5 essential questions to craft a winning strategy | Roger Martin (author, advisor, speaker)

Why are so many people bad at strategy?

What's taught now in business schools generally sucks. People aren't prepared educationally, then they sure don't get prepared for it in companies. It's intellectually challenging and it's emotionally intimidating.

You have something you call the strategy choice cascade.

You have to have answers to five questions. What's your winning aspiration?

Where to play?

How can you win? What capabilities do you have to have that your competitors don't?

And then what enabling management systems do.

You have to put in place for the most part in the leading business schools, it's illegal to teach that.

Playing to win, you talked about there's kind of these two routes.

You have to be either differentiated or low cost.

There's no way to protect yourself if.

You'Re not one of those two.

Is there anything else you wanted to just leave listeners with?

I have never met this mythical beast called a great natural strategist. Great strategists have all one thing in common.

They just practice.

Today my guest is Roger Martin. Roger is one of the world's most trusted trusted strategy advisors. He's Professor Emeritus at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, where he served as Dean for five years. In 2013, he was named Global Dean of the Year, and in 2017, he was named the world's number one management thinker by Thinkers50. He's also the author of what many listeners consider their favorite book on strategy called Playing to Win. I've gotten a lot of requests to get Roger on this podcast. and I can now see why. This is the most tactical and fascinating conversation I've had on this podcast about developing a strategy, and that is a really high bar. We delve into the five questions that you need to answer to help you craft your strategy, how Hamilton Helmer, Michael Porter, and Richard Rumelt's work fits into his framework and world view, what people most often get wrong when they're developing their own strategy, the two options you have for how to win, with your strategy, a very tactical and simple trick for getting started thinking through your strategy, and so much more. This episode is for anyone who is trying to build their strategic thinking muscle. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously.

With that, I bring you Roger Martin.

Roger, thank you so much for being here and welcome to the podcast.

It's great to be here, Lenny.

Thanks for having me. What I want to try to do with our time together is to help people that are on the ground at a company, say like the product manager, designer, engineer, data scientist, folks that aren't necessarily the CEO or the founder or executive company, get better at product strategy, at crafting a strategy, validating a strategy, developing a strategy. Because it feels like there's always tons of advice for like the leaders of a company, but less for people on the ground doing the thing. and I feel like luckily your stuff applies to everyone. So how does that sound as a.

Lens for that sounds great. And can I tell us a little story to that end?

Please.

So recently there was a newspaper article saying that pointing out that 10% of the S&P 500 CEOs, 10% are ex-Procter & Gamble people.

It's an amazing number, like a stunningly.

High number why would that possibly be? I believe it's because at Procter & Gamble, there is a view that people way down the organization, like let's just say the head and shoulders brand franchise leader, right? Who reports to the head of shampoos and conditioners, who reports to the head of beauty care, who reports to the CEO. So at least four levels down in the organization and the guts of the organization. Procter understands that that individual, not the CEO, not the global president of beauty care, not the head of hair care, not the head of shampoos and conditioners, the brand manager makes super important strategic choices.

And if they don't make them well.

The brand does terribly. And so, so I believe, and not many companies have enough of that attitude. So I'm a big believer that people down organization have to make really important.

Strategic choices or bad things are going to happen. If they make really great ones, good.

Things are going to happen, and they get trained to be a CEO someday. So I'm with your thesis. But yours is counter, what I would say is normal. What is most normal is people at.

The top do strategy and people down below do something. And it's usually called execution.

And I hate that term of art for what it's worth. And so I think you and I are singing from a bit of the same songbook, even if it's a minority songbook.

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I just want to ask this broad question about strategy. Why is strategy so hard? Why are so many people bad at strategy?

Perhaps the thing that makes it sort of intellectually hardest is that it is an integrative activity. You've got answers to a bunch of questions that have to fit together and reinforce one another. So that just makes it a little more complicated. It's not like saying, Lenny, what do you want for lunch? It's saying, Lenny, what kind of diet do you want that'll keep you healthy? And that includes breakfast, lunch, dinners, snacks, a whole bunch of other things that you got to fit together.

So.

It makes that harder to do intellectually. Another aspect of it is it is intimidating.

Strategy involves making choices to do some things and not other things.

And it is often intimidating to say.

Oh dear.

I have to cut these.

Things off and not do them and.

Actually make a decision that I'll be.

Held accountable for potentially, or I'll even.

Hold myself accountable for.

So that's a second thing.

It's harder sort of emotionally, not harder intellectually. And then there's sort of the training aspect of it, the knowledge aspect of it, which is what's taught now in strategy in business schools generally sucks.

It's gone on a crazy theoretical bent.

The Strategy Academy as a whole has.

Fallen in love with a theory called.

The resource-based theory of the firm that.

Is silly and nobody uses it out in the world.

And so students are no longer trained on useful strategy.

And the other feeder into people learning strategy were the strategy consulting firms.

But the strategy consulting firms, the so-called.

Strategy consulting firms do almost no strategy.

Anymore because it's a little business compared.

To post-merger integration, digital transformation, and a.

Bunch of other things. So people aren't prepared.

Educationally for it.

And if they're not prepared educationally for.

It, then they sure don't get prepared.

For it in companies. It's intellectually challenging and it's emotionally intimidating.

On this point you made about how schools are teaching strategy wrong, how do you describe with the wrong approach?

It's a theory that's sort of taken over called the Resource-Based View of the Firm that was in the world of academics, there's a weird place where the.

