1 00pm 2 15pm Easy Long Term Planning Panel Alan Leeds, Amie Devero, Peter Compo

Welcome back. If you're just joining us for the first time, you are in the second half of the day, the live day, day number 2 of the Sustainable Strategic Planning Conference. And we're about to welcome, uh, let's make sure I don't make a hash of this again, The Easy Long-Term Planning Panel, how to facilitate the successful completion of long-term, short and long-term strategic plans that are interwoven without all of the difficulty. Because there are a bunch of folks out there who say that doing those kinds of plans is too hard and should not be attempted by anyone with a sane mind. We think differently. To help us do our different thinking. Let me bring up onto the stage first Alan Leeds. Actually, guys, if Alan, Peter, and me, if you could just raise your hand, that's a shortcut that would help me bring you on stage much quicker.

Great.

Normally I have to like search through the mic. Sorry, search through a list of people. Alan, the, the hand raise is at the bottom of the page, just that palm at the bottom of the page.

So Francis, can you hear me?

I can, yep, we're live.

Looks like all of my preliminary testing has not worked camera-wise.

It looks like you're a bit dark.

Yeah, I, and I did do all of the pre-checks, so Airmeet does not like me.

It's a personal thing.

When I go to testing, when I go to a different window for the test, it shows it working fine.

Okay, here we go.

Let me see if I can change cameras.

Peter, is your microphone off as well, or is that same problem?

Am I okay?

Oh, okay.

I went into the system and made sure I set it up again even though I was okay before. It threw me off. I had to go in and set up, uh, audio video settings. Right to the left of the raise your hand symbol down at the bottom will let you get into your settings, the three dots.

It may, it may work, it may not work. Alan, I'm handing this over to you to sort out with your capable abilities, skills, and temperament.

Thank you very much. Okay, hello, I'm Alan Leeds. I'm the president of Why Change, and we have an online purpose-driven strategy management assessment tool as well as a strategy management deployment tool. And I'm the moderator of this panel called Easy Long-Term Planning, and I'm pleased to be part of this panel with Peter Kompo. He's the author of the recent book, The Emergent Approach to Strategy: Adaptive Design and Education and Execution. And unlike many strategy authors from universities and consulting firms, Peter's professional experience was spent working in the, quote, corporate trenches at DuPont, where he held leadership positions in marketing, supply chain, and business management. Our second panelist is Ami Devereaux, President of Beyond Strategy and Coaching and author of the book, Powered by Principle: Using Core Values to Build Worldwide World-Class Organizations. And like the other panels, if you have questions, please put them in the Q&A section of the Airmeet platform, as we want this to be a very responsive session. If you have comments, by all means, put them in the chat and please stay active. Now, we've all come to this panel having heard business leaders at one time or another with objections to doing long-term strategic planning, like it's impossible to think far— that far into the future, or so long-term thinking should not even be attempted, and processes are too academic, theoretical, and abstract. So our purpose of this panel is to discuss long-term strategic planning. What is it? Should we be doing it? Is it too hard and can it be made easy? So the format for the panel will be, uh, some questions, and I'll pose the questions to our expert panelists and ask them each for their responses. I will then ask the audience for questions and comments on these questions, and approximately 10 minutes before the panel ends, we'll be entertaining general questions on our topic that the panelists will respond to. And then we'll have a wrap-up and takeaway at the end. So panelists, Peter, Ami, the first question for the panel is, in relation to this panel discussion, how would you define long-term strategic planning?

Peter? Thanks, Alan. I would define it as considering the elements of a strategic plan, a strategy framework, out as far as you have to go to be able to truly give you the guidance you need to make decisions in the short term. The horizon should be as far out as you think you need to go to consider and the right decisions in the short term and to give guidance to the organization as they march down the road towards their, uh, towards their objectives.

Okay, thank you.

Ami? Um, first of all, I really apologize for this video thing. I, I don't understand it, but anyway, and I've tried changing cameras, so I'm not trying to hide from you guys. Um, so I think for me, long-term strategic planning is actually planning It's actually using a date that is further out into the future than your actual strategic planning horizon. So for example, most of my clients are high-growth venture-funded tech startups. So their strategic horizon is what I would call the exit. Might be 2 years or 3 years or 5 years. And that's what we plan based on. But the long-term vision may be something 15 or 20 years out. Long beyond their own tenure, and we use that to establish the horizon of the strategic plan.

Okay, so we have a horizon that might be longer, 15, 20 years, and then things could change. I mean, things could change right now. Next, we might have Bard or ChatGPT. So really, Why plan long-term when things are going to change next week?

Ami? Well, so there's a difference between planning, like planning long-term, and actually having an explicit sort of logistical strategy for accomplishing your goal. But regardless of how things plan, I mean, I'm sorry, how things change, because things always change, right? There's always change. And there's no such thing as strategic planning with 100% certainty. The very nature of strategic planning is you're making an estimate, a probabilistic estimate, hopefully that's data-based, that's evidence-based about both how the conditions are going to change and about how you're going to confront the changes you've already projected. So when you go longer term, you're not so much predicting what's going to happen in the environment as you're defining and creating where you want to be, so the conditions may change along the way, and of course you'll adjust your strategy to accommodate changes in conditions, but at the same time, you're still aiming the same place. Like, if I get on a ship and I want to go around the world and end up back here in Tampa, Florida, lots of things are going to happen along the way, but they're not going to change my destination.

Okay, and Peter?

Yeah, I think this brings up a lot of issues. One is that a strategy, you know, we have kind of two definitions of a strategy. What is a strategy statement itself? You know, famously it's been said in the past, you know, can you state your strategy in 35 words or less? And in my view, a strategy is a rule. A central rule that gives guidance to the organization for making decisions. But a strategic plan, a strategic framework's got a whole bunch of elements that are related to many horizons, including the very long horizons outside of what the typical strategies that Ami was just talking about. So for example, a strategic plan has scenarios.. It has your vision and mission that can go way out in the future. It has assessments of, of, you know, what kind of constraints will exist on a, on a company from a regulatory point of view or, or societal changes. It has analysis of, of societal trends. All of these things are not about what you're going to do next month, per se. They're about Understanding the landscape, and sometimes you really do have to look out in long periods to get a feel for this.

Okay, so we are looking at the landscape, and but why do— why, why not 2, 3 months? Why a year? Or maybe a year is okay, but why 3 to 5 years? I mean, it seems like, why should we plan 3 years? Because now I have to come up with a whole machine intelligence way of doing ChatGPT, and I can start developing my products, and I have to change the way I'm going to do my help experience and how I'm going to interface with people that can do automated. So I wouldn't have known that 5 years ago. So why go out that far? Well, by all means, before you answer, Peter, by all means, any of you have questions out there, by all means, put them in the chat. I'd like to hear what everybody else thinks about it. So my first question, Peter, is, yeah, why, why longer than 3 years?

