Ep 16.5 Is There Actually a Valid “Just Keep Things Going” Strategy?

It's the Jump Leap Long Term Strategy Podcast, Episode 16.5. Your organization is about to conduct its annual strategic planning process. From all indications, this will be another business as usual effort intended to merely the box. The time horizon, after all, will only be about 4 years maximum. No one expects anything out of the ordinary to emerge from it. This is a ritual in which prior performance is improved on by a few percentage points. But are expectations too low? And if this is to be the norm each year, should a plan require more than just a single person making a few edits or a few corrections or a few single-digit, uh, changes. Is there a problem with this approach? Well, let's see. Tune into this episode to join me in tackling this tricky problem. I'm Francis Wade, and welcome to the Jump Leap Long-Term Strategy Podcast. Welcome back. This is the first time you're joining me on this podcast. You may be wondering what kind of approach I'm taking, we take. Well, it's simple. Spend a good amount of time diagnosing a particular problem or a particular challenge. And the idea why we do that is to give you a way to understand the underlying reasoning that leads to particular outcomes. So for example, I've done, um, podcast episodes or, and I've done, I've written for the newsletter, done things for our conference that explain the endpoint approach to doing long-term strategic planning, the one my company uses. However, you may be asking, sort of, where did that come from and why is it being used? And here in podcasts like this, I try to get into the reasons why so that you understand the underlying logics. Therefore, you can apply it to yourself if you want or, or not. If you don't want to, but at least you have the choice. I'm following basically Albert Einstein's advice. He said, "If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions." So let me tell you a story. So this is a story about Brad. He is a new Chief Strategy Officer of his company, and he's about to start his first strategic planning cycle in this what is a very new job. As part of his due diligence, he's looked over prior strategic plans and he's noticed that they only covered 4 years each. But his big concern is that they appear to be copies of each other. In other words, from one year to the next, nothing has changed. It's as if the company were executing the same strategic plan from 10 years ago with only minor changes. He could probably send out the same plan from from a decade ago and call it the new plan, and no one would detect the difference. In addition, the CEO and the chairperson have both hinted that they want him to do things the way they've always been done in strategic planning. They keep talking about being comfortable with the final strategy as if that were their priority. Consequently, Brad is feeling very uneasy. Why? Well, they're in a competitive industry and the new technologies which are being introduced are basically all everyone in the company ever talks about behind closed doors, muted tones. They kind of maybe all agree that something should be done, but somehow no one apart from him has connected the radical changes which may need to be made with their strategic planning effort. But he thinks that a shift needs to happen to connect the two. He does see value in keeping some things the same, especially the ones that are working. But is this a case of taking a good thing too far? If he were to suggest a change in direction, where would he begin? So Brad is in a, a, a difficult spot, and it has political ramifications, and it has, it has, uh, will have an impact on his working relationship with his boss, his superiors, and others who are around him. He right now is pretty much alone in seeing things the way he sees them. And if you're listening and sort of relating to the situation that he's in, where Maybe a client or your company has engaged in strategic planning and it's pretty much following a fixed track in the sense that they pretty much are doing the same planning from year to year, only making small changes. Sometimes in big organizations, or, you know, there are business units that pretty much, you know, they don't envision anything other than 2, 3, 4 years out. And really what they're thinking of doing is staying on the same track and making some incremental changes. But you may see things differently. So you want to think big, and maybe you even want to think long. And for you, there are some big things to be accomplished, some important things, and they won't happen in the normal course of events if strategic planning continues to be done the way it's always been done. So you have a concern that if the current way of doing things basically just continues, that you'll end up with a plan that doesn't take the company anywhere new. And as you talk to people, maybe you may notice some really small thinking that essentially is about ignoring some big trends. So people might be aware of them and they might be concerned, but that's not enough to take them to make decisions. They are perhaps like the chairman and the, the CEO, actively sort of against