In this solo episode of the Jump Leap Long‑Term Strategy Podcast, host Francis Wade addresses the "wicked problem" of persuading C‑suite leaders, boards, and employees to adopt a genuine long‑term vision and strategic planning beyond the typical 3‑5 year horizon. He frames the audience as seasoned long‑term thinkers who feel like a "fish out of water" when surrounded by short‑term focused colleagues. Wade diagnoses why short‑term thinking dominates: incentive structures, board expectations, and vague vision statements that fail to inspire. He illustrates the dilemma through the story of Louise, a VP who tries to champion a long‑term vision but is reduced to drafting a two‑paragraph, high‑level statement that demotivates younger staff. Wade outlines the tangible costs of lacking a robust vision—employee turnover, loss of competitive edge (e.g., Kodak vs. Fuji), and erosion of long‑term value. He emphasizes the need for concrete, audacious goals (BHAGs) and a clear description of the future world the company aspires to create. The episode previews a forthcoming Part 2 that will dive into strategic planning, and includes a brief guest clip from Ami Devereaux discussing how to articulate a 20‑year goal and derive strategic constraints. Throughout, Wade’s diagnostic, conversational style aims to equip listeners with a mental framework for convincing stakeholders of the necessity of long‑term visioning.
Chapters
It's the Jump Leap Long Term Strategy Podcast, Episode 13. You're someone who is already a long-term thinker working in a for-profit company. Unlike many, you don't need to be convinced about the importance of long-term thinking. Somewhere, maybe in your past, your childhood, your early part of your career, you embedded the idea of long-term thinking and its value in your mindset. Now it's a part of your character. You naturally want to borrow or balance short and long-term thinking so that they both have a place. But this may be why you're a bit confused. It's obvious to you, but others around you don't share this particular trait. In fact, you feel a little bit like a fish out of water, always harping on the need for long-term thinking and sometimes asking some really inconvenient questions. You don't understand why others don't share your concern, and it's not that you're particularly sustainable or ESG or anything like that. You're also not like an old-school person, and you know, you're taking your, your inspiration from the 1940s. You actually sense that the company would make better decisions if it had more than just a 3 to 5 year plan. The question is, how do you convince others in the C-suite and the board, in fact, in the entire company to think with an additional lens, a long-term lens. Tune into this episode as I share and tackle this wicked problem. I'm Francis Wade, and welcome to Jump Leap Long-Term Strategy Podcast. And welcome back. And if this is the first time you're tuning into this particular podcast, You may be puzzled a little bit by the particular format that we use. And before I get into the issue at hand, I'd like to just give you a little bit of an introduction so you know what the heck you've logged into. Well, in this particular podcast, we don't interview people and, you know, ask them for their great ideas. Instead, every episode is committed to wrestling with a very difficult problem, what people call wicked problems. The kind that don't have easy path, conventional wisdom type solutions. And our commitment is to sort of tear the problem apart, spend a lot of time in diagnosis. And whether I have a guest or I'm appearing solo, as I am in this particular episode, we spend most of our time essentially diagnosing the problem, to use that word again. And we're a little bit like Einstein. Why? Because Einstein said that if I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about the solutions. Because we don't just want to give you the answers or the, or ideas as to what we should use, the conclusions. We want to take you through a process, a thought process. So as I share with you different assumptions and, you know, different lines of logic and different ways of thinking, schools of thought. You can say, "Yes, I like that." "No, I don't like that." "That doesn't make sense." "This makes sense." So you can follow the line of reasoning and just— not just the conclusion at the very end. And my hope is that by listening to the diagnosis of the problem, you'll actually become more equipped and more able to solve this particular wicked problem for yourself. Because you'll be able to see where my thinking departs from yours and where my conclusions— we may want the same conclusion, but where my line of logic or my line of reasoning doesn't exactly map with yours. So let's start off with a story. Louise is a vice president in a successful for-profit company. He was raised to respect the power of long-term thinking, and as a result, he actually speaks two languages. It took him 15 years to get to that point, and it was the kind of thing that he did because of his parents' encouragement. They encouraged him to think for the long term. So when he shared that he wanted to be bilingual, they encouraged him, they, and, you know, explained that that