Well, I, I think there's 2 reasons in my mind. The first is there's an old line, chance favors the prepared mind. The changes that are coming are not completely arbitrary. Everything is not, um, you know, a complete surprise. There are things that you can learn about industries and learn about in the space that you're going to play that will enable you to recognize when things are changing much better than if someone who just ignores the future. Um, you, you prepare yourself to react to changes and be, and be able to react to changes by having studied the future and studied what, what might be. I think, uh, another reason though is, and it's related. All kinds of opportunities come at businesses over time. The idea that your strategy will tell you everything you have to do in the next year or two is just wrong. It could never be like that. That's the fallacy of strategy as plans, lists of plans. You can't plan the future. Um, but You can be prepared when an opportunity comes at you to judge whether it makes sense, to judge whether it will fit your mission and your overall vision and where you're trying to go. And without having thought out into a larger horizon, you have no way to do that.

May I?

What you're saying— Oh, go ahead. So, Um, I actually think it's something much more profound than that. If you're strategizing to solve a short-term challenge, then by all means, only think out a month or 2 months or whatever the particular problem is you're trying to solve. And there is a lot of strategy around solving, excuse me, seemingly intransigent problems that are not part of your strategic plan per se. But the reason to have a strategic plan that goes past 2 months or 3 months or a year is because defining your strategic, um, existence, so to speak, is not subject to the reactivity you're going to bring to dealing with these interim problems. And what I mean by that is, let's take for example the pandemic. The pandemic was truly an unexpected and unanticipated change. So with all the things that companies put into their strategic plans in 2018, probably a worldwide pandemic that shut down all in-person commerce was not one of them. And so when that happened, businesses had to adapt in order to address how to keep going with their business despite the, the sort of constraints laid on all of us by the pandemic. But they didn't change the business they were in. They remained in the business they were— I'm sorry, I apologize for that. And they found new ways to confront these logistical challenges, the logistical challenges presented by the pandemic limitations. So for example, if you were a restaurant and your restaurant specialized in authentic Chinese or authentic Cantonese food, You didn't suddenly close up shop and go into the mail order business. You remained a Cantonese restaurant. However, you found a new way to deliver your goods given that people couldn't eat in your dining room. So knowing who you are, what your strategic value proposition is, and the way in which you interact with the marketplace that makes them go to you instead of all of the other things they could do instead of going to you. Is still the, if you will, to use Peter's terminology, is still the strategic rule. But you're going to find a new way to deal with the conditional changes that now make what you had in mind impossible or difficult.

Okay, so you're talking about strategy as a rule. I heard about scenario planning. So are we talking about writing something down as far as where we want to go, or are we just talking about putting together scenario-based plans and see what happens.

Can I, uh, can I jump in on that? Uh, and to follow up, I think Ami's point of bringing up the pandemic is a great example to use here. Um, and a restaurant is one case, and restaurants had to, like Ami talked about, adapt and find ways to do that. But what about retailers who were in the middle of a slow, inexorable process of the movement to online retail, right? So if in the years before the pandemic, if a company was ignoring the big picture and ignoring scenarios of the future that, um, online retailing and e-commerce was coming, uh, and ignoring all the implications of that for their company. When the pandemic hit, they were much less prepared than a business that had already explored those scenarios and perhaps had put in some option— optionality for themselves around how to make the switch sooner. Than later. I think this is an example of using scenarios in a strategic plan to be prepared.

And I'm a big believer in scenario planning as well, but I think we need to— this is where we really need to define terms. So we've now used strategy in about 100 different ways. So there's strategy, which is simply the path you're going to take to solve a problem and get someplace. There's strategic planning, which is a formal plan that includes, as Peter said, lots of different elements, but that the strategic part of it is actually what he's calling the rule, what I'll call the differentiator, and the go-to-market strategy. There are, there are a lot of different terms, and I think what we're talking about in this panel, or at least my understanding of it, was we're talking about the rationale for doing a long-term strategic plan, or at least a strategic plan based on a long-term goal. Long as opposed to medium term, like a year or 2 years, but not of all the other permutations. So scenario planning is a great addition to strategic planning. So are core values. So are, um, so is all the data collection and SWOT analyses and PESTLE analyses, but those are not strategic plans. Those are information you gather so as to do a strategic plan.

So what you're saying is there's different types of plans then, what you're saying, this scenario planning, there's a direction which is strategy, um, and then there's the strategic plan you write down. Is, is that what we're all saying? There's different and we have to make sure our words match what we're looking for?

Well, we do have a not only in this panel session, but in everywhere that strategy is discussed today, there is just a very difficult problem of lack of common definition of what strategy and a strategic plan is. And with enough time, you can kind of get through it and start to, start to align, but it is a very difficult challenge in the literature and in discussions. So there's— yeah.

So it sounds like we have a problem in defining it. Maybe that's one of the first things needs to be looked at is, what do we mean by strategy or strategic planning? Let me give you an example. There's a gas and electric company, very large gas and electric company, in, in the United States. And, uh, when COVID hit, they all made an announcement. The president made an announcement, we're going to go to Level 3. Level 3 defined how many people stayed home, how many people worked from home, how many people didn't. He had no idea that there was going to be COVID or an epidemic, but he— they had different levels of working at home because of different types of scenarios they had come together. So that was very good. Then they had a whole big issue on what to do as far as how to give repair to transmission lines, etc. And they, they weren't prepared for that. Now, is that strategic planning or is that scenario planning? What's, what's your thought, Peter?

Well, in my approach, um, scenarios— I wouldn't call it scenario planning because scenario planning is just kind of another strategy planning with focus on scenarios. For me, scenarios are an integral part of a strategic plan because they define alternative futures in which your strategy, your strategy rule, and your goals, and your specific plans, they are different futures that you may have to exist in. And strategic Adding scenarios into a strategic plan is, for me, an integral part of a strategic plan.

Okay. And what should be written down for long term then? I mean, do we need to— it's so hard to plan the future, then what do we need to do? What would you suggest?

Well, I'll let Emily jump in on this too. Glad you're back.

I missed the question, so I'm not entirely sure.

Well, let me finish it out and then we can restate.

I had some kind of power outage that threw me off everything.

Well, I think there's a— if I could just finish up this thought, there's a huge difference between predicting the future and scenarios.

I quite agree.

Right? This is something that I think is often used. So when people say we can't predict the future, The whole point is not to try to predict the future.

It's true.

And then what scenarios does is identify plausible futures, multiple plausible futures with some sense of probability. But the, the real core idea is to admit that whatever you say you're going to do, it's at the mercy of multiple futures.

I would say that quite differently. I don't think it's at the mercy of multiple futures. I think that scenario plans are, as you said, they are alternate scenarios of future stories. So when you do scenario planning, what you're essentially doing is telling multiple narratives about the future of the enterprise. And each possible narrative could happen exactly the way you describe it, or it could happen in some variant of the way you describe it. But once you select a scenario, you're not only saying this is the one that we think has the highest probability of being successful, although that is one thing you're saying. You're also saying this is the one that we are going to take the appropriate actions so as to cause it to go that way. So for example, if you're running an organization and you want to be a certain, no, certain dollar of revenue in 5 years, and that dollar amount is let's say, 1,000% what you're doing right now, you need to ask the question, where is that revenue going to come from? Is it going to come from some kind of unprecedented explosion in demand? Is it going to come from acquiring other companies? Is it— and if we're going to acquire other companies, are we going to acquire other companies in this business, or are we going to branch out? Are we going to be acquired? Are we going to split into multiple— so these things are not things you're trying to predict. These are creative acts. This is no different than writing a novel. You're literally writing a novel of the future of your organization that takes into account your own assessment of what's likely to take place in the conditions and the degree to which you have the core competencies, resources, and wherewithal to exploit those things in order to make the result happen that you're committed to having result— having happen. So, it's not a question— it is not actually, as somebody in the chat says, scenarios are part of environment assessments. I totally disagree. Scenarios take into account environmental assessments, but they are themselves intentional inventions so as to assess possible future scenarios or possible future narratives.