conflict, sometimes against the hard decision, against opportunities to make the hard decisions that would take the company in a different area, a different, a whole different direction. If you're in a public sector, so you may not have direct competition, but I would suggest to you that if you're an NGO or a ministry or a secretariat or somebody in a larger government organization, it could be a charity, that what you're fighting against is not competitors per se. You're fighting against irrelevancy. In other words, there's a concept called contestability, which is basically, basically says that even if you don't have direct comp— competition, that resources, funding, attention, um, growth, energy, budget, that these all get directed to the most relevant organizations. And if you don't plan strategically and don't think about where you're headed, that you could be deemed irrelevant by those who have the power to not give you funding or basically declare your operation redundant, or the need that you're trying to fill goes away and you keep trying to fill it, but it disappears because maybe some reason the client group that you serve or the problem you're trying to solve in your nonprofit or charity, the problem goes away. You didn't notice that it was going away You have a whole bureaucracy meant to solve problems that no longer exists, or it's being solved in some other way that's better than the way that you would do it. So those are some of the, you might say, some of the forces that you're working against. And I would say that if you don't make these changes, that you leave yourself open, you may think that you leave yourself open to danger that if there's no new strategy being created, that the— in the background, the dangers and the, the trends, regulations, the changing climate, technology, political changes. If you're familiar with PESTA, that's a nice way of thinking about all these problems that may be in the background waiting to disrupt your new strategy. Because your new strategy is really just a continuation of the old. So it's really that your old strategy is being disrupted. Strategy is no longer relevant, and you could be setting yourself up for danger by allowing blind spots to continue, uh, unabated. For you, that may be causing anxiety, uh, maybe even a sleepless night. Or maybe some deeper concern that, that if you don't resolve this problem, that the organization could basically go out of business or lose, lose its function or lose its place and be unable to make the difference that it wants to make for clients, for customers, whoever the recipients are. Um, ultimately that could lead to people losing their jobs. However, you— the fact that you see things this way doesn't mean that it's easy to get other people to see things your way. Matter of fact, they— in this case, the case that we conjured up with Brad, story is fictional, but you know, we set it up so that people are definitely not seeing things his way and he's the only one. So he needs to find a way you know, to convince others, to demonstrate, to show, to teach that a strategic plan should go for big strategies and long strategies, and that should be a part of it. Now, this is— I would call this an epic problem because I see every organization in which human beings gather of all profit, non-for-profit, volunteer, NGO, government, whatever it is the organization might be, all the way down to a service club or a school or a church or a running club or a cycling club, that they all need big and long strategies. So maybe there should be a way to convince people that this is the case, and you already are convinced that if this happens, then it would serve all who are concerned. It would be a win-win for all who are involved. So you're probably aware that if you don't solve this problem, then— if Brad doesn't solve this problem, if you don't cause this to shift, then the organization 10 years from now would still be doing incremental strategic plans. And nothing of a breakthrough or game-changing nature. And if the reason that, you know, or the way people that respond to this notion, because long-term and big thinking are both kind of risky, the way many executive teams, I would say most, respond to this is to say something like, the world is so VUCA, we can't think big and long. We need to think small and survival as if we were still in COVID. So COVID left us with, uh, I would say the wrong lesson for most companies. And we've convinced ourselves that the world is more VUCA than it's ever been before. I'm gonna say that studies have shown that that's not true. And when we say that 2024 is as VUCA as 1944 or 1914, that we're seeing some crazy things. But this is how, this is how prevalent this idea has become, that because the world is changing faster than ever before, oh, because we have technology, yeah, but it's all, it's all relevant compared to 1944. Yeah, there's more technology changes today But we're also more capable of riding with the technology changes than our grandparents were in 1944. So is the world more VUCA? The studies say no, it's not. It's all an illusion. And the same illusion prevailed in the banking crisis of 2020— 