Welcome and John and Sonia Session

How do we take our world from one that is marked by short-termism so that creating long-term value becomes an everyday way of operating in corporate, the corporate world around the world, around the entire globe? How do we cause that kind of shift in the area in which we are responsible and we're interested, in the area of strategic planning? How do we bring about interwoven short and long-term strategic planning? My friends, if you're here to answer that question today, you're in the right place. And if we've not met online, my name is Francis Wade, and I am the host, co-host of the Strategic Sustainable Planning Conference 2023. And I am not alone. I am here with my colleague and wife, Dale Pilgrim Wade. She's also in the chat. And together we'll be guiding you through the live portion of today's events. So yesterday we was all about the downloads, and we had downloads, I think 17 from our 38 speakers. Today continues, there's also some more downloads, but we're also going to be doing live events today. And we're here on the Emery platform, and I want to make sure that you're hearing me. Are you hearing me? Are you there, uh, in the chat? So Get those fingers working, get those emojis working. Let me make sure that I'm not alone and I'm just talking to myself. Gonna be an interactive day, so let's see what we have. This is the part where you type it in the chat. Francis, can I— are you hearing me? Am I— you hear— am I hearing you? Am I seeing you? Go ahead and drop me a note in the chat. Oh, Dale says hearing you, Fred. Anyone else apart from my wife and colleague Dale? Are you hearing me out there? Great. I have Judy Wade and Chris says she was hearing me this morning. And so does Sonia. Wonderful, guys. I'm going to be bringing you up to share some of what you got from yesterday's experiences. But before we do that, let me drop a poll and see if I can get that poll working. Oh, guess what? Poll did not work. Oh, interesting. Airmeet does this from time to time. It just kind of forgets that you wanted to do a poll. But here's my, here's my version of the poll. It's not an automatic poll, but it's just a just a second. Okay, here it is. Drop it in the chat. Dropping the poll in the chat. On a scale of 1 to 3, where is your organization and client in terms of its strategic planning? And you could— if you're— if you deal with multiple clients, you could talk about the multiple clients that you deal with. Is it super short-term and no long-term? Short-term and some long-term, or short-term plus a lot of long-term? 1, 2, or 3? 2, says Ernesto. 2. 2. Looks like we're getting some 2s. 2.5. I think that's a good thing. We're getting some really good scores. Very interesting, because that sort of directs us as to where to kind carry our conversation today with the events that we have lined up. Mostly twos, interesting. I wonder if it's because I only had 3 options. You always wonder, right? Anyway, the first part of our day today is for me to help you accomplish some extraordinary things today. We, on behalf of myself and my team of speakers, we know that it's a difficult task to move an organization from being short-term oriented to being long-term oriented. And today, we'll be giving you some ways to think about making that movement happen, empowering you to have these conversations with C-suite, board members, people with whom it really matters, and some practical tools, things to say, models to give, ways to lead conversations, even retreats that you could want to have that would bring out an interwoven short and long-term strategic planning kind of approach. So let me jump into today's agenda. Um, actually, before I jump in today's agenda, let me hear from those of you who were there yesterday. What was your experience yesterday? Just drop that in the chat so we get a sense of what, what happened. For those who weren't there yesterday, what was yesterday like? I know it's early in the morning for some folks. I know. What was it like? So yesterday we had, as I said, we had 17 videos. And Ernesto is saying, I did not have time to see them all. Ernesto happens to be one of our presenters. I'm going to invite, um, Sonia and John to join me on, on the stage because That'd probably be the easiest thing for us to do at this point. Let's see. Okay, I'm looking for Sonia. I see John. All right, great. And let's— it's Sonia. And I'll introduce them and we'll get going. Uh, let me tell you a little bit about these folks, just a little bit. So Sonia Garlick is a management consultant, facilitator, and educator. Her curiosity and love of learning has taken her to over 40 countries, providing her valuable insights into different cultures. With a career spanning 3 decades, she recognizes the evolving role and responsibility of business and society. And John Friedman is an award-winning ESG and sustainability leader who helps companies integrate their operational, sales, financial, and cultural initiatives into sustainable and responsible business practices. He's quoted frequently in national news outlets and is the author of Managing Sustainability: First Steps to First Class. Okay, I'm hearing a little bit of not sound in the background. Oh, that's Sonia.

