Limited availability makes things seem more valuable or urgent.
More quotesEfficiency is trying to murder creativity with a relevant-reading list.
Every input must support this quarter’s brief. Every meeting contains the usual experts. Every reference comes from a competitor’s launch last Tuesday. The team becomes spectacularly informed about its category and incapable of surprising it. Diverse experience looks wasteful until a stuck problem needs the obscure analogy nobody was supposed to collect: a queueing trick from a theme park, a welcome ritual from hospitality, a constraint borrowed from manufacturing. Linear experience produces linear answers because everyone starts with the same dots. The connection appears obvious afterwards, which is how useful creativity often hides its labour.
Reading widely is not enough; the fragments need attention and somewhere to wait. Save the odd example. Ask why it works, what condition makes it work and where else that condition appears. Invite people whose histories bring different dots before the solution hardens. A nurse, stage manager or mechanic may see a service problem more clearly than another category strategist—not through magic, but because they carry different patterns. Most material will never earn a line on a timesheet. Call it the inventory cost of having an imagination larger than the category newsletter. That stock matters.