Number one emotion is jealousy.

And people were massively jealous of Mike Porter, who created many of the most important concepts of strategy when he wrote a book, Competitive Strategy in 1980.

And so they needed to counter him.

Because they just didn't like the fact.

That he was so prominent.

And they decided they would say he was about positioning.

So they called his the Positioning School. And they caricatured what he said, which.

He never did, but they said. He said, it's all about finding a place that is structurally attractive and then.

Milking it for everything you can.

We at the resource-based view of the firm think that strategy is all about building resources.

And if you build resources, it's almost.

Like if you build it, they will come. And that's what you should pay attention to. Now, the problem is any resource, right, that may be useful somewhere is not necessarily useful elsewhere.

So it sort of begs the question, how would you think through what resources.

To invest in building? What would be a way of doing that, of investing here versus here versus here? It's silent on that because it's kind of a dumb theory and it doesn't have anything useful to say in my view about that. And so when the students go out and say, they're a company, I'm going.

To do a VRIO analysis or a VRIN some.

People just roll their eyes.

At them and so it doesn't get used.

I've only seen it used, I've been in consulting companies for 42 years and I've seen it used once. And the truth, as is usually the case, is that it's both. And that's why the model I use for strategies says a lot about where you play is important. That's one of the key questions and your capabilities are important and you've got to link those things things together, but that's for the most part in the leading business schools, it's illegal to teach that.

Illegal to teach your approach.

Yes, I couldn't teach my approach at my own business school. What?

So when I was Dean, the most.

Powerful person, but the departments or areas, as we call it, like strategic management is an area, they have 100% control.

Over what's taught in strategic management, finance, in finance, et cetera. The dean may be the most powerful.

Person in the school, and I happened.

To be a super successful dean.

So if anything, I was a super powerful, powerful dean.

And students would beg me, they'd say.

Roger, you have this 20 years of.

Experience, you're sort of a famous consultant.

In strategy, and you've got these theories, Please teach a course in it. I did do extracurricular stuff, right? I had practice of one Saturday a year teaching everything I knew to anybody who wanted to show up. But for credit, I was not allowed. And if you try to get a job at any business, the only exception might be Harvard Business School, maybe. But if you took the 49 other top business schools in America and if asked the question, do you swear allegiance.

To the resource-based view of the firm? If you don't answer an enthusiastic yes, you have no chance of being hired.

Zero.

Wow.

This academia drama, I had no idea.

The loyalty test.

This is unreal. Makes me even more excited to dive into your world. And your ways of seeing things. Before we do that, just, we've had a few other strategy people on the podcast. It might be helpful to frame out where they fit in the spectrum that you're describing.

Okay. I may not know all of them.

But you give me, I imagine you do. So we've had a Hamilton Helmer on the podcast. And then Richard Remelt on the podcast. How do they relate just for people to get into your stuff versus this dogma?

So one of them is an, one of them is sort of an academic and one of them isn't, is a, is a quasi academic or non-academic like me. Like I, I was a tenured professor for many years. I don't consider myself an, an academic. I don't think Hamilton does, though I've never asked.

He's an investor now.

Yeah.

So he's, he's wrote, written a, a very, I think, useful book.

That would in some sense fit into my how to win box, right?

I say strategies about where to play how to win, and he has a.

Category, what I call a categorical model.

Here are categories of things that you should think about.

If you're trying to win, here are.

Seven ways of winning. And I categorize him as a non-academic practical strategy guy. Richard Romhilt is a now retired tuck professor and he has this hyper competition thing that he does. He also is of the I'm jealous of Mike Porter kind of thing, so.

I've got to say Mike Porter is.

Wrong and here's how I am so right and competition doesn't take place in the way Mike says where it's really stable and and whatever, it's really hyper competition.

Mike Porter never in his entire life.

Has said competition is stable. He's repeatedly said the opposite. But in order to say, I'm not like Mike Porter, and in fact, I.

Distinguish myself by saying he's wrong and I'm right. And so.

I don't know.

He seems like a fine guy. I.

Don'T think that he, like most business academics, he doesn't know much about business, right? Like he hasn't gone out and practiced a lot. He came to our school and gave a lecture because people loved hyper competition because he would blast Mike Porter. And he gave an example of Procter and Gamble. I've been consulting at Procter and Gamble and know everything about Procter and Gamble, basically. In what he said about Procter & Gamble had zero to do with reality. Like zero. It was just completely, utterly, absolutely wrong. And I sort of asked him afterwards, it's sort of like, why did you say that? And he said, well, I think that's the way it worked. Are you kidding me?

So.

I'm not a fan of that piece of work. I would say it doesn't fit nicely into research-based view of the firm versus Mike Porter.

It's sort of like here's another lens.

To take on the world and I'm going to take that lens.

Everything's hyper competitive and here's how you.

Think about hyper competition.

This is fascinating. I love that we're spending some time on this. This is really helpful to hear the landscape of strategy minds. Okay, let's dive into your world view. And maybe the simplest way is just like, how do you define strategy? What is a strategy?

Strategy is an integrated set of choices that compels desired customer action.

So the way I think about it is, There's a whole bunch of things a company controls, right? How many factories to build, how much R&D to do in what areas, and how much advertising to do, how many people to hire, what to pay them, blah, blah, blah. Those are all the things under our control. What, Lenny, is the thing we have.

Almost no control over?

What, if we're a company- what customers do. Yeah, like we would like them to take some of these out of their.

