How I Work: Katherine Lee, Executive Strategy Director, Athletics
Katherine Lee’s superpower is listening. Image: c/o Katherine Lee. Design by Barbara Cadorna.
Athletics Executive Strategy Director Katherine Lee’s day starts with pterodactyl screams (aka her toddler waking up). And she freely shares where it goes from there, from her schedule (“free jazz stuck together with a lot of calendaring”) to her mantra (“There is no such thing as a branding emergency.”)
Lee holds a MS in biotechnology, a BA in molecular biology and economics, and a MFA in Design+Technology. Her approach relies heavily on the human factors, believing that when it comes to brand, it’s all about digging into what makes people tick, and what drives them to make the choices they make. She plays a key role for Athletics clients, working with Tia, Galileo, and more. Read on for how she works.
Rise and Shine
I’ve always loved the morning. It’s got a little bit of so many things I like. The scraps of any weird or boring dreams that were occupying the last few minutes of sleep. Coffee. Close-to-home clothes. Breakfast foods. WNYC. These days, my morning routine has been significantly altered to suit the whims of a toddler.
Currently, my ritual is something like this: He wakes me up with his pterodactyl screams, and I go and get him out of his crib. He stomps purposefully into my room, opens up the bedside table drawer to retrieve a remote control and turns the lamp on. He drinks milk, and then we have heated discussions about such topics as Spot Goes to the Farm, the light, trains and planes, or peeing and brushing teeth. Then, there’s coffee and maybe a fast and furious breakfast before we go on a walk to the fruit stand by Myrtle-Wyckoff. This spot is remarkable for being run by a Pakistani guy whom I’ve never seen without a lit cigarette hanging from his mouth. Also, because it’s right under where the M train stops, which means there are big trainspotting opportunities. Then we’re back home, and I sneak upstairs as subtly as I can to exercise (right now, it’s Daily Burn, because I don’t have to use a single brain cell, just turn it on), shower, and be on for work. The exercise is really my saving grace.
Work Uniform
There is no real work uniform. What I wear is completely dictated by how I feel that morning, though since I work from home more often than not, voluminous pants are one of my staple choices. I vacillate wildly between shapeless garments featuring a dull, female bird palate, and mid-life crisis vacation clothes. Since the beginning of the pandemic, I have had a little box of earrings and lipstick on my desk, so if I’m feeling a little grody or if I have to use a videoconferencing technology that makes me look gray (I’m looking at you, Chime), then I swipe on a little lipstick or put on some big-ass earrings.
How I Structure My Day
Ha, you’ll be happy to know that I often allow the structure of my day to simply become a victim of my calendar. This probably sounds hilariously wrong, given that my job is supposed to be strategic planning. For the days that are so-very-full-of-meetings, I put on my Zoom armor, and slot in moments of re-caffeination and snacking. But what that means is that I look at the stuff that’s in my calendar that’s immoveable, and I work around it, quietly blocking off a few swatches here and there to focus on specific tasks. Then, I go through my hot list for the day, and I prioritize the things I have to do. That’s about it. It’s a little bit of free jazz stuck together with a lot of calendaring. If I really need to focus, the Pomodoro Method is a bit of magic (25 minutes of focused work, followed by an enforced five minutes of dicking around), if my day can accommodate chunks of 30 minutes at a time. It’s a perfect babysitter when I just need to force a bit of discipline into my day or stop myself avoiding a task.
Playlist Favorites
I spend a lot of my time doing work that requires thinking and writing, so I can’t really listen to anything with words. I love me some Bach, Jóhann Jóhannsson, Penguin Cafe Orchestra, Brian Eno, and Hans Zimmer. Because I’m often crippled by the question of what to listen to while I work, I put on whatever Flow State sends me in my inbox every morning for two hours of no-vocals goodness. If it’s not thinking-time, then my playlists are very promiscuous. I like all sorts of stuff from shower bops to Soul Calypso, to early 2000s house, to country.
Tools of the Trade
The usual suspects are the blank backs of printer scrap, a Bic mechanical pencil, Apple’s Notes app, thesaurus.com, Google Slides, and Figma. I’ve always been kind of a weirdo about recycling and reusing, so I keep lots of odd bits of scrap paper. Most of my work, the best and the worst of it, starts on a sheet of paper with lots of scrawl, intersecting every which way across the page. Because I’m a strategist, much of the work I do is communicated through slides or decks. One of the most important pieces of building a deck is sketching it out, almost like a comic book or a storyboard—at that level of abstraction. You might find the first slide in any deck I’m drafting looking a bit like a crazy solitaire game, with little rectangles all over it, each representing a slide with a sketched out cartoon of what will eventually be on that page. It really helps me to see how someone might actually take in the information I’m trying to lay out. When I’m doing research on audiences, I love a good ol’ interview, or a group discussion. It never gets old. On-the-street interviews are always fun, if that’s right for the thing. I don’t have any qualms about lightly accosting people to get their perspective on things.
Dream Studio
I’ve always loved places that make me feel like I’m both inside and outside at the same time, where there isn’t a hermetic seal between the inside and the outside, where the air is continuous from inside to out and windows don’t always mean glass. This is really only possible in places with equatorial climates, but I’d want my studio to be right in the thick of nature, so I can hear the rain, birds indulging in un-self-conscious songs, animals going about their business, water rushing off to wherever it has to be next. I wouldn’t mind if that meant that the humidity stuck to me. I feel like that’s part of it.
One Unique Thing About My Work Process
I think there are probably a thousand flavors of strategists, and the thing that serves as the foundation of my own work process is listening. I guess I would describe it as my secret sauce. Just about everything I do starts with listening, and that includes listening for things that people are actually saying but can’t articulate, and also all the things that aren’t said (out loud).
Mantra
Start by starting.
Go slowly, for I am in a great hurry.
There is no such thing as a branding emergency.
My Bright Idea that Never Saw the Light of Day
You’re gonna think this is rich because I’m one of those people who’s a bit deaf to lyrics. I might listen to a song a million times and not pick up on the main refrain. But still!! For the lyrics that I do in fact hear, I’ve always wanted to have a function in my messaging apps that would allow me to quote a little clip of a song, almost like the way people use GIFs. Imagine that you’ve just emerged from spending the last 12 hours binging Succession with your bestie, you could send them an iconic Whitney Houston line, “The Lord asked me what I did with my life, and I saiiiiid, ‘I spent it with you.’” Or maybe you could gently remind your buddy (the one you never pays you back) to pay you by sending them a clip of Rihanna’s “B*tch Better Have My Money.” If it weren’t such an IP minefield, I’d love to have this be in my life.
To-Do List Item That Keeps Me Up At Night
My house runs on heating oil #2:
My house runs on old, dead dinosaur bodies. As a huge eco-freak, this really eats away at me. I want to transition my whole life to cleaner everything. Solar. Geo. Electric. Anything that’s not old, dead dinosaur bodies.
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