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'The Playmaker's Standard'

The Playmaker’s Standard is a classification system of stratagems that people and organizations employ in business, politics and popular culture to develop a position or advance their agendas in competitive marketplaces. Most notable is its inclusion of The Playmaker's Table, a periodic table of influence strategies.

The Playmaker's Standard is part of a larger discipline called first conceived in the 1990s by Alan D. Kelly, a Silicon Valley-entrepreneur. The discipline was introduced to the public when Kelly published his book entitled “The Elements of Influence: The New Essential System for Managing Competition, Reputation, Brand and Buzz.”

When Kelly began his career as a Silicon Valley communication strategist, he identified three fundamental truths in business and communication that would serve as the foundation of The Playmaker’s Standard: The first was that those with careers that centered upon the pursuit of strategy, positioning, influence and advocacy had virtually no standard or reliable reference for plotting and planning the movements and motives of actors in their marketplaces. As he would later say in the introduction of his book: Economists have game theory. Biologists have the phylogenetic tree. Chemists have the periodic table of elements. Software developers have object-oriented programming. But for those who work on strategy, positioning, or some form of marketplace spin there is nothing. There is nothing for those whose jobs involve the pursuit of influence and, accordingly, the management of opinions, perceptions, behaviors, and decisions.

The second tenet was that communication – and by association, all professions that involve some aspect of influence strategy, such as marketing, public relations, advertising, advocacy, sales, politics, leadership, and even decision-making – is by nature a competitive discipline. For any actor – be it a company, a brand, or an individual – to achieve success in his or her marketplaces, he or she must seek a relative competitive advantage over rivals—however collaborative or confrontational. While Kelly’s second tenet had been articulated to some degree in past organizational communication literature, it had never been decoded, defined and organized into three classes and eight sub-classes in a table-based framework, known as The Playmaker's Table.

The third tenet is that every move in a marketplace can be divided into strategic fundamental components, which he began calling “plays,” and set about decoding, defining and categorizing them in an organized table-based framework. According to Kelly, "a play is a stratagem, one of a finite set of discrete strategic maneuvers a person or organization employs to improve its relative competitive advantage in a marketplace."