Pocket and give them to us. Can we make them? No, we can't.

So essentially the job of strategy is to make decisions on the things we do control that will compel, right?

We can't force, but it'll compel them.

They'll say, gosh, I should take my hard-earned cash. And whether it's a company or an individual, I should take my hard-earned cash and give it to you. rather than give it to nobody if there's no product now, or give it to a competitive product. So the important pieces of it are integrated, right? It's the whole set of choices that has that one outcome that it compels desired customer action. Amazing.

Okay. And to help people define their strategy, you have something you call the strategy choice cascade. Yeah, which is basically five questions that you need to answer to help you think through strategy. Can you talk through this?

Yeah, and this is, yeah, this is sort of the fruits of many, many years of doing strategy work and trying to figure out, like, how do you do this thing? Because the fun thing was I was in the era, like I started in strategy in 1981, and that was early in the era.

Strategy was born in 1963 with the founding of Boston Consulting Group. by Bruce Henderson, who was the father.

Of strategy, in my view, of practical commercial strategy.

So it was still in the early.

Days, and Bruce Henderson had a theory of how strategy should, what result it should produce for you. Mike Porter then came along in 1980, so 63, Bruce Henderson and 80, Porter.

The two most important figures in the.

History of strategy, came along and said, a strategy has to look like this. It has to have this as its output. But neither of them was very good on, because again, it was early, they can't do everything right away of, well.

How would you get one of those?

So Mike Porter says you have to.

Be either differentiated or low cost. Good.

And if you look through Competitive Strategy, his landmark seminal book to say, How would you do that? There is no answer. And so, and because Monitor Company, the firm I was one of the leaders of for a decade and a half, was founded essentially to commercialize Mike Porter's work. Customers would ask us, they'd say, well, we like Mike Porter and we'd like.

To have one of those.

We can look at ourselves under his framework and we can say, we're stuck in the middle. And he said, that's bad. And he said, good is this or this? How do we think through creating one of those?

We didn't actually have an answer.

And it turned out because I was sort of the most, I don't know.

Intellectually engaged on this and didn't mind the hard work of product development from.

About 1987 when we sort of discovered we really didn't know that and clients really wanted us to tell them that. Between 1987 and 1995, I did all this work on, well, how could you develop a process for getting yourself one of those, right? One of those excellent strategies? And I came to the view that.

You have to have answers to five questions.

You have to have an answer to the question of what's your winning aspiration?

Like, what are you trying to accomplish?

Because it'll help contextualize the kinds of choices you could make. Then there's a where to play on what playing field, or if you're like military stuff, battlefield, are you going to.

Plop yourself down on?

You're not going to play everywhere in.

Every product at every vertical stage around the world.

You're going to pick some place. And in that place, how can you be either.

Better than competitors in terms.

Of creating customer value or lower cost than those competitors. To win there, where you've chosen to play to meet your winning aspirations, what capabilities do you have to have that.

Your competitors don't that would enable you.

To win that way? And then what management systems, enabling management systems, do you have to put in place to make sure you build and maintain those must have capabilities to win? where you've chosen to play to meet your winning aspiration.

And so I came to the conclusion.

Actually, it was in 1995, the end.

Of an eight year journey, I came.

To the conclusion, those were the five and you had to do them together, and that is the essence of producing a strategy that compels desired customer action.

I want to go through an example of a company, but before we do that, something I think is important to talk about is, Your book is called Playing to Win. You talked about this idea of you need to play to win. And you kind of argue that a lot of people are just playing to play. They're playing to play the game. I'm guessing most people listening and most people developing a strategy don't think they're doing that. They don't think they're just playing to play the game. They think they're playing to win. I'm curious what are signs that you're not actually playing to win?

It would be mainly signs given to you by customers. So if you say, we're the most innovative company in our industry.

And customers.

Let'S say the industry distributes through a given channel, and customers come into that.

Channel.

And they look at the two products and say, I could flip a coin on this one, right? you are not effectively playing to win. Maybe you thought you were winning, but customers don't think you're better. Or if your competitor lowers their price compared to your price, and you say to yourself, oh my God, if we lowered our price, we would make no.

Money.

But your competitor keeps on pricing there. you may think you have the low.

Cost position, but they do, and you have to give them whatever share they, they desire at that lower price because.

You can't compete there.

So you, you'll know you're playing to play if you're not aiming to and.

Accomplishing having either an offer where Lenny walks into the store, whatever kind of.

Store it is, and says, and it says to person in the store, I want that brand.

Right?

This example, Lego, one of the companies I've worked with for a long time, great company. It turns out that if you do market research on kids, a store that.

Purports to be a toy store.

But.

That doesn't have Lego, is not a toy store. They would define it as not a toy. They said, Mom, why are we here? I wanted to go to a toy store. And she said, But this is just, it says toys on here. And the kid says.

That'S an insane brand.

That's an insane, insane, insane brand.

And, you know, it has a price premium for anything over any of its competitors by a by a long shot.

It keeps growing.

It actually for most years in the last decade, it has had 80 or.

90% of the entire category growth is Lego. And so they're playing to win, to.

Be distinctive in the minds of consumers. But, you know, Vanguard, you know, has got $9 trillion of assets under management. Last time I checked, does it do anything distinctive?

Not really, the customer bought.

Do they have the lowest cost position so they can charge the lowest AUMs?

Absolutely.

And so there's different kinds of ways, but you'd know by the actions that customers take.