2008, sorry. It happened right after 9/11 in 2001. That there's various times— the oil crisis in the '70s— there's various times in history when companies and leaders fall into the trap of thinking that the world is too VUCA, so I only need to do short-term thinking. And this company is no different. You know, COVID, probably after COVID, they probably said, oh, this is exactly why we need to not think about big and long and only talk about short-term, because that's reasonable, that's comfortable. They may not have used the word comfortable, but they would say that's reasonable, that's really what we should be focusing on. And maybe if we want to accomplish something big, we need to think about squeezing it into a short time frame, which many CEOs do. They'll happily take a 10-year target and squeeze it into 3. Why? Well, all kinds of reasons, but one reason is that my stock bonuses or my tenure, I want to benefit from being CEO and I'm going to be leaving in a few years' time. And I want all the results to come in before then. If they come in after that, then they won't accrue to me. In other words, there's some selfishness that kicks in. But this short-term thinking and this, this tendency to squeeze a big goal into a short horizon, maybe it used to work in the past, but today we've gotten more savvy. Today's employee And why is that? Well, try on this explanation. We're used to being advertised to way more than we've ever been in the past. And the average person sees— I've seen crazy numbers about the number of ads that the average person sees per day. If it's not in the hundreds, then it's in the thousands, which essentially means that there's a lot of promises being made for short-term gain. To us. So we're being exposed to messaging from people who are trying to persuade us that short-term gain is possible, that you can lose 5 pounds in 2 weeks, that these things are possible when in fact many of them are not. And we've become discriminating around these short-term promises. In other words, we don't believe them. So when a CEO or an executive or a chairman stands up and says, we're gonna do all these great things, everybody says, yes, we are those great targets and we're gonna do them in 3 years. And a dead silence kicks in and that silence kicks in in the room because nobody believes, not even the executives who made the plan believe that it's possible to do it in 3 years, but we're gonna do it because it's a stretch goal. There's all this motivational language. That sounds a lot like the promotional language that we are actively filtering every time we go online because we've become more cynical in a way, but also more discriminating and smarter about what to believe and what not to believe. Mostly we do not— I don't think we believe advertisements, so we don't believe CEOs who try to squeeze these big goals into short horizons. And a couple of the reasons why we don't believe them is that we, we think, well, to get that done in 3 years, we're gonna need perfect, absolutely perfect execution, which means like nothing can go wrong in terms of how we go about executing that strategy. What are the chances of that given our history? We would need perfect circumstances where political, environmental, social, all the external pester kind of influences stop. They don't have any influence on our operations so we can engage in accomplishing these big goals in 3, 4 years and they'll leave us alone while we're trying to do it. And as people make these calculations in their head, they say, what are the chances of perfectly executing in— under the perfect circumstances, in a perfect environment? And they add them all up and they say less than, and they quote some small percentage. In other words, they don't believe that it's possible. Now CEOs persist in thinking that they can be that persuasive. And the harder they try, the more credibility they lose and the more inauthentic they sound. Hmm. So given that problem, which I suggest executives are not familiar with and they don't realize it happens in the moment, it's still a tricky problem to solve. Business of going big and going long because people are inherently If they're not afraid of setting big, hairy, audacious goals, they're at least anxious about doing so. Setting up an organization for the accomplishment of something outsized or way outside its normal trajectory, like the company that Brad works for has followed, is probably gonna create its own level of nervous kind of resistance. It's its own feeling that, do we want to fail? If we commit to big things, we could fail big time. And if we fail big time, we would look bad. And in the executive suite, there's a lot of egos. There are people who do not want to look bad. People also ask, where are the plans? To accomplish those big goals. So another reason that people don't believe them when they're announced is that there's often no long-term strategic plan, no credible plan. Because anybody, any executive, can get up and say anything about any big goal and announce anything. And where do the numbers come from? Oh, we just had a retreat and just came up with them. But is there a strategic plan to accomplish it that's credible? What