it wouldn't be a short journey. But in his job, he's been struggling to get his colleagues to agree to a long-term point of view. And recently, in a weekly C-suite meeting, he tried to make the case for a long-term vision for the company. After a long discussion and disagreement, pitted the CEO on one side and the CFO on the other, divided the team. All they could agree to do was to craft a 2-paragraph vision statement. And, you know, as they were having this discussion, they even went over a few statements from a few successful companies. But of course, you know, these are vague statements. He was burning inside, as a matter of fact, in the whole conversation once they sort of agreed to just go with a vision statement. And he's thinking, you know, how could I take these kinds of statements to the company and champion them? Because they're so high level, 20,000 feet, 100,000 feet. You know, younger staff want more than just these vague kinds of one-size-fits-all or statements that could belong to any company. Kind of two-paragraph, kind of lofty. People want way more concrete than that nowadays. They wouldn't be happy with vision statements. He thinks that if he were to announce such a statement, or the CEO were to announce it, that it would drive especially the younger staff crazy, and it would make some of them leave because they would now think, oh, our company isn't up to much. So why should I stay around to see how this turns out? I'll go hitch my career onto a different wagon that I think is actually going somewhere that is actually inspiring and makes a difference. So Luis is convinced he needs to make a better case for a long-term vision. So you may be someone who, you You know, I imagine if you're listening to this podcast that you already believe to some degree in long-term strategic planning. So you already are in that school of thought. And, um, you probably are like Louise that you have to battle some people who are real short-term thinkers. Among them could be your CEO. If your CEO, for example, is motivated or paid or incentivized by short-term stock options or short-term results. So the board is holding him or her to account for what happens in the next 1 to 3 years, and then that's it. Um, you could be in a situation where you have already tried, or some have already tried to, you know, broach the idea of long-term thinking and say that we need more than just hand waving. And then you may be even some who are against the whole idea and say that life is changing too much and we can't can't afford to spend time doing that kind of thing. And, you know, so those might be some of the folks you are sort of actively, I would say, working against, but their point of view is one that you have already either rejected or you suspect is a problem for the company right now. Problem is that you are an advocate for long-term visioning and long-term strategic planning, but no one gets convinced when you actually try, you know, to explain or— Hope you're enjoying this free excerpt from the Jump Leap Long-Term Strategy Podcast. Interested in finding out more about getting a subscription to full episodes? Visit www.longtermstrategy.info. Go through the benefits. You're not a great salesperson. Let's imagine that you're not the head of sales in this case, or it's not part of your makeup perhaps. And you, you, you realize in your gut that there's a cost to not having a long-term vision and the resulting long-term strategic plan. And there's some things that are being lost You know, just to rattle off a few of them, there's a direction that's missing, inspiration, a bunch of other things that we'll talk about. But you see them very plainly and very clearly. Maybe you've been in an organization where there was a vision, and now that you're one in one in which, eh, not so much. You know, the difference is like chalk and cheese. And inside you, you maybe, you know, even feeling a sense of frustration, like you've reached the end of the road in terms of you don't know what to say next. You're struggling to explain, you know, the way Louise did in that particular meeting. And you're wondering, you know, maybe I'm the only— maybe I'm wrong. Maybe this is not the best way to go, you know. And, but as you know, as you talk to other folks who have a long-term vision, You gotta think that they can't explain why they have one in their company and you don't have one in yours. What makes them long-term thinkers? What makes them be willing to have BHAGs and the folks in your organization are not convinced? You think, you gotta think, it's gotta be easier than this. Maybe you're overthinking the whole thing, that it should be easier to convince others of the value of long-term thinking. So if you find yourself in, in, you know, sort of in the space that I just described, you're in the right place because in this particular podcast episode, we're going to be looking at visioning, the creation of big hairy audacious goals, and the difference they make. In the part 2, which I intend to be in the next few episodes, but there'll be a part 2 to this particular episode, we'll look at strategic planning. In you know, how do you convince others for the need of long-term strategic planning. But