Peter, what do you think?

Well, we do have an issue again of the definition of scenarios itself. So for some, a scenario includes all of your own actions and its interaction with the outside world. Uh, for others, it is the outside world in which you're going to play in, and that your own actions are strategy alternatives that you're evaluating that are going to play out in that outside world. I think you can get to the same place if once you know the language. So just for example, you know, a great example is for 20 years we had very low interest rates. And all of a sudden, how many people have been just thrown for a terrible loop because they didn't consider the possibility of 5% interest rates? Um, they didn't consider in their strategy alternatives the possibility of a case of 5% interest rates. And 5% interest rates was not a prediction. It would have been a one scenario of the external environment that they might have considered when looking at strategy alternatives. So strategy alternative in that case for a bank like SB— I forget, SBV or C, the one, uh, the Silicon Valley Bank. Silicon Valley Bank, thank you. You know, there would have been a way to hedge or to protect themselves.

They didn't fail to hedge because of interest rates. They invested in volatile instruments, and that's what happened to them. And then interest rates—

well, they also assumed that interest rates of the treasuries would be would be this— investments would be the same and so forth. But they could have created a strategy alternative that reflected— and in my language again, they were at the mercy of both a continued low-interest case and a very high-interest case that their future 2 years ago, looking forward, if they were working on their strategy 2 years ago, they would have had two scenarios, low interest and high, and their strategy, whatever they chose to do, would be at the mercy of both of those futures.

So I think what you're both saying is that there has to be looking at scenario planning. Now, do we cause the scenarios or do the scenarios happen on us? But if we have a strategic direction, I think we know this is where we want to go, and then how much planning do we need to do? And I think is what you're all saying, and whether it's something intentional. There's somebody in the chat that mentioned Darwin's point of view as far as how to adapt and the core of resource-based theory of organizations. Any comments on that?

Not really. I mean, we can talk about adaptation. I'm not— I mean, I think it's a stretch to talk about Darwin and adaptation, but Not that Darwin doesn't address it, but Darwin is addressing a very different thing. He's not addressing intentional adaptation. The reality is, is that whether you use scenario planning to describe your creation of the future or to describe the possible ways that conditions could change, at least the way I'm using it, it has to do that anyway. So in either event, if you are looking into the future and trying to make assessments about what are the likely ways things will unfold, you are unwise to plan your strategy without regard to the downsides. So when things are all going very well and the conditions are opportunistic for your business, it is foolhardy and naive not to consider that many of those tides may change, whether that be interest rates going up or down, whether that's that the marketplace changes, that we have a recession, I mean, anybody right now in this conference who's a consultant should be thinking about what happens to their business if we have the recession that economists have been telling us for 5 years we're about to have. You should have a plan. And if you don't have a plan, make one now, because you should have had one 6 months ago. And we may never have that recession. But if we do have it, what you don't want is to lose— I mean, I lost my business in the last recession. Because my book had just come out and I was on a speaking tour. And, you know, people stopped paying for strategy consulting. People canceled professional conferences. They stopped buying books in bulk. And it was a disaster. I'll never make that mistake again. But I wish I hadn't made it the first time.

So it sounds like when you're doing strategy and coming up with your overall directions, your scenarios have to include the best cases and the worst cases. Absolutely. Yeah.

And the worst case is across multiple dimensions, right? Because I mean, let's say you're in real estate right now. If you're in real estate right now, you've got a problem. Interest rates went up and the— there is just a— the pricing has reached such high levels that the people who would have bought a year ago at 0% interest rates simply can't come up with the down payment or afford the mortgage payments. On these properties that have now risen in price by 30 to 40%. So you are priced out of selling property. That's something people should have thought about before becoming real estate agents.

So, um, if we take a look at 5 disqualifications for strategy, and we take a look at, you know, um, Peter, in your book you talked about the disqualifications. One key area is those disqualifications also have to look whether you're looking at strategies that are likely or not likely, it sounds like.

Um, you mean outcomes, maybe? Yeah. Uh, well, I guess, I guess the most important thing here would be to distinguish between a strategy that's really a goal and that is disqualified by the, uh, by the opposite disqualifier or the numbers disqualifier and a strategy that's truly giving guidance. So let's just keep following on the example we've been using. Um, our goal is to make X dollars in real estate, right? Or, uh, to, to buy and sell homes, buy low, sell high, you know, some cliché goal, right? The opposite test says, well, if the opposite is absurd, it means that you're It's not a strategy. Um, you know, no one would buy— aspire to buy high and sell low. Or, we're going to buy 10 homes and sell them in the next 4 years for a 50% gross profit on each. That's numbers. That means it's a goal. Um, what we need is, like, for example, a strategy that says, look, we can't predict what the real estate market's going to be. We can't predict what interest rates are going to be. We know they could be high or low. So our strategy should consider some rule, some hedge rule, some design, something that guides us to make decisions, to only buy things of a certain type, to only buy in certain markets, to only buy under certain financial conditions. That would enable success in both poor real estate markets and good real estate markets. That's this distinction there between a goal and a strategy, and a strategy that works under multiple scenarios. And I, I think that's consistent— I mean, where, where you were going with that, right?

So when we talk about a strategy now, what we're talking about is looking at all the options for the strategy, things that could go well and things that could go not well, like the, the transmission and energy company had to look at what to do if we have all the people coming to our buildings and people when we don't, and they plan that out. So maybe the option is to take a look at what the direction we think is going to be based on where we want to go, our true north, and then take a look at all the contingencies that might happen. So an example is there's a very, very large software company And what they're doing is they have over 400 people just looking at artificial intelligence, ChatGPT, and they're doing all their help screens and all that. Now, they're in a position where they can actually use humans to do it, which they're planning, but they're also looking at the case where this is all gonna be automated and they don't need those people. And they're looking at both. Does that make sense?

Those are two great scenarios. You know, that's an example of, of considering two different futures that they've got to accept have a reasonable probability of happening over the next horizon, whatever the horizon that's meaningful there, for sure.

However, let me, let me just say something here, because there is a distinction between having a Plan B for a change in conditions and having a strategy. And if you're If you're operating a business, you must differentiate yourself because there are always competitors that can produce the result in either some other way or some other style or at some other price point or for some other target market. And your strategy cannot simply be, as you said, buy, you know, buy low, sell high, or provide a help desk either through ChatGPT or through humans. That's not a strategy. That may be an adjustment you're prepared to make because the technology changes or because you can't sell your help desk anymore for the price you had because you're being priced out by all of the low-cost ChatGPT versions and you need a model for that. But you still have nothing to sell that distinguishes you in either of those so-called strategies because they are entirely generic. And the point about differentiation is that you have to distinguish yourself. You have to find a way to distinguish yourself that is strategic and that lives— it is constant or steady across conditional responses. So changing your model from human to ChatGPT if you're running help desks is not a simple logistical change. It's literally— unless you were already running a rather robotic help desk, the odds are you must change your differentiator. Now you have a different market, a different pricing. Everything changes if you go to an AI model, unless you have a business already for which that would be an appropriate an appropriately differentiated exemplar.

