Blair Singer walks through PERT, a planning method used for Pearl Harbor, the Polaris missile, and the moon landing. Start with your bold goal, work backward to find what steps and inventions you actually need, and align your team around it.
There is a process to help you build a brand. There is a process to help you build a team. There's a process that will take you from the unknown to the known to create miracles and magic in your business. No matter what's going on in the environment. Would you like to know what it is? Okay, well, if you want to know what it is, you're gonna have to wait because I got to tell you a little story first. Okay, so humor me with the story. In 1941, on December 7th, early in the morning on a Sunday morning, about 350 some odd Japanese fighter bo wrecked Pearl harbor and destroyed, decimated the Pacific Fleet of the United States of America at that time. Two days later, a day actually a day later, the United States declared war on Japan. Another couple days later, Germany declared war on America. And so the United States, which was like a seventh, eighth ranked military power in the world, now is fighting two wars and had to figure out how to get it together to win them, which in fact with the allies did win. So but it started a process and the process was how do we go from where we are now to some to a place where this never happens again? Where we become, where the United States says we want to become number one. It sounds familiar. We want to become number one as a military world power. I'm going to say, is that familiar? That's what we do in our businesses. We want to be number one in this, number one in that. We want to have market share. Same thing, big goal way out there. How are we going to do it? So by, by the end of the, by war's end, a few years after, we're now in a cold war competing with the Soviet Union. And so the United States figured that we needed that they needed one way to get ahead to have ultimate nuclear supremacy. So somebody came up with the idea of, of a submarine based missile system armed with a nuclear warhead that could strike anywhere in the world on a moment's notice. Because we don't have the technology for that. How in that world are we going to do that? So they put together a process which I'm going to show you a piece of here. They put together a process that's been closely held by the industrial military complex and used for very, very big functions that was developed just for that Polaris missile project. This was in the mid-1950s, 1956, I believe. On January 20, 1960, the USS Washington submarine launched the first Polaris missile, not with a warhead, and hit, accurately hit a target a thousand miles downrange with then took the United States from being a seventh or eighth ranked military power to numero uno in the world. Now, how did that happen, by the way? It happened in half the time they projected it, but employed over three or four thousand different contractors, hundreds of thousands of people and hundreds of thousands of events that all had to come together at that time. When that person hit the button, that that thing would launch accurately. How did that happen? What kind of a process was that? How did they align all these people? I have a hard time just getting five people to cooperate on my team. They're doing hundreds of thousands. Well, two years later, John Fitzgerald Kennedy stood on a podium on a hot summer day at Rice University and said, by the end of the decade, we're going to put a man on the moon. A man on the Moon. 1962. A Man on the. What gave him the confidence to do that? What gave him the confidence was the process that was used to build that and launch that Polaris missile project is now the same process they would use on Apollo to get Neil Armstrong and his team safely to the moon and back. Very powerful process. Would you like to know the process? Well, you can look it up. It's called pert P E R T pert P E R T. PERT stands for Program Evaluation Review Technique. You don't need to remember any of that. But one of the fundamental differences, and we learned this from one of the. The way we learned it was kind of convoluted. So a little more story. Back in the early 1980s, one of Robert's friends and my friends happened to go to a program where the guy who developed this planning process actually was teaching the program, came back and taught it to us. We ripped it apart, pulled it apart, made it really fun, really simple, really easy, very collaborative to do. And we started teaching ourselves, our clients, our customers how to do this. I haven't revealed this to the public in many, many, many years, but now more than ever, as Ford said, you are meant to design your future, not to be a victim of it. You're designed to create the future. Design your future, be an architect of the future, not to be victim of it, as so many people are. That's why this is an opportunity. So there were 40 some odd steps to this thing. Very complicated, designed for engineers. We boil it down to like 10 steps, make it really fun, easy to do. And there will be more videos on how to do that later. But I'm just going to give you a fundamental right now that makes it the difference okay, so if you look over here, that, that is a goal over here. That's. That's you going to the goal. Okay, so he set a goal. He set a mission. Very good. I got that, Blair. I know how to do that. We could do. We could set goals and missions. Got it. Okay, now what do you do? Well, now we got a goal. What's step one? What's step two? What's step three? Right. Wrong. That's not how you do it. You can't do it that way because you don't know you're going from the known to the unknown. Admiral Rayburn, who was the head of the Polaris project, said there were all kinds of things that we didn't even know we were going to have to invent and create new alloys and new circuitry and all, all these other people would be involved. We had no idea what it was going to be all about. But the pert let them know in advance what it was they were going to need to create. Why? Because they start. Here's the key. You get your goal and you start in the future. That's where your goal is. And you don't start by starting from here and going to here. You start creating the plan from here. You work backwards. I'll say it again. You go start here and work backwards. I just, I just work with the Rich dad company. We did a pert on a big project that they're a global project they're doing on their Cash Flow Club games. It's amazing project. And that project, the. The last goal was not the release of the software of the project. The last goal was the party they were going to use to celebrate. In typical Rich dad style, we're going to have a party to celebrate what we just did. So start from there and work back what happened before that, what happened before that? What happened before that? What happened before that. And that's how you pull out the hardware of going from the known to the unknown, which is what an entrepreneur does. If you're doing what somebody else is already doing, that's redundancy. There's no need to do that. You can do it, maybe do it a little bit better, that's fine. But a true entrepreneur creates something that was not there before, creates an artifact, a tool which becomes an asset of the business. Okay, so fast forward. The United States went from number eight to number one, put the first man on the moon and brought him back safely. This technology, like I said, it was never available before today.