people really want to know is that, was that your first number, or after you did the strategic plan, as you were doing it, did that affect the goal and did it make it push it out by a few years? Did you have to change some of the— they want to know, was this real? Was there a real planning session to assure that, assure yourselves that this thing would happen? So the Sustainable Development Goals appear not to have gone through that process. For example, they were set in 2015 and due to be completed in 2030, and they're in deep trouble according to the UN. And I suggest that the reason they— that they're in trouble is because there aren't long-term strategic plans to support them. Funnily enough, the world had the same problem back in 1950 1957 to 1958 and 1967. The world committed to rid itself of smallpox in 1957, and in 1950— by 1967 realized that there was no progress being made whatsoever. 1967, they did a reset, and this time they set a time frame, they created some specific strategies they put in a long-term strategic plan that eventually allowed them to accomplish the goal, even though it happened 9 months after the original— sort of the original intended goal, or the new intended goal, which was 1997— 1977. It took them 9 months longer, but the reason they could accomplish it even 9 months late was because they had a long-term strategic plan the second time around. That was one goal. So the Sustainable Development Goals have 17, which are of equal difficulty. So the fact that there are so many goals and no long-term strategic plans to accomplish them reminds us a little bit of 1958 kind of thinking around smallpox, except that it's 17 goals as opposed to one. So people don't believe in BHAGs today unless they know that there was some serious long-term strategic planning behind it. They, they figure that they're not going to happen. And already long-term strategic planning, some people say we don't know how to make them, we don't have time to create them, they won't last. In other words, there's already a difficulty in most companies because the discipline of long-term strategic planning isn't well understood. So I want you to walk away today with some insight into how to resolve this problem, and I want to introduce some new thinking to you that maybe you have or haven't heard, um, but that are actually practical in nature so that you can actually have to start to have conversations with people around you. If you have a client or your company is stuck in this kind of rut, you know, where do you begin to have conversations that could make a difference? Um, and, um, I, I probably should, should share a little bit about how this— the core of this idea, uh, some of this idea came, came along. Um, in the 1990s, I read a book called Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. You may have read it or heard about it. It introduced the idea of a metaphysics of quality. Author was Robert Persig, and he wrote a follow-up book called Lila. And what I'm going to share with you today is some of the thinking from both of those books. And, um, it was more than just an interesting book, and they're written like novels. What I found was that it changed the way I thought about change management, and in particular the change management that goes into strategic planning or the implementation of strategic plans. Okay, so what do I mean more directly? Okay, so his idea was that there's two kinds of quality or two kinds of goodness: static and dynamic. And the idea behind dynamic— static quality is that that's a pattern of value that keeps things the same. He also said that there is dynamic quality, and that's a pattern of value that is all about change. So, there's two kinds of mutually existing forces in the world. This is metaphysics, okay? So, it could get a lot deeper, but I'm going to keep it at a understandable level. So there's a force of keeping things the same and there's a force of changing things. And if you buy into one versus the other and don't think of the other while you're doing the one, you'll end up with a problem. So here's an example. So Steve Jobs, interesting. So there's some conflicting, not conflicting, but there's some different stories about how Apple came to dominate the space it was in, the space it created in the 2000s. So early in the 2000s, somewhere 2000, 2001, they came up with a vision, and the vision was for a single ecosystem at the— by the end of the decade. And that ecosystem would tie together all their products and services, which would be seamless. So nothing like that existed before. Maybe it was one of the first, you know, platform strategies that was actually put into play. But from that point on, between 2000 and 2010, everything that they created was created as a part of this imaginary platform. At the same time, someone interviewed him in around 2002, 2003, And they asked him kind of like, what's your strategy? And he said, well, he's kind of being coy, right? Because he doesn't want to let the whole world know that he's creating this ecosystem. He says, well, right now we're just kind of waiting. Person said, waiting? He said, yeah, we're kind of waiting to see which way, which