So what should long-term strategy be? What kind of tools or what do you do to do this long-term strategy? Because many people are saying, I don't want to do long-term strategy. It's too hard. Do you have suggestions on what needs to happen?

Yes.

OK, I'm all ears. I think we all are.

Well, I mean, I think that— I think, first of all, we have to say it like What is the average horizon for most strategic planning? Are people doing strategic planning at all? I don't know the answer to that. I only know about what my clients do.

Yeah, I think when there was an earlier session, I think Frances did a poll and found about 30% of the people were saying 3 to 5 years.

3 to 5 years. OK. And what did everybody else say?

I don't know, Frances, you might want to jump in on what everybody was saying. There was very few that was longer.

What is the typical horizon? Is it 3 to 5 years, or is it shorter or longer? Or are those— is that long?

3 to 5 years was the horizon.

But is that considered long-term or short-term?

Yes, the majority, the majority are 5 years by far. I could find a graphic and throw it up. I think I have one, one somewhere, but it's majority are 5 years.

All right.

And are you—

By the standards of the Sustainable Strategy Conference, is that long or is that short?

Super short.

Okay.

That's basically tactical, tactical with, because it's not really a rethinking of anything. It's a continuation of what we've already been doing, just kind of an extrapolation.

Yeah. And I think actually, I think that's a really good point that in order to have a strategic plan do something other than provide improvement over what you're currently doing, which is largely what people do in their strategic plans, by the way. I mean, 99% of companies I ever talk to have a strategic plan that essentially says increase by 10% or 15% or some arbitrary percentage, and therefore changes nothing in their basic operation except adding some efficiency or possibly adding technology. It's always just an incremental change. So if we're talking about a strategy that fundamentally alters the trajectory of an organization, all right, and altering would be an order of magnitude of alteration, not just, you know, 15% instead of 12%, then there needs to be something that changes that's fundamental. And that would demand a longer-term, at least vision and rule or differentiator, if not an entirely different plan.

Somebody in the chat said that based on what Peter is saying is that having a strategy of principles which will guide the future operations regardless of what is happening is— what do you think? Peter, what do you think of that?

Well, I, I'm not sure about the regardless of what is happening part, but the first part, I think rules and principles that can guide the organization. I think it connects very much to what Ami is just saying. If you're going to look at, if you're going to do something, make a change, make a systemic change or really alter something, it's going to take time usually, and there's going to be failures and struggles and you're going to be seduced to go back to what you were doing before., and you need some principles that will keep you on that track on a longer horizon. You've got to see that as a longer horizon. Um, this, this question may have been relating to the scenario issue where I, what I'm saying is that, um, that core, those core principles, those, that strategy, central strategy rule and tactical principles that will guide you. Going for, constraints you put on the organization. And maybe we can give some examples. You have to decide if you think those are the right ones to succeed in the multiple futures that, you know, may exist. And this is when I say, and I know, I mean, you didn't like it, but maybe I can say it again. I'm saying that your decisions around what you're going to do and what you're going to be guided by are at the mercy of multiple interest rate scenarios and multiple competitor scenarios and multiple regular regulatory and so forth, meaning that you, you want to pick a strategy set that will make you at least robust to the highest probability that you think of those futures. And that's what I mean at the mercy. You don't— you can ignore a future. You could very easily say, I don't care if the real estate market goes bust because I'm going for it. And in the 50% chance that it doesn't go bust, I'm gonna make a mint, and I don't care about the other possible scenario. But that doesn't mean that scenario doesn't go away. It just means you chose to ignore it.

I actually think there's a third option there, which is not cherry-picking your scenario based on what you think is going to happen, and not just throwing caution to the wind and saying, I don't care one way or the other, I'll sink or I'll swim, so be it. There is also choosing a far-off vision with a differentiator, and then acknowledging that along the way, you're going to have to make tactical adjustments. As far as I can tell, and even looking at something as pedestrian as real estate, which is not an area I'm an expert on at all, you can succeed in real estate over the long term despite massive fluctuations in interest rates if you have a defining differentiator that makes your service desirable to some target market you've defined regardless of what the interest rates are. Now, you may have boom years that are, you know, far better than your bust years when the— as the interest rates fluctuate. But that doesn't mean that your business becomes insolvent by virtue of some— what really is just a cyclical change in the marketplace. If you're going to change something— but let me just say this. So if you really are going to disrupt your enterprise, in a substantial way that causes a discontinuous change, that is to say, an order of magnitude change. So you've been growing steadily at 4% a year. And what you're committed to now is becoming a multinational that where you can have an exit of a billion-dollar exit, which is what most of my clients want to do. Then you need to do something that is extraordinary. And you're not going to be able to anticipate all of the changes in the environment, particularly with disruptive technologies that might make it difficult. So let's take a perfect example of this. When Uber introduced its model, it had every regulatory body in every major city that has any density fight it tooth and nail. And had they anticipated that scenario when they did their scenario planning, they could have been faced with a choice like the one you just presented, Peter, in which it's binary. Either we just say we don't care, or we just think that that's not good, or we have a plan to only operate in the cities in which they don't throw up regulatory hurdles, or we do a different business. But they chose something different. They said, we're going to disrupt this industry, and we're going to do it despite these regulatory obstacles, and we will over time use all of our wherewithal to change the attitude of the marketplace and change the attitude of the regulatory bodies, which in fact they succeeded in doing. And they had a ton of opposition. The City of New York outlawed them. Same thing happened to Airbnb. They outlawed Airbnb. They outlawed Uber. They had tons of obstacles. But the reality is, is that they had a particular vision of where they were going and what their enterprise would be. And so in the interim, as conditions changed to make it less favorable for their sort of huge growth, they confronted those strategically and tactically one by one on the way to being a ubiquitous brand that was in use everywhere.

So what I'm hearing is, I mean, you're suggesting there's three things. You have a a target, a direction you want to go. And you can either let willy-nilly come and react to it, or you can respond to what you're doing, or you can say, we're going to go into that target. And no matter what comes up, good or bad, we're going to lean into it. And we're going to work on that in order to make it happen. And many companies like Southwest, when they were outlawed and a lot of problems launching their services, they leaned into the problems. They said, OK, we will do quick turnaround. Well, you know, we'll do these things. And they actually leaned into the problems. So one person in the chat basically says that long-term strategic plan alters the trajectory of a company. It does. Trajectory is the angle of motion. I guess, first of all, one, what do you think of that? And two, what do you think guides that trajectory? So Peter?