So essentially, to mirror back what you're saying, to win, there's kind of these two routes you talk about. One is you're the lowest cost option. The second is you're differentiated. You have a differentiated brand where it's not a coin flip. It's like, oh, I really need that for this reason.

Yes.

Yeah, you got it.

And if you can't do that, then the advice you share is go find a different playing field.

Well, or get out of business, whatever. It's only a matter of time till you're dead, right? Is the sad truth of the matter, which is, which is the competitors in.

Your industry who are either low cost.

Or differentiated can essentially jerk you around.

As much as they want.

It's like Southwest Airlines, right? Like Southwest Airlines was just a tiny little airline that flew Austin, Houston, Dallas.

And now it's number one in passenger.

Seat miles in America and the only airline that's earned its cost of capital.

Over the last half, half all the.

Rest are losing money for their shareholders over time. They have good cycles and bad cycles.

How did that happen?

Well, it's just the other airlines had a step aside. Whenever Southwest came into a route, the other airlines just had to say, well, I guess you're going to get your.

30 share or 35 share of passengers.

On this route, you know, welcome to town. That's all they can do. They just have to seed position. And that's what happens if you play to play, you will end up just being, I mean, it's literally like having a bully who can just, you know, shove you and you take one step back, then they shove you and you take another step back and they shove you and you take another step back. There's no way to protect yourself if you're not one of those two. You cannot bully Vanguard. You cannot bully Southwest.

You cannot bully Procter and Gamble.

You cannot bully Lego. That's the way the business world works.

And in the case of Southwest, the reason they couldn't be bullied is they were the low-cost provider and the other airlines couldn't meet their prices. So they're like, All right, there's nothing we can do.

Yeah.

Awesome.

Right.

So while I was In living in Boston, they entered the Boston to Chicago route, which was a duopoly of American and United at the time. And the price was about, in those days, like a thousand bucks for a round trip, 'cause it was a nice duopoly. When Southwest come in, they say, We're gonna fly Providence to Midway, not Logan to O'Hare, and it's gonna be 200 bucks. And they had great advertising.

I always loved the advertising they had when they entered. They did maps of Boston and said.

If you live in any of these places, kind of the south, the west of Boston, it takes you less time to get from your house to the gate than it does to go to Logan. Because at Logan, right, you're got to park in a parking garage and then walk half an hour, and then when you get through security, you still have to walk 20 minutes. 20 minutes, blah, blah, blah, and at.

Providence, if you've ever flown out of.

Providence, you can park about 100 yards from the gates. And so they just had to say.

We can't stop that.

Not everybody's going to do it, but a whole bunch of people are, and there's nothing we can do to stop that.

What I love is we're already diving into these five questions. So we've been mostly talking about how we will win. Basically, here's your options to win. low cost provider or be differentiated or find a different place to win. Let me summarize the five again. What is our winning aspiration? Where will we play? How will we win? What capabilities must we have in place to win? And what management systems are required to make sure the capabilities are in place?

Right?

You've got it.

Okay, cool. You're very quick, quick study, my friends.

I got some notes here. So coming back to the how will we win? Because I think everyone's listening to this. Okay, cool. We got two ways to win. We're going to be the cheapest or we're going to differentiate. Okay. Okay, how do we differentiate? Is there a taxonomy of options that you think about or tell people, what are the ways and options for exploring? Here's how we will be different.

It is mainly understanding customers.

As well as you can, and then saying, Is there a way to be distinctive against that? And there are There are lots of ways to do it, but it's tied.

Very closely to the capabilities, right?

Which is if you have a way of winning, right? You say, my where to play is.

I'm going to sell pet food on the internet.

And my how to win is I'm going to be the best. But it turns out that anybody who can build a website can sell pet.

Food on the internet.

And in fact, 20 of them do it almost immediately and they all go bust. You don't have the capability. So you've got to ask yourself the question, can I serve a particular customer need with a set of capabilities that are going to be hard to replicate by my competitors? They either can't do it or they won't do it. And both are important questions because Sometimes it won't, right? Like, do you really think Walmart couldn't have built as good a website as.

Amazon and at massive scale?

I think they could have, right?

Yeah, probably.

Did they? They didn't. They said, I hope this online thing doesn't really take off because that would.

Be a pisser because we've got 5,000.

Stores across America and and we've got all that. And that would be really, that would be a bummer. And so they don't do anything for 10 years, giving Amazon the scale, so that Amazon then has this huge scale advantage kind of on this and network effects. And voila, you've.

Got a competitive advantage.

That you didn't necessarily kind of completely deserve, you needed the help of the player who stood to lose the most to hope that it wasn't going to happen.

Same with Tesla. Tesla got a 10-year head start.

Not because the OEMs couldn't, they could have. And of course, GM did many, many years ago, right? Create a fully functioning electric vehicle. But they couldn't figure out how the hell you make make a buck on it. And so they didn't, they didn't do it, giving Tesla the ability to establish a brand that people associate with that electric vehicle equals Tesla and get them, you know, allow them to jump way.

Ahead and then have the scale that is hard to, hard for others to match.

You said something that's really interesting that I think is also really important, which is you said that just being the best or better is not, not a solution. You could have a better pet food. You imply that's not going to get you there. Can you talk a bit about that?

Yeah.

You have to answer a second question.

I guess, which is, which is, here's.

The way I'm going to be better and here's the way somebody else isn't going to be able to simply replicate that quickly.

Right?