technologies come out next. So he was looking for opportunities based on the newer discoveries that would eventually come out. Because perhaps at that point he didn't foresee that they would have an iPad, uh, an iPhone. Like, these were still, um, the, the earbuds, the ear iPod— well, I forget what they're called, I don't have up here, so— but the earbuds, that the television, Apple TV. So he had the outline of it So he had the dynamic quality in terms of the vision, a long-term vision, but he also had, when this interview took place, static quality, which was essentially, we're going to keep things the same until new technologies get— become available and the internet gets to the point where we can exploit the next step. So his plan had both dynamic and static quality balanced in it. Now, I've studied some of, of what Amazon has done and Jeff Bezos has said, and Jeff Bezos talks about being patient. So being patient and waiting for something to turn out strikes me as an element of static quality. And at the same time, he says we have 7-year plans plus, because all our competitors are thinking about 3 years. So we beat them because we're more patient than they are, and we are painting a big— we're going bigger and longer than they are. So the idea between these two types of quality and the examples I gave is that you don't need to be doing both at the same time. There could be years in which you're essentially keeping things the same, and then there are years in which big changes are happening, but it's all part of the same strategic plan. It's a little bit like being an athlete. So there's a season, and then there's a, a period of time where you're out of season. And when you're out of season, you don't exercise and and tax your body in the same way as you do when you're in season. You have one strategy, but there are seasons. So that's an easier one to understand because the seasons don't overlap and they're determined by the calendar. So you can flip between dynamic quality and static quality if you're an athlete. It's more straightforward. The company, however, you can hold both energies and have them in your strategic plan, and operationalize them at the very same time. That means that people who are skilled at static quality are not the evil, I'm gonna do things the way they've always been done, enemies of change. They're not necessarily the villain when it comes to long-term strategic planning. It's not that they're bad. In fact, your company or organization or country needs lots of people to maintain status quality, static quality. It needs them to do what they do so that you can keep things going and you can keep profits, um, keep making profits from prior products and prior services. And you also need people who specialize in dynamic quality. So you need to manage both elements of your strategic plan, and they may occur at the same time as they did in the case of Steve Jobs. It's just that they're on different horizons. So you may know that I've led some 50, 50-odd, 55, 66 strategic plans of a long-term nature they're all 15 to 30 years in duration in the last couple of decades or so. And having been— having witnessed executives struggle with what to do and when and how to think about these things, I can say that it's a sort of a weird thing because I've never explained this distinction to them. At the same time, I never encouraged them to balance the two qualities or the two energies. The same time, the best plans do. So they've done it without my help. They've done it without my instruction or my facilitation. Intuitively, they, they just kind of figured out there's, there's different kinds of things going on here and we need to manage both. Now I, I could say that next retreat I'm definitely going to be talking about this, and I've known about this since the '90s. I've just never put it into strategic planning. Never had the idea before. So I'm gonna invite you to, to do that because no, you know, and here's some of the complaints I hear. Oh, we don't want to do long-term strategic planning because we don't want to lose our focus on the short term. Never understood that. And maybe I can understand it now with this distinction a little bit better. So my thought has always been, my argument has been, don't worry, your long-term strategic plan includes the short term. So a 15-year plan has, has details for '14, '13, '12, '11, '10, '09, '08, '07, '06, '05, '04, '03, '02, '01. And there's more detail about years '01, '02, and '03 than there is about years '14 and '15. So I argue it that way by just showing them like, here's what a plan looks like. As you can see, there's no way that you're going to miss out on the short term because you're focused on the long term. The two are not mutually exclusive, not the way I lead companies to long-term strategic planning. Now you hear executives and consultants and authors and experts who make this argument, and all I can imagine is that they've never sat in a long-term strategic planning activity, or they think it's something like scenario planning where you just think about something way out there and that's the end of it. No, with backcasting, which you can learn about at the