Well, I need a chance to respond to Amy's examples, if I could. Not that I disagree with them. I want to make sure that it's clear what I was saying. Um, when I gave the example that someone in the real estate biz could say, I'm going to ignore bad markets because I think I'll make— I have a higher probability of, of, of succeeding if I just go for broke. That was in response. That was not me saying that's how to do strategy. That was me giving an example where there was a comment in the chat that said a strategy must consider every possible future environment. I'm saying, no, it doesn't have to, but it has to do it in a way, at least be eyes wide open, that you're making a choice not to address a future. The other point I want to make is I think in both the examples you gave, I mean, of a real estate operation that's differentiated in good or bad markets. They have their— they're just—

they have a better proposition, um, uh, in that case, or a better proposition for someone. Yes, you don't have—

you're not a good proposition for the— for enough of a market during both times. Um, that is an example of Darwinian fitness in the sense that that strategy, that rule set, whatever that proposition gives is robust to multiple environments. It's adapted to multiple, multiple environments, just like an animal that could do well in multiple environments versus just thrive and thrive in, in just one.

Um, so my only point about this, about this dismissing Darwin is just that I know enough about biology to know that the comparison makes no sense because adaptivity under Under Darwin's theory is a matter of complete randomization. I mean, it's not deliberate.

I don't think we can get into this.

We're talking about deliberate adaptation.

We probably shouldn't go there, but Darwin is not totally random. There's popular views of Darwin.

All right.

We don't have time to go there, but I think we can use the word robust, correct? Robust to multiple futures versus a competitor, and we can still get the same point across. So, I'm sorry, Alan, I just needed to jump in there because I thought those examples were important.

Yeah. Okay. So, we're talking about getting a robust strategy, and that's going to be responding to whatever is coming up. And, you know, in order to do that, you need to do some scenarios for that. And then what someone talked about here was the idea of trajectory. Right. So, um, so what do you think?

Strategy is your hypothesis, right? A strategic plan is your hypothesis of how to change the trajectory of an organization. It's not a guarantee.

Of course not.

Hypothesis, right? It's, it's, it's, uh, a collection of analysis, understanding of what's in the way, goals, plans, sub-goals. Metrics, scenarios, and a system of implementing all of that in a way that lets you march down the road and see if you can change the trajectory the way you want it.

So what do you think of that question on the screen there? Long-term strategy alters the trajectory of a company.

I actually, I agree with that wholeheartedly. And the reason I agree with that is, and I think I can give an example that's not even a business I'll give you an example. Let's say that you have a kid and your kid has decided for whatever reason that he wants to be a virtuoso violinist. If that is his goal— actually, my sister sort of did this. My sister wanted to be a veterinarian from the time she was about 5 years old. She had already decided. Knowing that she wanted to be a veterinarian when she was 25 years old, altered every single thing she did in her life from age 5 to 25. She did school differently. She studied specific things. She did internships, and she mucked out stables as a child. She worked as an intern at a veterinarian's office. She worked at the zoo. She did all kinds of things, all of which were dictated by this 25-year plan to be a veterinarian, and this was, this started long before she had any such plan. You know, this was just having that future in mind was determinant of the choices she made and the things she didn't do along the way, and that makes a significant difference in how you approach the next 2 years, 3 years, 5 years, or 10 years, so if you have a long-term vision, that's 20 years out. It may not absolutely— you may not have planned through the 20th year, but knowing that you want to be a particular place and in a particular size and of a particular quality in 20 years will dictate the way that you plan for the next 2, 3, or 5 years. And it will alter the trajectory of the company's growth and velocity.

Can we say it? It can alter.

Yes, it can.

It can, right? 98% of businesses fail. We have to keep that in mind, right?

But most of them don't do this work.

Reality.

You have to actually do the work.

Yes. Yeah.

So I think—

How about the trajectory? So we're trying to come up with—

Go ahead. Yeah, we were just talking. I wanted to respond to Ami's points on trajectory. I think clearly this was the way we started the whole discussion, that the longer horizon that may not look like something that has to do with your short-term actions that you need to walk down the street tomorrow, quarterly, yearly, can put constraints, positive constraints on what you do. And I think, you know, we haven't talked about it, but there's an important word that goes in this. It can keep us from being seduced by the wrong things, right? Exactly. You know, I love the automotive examples. You know, maybe we could even, you know, well, start with Tesla. I remember hearing Elon being interviewed by someone who said, how come you succeeded but the other electric car companies didn't? What was the major one? Bricklin? Uh, what was the major California— there have been tons, and there were several, but you know what he said about this one in particular? It started with a B.

Um, and then there was Fisker, the Chevy Volt. That was a Volt.

No, no, no, it was a company. It was a company.

I don't remember.

Someone in the chat should tell us who it was.

It might have been Rooney.

No, no, it's gonna be— anyway, the point of the story is this. He said, we're an engineering company. They're— they got involved with style. Their first car was an extraordinarily stylish thing. It looked like something right out of Batman, you know, like, and whereas Tesla stuck with making a supply chain and engineering so that they could get past the performance features and the range anxiety and so forth that existed and the cost problems of building a new car. So by saying that we're focused on engineering, he couldn't get seduced by someone who came up with an idea for all these colors. And, you know, colors and, and not just colors, but style in general. The reason I said colors, I want to go back to Ford 100 years ago when he was trying to do what Tesla is doing now. For the internal combustion engine. And he said, we don't do options. We don't do style because it gets in the way of our mission of reducing the price and increasing the availability of cars for the public, for the average person, not just the rich. And he was never seduced to get involved with these other things.

And it was— He ultimately lost to his competitors. And I, I should never address the changes in the marketplace.

Well, can I finish the story? I was going to go there. For 15 years, it made him the greatest car company in the world, but then environments changed. He didn't consider the scenario that cars got commodified enough that cost and availability wasn't the bottleneck to success anymore, and he ignored the market demand for style and options, and Chrysler and GM didn't ignore it and took over. But his, his mission and his guidance, his rule— never sacrifice, um, throughput and cost for style and options— guided him and made him the greatest company for 15 years, right? And more, actually.

But there's There's more to it than just the success. There's also the adaptability. I mean, you see what's happened where initially, as Tesla dominated the electric car market, all of its would-be competitors shunned its grid, shunned its charging stations. And now what we've seen is that the market has changed, and the electric car manufacturers have realized that it's better for them to invest in developing competitive vehicles and to utilize Tesla's charging infrastructure than for them to try to develop their own charging infrastructure. And that's what they've now done. And Tesla may end up not leading the car industry, but leading the charging industry while these other manufacturers actually produce the cars that people want.

So isn't that a perfect example of the environment changing? He changed the environment. By having the sense to see that those char— supercharging network was one of the great bottlenecks in creating a true electric car thing. And he changed the environment and everybody else was sleeping. I had wondered 5, 6, 7 years ago, why didn't the rest of the car manufacturers create a consortium and create a conflict, a, uh, competitive, um, charging network because they actually didn't believe that this would get the kind of traction that it did. You're absolutely right. They didn't accept that scenario, did they?

Okay, so let me, let me just interject here. So let me throw something out. I want to know your response to it. What happens when we say long-term strategy is basically not being seduced by the wrong things and leaning into your direction and overall intent of your company?