Like one of my, one of my, one of my favorite businesses, because I was on the board of, I was on the board of Thompson Reuters for 14 years.

It was Thompson first, and then he bought Reuters.

So Thompson Reuters. Best business is a business called Westlaw. And it's the dominant provider of online legal searches. So if you're a litigator and you're trying to, you're getting ready for a case and you need to know what.

Are the important precedents for this case. You go on to Westlaw.

And put in some search terms using a Westlaw keyword system. to help with it. And you get the five cases that really matter.

You can Google it and do the.

Same thing, and you'll get the 500.

Cases that might matter.

So how does Westlaw do that? Well, for now over a hundred years, they've taken every case that's come out of the US legal system, had a lawyer, a Westlaw lawyer, write a headnote.

That summarizes what's in the case using these keywords so that they were searchable.

And today, to do 2024, it takes 1500 full-time lawyers.

Right?

So if somebody else said, you know.

This Westlaw business is incredibly profitable and.

It keeps growing and it's, you know, it's awesome.

I'd like to be in that business.

All they'd have to do is hire 150,000 lawyers full-time, and you'd have to.

Create a numbering system and a keyword.

System that's different than West Law's.

And then you'd have to do what.

West Law has done for the past 50 years, which is give it free to law schools so that they teach their students before they even get out how to use West Law and all, you know, no probs. That'll be easy, right? You know, nobody's even tried.

Why bother? Life's too short.

And that's the kind of, the kind of capabilities you need to be able to say, we'll win by having the searches that make the lawyer's job the most effective. And if it saves them time, it saves them money, right? And, and you don't need a huge law library. Law firms used to have these huge law libraries, right?

You don't need one, you need a.

Terminal where actually now it's on everybody's PC and you don't need a bunch of librarians to go and find the cases that you need that pop up on your screen. That's a great case of competitive advantage.

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So essentially we're talking about moats. What are some moat that you can create where people can't just copy what you're doing?

Warren Buffett likes that terminology, right? That's what he says. He invests in moats.

Yeah.

I'll find the quote we did in a recent podcast episode, but he's like, yes, castles with moats. And maybe along those lines, is there kind of a way you think about types of barriers to recreate capabilities? Like, here's the options we have. Is it like essentially the Seven Powers, I think, talks about this?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's why I kind of like Helmer. Because he categorizes them. And I've got to look into it some more, because I haven't studied it. to say whether I would concur that there are just seven or there are more. My suspicion might be that there are more, but there may not be.

They may be all clustered.

There may be variants that cluster behind those. But I don't myself have a categorization.

Scheme that says, here's how you search for the mode.

Great.

That would be nice. So here's the quote from Buffett, by the way. I look for economic castles protected by unbreachable moats.

Yes, I like that. I like that. And he's smart, he's consistent. Though, you know, everybody makes mistakes, right?

And he did too, right?

Solomon Brothers, U.S. Air, it's, you know, anybody who thinks they can be perfect on strategy is delusional.

And so even the very, very best.

Like a Warren Buffett who's outstanding, arguable genius is gonna sort of think, I think this is a moat and it's gonna be ephemeral.

But.

Any of us should be pleased to have a track record that would be anywhere close to that on really identifying moats because he has.

We talked about the Hamilton Helmer that every startup deck has like, here's our moats, here's how we're gonna have barriers to entry. And they're all delusional, like rarely is there ever actual mode, at least, especially.

In the early stages.

Yes.

Let's go back to the five questions again, because that's so core to the way you think about strategy. What do you think about using, say, this FigJam as an example as a hypothetical just to think through questions that they might ask to think about strategy? And I can describe what FigJam is, so you told me.

Sure, sure.

I do not know the product. It's basically a visual whiteboard collaboration tool where people can put in sticky notes and put little mocks and kind of play around with cursors.

Okay.

And so it's sort of like brainstorming and ideation and things like that and laying out concept.

Gotcha.

Okay, that would make sense for- yeah, exactly.

Yeah, right.

Okay, so you'd ask the question sort of kind of what are we trying to accomplish, right? Are we attempting to create something where nothing sort of digital exists? People do this in pen and paper, or are we, and so we're trying to invent a category and then be transformative by making the user experience better. Is that what we're trying to do or are there players already doing this.

And they're just not doing it very well? You'd want to sort of say, well, what are we trying to accomplish? And I don't spend a whole lot.

Of time on that because you got to toggle back and forth between those five questions.

You have to have a reason for searching in a given space for a where to play, how to win.

And so, so what do you think their, their reason for fig, for thinking.

FigJam is worth investing in is?

What do you think it is? Is it, is it, is it white space or is it, is it crummy, crummy offerings in the, in the market currently?

Like, if I had to get to it, I think it's, they're trying to expand their market and they have a a stronghold in design tooling, and there's this adjacent market for product teams broadly to be using Figma more. And there are existing tools similar to that that are good.

Okay.

So I don't love it to start.

I had to say more. So there's a big market over there. We'd like to get some is a.

Terrible reason.

In my view. The reason should be customers are bereft. Customers are lacking something that we can provide. This is why I hate most entries by foreign companies into China.

They get their faces shot off.

And the reason is the rationale is it's big.

We could get some of that.

So, So I don't love it for starters. And I'm not saying that that will guarantee failure, but if somebody gave me a review with a pitch deck for that, I would not invest.

Well, I imagine you can also frame it in other terms, like our customers are demanding more ways to work within Figma with their teams, and there's these-.