in this case, we're just looking at long-term visioning. And I'll, I'll, when I go into the solutions and get out the diagnosis, I'll perhaps say why we're doing this, because you may not even see the connection between the two, or you might just think we just need a strategy, we don't need a vision. Okay. So what is it like when your company doesn't have a long-term vision? Um, over time, I would say that your company ends up communicating short-term, short-term, short-term, and short-term. And the people who are thinking long-term, long-term, long-term get turned off. So it doesn't happen all at once. They're not outside, you know, with placards saying, we need long-term vision. But small things happen, you know, like they go start looking on LinkedIn to see, okay, what's, what's a company that's aligned with my values to some degree? And what's a company that is going in a direction that I can support, that I'd be interested in, in going with? Where should I again hitch my wagon? You know, if I think that a technology is coming that's going to disrupt the industry and we're refusing to look at it because it doesn't fit into our short-term look at things, it's going to take 10 years, I want to be there when it hits, then, you know, I go looking on LinkedIn. So I start to take these small steps to commit myself to something that has a a greater long-term future. And you know, you start losing out against competitors over time because your vision for 3 to 5 years just doesn't measure up to another company's that is even 6 years out there. So you're— they're further off out here, they're out there than you are, and you aren't. And then there's all the shareholders Stakeholders, I would say, sorry. Like a board member, for example, who— I was in a board retreat the other day where a board member shared that, you know, they were basically disappointed that the executive didn't come to them with anything more than a short-term vision, short-term strategy. That they basically said, we're here to solve some big problems and take on big issues. And all we're hearing from the executives are these short-term kind of, say trivial, but yeah, that's kind of what they meant, these trivial kind of pursuits. You know, so it's tough to communicate over time and get people excited and enrolled and interested when that's all you have to share is where we're going in the next few years. And when someone raises their hand in a town hall and says, "Where are we headed in the long term?" And you say, "Well, you know, we're headed to good places." "Uh-huh." "Well, have you read our vision statement?" You know, and then you hear some kind of like tittering throughout the audience. And you say, "What? There's no— no, our vision statement says everything." And you can tell by just looking out into the audience that the vision statement isn't doing what it's supposed to do. What is it supposed to do? We talk about that in a few. But over time, you know, you could expect that if you persist in not having a long-term vision— in other words, if you're not effective in getting the company to commit— then essentially you have the company at some point just be displaced by some trend, the way Kodak was. So Kodak was completely displaced and thrown off by the change from analog to digital, from the old style of using film to capture, capture images to using digital solutions to capture images. Fuji, on the other hand, wasn't because they had a long-term strategic plan and they maintained their relevance. And you're concerned that the company may not be relevant in the future. You know, this is competition now on steroids, to the point of being an existential threat or not. And ultimately, you may even worry about long-term value. You know, companies, companies exist to create and sustain long-term value. Now, how do they get by without long-term strategic plans? You don't understand why, but if you don't communicate the need for a long-term strategic plan to sustain long-term value, then the company will not succeed. So you see these things very clearly, and if you don't You've reached the end of a complimentary clip from the Jump Leap Long Term Strategy Podcast. To hear the full episode, go over to www.longtermstrategy.info and grab a subscription or a free trial. See you there. And here's a clip of our next episode with Ami Devereaux.
What, you know, what those numbers describe exactly. Like, we want to be $10 million in, you know, annual revenue or something. But they haven't actually thought through, like, what that, you know, what would that company look like? What would that world look like in which we have $10 million in revenue? So what we're doing here is we're describing the world. This is the world that will exist when they have achieved their 20-year goal. And that world Once you've described the world, now you have the constraints that are going to drive your creation of the strategy.
And if you like the work we're doing, feel free to follow us at our website strategyconf.fwconsulting.com or like or leave a comment on one of the popular podcast apps such as Stitcher or iTunes. This is Francis Wade, and I'm signing out from the Jump Leap Long-Term Strategic Planning Podcast. See you later.