I think it's a weak— I think it's a weak characterization of it. So having a long-term strategy informs all of your decision-making. So yes, it informs you not becoming an opportunity magpie and just grabbing at any revenue chance along the way. That's something I see constantly with my clients and the reason that I push them to have long-term strategies, because otherwise As startups, they're being driven to grow and generate revenue and have ARR and all these other things. And that pressure has them become un— I would say less than discerning about what opportunities they go after because they're more liable to take an opportunity than not if it promises revenue, even though it may be a massive detour off of of their long-term strategy. So being able to make all of your decisions being informed by a long-term vision and a long-term differentiator and a long-term rule is useful for every decision. And that includes, of course, not, you know, saying no to the right things, but also saying yes to the right things and being willing to make the investments that will not necessarily produce an ROI in the short term,, but that you see as being integral to fulfilling that long-term vision. And that takes a high degree of, I would call it, organizational self-control.

I agree, I agree with Ami completely here. Seduction is only one thing that a, that a true proper horizon strategic plan influences. It's also all the positive things of what you must do. The energy it gives you to do the things you have to do, even though it's frightening because you don't know for sure if it's going to come out the right way. You have a northern light, you have a guiding light to do it. So I agree completely. But seduction is just one of the key areas that it helps with, if you could agree with that, Ami.

Totally. Totally.

Okay, so Peter, what— so we're talking about long-term strategy and we're coming to some ideas of what it does Are there tools out there? I mean, you know, this sounds like a lot of hard stuff. I mean, we can do SWOT analysis, we can go out there and do voice of the customer. You know, what is there to find this long-term strategy?

Well, I think a key point for me on this question, and it's a great question, is that I believe the tools and techniques for strategy are independent of horizon, meaning you still can use basic ideas like a strategy matrix to explore multiple rule sets, for example, that we've been talking about, you know, multiple principles, and to explore them under multiple scenarios. Strategy horizon is given by the aspiration that you're you're talking about. And, you know, I mean, he just talked about, as you know, companies she works with where they have an aspiration to do something out 10, 15 years. Okay, let's focus on 15 years. What would we want to look like there? What is that goal? The same tools would be used to explore that than if you're saying, we got a 2-year goal where we got to make a certain amount of money or else we're not going to be able to through this.

So what you're saying is you can take the tools that we're using now, tools, and, and adapt them to different horizons.

Absolutely. That's my view.

Do you have an example of one?

Well, I was just talking about a strategic alternative matrix where you consider various options, various alternatives as to what you think your rules would be going forward that give the guidance we were just talking about, right? That would give the guidance as you're marching down the road. How do you know what things to invest in and which not to be seduced by and so forth? I think you can use an alternative matrix very, very well to do that. And the matrix is exploring what does 10 years out look like or even 15 years out look like.

Okay. Ami, what do you think? What are some tools or methods or areas that people could use So it's not so hard.

So I, Francis and I both use a process called the Merlin Process, which takes your, you take your scenario plan, but you end up with very far out, like 25, 30 years, the metrics that are comparable to your current metrics. So you gather all of your data about what all your numbers are right now. And then you jump out 30 years, and then you put all the same numbers in a column. 30 years out. When you have that horizon and you have both a qualitative and a quantitative definition of what success looks like, and you walk back from that, so you're trying to connect those future numbers to these present numbers, you're walking back in increments of, say, 5 years or 10 years. You will end up with numbers and qualifications that describe your 5-year plan. Now, here's the problem with what Peter said, which is that any horizon will do. You can apply the same, the same tools. You can apply the same tools, but if your long-term, if the longest plan you have only goes out 5 years, then you will never be doing things today that could create something exemplary in 20 years. Because if it takes 15 years to get there, they will not show up on your radar screen today as options, because they have no point. So if it's going to take 15 years to accomplish a very substantial vision of your, of your organization, and it's going to take projects, each of which takes 4 years, 5 years, 6 years, then you simply don't start those projects because they don't yield fruit in the term in which you're looking. So it precludes and literally rules out many of the things that you would do if you had a longer horizon.

Now, one option though is— I mean, you said there was a problem with what I said. I'm not sure what I said that conflicts with that. You can use a strategy matrix and you can look You can use all the other strategy tools depending on the horizon. You can put a 50-year horizon if you want.

But this is about why we should actually have a horizon that is extremely far out. And if you have a horizon that's 2 years from now, then you're only ever going to tackle things that will produce a result 2 years from now.

I couldn't agree more. I'm having trouble understanding what I said that was in conflict Right.

Can we not— it doesn't matter. We can talk about that later. But my point is that it's not about whether you were right or wrong or what you said. My point is that going longer out and actually quantifying and qualifying what it means to succeed in a 20-year or 30-year timeframe will have repercussions for the things that you undertake in the short term. And so if you don't look that far out, unless of course you're planning to get rid of the company in 3 years or 5 years or something, unless there's a good reason not to, by not looking that far out, you have literally ruled out the opportunity to invest in the things that you might do that would yield something extraordinary, but will take a long time to produce.

I think we've agreed on that 100%. Absolutely. I love the way you say it. What I'm saying is that a tool like a strategy matrix or the other tools that— many other tools that exist can do that. Is that because you— if you set a long-term horizon to do what you just said, the tools scale. They can scale up to that larger horizon. That's my only point.

Okay, so I, I think you're both agreeing to the same thing. It's we need to take a look at tools. A lot of the tools we're using or of all the tools we can use, but you need to put it on a different horizon. And the companies therefore putting in a different horizon can have a 3 to 5-year strategy horizon. Or a 15-year horizon.

I'm sorry? Or a 15-year horizon or a 25.

You pick. So you put in the horizon in there. I think one of the things that I think is very helpful to companies is they do small bets. So you test out the market. You try something out. And you, you, you, and, and you see whether it has, has any traction. And then by doing that, you can find out if it works. But Elon Musk takes very big, very big audacious goals, and he sticks with it. But he also leans in on what's happening. I mean, he knew batteries were going to be a significant thing. He knew chargers were going to be— he decided not to do chargers because he wanted— he needed a conflict, and that was something he didn't necessarily need to agree to now and let the marketplace decide what happens. He knew if he took over the market, they would have to use his charger. So You know, so, but the bottom line is you have to look at your 30-year plan. And, you know, going back to the first question, long-term strategy is really hard. I don't know what to do. And to answer those people, I'm trying to get some ideas from you two of what to do. And what I'm hearing from you—

I gave you the Merlin process as a way to start to get to metrics for the actual strategic plan. The Merlin process is a very simple process, but it does require you to do the thinking and confront the question of, what do we want to be 30 years from now? What does the world look like where we have accomplished our vision in 30 years? So if you're looking at that world, I'm not saying that's— it's not, it's not, it's not structurally hard to do. It's not logistically hard to do, but it is cognitively hard to do. So in order for us to have a conversation like that, you need to have your leadership team together and have everybody willing to do the difficult work of imagining something that they can't make happen tomorrow. And we are inherently lazy that way. We want to come up with metrics and horizons of goals that we can get our hands around. Whereas if you go all the way out 30 years, you're forced to confront all the things that you don't know and all the things that you can't possibly imagine in order to throw that sort of, put that stake in the ground and then walk back from that to what we actually need to work on for the next 5 years, if that's where we're going, but it's no harder than my, my 5-year-old sister saying, "I want to be an animal doctor," doctor and letting that dictate the choices she made that became more and more explicit as she got closer to that eventual date.