Good morning.

Hi guys, good morning.

Good morning and welcome to the 21st century technology. Congratulations on getting it working and never giving up.

I tell you, we have some tech support from a different country with heavy accents like mine, and it was a bit of a translation job to say edit. What is that? Edit? Edit? So anyway, we had some of that going on as well. Multiple machines, the whole thing.

If it's any consolation, when I need tech support, I turn to my 15-year-old.

I'm the 15-year-old.

No, one five.

I'm just 3 times 4. I'm more than the age. But guys, thanks for joining me at the conference. On Wednesday, we had a fascinating conversation online with Mike Baxter, and it had to do with ESG, but I wanted to continue our conversation to focus on the long term. You know, John has this awesome saying that one day we'll just call ESG business. And I thought we could talk about, you know, what's— what does it look like to think that in the long— in one day we'll just call long-term business, like business will be about the long term. That something has shifted and today long-term concerns seem to be this outside thing. Today, part of it we call ESG, environmental long-term, social long-term, and governance long-term. And companies have really contracted their point of view. But before we even get into that, let's contrast short versus long-term thinking and what does each one require, and sort of the benefits of each one. So who'd like to go first?

Well, I'm happy to. It's a little early for my neck of the woods, but if I may add a couple of things. When you speak about that ESG long term, and just thinking about John's comments, I think what's— as companies evolve, what they're going to realize is And as part of the strategic planning process, however you call it, companies are going to have to look at not only from a risk perspective how environmental, social, and governance issues impact their organizations, but also are going to have to look out, which is how their organizations impact the environment, how their organizations impact society. And I just think, and to John's point, eventually it'll all become business. And that's exactly what it is, is we're learning to, we are actually learning to create economic value out of those things that in the past did not have an economic value. We are placing greater value on the environmental impacts that businesses have, that our society have, because we are seeing whether it be climate change, whether it be the changing in the temperatures of the waters or the oceans, we're seeing that. So that's why I think it's going to be integrated into long-term strategic planning.

So not to put too simple a point on it, long-term gives you the vision, short-term gives you agility to deal with things that change along the way. Long-term is when you decide you're going to take a trip across the country and you program it into GPS, and short-term is when there's an accident or construction or something and you reroute for a portion of your journey, but you don't ever lose sight of your long-term vision.

Yeah. Ah, so the long term sort of stays the same in some ways, whereas the short term is about being flexible.

Yeah, monitoring and evaluating. Do we— where are we at? And do we actually need to make a course change because we're heading into a storm? Right. Do we need to batten down the hatches or do we need to actually go around the storm?

Right.

But the short term can also help redefine the long-term. So if your long-term vision is a true vision, let's say reducing carbon emissions, work-life balance, and things like that, a short-term reaction to something like COVID, which businesses, cities, individuals had to react to, has changed the way some businesses are looking fundamentally at things like work from home and the size of their physical footprint and office space and what is truly necessary to run their business. And so the short-term And things that happen and change over the short term can also be effective at informing how you get to, how you realize that long-term vision. Because the long-term vision has to be aspirational and has to be about the ultimate goal.

There are some companies— arguably, every single company has a short-term something. It may not be a strategy. But they have a short-term— they have meetings and they talk about what's going to happen next week and the week after. And what we've seen over COVID, I've seen over COVID, is that their attention, their meetings have gotten shorter. So they really only have time for short-term and what's happening right now. Um, and would you agree that they've punted long-term considerations until some point in the future where we have time or when things settle down, or when COVID goes away, or when the economy recovers, or when inflation comes back, or something happens, some magical thing. But long-term planning has been put in suspension. It's like it's waiting. And short-term, everybody is doing short-term and believing that this is all that we can do. Is that your assessment also?

I see Sonya's also shaking her head. I don't think that that's true because When you're in a crisis situation, obviously you don't think theoretically, you think tactically. How do we solve this? But one of the things that happened when we started to work, for example, from home and remotely, is that we lost some of that connectivity to each other as human beings, which is part of being a great place to work. And we lost some of that, the commitment to how we handle and build teams and so forth. Which are necessary for long-term success. So yes, I think some cases it was punted because some businesses were just trying to survive. And you know, there's an old saying, you know, you don't worry about tomorrow. You don't worry about tomorrow when you're worried about how you're going to get through today.