newsletter website or on the podcast, backcasting connects the future to the present. Hence my statement that the long-term strategic plan of 15 years has Years 15 through 1 mapped out, and the method that uses backcasting. So that's one way I've explained it. So the other way I would explain it is, or help them understand it, maybe you could use this also, is to say that you don't want to get stuck in one kind of quality versus another. So you neither want to be keeping things the same all the time, as is the case with Brad's company, nor do you want to be frenetically changing everything all the time, especially over the long term. You need to be two-headed when you're doing long-term strategic planning. Now, the problem is that if you're only doing short-term and you say, you know what, we're only going to focus on the first 3— let's say Brad loses the argument, the chairman and the CEO prevail, and he only focuses on the first 3 years. Then there's not much dynamic quality that they're going to be able to introduce in the long term. They're just basically saying that anything that concerns us of, for years 4 through whatever, 50, 100, anything after year 4, 5, 6, we're going to ignore that and just pretend that only the first few years are important. So the problem with that approach, the reason, one reason it doesn't work is that you can't go really big, as I explained before. So you want to be able to prove when someone asks that big is synonymous with long, that the two go together, and that this is just a matter of one, one level of common sense. At another level, it's a matter of credibility. It's a matter of logic. You know, use, use whatever argument or persuasion or story that you can use to equate big with long and help them understand that the two are synonymous. Also, you may look for evidence from the folks who invented the term BHAG, Big Hero Audacious Goal. Collins and Porras wrote their book in 1994. 2 years later, they issued a correction because the original book doesn't say anything about timeframe. So people who read the book came up with 1-year BHAGs, 2-year BHAGs, 6-month BHAGs, came up with BHAGs all over the joint and behaved as if, if you build it, they will come. That all you had to do was to create this BHAG and it would do the magic for you. And to be honest, to be fair, the book is written that way, as if that's true. Two years later, they issued a correction, and I've tried to contact them to ask them, how did you come about this correction? Not heard any answer, and I've not found any in anything they've written. But the correction was— came out in Harvard Business Review They wrote an article that said that a BHAG needs to be 10 to 30 years out or have a horizon of 10 to 30 years. Now, I don't know about you, but it's a pretty big horizon. I think that, yeah, that's a big thing to say. And they kind of just said it in passing as well. But meanwhile, companies were creating BHAGs all over the place and they didn't work. Using the "if you build it, they will come" ethos of Built to Last, the book by Porras and Collins. Following the spirit of the book, they failed and stopped using BHAGs. Another piece of evidence that you might use if you— if you want, I recommend reading the book and becoming fluent in this explanation that I just gave you and all its nuances and ins and outs. Another one you could use is, believe it or not, it's on YouTube. So there is a channel on YouTube by a fellow by the name of Company Man. I believe it's a fellow. I actually don't— well, I guess it's a fellow. It's Company Man. It's not Company Person. And Company Man analyzes these different stories. And these are stories of companies that are failing, have failed, or are failing, or are on the brink of bankruptcy or already bankrupt. And they're fascinating. They run about 12 to 14 minutes each. There's about 5 channels that do the same thing, and they all, they all pick these companies, well-known brands like Kmart, like Sears, uh, Kodak, um, Nokia, and they, they, they attempt to explain what happened and why the company no longer exists or why they are a minute version of what they used to be? I'll tell you what, the answer is kind of all the same: no long-term strategy. It's never the case that they made one mistake. It's never the case that they were doing the right things, or maybe sometimes it is— they thought they could do the right thing but the execution was poor. But It's either the long-term strategy did not exist or it wasn't executed well. And that's the theme throughout all of these failures. So I recommend that you take a look. Why? Because it'll give you some ammunition to talk about why they failed, what was missing, and what their competitors figured out that they didn't and implemented over multi-year periods. So Nokia could be in business today and it could be a smartphone provider if it had a long-term vision going back to about 2003. That's probably when the window closed on them. Between 2001 and 2003, they had a window where if they had created a long-term strategic plan in that window, there may never, never have been an Apple iPhone. They may have beat Samsung to the market. They may— we