Yeah, yeah, so that would be a better one. And you're speculating, I've asked you to speculate, so we don't know, but I.

Like that one better.

Right?

Which is, what's our aspiration is to satisfy core customers who love what we do, but think it's too narrow that.

If we could broaden that for them into this market, our customers would be very happy.

That is really cool. And so you wanna frame it in the words of how customers would benefit essentially.

I just think those are tend to be stronger, strongest if there's a link.

Because remember, what is strategy about?

Compelling, desired customer action, right? So everything sort of ties back to that. So then the where to play would be you just want to say, okay.

What customers are we talking about?

Or what parts of our current customers.

That we don't serve? Are we attempting to serve with that?

And what kind of what product is it? Is it a finished product? Is it a component of a product.

Through what distribution channel?

Would we sell this as another self-serve type product?

'Cause I think Figma is mainly self-serve, right?

And so you choose that where and then say, how can we solve? Before we get to that, before we.

Get to that one.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, please.

So the things you mentioned there is like who specifically are the customers? So in this case it'd be like product managers, engineers, and other functions. And then yep, there's the distribution channels, like how we'd actually get to them.

Get to them.

And then what else was, what other questions are there within this?

Where we will go with this. It is sort of, to what extent.

Is it a finished product or a component?

Because sometimes it could be, you know, we'd like to supply this component that could be integrated into other people's products. I mean, that's what Apple apps are, right?

Got it.

We don't sell them an iPhone. We sell them a component within the iPhone that customers iPhone, is that what we're doing here? Because then you have to ask questions about, well, how does it fit in with.

The rest?

So the where also implies where in the product it kind of lives, like where?

At what vertical stage is it an.

Integrated product where the whole thing from.

Soup to nuts, is it some upstream pieces that some people downstream?

Do we take pieces from other people and assemble them?

So were the, where the integrator, those are all important where to play choices from my view because those make them kind of a big difference. Like Four Seasons chose a Four Seasons hotel company, Luxury Hotel TR, chose a completely different choice on the vertical stage where to play. Back in the 80s, they said, We're going to get out of real estate development, so buying land and getting a zone for hotels. We're going to get out of construction, building hotels. We're even going to get out of the business of owning the land or the hotel so that we can be.

Awesome at hotel management.

Rich people like Michael Dell and David Thompson and Bill Gates will own the.

Hotels as an investment. and they will be happy to have Four Seasons brand on their hotel and.

We will charge a management fee. That is a where to play choice, right? Even though somebody could say, well, you're a luxury hotel. You're like the other luxury hotels who serve luxury customers at a high price. Oh, no, no, no, no, no.

They do it with a stack this thick. We do it with a stack this thin.

So it's like a value chain question. Like where in the value chain are you going to play?

Yeah, where in the value chain? That's exactly right. And everybody has value chain questions.

They often complain after the fact, like.

All the apps complain about what cut Apple is taking. But they made a choice, a value chain choice. We are going to design something that will appear on an iPhone or an Android device, if it's that case. then good luck to you.

You can complain like crazy that they're taking so much of it and this.

Is unfair and they've got a duopoly. Yeah, but you guys cooperated 100% in building that. 100% never complained about it until you wanted a bigger piece of the pie. That was a vertical stage of value.

Chain stage that you chose willingly. Nobody forced you to do that.

And Apple's not playing ball, giving it back too easily.

Oh.

And do I love the love just how controlling and everything Apple is? Do I? No, but would I say, oh, those poor apps, right?

Yeah, no. Get your own distribution channel, buddy.

Cold blooded.

Yeah.

Okay.

So we've talked about the winning aspiration. So for FigJam and B, satisfy customers that are trying to work with their team in these different ways and make sure they are staying, make sure they get what they need out of Figma versus going maybe to other tools. And then where will we play? Let's say engineers, product managers, trying to target them, distribution through the existing product. And so it's like a feature of the existing product.

Yep.

And then it's how will we win? How do you think about that.

Yeah, yeah. Well, you ask the question, how can we solve?

Well, how can we either solve that problem at a, at a much lower cost? So we can always be a sharper price point than, than them. So if they exist, there are Solutions, but they cost 50, 000 a user.

Because their costs are 30, 000 a user. We can do this for 15 bucks.

A user and so. We can charge a hundred bucks per seat and absolutely annihilate the competitor by.

Figuring out a less costly way to do it.

Or there are other selections, but they make the user do all these things.

And it's ponderous and it takes a long time. We have shortcuts.

We use AI to, you just say a few words into it and they say, oh yeah, I know what you mean. And here it goes in the, in the, in the workflow or, or we're more integrated, like Thompson Reuters, the company I was on the board of, you.

Know, our advantage was we were better integrated into the workflow.

You didn't have to sort of get out of your workflow to go use this product, and then you get back in.

We just said, what's your workflow?

Oh, we'll integrate it. Is it better integrated into their work workflow that makes, makes their life easier? It would be There'd be questions, possibilities like that that I would be asking. Essentially, you've got to have a theory there of how you're going to be.

Better or lower cost.

On the lower cost front, I think generally the advice is you don't want to go that route. That's a very difficult route. What's your thinking of just like when to go that route that you might actually win at lowest cost?

That'S not advice I give, right?

I think they're both completely legitimate.

Strategies.

They have implications, right?

So if you want to be the cost leader, it is rare that you.

Can be the cost leader without having.