That's true.

Sonia? No, I agree with John's saying. But I think whether it's COVID or anything else. And some of the management teams I've worked on in the past, and that's quite often, it's a constant conversation that we have that they're so busy dealing with the issues of the day that they have difficulties focusing on that, the long-term vision. And one of the things we often talk about is strategy is not just about your vision and your mission. But we start talking about the purpose. We start talking about values or culture. And part of when we talk about values is what does that look like in terms of how you're behaving, like how you're behaving towards yourself, how you're behaving towards your stakeholders, your suppliers. What are you saying? What are you doing? And that actually helps guide that decision-making process. So when you are dealing with the, the short-term reactions to making sure you're surviving, you're still able to turn the lights on next day. There is, there is symmetry around how we're making our decisions in the short term. It's creating a discipline so that the decisions you're making in the short term are still aligned with your long-term vision. And there's a— and when there's— and I know we've talked, Frances and I have talked about what we talk about values or what that means in terms of principles. But it's creating that discipline around the decision-making process so that when you are bombarded with whether it's COVID or or anything in the short term, you have a system in place that allows you the discipline, the intentional decision-making, so that it creates clarity around why we're making the— how to make those decisions, why we're making those decisions, and how does that always align back to our long-term vision. So you might not— you might be in the middle of a storm, but it is all interconnected. And it's just creating a framework around the short-term decision-making process that allows you to still keep an eye out in the long term. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Yeah, let's talk about that framework a little bit because So, so companies are— they need to transition back to long-term thinking, long-term strategic planning. They need to sort of true up, or at least revisit, their long-term strategic plan if they have one. They need to return to it. It could be obsolete. It may never have existed in some cases. Many, many cases it didn't exist. How can companies simply start to take small steps towards moving from short-term thinking to incorporating long-term thinking. And I know that if, you know, for ESG advocates, it'd be like, just do it. The company is, you know, the country is, sorry, the planet is dying. We are doing all these awful things to it. People are suffering. Just do it. But if we were to advise them on a sort of a practical way, you've been having these problem-solving sessions for the last 3 years. How do you migrate back to including this long-term perspective? What are some steps?

John, do you want to start with that one?

Yeah, it's a little tricky, right? Because the long term— and I'm seeing some very interesting points in the chat as well— the long-term vision should be aspirational, but it may not be tied to a specific tactic. So, for example, I worked with an organization that's goal was to be the most admired business in its particular business sector. And think about that, the most admired. What does it take to be admired? That changes as long and short-term perspectives come in. But to be admired, you have to be a great place to work. You have to provide great value to your customers. You have to be a good, responsible steward of the environment. You have to help work towards social progress. You have to be a good member of the community. That aspiration that works for the long term wasn't tied to a specific tactic. I've seen other organizations that wanted to double their revenue and half their costs. But they didn't in the long-term vision define how they were going to do it. They had a plan. But then as realities intruded, they modified the plan but never lost sight of the long-term vision.

And just out of curiosity, that company you spoke of that they wanted to be the most admired, In their strategic planning process, did they actually define what that looked like?

They defined what the attributes of a company in their sector were that people most wanted to see. So, it started like doing a materiality assessment. But you know, and so what did employees want to see? What would it take to be admired? Yeah, and it was a fascinating intellectual exercise. And then to see it as the senior leadership team started talking about that, use it as their language, created the, if you will, the true north, and they tested everything they did against it. Now, the interesting thing is when the short-term things came up, they weren't always— they sometimes had to do things that they knew would hurt them against that vision. But most of the time, they tried very hard to stay true to it. Like layoffs, for example. If you have to lay people off, there's a downturn in the economy. You talk about inflation. Companies that want to be admired hold on to their employees. But reality can intrude. But the manner in which they did it, I think they would argue they did in a way that was respectful and responsible. And for not only the employees who were affected, but the employees who were left behind, but as well as external people looking at the organization saying, you know, We understand they faced a bad reality but they handled it really well.