Okay, good. Let me switch the topic for a second and then maybe come back to it. There was a comment, um, I think that your presentation is outstanding, but only for countries with stable environments. All this is very North American oriented. I don't think your points are applicable for unstable environments like African and Latin American countries?

Any comments on that? Yeah, I'd like to respond to that because I think in the beginning we did try to— and I think that is an extremely important point and something that has to be faced, um, that horizon strategy— you can't put a number on what a long-term strategy is because it does depend on the environment and on the business itself. The difference of long-term, if you're going to invest in a new oil field in name the country, you know, that's a 30, 40-year proposition. I give an example in my book of an English consortium looking at sustainability goals where they need a 50-year horizon because that's how long it takes for the trees to grow and get to maturity. And so forth. But if you're doing something in software or something in, you know, small manufacturing or services, 5 years may be a very long horizon. Even 3 years may be. I don't want to counteract the importance of looking out many years, but I don't— I think we've got to scale long-term to the task at hand and to the environment at hand. And you, you could make a mistake thinking 20 years out in a country without a stable government. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you could say, well, one part of our scenario is we're going to admit we're not going to have a stable government, and what kind of— how would that influence our strategy approach?

I think that's, that's exactly the point, is not that you're— because remember, it's not based on prediction. A long-term vision is not about predicting. It's about making a plan that takes into consideration the variability of conditions. And one of the conditions that is variable in the developing world is stability of the government. So you have to ask the question, what is, what is the probability that over the next 20 years we will have a despotic government that will that will literally possess— repossess all of our property. That's a very authentic possibility, right? But if you know that that's a possibility, then you start making decisions today that take that into account, like keeping your assets offshore or just developing a business that allows you to cater to a marketplace outside of that variability, like having an online business, an commerce store or something else, or having your supply chain be outside of the country in which there is so much volatility. Again, that long-term vision, if you do it utilizing the tools of assessing the existing conditions and the likely trajectory of those conditions, it's not that you rule out things, it's that you simply come up with ways to contend with those changes, however extreme they may be. I don't think that my assets are going to be repossessed in America, so I don't need to take that into account. But if I were going to do business in Eritrea or in Sudan, I might have to take those things into account, and I would make very different infrastructure and market decisions based on knowing that was possible.

So, I think—

could I just follow on on that real quick? Absolutely. I don't think that necessarily— I think that was the perfect answer to this question. I don't think it necessarily means having to think 20 years out to do that.

No, it doesn't demand that.

You might capture all those dynamics that you just described in a 5-year or 7-year view. You could capture all those dynamics, but still the principle of looking beyond your short-term horizon is in place.

So, you know, it's not only that it's hard because the tools aren't there, but you might need to have the courage to do that. I mean, you need to get with a group of people that are very focused on it. So let me talk about Zimbabwe for a moment. There's a very large bank there. And do we have branches? Do we involve the government? Because the government owns part of the financial services of this large bank. What do we do? And you have to have the courage to sit down and have those discussions. And who do you have those discussions with? So do you involve politicians? Do you not? Now, do you even want to bring that issue up? So we get back to the whole idea of an elephant on the table. And what are the elephants on the table? So maybe a long-term strategy may be bringing in an elephant or a hippopotamus in Zimbabwe and say, OK, what are those things that are going to get us? What are the things that are going to get our lunch? And what do we need to deal with? The tools might not be a big issue. Excuse me for a second. The tools might not be a big issue. It might be the courage to bring up those issues and talk about it in a long-term scenario, even though we're starving right now.

I mean, I think that's exactly the point, Alan. When, when we ask the question or we propose the objection, it's really hard. That's what I was saying earlier. It is really hard, but not because it's hard structurally and not because it's hard to get the tools. It's hard cognitively. It's hard psychologically, because the only way to do long-term strategy authentic-euphonically is to have the courage to raise all of these issues of the possible future and all of the issues of the past that you're bringing with you, so if you are contemplating a 30-year future but you have a toxified, psychologically unsafe culture in your organization, failing to mention that and failing to contend with it is equally as egregious an omission as not mentioning that the company is 50% owned by a despotic government. Both of those facts are essential to planning for the future.

Peter, you're nodding.

No, I'm absolutely, and I think I love your, you know, Alan, you bring up this courage and this kind of the, the fortitude to, to do this kind of work. It takes something. It really does. And I think as you was talking, both talking about it, I'm saying to myself, well, one way you can get that is to get out of your head this image of a strategic plan. That's just a list of action items and a list of subgoals. That's not what we're talking about here, right? We're talking about scenarios, we're talking about dynamics, we're talking about our own values and our own vision and our own mission and not getting down to the point of, of lists of good things to do. And I think that could help people have the fortitude to get into this long-term horizon planning that we're, that we're talking about here and that hopefully people have seen has real value for the short term, right, to guide the short term.

So what we're talking about is a different way of looking at things that might be in a different scenario, a different message. So not having, oh, by the way, we just did our meeting and goals and objectives. Now, let's go to long-term strategy. It sounds like you have to get out of the room. You got to bring in the zebra. You got to bring the animals and say what's there. Now, I heard that there was a good example of that in Jamaica. And I wonder if Frances would mind either putting that comment on about what happened about the 21-year vision. I'm not sure, Frances, if you want to join us. Oh, good. So any comments about that from either the audience or from our panelists?

Frances, you want to give us a 5-minute sort of background.

Yeah, tell us the story.

He may be doing like behind the scenes work and unable to do that. Oh, there he is.

Here he is.

Takes about 15 clicks just to put myself on stage, all of which have a lag. So Jamaica's history is that we had a a semi-civil war in 1980. Hundreds died as a result of political violence. It was kind of the culmination of years of political tension, and you know, for 2.2 million people at the time, 800 people dying because of politics was unthinkable. So it was by all means unacceptable by everyone, and essentially the two major parties over time have cooperated to produce a 21-year vision, uh, that has brought the company— country together. Essentially, we're now saying we want the same thing. How you do it is, you know, that's a subject to depending on strategy and who's in power and the finer details. But the broad strokes, the bottleneck, Peter, has been agreed upon and It was extremely volatile environment, Ernesto's point. But from the point of view of a business person, what the private sector did was it basically came off the sidelines and said, this shall not happen again the way this just happened. And they, they helped champion the new electoral process. So we have a better electoral process than you have in the States by far. Having voted in both places, I can tell you it's like a world of difference. Um, but that became out of a commitment to never ever, ever again have a return to what things used to be— stolen ballot boxes, double voting, and 100, 110% voting in areas. All kinds of crazy stuff was, was— that was the norm. But also the private sector came off the sidelines and created these civic accountable bodies basically that don't report to anyone political or the government, and they provide a temperature check to— I mentioned the IMF and other multilaterals— to say that, or an independent voice that says that our government is on track or not on track. And they have tremendous power, have developed tremendous power over the years. So arguably they decided to change the environment. It wasn't within the scope of one company to do that, but certainly companies looked into the future and said more of the same is going to kill us and we're not putting up with it. So one, one few big companies got together, agreed, and then decided to. And the model has worked in other countries as well. But it's a, you know, it's a, it's a funny thing when you go many years out All sorts of strange options that you never would consider give themselves to you, but you have to have what I mean, you said the courage, the courage to go out that far. And so far it— I have not, I've not seen a company be able to escape, say, 2 years, 5 years, and escape its history, because invariably what they're doing is detouring. It takes a lot of hard, she said psychological and intellectual and cognitive work to go see it 21 years from now like we did. But it allows you to do these big things that you can't do on a short horizon. They're just not possible to do them. We couldn't, couldn't commit to these big things and do these things that transformed our country essentially it couldn't be done on a short horizon. It needed these big players to make these big commitments, provide big dollars in some cases, and commit the citizenry to a long-term vision. Inarguably, the Declaration of Independence is a long-term declaration of a particular vision, you know, that should want— the founders wanted it to galvanize the nation for hundreds of years to come. You know, I don't think they were talking about anything short-term. They were thinking of hundreds of years of nation-building. Um, and I think that, that, that what they did is sort of— and what just happened in Jamaica makes me think that it's in the realm of, funnily enough, it's in the realm of all of us to make that kind of difference if we're willing to think far enough and commit big enough. It's kind of the two go together, right?

