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Erik: What have Sun Tzu's writings taught you about effective political campaign management?
Matt: You know, I wish I had a white board but Sun Tzu, I love to write on a white board
with a marker and I had a marker here and a white board, I'd write a globe as an objective,
a circle on the white board and an arrow just approaching that globe, that circle dead on.
Sun Tzu said that you engage the objective with a common maneuver but that you defeat
the objective or achieve the objective with an uncommon maneuver so kind of like a little
bended hook arrow underneath, the idea being in the old days, in Sun Tzu's time, the armies
would march straight forward in rows and engage the enemy... and the innovative maneuver would
be, let's say, the cavalry doing a flanking maneuver to the side of the enemy and that
would defeat the enemy. I think that same concept holds itself in any campaign, in any
initiative that I work on to this day and I concentrate on the innovative, that you
engage your objective with a common and that you defeat the objective, you achieve the
objective with the uncommon or innovative maneuver. We all know what the common maneuver
is, we all know what it takes to move forward, to engage that objective for the day or for
the year, what those common maneuvers are, what those common tactics are, but it's the
innovative tactic, that's what makes us different. You know, this was a different kind of campaign,
I was Mayor Will Wynn's aide during his first term and through reelection, he was the mayor
-- our fiftieth mayor of the city of Austin and so I was in-house, I wasn't on the outside
running the campaign but I was inside working on his... the initiatives that we were working
on basically to get reelected but from the mayor's office and the innovative tactic that
I used was very simple and they so often are very simple, we put together a message calendar
that led us down the path of one week of good public policy and then one week of fluff.
So one week of fluff, one week of good public policy, one week of fluff, one week of good
public policy. We were always in the press, some weeks it was because we were signing
the World Environmental Day Accords or we were signing some environmental policy, but
in the weeks in between we would go and jump off a bridge for a movie and it would be a
whole big thing and the TV would come out and the Mayor would be jumping off a bridge
into water, it was really cool, or we pardoned a goat in southwest Austin, there was a goat
because of some zoning restrictions was not able to live in the house that he was at,
so he wasn't able to live in the front yard, a very well known goat. So we changed the
zoning rules and that was neat enough, but what was really cool was we actually went
down to the goat's house, set up a table with a bunch of pens out in front and some proclamation
paper and even though it didn't really mean anything we had a whole ceremony and the Mayor
signing stuff and giving the pens away and the press there, got a whole big splash of
press for it. But it was those innovative maneuvers in between the common, so you'd
probably say the common would be passing the public policy, doing what mayors do in the
United States every year, signing good policy into place or championing a new park or something
like that, but it was those little innovative things in-between that really helped put us
over the top.