Yeah, yeah. And it's interesting that you say that though because one of the things when I'm teaching, one of the things I try to— the first steps of creating an— once again, it's an ethics and business class. So, we talk around, we use the words ethics in it. But it's to create awareness. And to your point or the one, the example you chose, which was We need cutbacks. We need layoffs. And creating awareness around that conversation that, okay, what are the different— we need to cut costs. What are the different ways in having those conversations? Because it's not— there are lots of solutions. And it's contextual in terms of the environment in which you operate in. But it's having those conversations, being aware of the different perspectives, being aware of the impact. And being very intentional in your decision-making process. Yeah, and having clarity around what are the potential impacts of that. And I think the reality is we don't know whether or not we've made a good decision potentially until a much later time.

Right. Well, it's funny because I worked with a different organization that also faced an economic downturn.. And I was fortunate enough to be in the room with the president of the company. And it happened to be his senior leadership team. And they wrote a number on the whiteboard. And it was how much money they needed to save in order to make it, you know, to make the budget work. And then the next person walked up there and wrote the word right under it, no layoffs. And they said, and the CEO said, it's very simple. There's going to be layoffs. The first people are going to be laid off are the people in this room because you're the senior leadership team and you led us down the wrong path. And that starts with me. So let's find this much money and let's work together and find this much money and avoid cutting jobs that people count on. And we went through and I watched them go through the exercise of changing the CapEx plan and the strategic plan. And they gave back their corporate cars and a bunch of other things that they had. They combined some equipment that the company was going to buy and said, we're going to share it among 2 or 3 divisions instead of each division getting their own. And they went through the budget and found the number.

Yeah.

And it became a real pride point. Now, we never told anyone outside the meeting about that conversation, but people saw what the result was in reality. Oh, each of those senior leaders gave back part of their salary and their bonus.

In advance.

Yeah, they said we're not gonna take a bonus for 3 years, or however long the period was, in order to make the numbers work.

And I would love to see what— like, when I work with companies and we develop a strategic plan, it's not just the vision, vision and mission, but it's also, like I said, identifying the values. And because it's It's those and not just words on a wall but actually defining them and what it looks like in terms of our actions, our beliefs, and how we speak, and how we deal with each other. And the reason being is those are actually what support the culture and the success of that company. So, it was the values within the corporate executives that said, "Our employees are incredibly valuable." We are going to, by our own actions, show that we are prepared to make the necessary cutbacks because we value the entire organization.

Like, values are not what's written on the wall. They're what you live day to day.

Exactly.

You will know a company's core values by the way it acts. Yeah, just the same way you do with people. You know, talk is cheap.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly. So values are an important piece of data that are input into the long-term thinking. The short term, maybe, but definitely the long term, because that's where it's going to really play out. But some organizations are wary of having to do a whole lot of research before they make the transition from short to long. So that's one piece of research, which is what are the values that we are actually acting with, behaving with, as opposed to the ones on the wall. Some of them won't even start their strategic plan, long-term strategic planning, because they're afraid of how much data they'll have to collect and how much research they'll have to do. Any insight as to kind of, as opposed to all of this data, what's the, the core set of information they need before they start making this transition to, from short to interwoven short and long?

I would argue that a company that doesn't plan for the long term is planning to not have a long term.

Having said that, and I completely agree with John. But having said that, I recognize that some of the companies I've worked with, some of the smaller startup type of companies that I've worked with, I've had to have some serious conversations around what they're doing now and where they want to go because they may just have a product is not a strategy. And when you're dealing with I think smaller companies and this isn't every. Company. I want to make that okay. I'm just saying that some of the ones that I've worked with, there's been huge conversations around the importance of strategic planning, the importance of your— you have a product. It is not a company. It is just a product. What are you? What is your value? What is— what is— how do you want to create value?

What—

and we've had some of the— had to have some of those conversations and On occasion, I've actually had to step back and just said, 'Hey, I'll gladly advise you but we can't do strategic planning.' Because they're not there. They don't— at where they are at, I don't want to say they don't see the value. They're just too busy focusing on trying to keep the lights on for tomorrow. And I think that depends where you're— I'm not saying it's a great thing. I'm saying it's, I think it's dependent on where you are in your growth. And I think publicly traded companies are different than privately traded companies. I think actually private, large private companies can actually have a much longer term strategy because they don't necessarily have the what did we call them? The competing forces. Yeah. So, I don't know if that's been John's experience. But I think we've all had different client profiles and different experiences.