may still be using their phones. They would have had to create a whole new category, but they had the time and the resources to do so when others didn't, and they failed to do it. So having these horror stories can be very persuasive, especially if you can map them onto something that relates to your industry, something that relates to your geography. So here in Jamaica For example, we had the instance of a mobile phone company, Cable Wireless, which had 100% market share in 2001. Today it has maybe 30-something, to be generous, and they were entirely disrupted by another company that came in and they thought wouldn't even register on the radar. They didn't think they were anything to pay attention to in spite of very blatant, loud warnings from some. So use a local example, a geography in your country or your part of the country that people could relate to. And if you could find examples that are sort of emotionally connecting, that link to the experience of the folks in your, in your business, that can help also. So one way in which we make that emotional connection is to very innocently ask— and we do this in retreats— tell us, what are some of the decisions that you wish prior executive teams had made? What are some of the things that they should have decided on before now that would have made your life easy? Or in other words, what are some of the, um, choices they failed to make that in retrospect were— it was a big mistake not to make those choices, to not decide, or to not consider? And they have a list, they have a list of, oh, what's that? Oh, they, they'll go to town. So really interesting question. Then I pick the, the, the, the youngest person in the room. Say that person is 25. And then I say, so Sharon, so Sharon is here. She's 25 years old. I want you to imagine that Sharon is in a retreat 20 years from now. And she's the only person left from this group of 20 people, and she's reporting on the strategic planning session of 2024, the one that you're in, we're in right now. What do you think she's gonna say? Will she report that even though the decisions were hard to make, that this team made them. They had the courage and the chutzpah, the far foresight, the care about the next generation of leadership, customers, shareholders. They cared about long-term value, and so they stuck it out. And in spite of it being very difficult to think that far in the future, they laid the groundwork for what we have today. And then she says they were like the, the framers of all— if we had a, a constitution or a Declaration of Independence, this was kind of like the corporate or company's equivalent of creating those documents. And as she says it, she gets teary-eyed and misty. She says, it really was— it wasn't an easy job, but you know, they did it. Kudos to them. And yeah, most of them have passed away at this point. Her voice catches a little bit, right? And the room goes quiet. People are really inspired and they're grateful and thankful. Or is she gonna say Sharon, is she gonna say 20 years from now that, "Oh yeah, well, I'm sorry to say they only focused on the short term when I tried to say, well, how about the long term? And they almost kicked me out of the room because they didn't care." And then the room goes quiet again, but this time for a very different reason. And she said, but, you know, I think, you know, we really should forgive them and move on. I don't think we should dwell on it, that, you know, what's been done has been done. And while it was very obvious that there was, there was going to be a future for this company and they needed to take care of it and they didn't do their job, I think in retrospect we can just forgive them for, you know, being cowards. No, I'm going to tell you, I actually use words like this. And it's, it's fair. I've never been kicked out yet. But I invite you to create your own version of that kind of emotional connection. So with that, I want to leave you with the idea that going big is the same as going long. And that when you commit to going big, if you follow the logic laid out in Built to Last or just plain common sense, going big in a short time frame is a ripoff. Yes, you can achieve milestones, but ultimately something's a sacrifice if you try to accomplish a big audacious goal in a short time frame. Either it's not big enough or you're just going to be plain lying about what's possible and what's not possible. So this is a bit of a special episode because I want to let you know that there's an amazing opportunity coming up if you're listening to this episode of the podcast before June 20th and 21st. And that's because we're having our Long-Term Strategic Planning Conference and it's coming up in about a just a little less than 2 weeks. And if, if what I've said with you has registered— has, has, sorry, resonated any at all— then I'm going to invite you to register at strategyconf.fwconsulting.com. Once again, it's a long-term strategic planning conference. It's all virtual. Let me tell you some more about the details here. If you're watching on YouTube, you can actually see what I'm showing you, but I'm happy to say that the Association of Professional Futurists is our, one