Washington, D.C.– With the publication of his landmark book The Elements of Influence (Dutton/Penguin, on sale today), technology marketing veteran Alan Kelly today introduced The Playmaker’s Standard, LLC, a visionary software and consulting firm that puts the theory of Elements into practice.

“Economists have game theory. Biologists have the phylogenetic tree. Chemists have the periodic table of elements. Software developers have object-oriented programming,” says CEO and founder Kelly. “But for those whose work centers on strategy, positioning or some form of marketplace spin in business, politics or even pop culture there has been nothing – until now.”

The result is a windfall of customer-tested, easy-to-use web services – for gurus of strategy and working managers alike, whose jobs are to build a brand, cultivate a reputation, promote a policy, run a winning campaign, launch a product or create a groundswell. All are available online at www.plays2run.com, from the free Playmaker’s Table, an easy-to-use classification system of 25 irreducibly simple strategies, to the subscription service Play Action Whiteboard, a patent-pending web application that lets online client-users quickly predict and plan the underlying moves of a marketplace and their options for winning. (See fact sheet for additional information.) The new firm also offers a variety of training and educational workshops and webinars, customized research and strategy consulting. Below are full details of this entire suite of new services:

Free Web Resources

Visitors to www.plays2run.com, the web home of The Playmaker’s Standard, have free access to a wealth of information and resources. These include: The Playmaker’s Forum™ blog (blog.plays2run.com), a weekly chronicle of plays in business, politics and pop culture, all with links to the system’s 25 plays and three surrogates; The Playmaker’s Table (described above) ; sample Play Action Maps™ of historic events; and excerpts from The Elements of Influence.

Subscriber Services

Subscribers to The Playmaker’s Standard may choose between two levels of service, depending on their frequency of need and requirements:

• The Basic Standard™, a powerful web tool that allows subscribers to “drill down” on any play type of The Playmaker’s Table to reach information-packed flash cards, each containing case examples, suggested counter-measures, risk/reward ratings, upsides and downsides, best uses, decoding tips, and related terms and plays. It also includes The Playmaker’s Process™, a methodology for staging, calling, and running the most effective strategies in a marketplace, and Factors at Play™, a reference table of prevailing marketplace variables, used by playmakers to fine-tune their play action (i.e., the moves and counter-moves of people and organizations in a marketplace) for maximum competitive advantage.
• The Professional Standard, a superset of The Basic Standard (described above) that includes StrategyMapper™, the ultimate weapon for diagnosing, visualizing and prescribing plays. It allows playmakers to interactively model and role-play the moves and motives of allies, opponents and independent players of a marketplace, useful to playmakers for rapid response, long-term planning and historical analysis.

Training and Education

Subscribers may enroll in a variety of onsite and online workshops and seminars, all led by certified consultants of The Playmaker’s Standard. These include: Playmaker’s Boot Camp™, a full-day playmaking blitz for Basic Standard and Professional Standard client-users; Pro Playmaker’s Clinic™, an intensive full-day clinic for Professional Standard client-users. This clinic answers such crucial questions as, What plays does your competition run? How do you (the client-user) typically respond? What keeps your rivals off-balance? What plays can you run? Which ones are out-of-bounds? It also introduces attendees to Crazy Ivan’s Disco™, a fast-moving team game of fast-thinking playmaking skill; and FastStart and FastMap Webinars, conducted by web conference for both new and experienced subscribers.

Research, Consulting and Support

Also available to subscribers of The Playmaker’s Standard are custom research and consulting services. These include custom Play Action Maps™, for subscribers who are short on resources or time; I*POW Advisory™ (An Industry-Specific Play of the Week), short and easy-to-read analyses of recent plays in select industries; Consultations by Standard-certified counselors to help client-users hone a strategy, dissect a competitive threat, or mine a marketplace opportunity; and Playmakers On Call, a helpdesk offered to multiuser-subscribers of online products and services.

The Playmaker’s Standard helps CEOs, politicos, strategists, marketers, salespeople, advertisers, PR and public affairs reps, and lawyers understand their strategic options, brainstorm new directions for their campaigns, factor in the upsides and downsides of each choice they make, and anticipate what their opponent might do in reaction to their chosen strategies. Playmaking amounts to a game of chess, where the goal is to think a few moves ahead of the competition.

Companies are using The Playmaker’s Standard now. The system has been battle-tested through a five-step development process over 10 years, culminating in a successful year-long pilot program with major companies in the chemical, insurance, pharmaceutical, semiconductor and wireless industries.

About The Playmaker’s Standard, LLC

The Playmaker’s Standard, LLC (www.plays2run.com), is a software services and consulting firm specializing in strategy execution and dedicated to the discipline of playmaking. We help business leaders, policymakers, strategists, marketers and media professionals manage competition, reputation, brand and buzz for competitive advantage. Our suite of patent-pending online products, workshops and consulting services, based on The Elements of Influence, the landmark book by CEO and founder Alan Kelly, includes The Playmaker’s Table™, a first-ever “periodic table” of the 25 moves and countermoves of business, politics, and pop culture, and StrategyMapper™, a collaborative web tool that helps playmakers quickly predict and plan the underlying strategies of a marketplace and their options for winning. The Playmaker’s Standard, LLC, is based in the Washington, D.C. area.