I think the key to remember is you want to know what your value is. Don't look at your product but rather how that product impacts the lives of those who use it and how the production of that product impacts the lives of those who produce it and how the people who provide the resources for that product and not just the economic benefit that they gain from selling you the parts, whatever you use to build your product. But the whole— that's the value chain. And that will help you lead to your vision. So And I help a lot of companies. It's not what you make, it's what you do. What is your contribution? That gives you your vision. So to your point, Frances, about a large complex, long-term strategy, it can be as simple as, name a product and I'll just go through the intellectual exercise of pointing out why does that product matter to people? What good does it provide in their life? And then from the values statement, you can work backwards and say, our strategy is to live that value. And a lot of companies will create a product because they think it's saleable today. They don't know if it's saleable in 5 or 10 years or even 5 months, depending on how technology and other things are changing so rapid, and tastes and fads change so rapidly. But let's take an example of a, as something that changes rapidly. I'm just picking this out of the air— is music. What is the value that music brings to people? It's joy, it's entertainment. So if you are a music publishing or a music producing company, your long-term strategic value has to be to bring that joy and that camaraderie and all that together. Um, that's the value of what you're bringing, contributing to society.

Yeah, the product is just one song, but that's not the value. Yeah, no, absolutely.

And the producer is just one artist. And I don't know why music came to me, but I think maybe because, you know, Jamaica has such great musical contributions to the world.

Francis, thank you very much.

There's a nod to, you know, you know, Bob Marley was creating art and joy and love, um, not sitting there saying, okay, Three Little Birds was a hit, how do I take the same chords and a similar melody and get another hit? Because if you go look at Bob Marley's catalog, the songs are not— I mean, he had a signature style, but I wouldn't say he had a signature sound.

Right, right, right. So, there's two things that we've covered. One is the product and the other is the values. Those are inputs. But how about those disruptive trends? You know, for example, if you have a company that is involved in some way in the environment and it's affecting the environment. And there's some talk, there's murmurs in the C-suite that this is not only affecting the environment adversely, but we need to incorporate some view of the future into the strategic plan because it's going to limit what we can do in the future in the long term. We're okay for 5 years. We can get by with the thing that we're doing. But somewhere around, somewhere around the teens, maybe there's a vague fuzzy feeling that that's going to catch up with us. And the same goes for social, social impact. The same goes for governance problems, any long-term. How do companies do the kind of research that incorporates those long-term disruptors where they're not a problem today, but they definitely will be at some point? We know this from the outside, but from the inside the company, they're kind of muttering to each other, do you think that's going to be a problem? And sometimes say, nah, I don't think so. Sometimes say, yeah, it's a huge problem. And some say, yeah, but by the time I'm gone, I won't even care. So how do you incorporate those concerns into this before they even— they start doing the strategic planning, or so that it's a part of it?

Well, the funny thing is, as you were saying that, I kept thinking back to the whole Blockbuster, Netflix And from the case studies that I've looked at, I once again go back to culture within the organization. One culture was more innovative. They were both delivering, we could argue, the same value from an entertainment perspective. But I think one culture is more dynamic, is more receptive to what was happening externally and agile to it.

I think the person who says, "Well, it doesn't matter because I won't be here." That's a symptom of short-termism. And Noel Purcell has a great quote, which is, "When short-term shareholder value is elevated to a core value, corruption is inevitable." Talk about a corruption of purpose. It doesn't matter because I won't be here. That's an abdication of any kind of responsibility, any kind of leadership, any kind of vision that, you know, and let's be, let's be realistic. That wasn't always the way. Built to last was a thing. You know, the idea of short term, you know, it's like the whole thing from the 1980s, the dot-coms. Let me get in, build something that's good enough to make a ton of money from the venture capitalists and get out before it implodes. But that's not how economies are long-term built. That's how bubbles are created. Yeah, economic bubbles, I should say.

Right. So, so, so something, something has kind of shifted, and it, it's— I, I pity those, you know, who were in Kodak, for example. You know, Kodak invented digital, the digital camera, and they, they've had many discussions about it all the way into bankruptcy. They were still talking about why didn't we. And so did Blockbuster. You know, they were well aware of what Netflix was doing.