of our official collaborators in this particular conference. And I'm looking forward to having their speakers and share some of their content. Again, if you're not on YouTube, what I'm showing is a list of our 26 speakers. List meaning a whole bunch of headshots, like facial pictures. And what you're not able to see that where we have a lot of people from different parts of the world. You know, there's a few of us from the Caribbean, quite a few from England, some from Africa, Canada, Oman, uh, different parts of Europe, very well represented, folks from Denmark, Nigeria, and I could keep going. Australia. But I think you get the idea. So the 26 folks that we have sort of corralled into speaking at the conference are— they come from a difficult, challenging search that we've done over the last year to find experts in this area because they're very hard to find. Long-term strategic planning is something that, according to one consultant, my clients stopped asking for it maybe about 5, 10 years ago, and all I've been able to do with them is short-term stuff. So there's 3 different ways that I recommend that you engage in the conference, or I'm going to offer them to you, describe them. One is to be a visitor, and if you're a visitor, you could come in as a casual observer just because you want to satisfy some curiosity. You may come in as a binge watcher and we have 8 hours of prerecorded videos on day 1, approximately, and then another 10 hours of prerecorded videos on day 2, actually a little bit less than that, but 10 hours of videos on day 2, including the lives. And if you come in wanting to be a visitor or a binge watcher, and you can just watch one video after another for 20 hours straight, I know people who have done it, then that's those, you can take a visitor's pass. And those visitor passes are complimentary. The great thing is that you can actually watch 20 hours because the videos are going to be available for 24 hours to anyone. Anyone can watch them from anywhere in the world. So the reason we're doing that is to make this absolutely available to all time zones. In addition, regardless of the option that you pick, You can also enjoy the live interactions on day number 2, and you can also join our online community of learners that's going to be active during the conference. You can meet other people who have a similar commitment to long-term strategic planning. So those are the free options. We also have a way of making it much easier for you if you're a serious, uh, learner, if you're someone who has something important at stake. In developing the discipline of long-term strategic planning, and that's a paid ticket. So a paid ticket affords you instant access to all of the content that we currently have available. And it's— right now we're doing recordings and they're being added to the stack, and you get instant access to them before the conference starts. You also get 1 year of all the replays after the conference. So maybe 18 to 20, 20, 20-odd hours of content, all from our 26 experts. Actually, it should be— my math is wrong. It's more hours than that, but you basically get access to our library of conference content. So the focus is on long-term strategic planning. As I said, we have 26 speakers. The first day is all about the on-demand videos. The The second day is about live panels plus more online videos, on-demand videos rather, 24-hour availability. We are establishing or have established already an online conference community and a full ticket costs $179. Now that full ticket is at that full price after the conference. Before the conference and during the conference, we have a discount. So to access the discount, just go to the website. It's all explained when you go to the registration page. You'll see the details in the— under the full ticket. You'll enter a code or click on a link and be able to access an early bird discount, which is about 50% thereabouts. We offer parity pricing, which means that the price varies depending on your country. If you're from a wealthy country, you may not see a discount. If you're from a country like us here in Jamaica, a developing country, then you'd see a discount. That's an even smaller price. But go check it out, strategyconf.fwconsulting.com for more information. And, um, I hope to see you in the conference. And, um, this is a bit of a different kind of episode, but I'll also let you know what's going to happen in the next episode. Here at, uh, the Long Jump, Jump Leap, Long Term Strategy Podcast. So this is Francis Wade reminding you that here up next is a clip from the next episode. It includes some brilliant new ideas which should shake up your industry and even introduce the world to a brand new category of products and services. But you are a bit wary because prior strategic plans barely made it off the PowerPoint pages. They weren't implemented due to a common complaint: no one had time. You have every reason to be worried, but what should you do about the problem? Tune into this episode to join me in tackling this wicked problem from two perspectives at once: task management and strategic planning. 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!