Last week, Jason Shen shared a really great guestpost here - "Unorthodox Strategies for Winning."

There's been some really good discussion/feedback on it. Here's a great comment by Pedro Ramirez - the story in here is excellent -

I would add a 7th strategy:
Learn the rules and the goal and exploit them.

Let tell you a quick and simple story:
I was attending to some weekend course about teamwork, one of those activities that are made to let all the team members know each other and so on, anyways, we were faced with a “challenge” of creating the tallest structure with just straws and standard pins, the rule was just one, the structure has resist one minute without falling, we had like 5 minutes to build the structure, we were five people, we spent the first minute discussing a design, then we started to build the thing, when four minutes had passed it was clear that we will not succeed, since all the teams were in the same area and we were able to see what others teams were doing, as you can imagine, all the teams were trying to copy or take ideas from other teams, our structure was at that moment like 3 foot tall and the tallest structure was like 4 1/2 feet tall, our structure was not very stable to I tell the team something like: “the task is to create the tallest structure, not the most beautiful or coolest, do you trust me?”, they did, and they followed my instructions, we quickly changed all the base and we finished creating something like an inverted champagne flute(without the base of course) with a very tall “antenna”, we won the challenge by far, our structure was not only stable but tall(more than 7 foot).

I have applied that principle, in many other situations and it works great, of course, some times people don’t like it but its completely legal.

Love that story. Great insights. Cheers Pedro, thanks for sharing some good insights.

Pedro's site on computer programming is - http://thereisnotrycatchfinally.blogspot.com/