Netflix tried to sell itself to Blockbuster, and Blockbuster turned it— and Blockbuster turned it down. Kodak. But the Kodak story is fascinating because they said, we're in the film business, not the image. But I would argue they're in the memories business. There's your vision. We're here to preserve memories. Had they had that vision, they might have made different strategic decisions.

And the same for BlackBerry and iPhone, right? They— same, same story. They saw it coming and they were like, uh, we're not in that business. People aren't gonna— executives, we're in the, the business, business device business is what they said, you know, for, for executives and managers. And they don't want a, a screen. That's what they don't want, apps. They want a keyboard. And they, you know, they bet the company on that and they were totally wrong. So these are 3 examples of long-term trends that weren't brought into the strategic planning process. Intel is another example. Intel got lucky, but it was pure luck that they saved the company by turning things around. But how do you go from failure to lucky to actually doing this by design so that it happens on purpose?

But you know, sorry, one thing I forget who mentioned it, but one thing one of you said that sparked something in me, which was to actually— I'm always a believer when I work with companies that I'm in there to facilitate the conversations. They know their business. They're the subject matter experts in terms of their businesses. I can't even as a consultant. I'm very cautious when I go in because you know your business. Having said that, as a consultant, I bring in an outside voice and say like, I think it was John's point about Kodak being a memory business. I think this is why it's so important to bring outside voices in because you get so tunnel vision on what your company's value is. You may actually not see that those on the outside actually see a different value, or see a different vision, or see a different— Yeah, so I think it is really important to bring in those outside voices. The voices that actually may not agree with you, and not necessarily surround yourself with yes people.

Right, right. Folks, we're just about to that time where the next— we queued up for the next panel, and I know ours was truncated due to technical difficulties that we didn't surpass quickly enough, and I apologize for that. But let me drop some comments on the stage from some of our So Xerox thought their business should be the content on the paper. They built groups of 10 IP companies— microfiche, publishing, training— and well, didn't end up so well for them. Um, other comments. This is actually a question: is it possible to plan for the long term in the midst of the Fourth Industrial Revolution where things are changing day by day? So a one-sentence answer, but don't just say yes, but give me a one-sentence answer to that question by Ernesto.

The companies that survive will be the ones that did. If you don't plan for it, we— the Industrial Revolution is happening. You don't want to be the person making buggy whips when the automobile takes over.

It's very easy to— you know, Intel had that problem. They were being— they were making memory, memory chips when— and they went from 89% market share to 1.9% market share before they changed their strategic plan. It took them right to the edge of the precipice before changing their minds.

Sonia? No, I was just thinking about the— are you the company that's selling shovels or are you the company doing the digging?

Listen, if anyone—

If you wonder about the road ahead.

If I've said anything that anyone wants to follow up with me on, my contact information is connected to this meeting. I know we were truncated. Thanks, Frances, for never giving up. That's the short-term, long-term right there. Keep moving with the idea that the conference is going to happen and just deal with the short term.

Yeah, that's kind of what I had to do. Sonia, where can folks hear more from you and hear more about you?

Oh, I'm on LinkedIn. Um, my contact information is, uh, linked with this, uh, uh, conference. So, uh, absolutely any questions, always happy to have a conversation. Um, always happy to help other people succeed.

Wonderful.

John? Thank you, Frances. Thank you, John.

Thank you, folks. Appreciate your time and expertise. Thanks for giving us some great powerful thoughts for us to move forward with as we go forward. You know, these are real issues that companies are grappling with. And are there any simple solutions? I don't know.

But that's what makes it more fun, the complexity.

If it was simple—

That's why we're here.

If it was simple, we wouldn't have jobs.

Yeah, remember, it's all about creating clarity out of the chaos.

There you go.

It sure is. It sure is. All right, folks, if you could turn off your cameras and your microphones, and I will hide you from stage. We're gonna take a 5-second reset, folks, so stay where you are, and we'll be bringing up for our next panel Judy Whalen. Whoops. My screen just flipped out. Judy Whelan, Chris Hafner, and Cecilia Mandigo. So stay where you are, we're gonna