You know, it's funny. I mean, yours is a very moving story, but we did something very similar in Tampa. And by similar, I mean long-term, where it took multiple administrations and tons and tons of private sector and individual activity, which is about 25 or 28 years ago when I first moved to the city, Tampa was a— excuse my language— it was an armpit of a place. There was— there was— it had been an industrial city. It had no— it basically had service industry and no jobs, no beauty. I mean, it had one beautiful street and no density and sprawl. And other than having beautiful natural resources, I've never had a job in Tampa. I've been here 30 years. I've never had a job in Tampa. It was unemploy— a place that was unemployable if you were educated and came from anywhere else. And we decided about 25 years ago, and I happened to be one of the founding members of the committee, to create a city that would be attractive to the creative class. And we undertook to do through multiple mayoral administrations everything from building a riverwalk to, creating accelerators for high-tech industries, to having the universities become state-of-the-art class universities that would attract students, to building infrastructure within the city and having small businesses create enough density that those college students would stay and work here and open businesses. And if you fast forward now, it's a whole 30 years to 2023. We have the biggest thriving tech community in the country, a dense, spectacularly beautiful downtown, multiple professional sports teams, and it is the most enviable place in all the entire country based on property values and number of people moving here to live. And it was on the back of a vision of creating a magnet city for young creative affluent— by affluent, I mean educated, like likely to become affluent— people who were not here at the time. And it— but it took that long, and we couldn't have done any of it with any one administration or any 5-year plan or any 3-year plan. Couldn't have happened.

Okay. Well, talking about long-term strategic planning, how difficult it is— and are we talking about how difficult it is or how rewarding it could be? So we have about 5 minutes now. So, um, can each of you take one or two minutes and just summarize some of your points, Peter?

I'm only going to make two points, and one is to follow on what you just said. Short-term strategic planning is hard too. It's all hard. It's hard in different ways, and that you have— it's easier to do short-term planning by just writing lists of good things to do and goals and plans and that kind of thing. And you think you've done good strategic planning, and then it goes on the shelf and collects electronic dust, and people go about doing what they were going to do before. So I think long-term planning is no, in principle, harder. Maybe there's different difficulties, and it does take a certain courage and resolve. Um, the second point I want to make is that one that we really haven't made is I don't think it has to be a singular event, that it probably won't succeed if your view is that you're gonna do even a 4-day, 1-week retreat and figure out the long-term view. I think an event, a day or 2 event can be very great for kicking it off and getting it going. But like most strategies, It has to be an ongoing investment. It has to be an ongoing cognitive approach where you're learning and seeing whether your thoughts were right and getting input and seeing how the world unfolds. And I think this might be one thing that could enable people to embrace it more so and not treat it as this one big event, but do it in pieces, do it Do it, stretch it out, make it part of the fabric of the business instead of having to do one perfect thing in a big load of time.

Thank you, Peter.

Ami? I wholeheartedly agree with your second point. I think that the idea that strategy is a one-and-done activity is nonsensical. And it's also very difficult to even think about the long-term and the short term in one offsite, whatever the offsite is. So I am very much in favor of strategy as an ongoing process that you may iterate upon in some kind of formal session once a year or something like that. But that you constantly are revisiting, constantly tweaking, constantly assessing the results to see whether you need to change something, update something, tweak something, and so forth. And if you're not doing it that way, you really shouldn't bother with the offsite at all, in my opinion. Like, the offsite is a complete waste of time if you don't have an ongoing process for testing, reflecting, improving, etc. That— and I just say that unequivocally, I would say that in any session. With respect to doing long-term strategy and if it's— whether it's hard or not. I think that the tools are readily accessible, and the things that make it hard are things that are just part of our humanity, and the reasons that we don't make changes in our lives as individuals. It's very hard to change things, and in order to change things, you have to be willing, first of all, to confront all the things as they are, and to be willing to create something and and, and commit yourself to something that seems unlikely, because big, substantial, discontinuous change is unlikely. It has lots of things going against it, because you can't take advantage of inertia. You can't take advantage of little tiny improvements. In fact, you have to confront all of the distance between where you are now and and this massive alteration that you're committed to making, but it's only when you actually confront that gap that you can plan in such a way that you accomplish those big things, and that's true whether you're trying to lose 200 pounds, do an Ironman triathlon, or transform your company or your country in a gigantic way, and I don't think you can avoid that long-term view if you mean to make that kind kind of change.

Thank you. I'd like to just bring up two points, if I could. One is the elephant in the room. I think, especially in other nations, in Africa, people are so driven to getting something done. Something has to be something physical. It has to be a phone. It has to be something physical. And you say to people, well, let's sit down and short-term strategy. What they're really saying to an American is, well, you got to look at Maslow's hierarchy of needs. I'm in safety, I'm in strategy, I don't have time to do all this other type of stuff. And people need to say, yes, there has to be time to do it. And the second point I'd like to make is that this reminds me of a quality issue a long time ago. Quality was something that you did at the end of the line when the product was going to come out. And who did it? Inspectors did it. And now what's happening? What's happening in strategy should be the same. Quality is built into the product is built into meetings along the line. Whose responsibility is quality? Everybody's. Whose responsibility is short-term and long-term strategy? Everyone's. And we need to come up with an agile process in order to make that happen. Francis, we have about 25 seconds. Anything you'd like to add?

Brilliant, brilliant, my friends. I'm honored to know you, and I'm so thankful that you accepted my invitation to come duke it out on I appreciate the heat that was raised and the disagreements between you as professionals. I want you to be friends and colleagues after this is over, and your differences sharpened our understanding. So I'm thankful that you went there, didn't just nod and smile and say, you know, the normal things. So Alan, Alan, Ami, Peter, wonderful, great, thank you so much. I'm We're in debt to you.

Thank you. Thank you for having us.

Thank you.

You're welcome. Okay, folks, we're going to end this session and then start a new one in about 20 seconds' time. So wherever you are, stay tuned. And speakers on the stage, if you could turn off your microphones and cameras, that'll help me— give me space to bring up the new crew.