Dominant scale in the territory in which you're operating. So if you want to be a niche cost leader, you know, good luck to you. that's almost never going to happen. So Vanguard had to make a race to, you know, we're going to do index mutual funds and it doesn't exist now. We're going to do it and we're going to get gigantic and we can't let anybody get close to us in size because we want to have the lowest cost position. And so they are the world's biggest mutual fund company. And you sort of have to do that.

And same with Southwest to really make that model work, they had to keep.

Expanding and expanding to get a bigger M&M Mars. It takes an enormous amount of commitment to say, we're going to go and we're just going to keep charging ahead on this. Whereas in differentiation, I think you can differentiate sometimes at lower scale and build.

Yourself slowly towards higher scale.

But the business world is just getting.

So much more scale sensitive.

When you think about the costs of differentiation, it's often spending on branding, spending on R&D, R&D sort of innovation. Those two are of the most scale sensitive elements of anybody's cost structure. And so being a niche differentiator is.

Getting Harder and harder, in my view.

I think it's also important to say either path is very hard. Like it's very hard to build a business that makes money and is profitable and survives just broadly.

Yes.

You're not gonna have a formula of like how to win. Okay, we got it. We got a big business.

I agree. I agree. And that's why, you know, if I looked at a hundred strategies of major companies, I'd say I didn't like 90 of them very much.

And then the other nine out of 10 probably look good but also don't work out.

Yes.

Yeah.

No, that's true.

There's lots of spaghetti thrown at lots of walls in the world of business. Yeah.

Capitalism.

Yes.

Okay, so now we're at the capability step of trying to figure out what capabilities you need to win. Can you talk about, say, with Fig Jam, what are the sorts of things you think about here?

Well, I, I guess I'd ask myself questions kind of like, do, is there, is there kind of a learning curve to this where we could have better.

Capabilities because we started earlier than anybody else?

Right. And have more essentially cumulative experience? Is there kind of a way that we've figured out how to serve customers that make them feel tended to better by us. So we've got helpline.

We figured out how to do sort.

Of the helpline because if it's sort of self-serve and that's how they get the product and then they've got issues with how to use it, they feel that we're just better. We're the best of all their providers at at that. How to win is a theory of how customers are going to perceive us.

Better if we're a differentiator.

And then it's what capabilities would we have to have to make that theory come true rather than just be a kind of a wish. So if we want them to feel like we're the easiest to deal with, we have to have capabilities to do that. It's just like again, Four Seasons said, the reason they're by far and away the most successful, profitable, best in all.

Fronts, luxury hotel chain in the world.

Biggest, best, most profitable, best employee rankings, best guest rankings, all of those. Well, their how to win was, they said, people, if you talk to people who are in luxury hotels, they'd rather not be there. You'd say, Wow, they're in the lap of luxury. Why would that be? Where do you think they'd prefer to be? Lenny?

At home.

Yeah.

Dominantly at home.

For their segment, which was high-end business.

Travelers, they've traveled, they've stayed in one luxury hotel too many 20 years ago. And so we're going to have luxury.

Defined as not grand architecture and decor.

And obsequious service, but rather, We're going to define it as a service that.

Makes up for what you left at.

Home or at the office. Because people would rather be, if they.

Have to not be at home, they'd.

Rather be at the office than in a hotel because they can be more productive. So we need capabilities, we need staff, right, that can deliver on that capability. What's the problem for that? The problem is turnover in the hotel.

Industry globally is 80% a year. which means that the average person you meet, the average staff person you meet in the average hotel is on their way to a 16-month career at that hotel chain. So how do you deliver that really.

Cool, special kind of service with that? The answer is, and now I'm skipping.

Ahead to enabling management systems, you have.

To have a different way of recruiting.

A different way of onboarding, a different.

Way of career development.

And if you do all of those things, you end up with a 10%.

Turnover rate so that your people are.

There 10 years on average. And you can then get them trained up to deliver that kind of service.

So that's the capability that you build in the people to be able to.

Take more decision making at a lower.

Level and treat the guests in a.

Customized way that makes them feel that.

This wasn't by the book, some rule book that this person just said, no, this is a good solution for my for my GIF.

It's interesting that these capabilities and even the management systems, which is step five, relate to your moat, which is the thing you need to achieve. Also, ideally, is the thing that other people, it'll make it hard for them to do.

So that you're exactly right.

You can call if you want how to win moat, right? Definition of your moat. And so capabilities and management systems are.

What both build and maintain the moat, right?

And the maintaining is an important part.

Because if you are the most successful, people are going to say, I want to do that too. But here's where there's this modern, unfortunately bullshitty thing that says, oh, competitive advantage.

Is fleeting in this modern hyper competitive world and you can't have long-term advantage anymore.

And I just say, oh, I see so four seasons. I guess, yeah, I guess that isn't very long term. That has only been 45 years now since they, no, 35 years, I should say, don't exaggerate since they went to that strategy. Oh, and Tide, so 77 years isn't.

A long time, I guess, either, because.

They'Ve been the number one detergent for 77 consecutive years.

I guess you're right.

It's fleeting.

It's not.

But, What makes it fleeting is when.

You have one thing and one thing only. So let's say you build the biggest.

Polyethylene plant in the world near a good feedstock source and you have the low-cost position.

What's somebody else going to do when.

They see how much money you make doing that? Build a polyethylene plant beside yours, twice the size. And then your toast.

Why? Because the competitive advantage was too simple.

But at four seasons, you got to.

Sell off all your hotels.

