

Of memes and magick (Aeon): "The internet has absorbed some of its techno-utopian luminaries’ foundational ideas to the extent that they are practically built-in. In some ways, it’s provided us with nothing more nor less than a magical canvas – a soul-space, to paraphrase the early internet historian Margaret Wertheim, where our desires, impressions and the forces that act upon them can be made ‘manifest’."

Gen Z is bringing a whole new vibe to the workplace: anxiety (Business Insider):  "Gen Z's entrance into the professional world has been anything but typical. Like generations before them, they have brought a new perspective to the office that has shaken up workplace dynamics. Unlike prior generations, however, Gen Z's first steps into the workforce came at a time when a huge swath of the world was rethinking their relationship to their jobs."

A 2023 Look-back: the internet dies, etc. (Culture: An Owner's Manual): "Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day calls the 2023 internet “the vapor web”: There’s a lot happening, but no central narrative. This brings us back to music theorist Leonard Meyer’s 1967 prescient notion that “the absence of ordered sequential change” — even in a creative explosion — causes the feeling of stasis."

A Camera, Not an Engine (Ribbonfarm): "Once you see intelligence as something embodied by particular pile of data rather than a particular kind of processing, a very powerful sort of decentering of anthropocentric conceits happens... you realize something even bigger: any pile of data that has some coherence in its source can be turned into an intelligence that you can relate to, broadening the possibilities of your own existence."

The Coming Humanist Renaissance (The Atlantic): "Just as the Industrial Revolution sparked transcendentalism in the U.S. and romanticism in Europe—both movements that challenged conformity and prioritized truth, nature, and individualism—today we need a cultural and philosophical revolution of our own. This new movement should prioritize humans above machines and reimagine human relationships with nature and with technology, while still advancing what this technology can do at its best."

High Bars

Quick hits of insight in socially acceptable places.

• It's a flex to meet your S/O IRL in 2024
   

• Community models with the greatest chance of success
   

• Women's health expands beyond babies
   

• Get a coach

Gotcha!

Creative inspirations for the other side of your brain.

• A bike on a flatscreen TV
   

• The hidden protest art of 'Melrose Place'
   

• Write without seeing your words
   

• Trail of wet footprints

In his book Life's Little Instruction Book, author H. Jackson Brown gives us the wonderful line "Opportunity dances with those already on the dance floor."

This isn't a rehashed version of "The harder you work the luckier you get" or "Fortune favors the bold." Brown's quote is something slightly different.

You have to get out there and dance.

You have to feel the music and get into your body. You have to bump into other people, move through the crowd, maybe even grab someone's hand. 

When opportunity comes to you on the dance floor, it's because you have embraced the serendipity of the group. We dance because moving our souls and connecting with others awakens our minds.

If you know what your dance floor is, make sure to boogie one last time before the year ends. And if you're still looking for your dance floor, I invite you to come do the conga with us in the new year.

I hope you have a beautiful, restful, deeply satisfying holiday and that 2024 blows. Your. Mind.

Yours,

Jasmine Bina
Founder & CEO
Concept Bureau, Inc.