Washington, D.C. - How will the next president of the United States navigate his or her way to the White House? How will HP defend or rebuild its damaged reputation? How will activists mobilize to slow or stop global warming? And in each of these cases, how will journalists report the substance and ignore the spin?
To technology marketing veteran Alan Kelly in his code-cracking book, The Elements of Influence: The New Essential System for Managing Competition, Reputation, Brand, and Buzz (Dutton/Penguin Group, on sale today), the answer is simple: "They''ll run plays, as many as 25 of them, in combinations, patterns and sequences to suit their instincts and conditions."
Presidential hopefuls will run framing plays, like Call Outs and Screens, to de-position their rivals and pump up their platforms. HP will first run diverting plays, like Deflects, hoping to buy time and make its corporate spying headache go away, but later, full-blown Lanterns and Discos to beg forgiveness and get back to business. Environmentalists will employ freezing strategies, like Jams and Mirrors, to regulate carbon dioxide emissions. Journalists will be happy recipients of Leaks and Trial Balloons and suffering victims of Red Herrings and Peacocks
Illustrated with intuitive icons and scores of helpful tables and case studies, The Elements of Influence is the new essential book for anyone who must make a sale, negotiate a contract, manage a campaign, develop a brand, cultivate a reputation, build a legal case, seed word-of-mouth, create a groundswell, plant a media virus, and build a buzz. It 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, and plays are its new lexicon.

What''s a Play?

"Plays are discrete strategic maneuvers," writes Kelly, a first-time author and former PR agency CEO, whose clients have included such elite success stories as Oracle, HP, Cisco and Sun. "Like preemptive strikes in maneuver warfare, like castling in chess, plays help people and organizations decipher and forecast their positions in a marketplace. A play can be a sword or a shield."

  Playmakers, the strategists who call and run plays, position themselves and their allies and de-position their rivals. They argue with some and agree with others. They sometimes work in isolation but more often with surrogates. They cajole and they challenge. They obfuscate and they "bloviate." They tell the truth and they shade it. Here are some simple examples of well-known plays:

 
• Business Play. From the launch of the Apple II and Macintosh to his reinvention of film animation and digital media, Apple''s Steve Jobs has repeatedly mastered the Draft, an aggressive but clever play that allows patient playmakers to follow closely then slingshot past a dozing leader.
   
• Political Play. During his tenure as Chief of the U.S. Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan used far subtler strategies to move markets and manage the U.S. money supply. In a rambling 1996 speech, he buried the words "irrational exuberance" to send a wary signal to bullish marketers. The play was a Ping, the most careful- but sometimes most powerful- of playmaking ploys.
   
• Pop Culture Play. In 2004, when daytime talk show host Oprah Winfrey floored her studio audience with the keys to 276 new cars, she was running a Peacock, a stunt whose novelty can overpower and power-up marketplace buzz.
   

The Playmaker''s Table: A Periodic Table of Plays

Plays are the building blocks of a classification system dubbed The Playmaker''s Table , a collection of 25 irreducibly simple and carefully placed strategies that, Kelly suggests, constitute the universe of moves and counter-moves of business, politics and pop culture. He writes, "Economists have game theory. Biologists have the phylogenetic tree. Software developers have object-oriented programming. But for those whose work centers on strategy, positioning or some form of marketplace spin there has been nothing- until now."

To illustrate, describe, sort, classify, and name the plays and the playmaker''s framework, Kelly conducted an extensive research and development process: 10 years of field observation and experience in the high technology market, including two years of literature review and expert interviews (in game theory, maneuver warfare, negotiation, parliamentary debate and the more commercial fields of business strategy, marketing, sales, advertising, public relations and public affairs) and a year-long pilot program with major companies in the chemical, insurance, pharmaceutical, semiconductor and wireless sectors.

The Playmaker''s Standard : Putting The Elements of Influence into Practice

Kelly has also launched The Playmaker''s Standard, LLC to help organizations put the theory of The Elements of Influence into practice. In addition to a suite of training and education services, the Washington, D.C. area-based software and consulting firm offers a variety of easy-to-use web-based tools for playmakers of all kinds. These include The Playmaker''s Table (described above), The Playmaker''s Process , a five-step methodology for running and calling plays; and Factors at Play , a list of variables that influence playmakers and their marketplaces. All are available online at www.plays2run.com with varying levels of accessibility- from The Playmaker''s Table, which is free to the public, to the StrategyMapper™ , a patent-pending web application that lets online subscribers quickly map and forecast the underlying strategies of a marketplace and their options for winning. (See companion news release.)

In Praise of Elements

The Elements of Influence has drawn significant advance praise and support from noted business, political and academic leaders. (See companion fact sheet for additional endorsements.)

 
• "Alan Kelly is the Bill Walsh of marketing and positioning strategy and tactics. His playbook reads like an insider''s field guide to the ins and outs of positioning warfare. Master it, and you can play with the pros anytime," says Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm and Dealing with Darwin.
   
• "This is the ultimate playbook for communicators and campaigners of all stripes. If you work in politics, business, or elsewhere, keep a copy of The Elements of Influence on your desk- and give copies to your staff," says Dan Schnur, Communications Director, McCain 2000 Presidential Campaign.
   
• "The Elements of Influence is a remarkable and timely book. It''s also a good read, not only for those who practice in the professions of influence, but for those of us who are subject to their maneuverings. No one in marketing, sales, public relations, lobbying, and other forms of psychological influence can call their understanding complete without first examining what Alan Kelly has written," says James S. O''Rourke IV, Professor and Director, The Eugene D. Fanning Center for Business Communication, Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame.
   

With the publication of The Elements of Influence, formation of The Playmaker''s Standard, LLC, and launch of the authoritative blog, The Playmaker''s Forum (blog.plays2run.com), Kelly aims to dissect marketing buzz, decode spin, and guarantee that no one reads The New York Times or watches The Today Show the same way again. "You run plays. And plays are run on you," he reminds us.

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 the 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.

About Alan Kelly

Alan Kelly is a foremost authority in competitive strategy and a leading innovator in the fields of communication, research and technology marketing. He is the CEO and founder of The Playmaker''s Standard, LLC, a software services and consulting firm specializing in strategy execution, and author of The Elements of Influence: The New Essential System for Managing Competition, Reputation, Brand, and Buzz (Dutton/Penguin). As founding CEO of Applied Communications Group, an acclaimed San Francisco-based public relations and research consultancy, he formulated the discipline of "playmaking" while counseling some of the best-known global technology companies, including Oracle, HP, Cisco, Sun Microsystems and Genentech, among others. Kelly holds a master''s degree in Communication Research from Stanford University and now lives in Maryland.

About Dutton

Dutton Books is a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc., one of the leading U.S. adult and children''s trade book publishers, owning a wide range of imprints and trademarks including Berkley Books, Dutton, Frederick Warne, G.P. Putnam''s Sons, Gotham Books, Grosset & Dunlap, New American Library, Penguin, Philomel, Riverhead Books and Viking, among others. Penguin Group is owned by Pearson plc, the international media company.