You got to fire all the people involved in hotel development and everything. And actually the people in the business like doing that. You have to essentially get rid of.

Your entire staff, start from scratch, paying.

Them more than you do now by far. Giving them more career security, giving them more training, giving them better uniforms, whatever, spending 10 times as much hiring them.

With the hopes that maybe someday you'll.

Be able to produce the kind of.

Services Four Seasons does.

Competitors basically say, Life's too short. Do they give up and die?

No, there are other great chains. Mandarin Oriental.

My wife loves staying in Mandarin Oriental, even more than Four Seasons often. But they've not said we will replicate four seasons. They've said we'll pick a different wear.

And a different how.

And that's in the end what you.

Want, is rather than complete overlap, right, where you've got concentric circles of people.

Picking the same wear, you convince people to pick different wears.

That's why people sort of say, Roger, how to win, that's so in politics.

You know, because that you're producing losers and then there's victims and we, you know, all that, you know, there's oppressor and oppressant, it fits in the modern dialogue. And I say, no, what I want.

To do is encourage them to find some place else to prosper rather than smack on top of us.

And so if you have completely different management capabilities and management systems, It'll encourage people to choose a different where to play, how to win.

If your capabilities of management systems are very similar to your competitors and you're succeeding with your chosen where to play.

Out of win, what are they going to do? They're going to drive straight to your where to play and try to win exactly the same place and wreck your market for both of you. That's what you don't want. And the more sort of complicated, in some sense, not I shouldn't use complicated, The more nuanced that your and multifaceted your capabilities and management systems are, the.

More likely they're going to say life's too short.

That's what everybody says about Southwest. So if you're the only airline in.

The United States that's earning its cost of capital for 50 years.

Wouldn'T you kind of say, gee, I'd love to be like that?

But what does it mean? Well, it means selling off most of.

Your aircraft so that you can have only one kind of aircraft, 737s, tearing up your entire root structure, your entire.

Hub and spoke structure, and make it point to point. Kind of changing your complete labor relations.

Strategy from fighting the unions to paying.

Them a lot as long as they're highly flexible.

People think Southwest is non-union, it's not as unionized as it is, but they do different. You have to essentially fire all your.

Travel agents and convince your customers to.

Book online by themselves to save more money.

Life's too short.

Life's just too short. So they try things like Continental Light or TED that do half the things that Southwest does. And then you're what? a crappy Southwest, you know? So that's, to me, that's the ultimate. The ultimate is, it's like the ultimate.

Weapon is the one you never use.

The ultimate way to compete to win.

Is to never actually be forced to compete. Wow.

That's a great quote. This story about Southwest makes me think about Hamilton Helmer's power of counter positioning. I don't know if you've heard that term, but basically you position yourself in a way where the competitor can't do the thing that you're doing because of the way their business is already structured.

And that sounds right.

The can't.

Yeah, can't thing. Awesome. Yeah.

And Mike Porter, and he probably, he.

May quote Mike on that. Mike was very big on that.

He said it's fault lines. You're trying to find fault line where.

It is so painful for your competitor.

Come across that fault line into your side.

And so a great example of that would be Olay when P&G, and it's in the book, when we did the repositioning of that. The competitor that could have killed us, absolutely killed us, was Estee Lauder with Clinique. If they would have brought Clinique into the mass channels, because we were doing a Clinique kind of thing in the.

Mass channels rather than the prestige.

Prestige is like the first four of.

The department stores, right?

Which is all, which all, or Sephora or Alta. If Estee Lauder would have taken their.

Clinique brand and brought it into mass.

They would have, they would have killed what we were doing. Simple as that.

And in fact, Clinique was the biggest.

Brand in all of skincare. We became the biggest brand in all of skincare.

And they didn't do it. Why?

Are they idiots?

No, they're not. Estee Lauder is super smart.

But Estee Lauder also has Bobby Brown and Mac and the Estee Lauder, Estee.

Brand and a half a dozen more, all in prestige.

And the prestige channel, if they'd have taken Clinique, and taking it over into mass would have done what? Shot them in the face, killed them, right? They would have been just apoplectic. And so Esté Lauder had to stay, if that's counter positioning by Helmer's terms.

They had to stay there. Was that stupid?

No, they're still, they're still with all of their brands combined, the biggest in skincare, but Clinique has lost leadership to our brand that they would have considered kind of nothing. Olay Pro-V Regenerist, all of these higher.

Priced products than they could ever imagine.

Being sold in the mass channel. But our biggest friend was, in some sense, their Distribution channel, which would have.

Killed them if we were literally they.

Would have just punished them so, so, so bad that they didn't do it.

I love that I'm learning all this information, all the strategic thinking about makeup and skincare. I also love just the idea of you leading strategy for skincare makeup brands.

Yeah, I know. I got Procter & Gamble into color cosmetics.

So funny. I love that. I don't know if you're following the AI Google stuff that's happening where there's search engines competing with Google by just answering the question versus giving you a bunch of blue links. And there's this question of, will Google shift? Because people seem to really like it versus they're making trillions of dollars running ads when they share blue links.

And it's this, like, super innovators dilemma position they're in. Yeah, no, no, I, I, yeah, I'm, I'm very interested in, in, in what's going on in, in AI, and I'm writing some stuff on, on, on that. But, I mean, it's hard. Like, I've seen, I've seen the inside of this for many of my, my clients. It is super hard when the, the guts of how you make money is under, is under threat. And you, you just don't want that.

Thing to go away.

You know, the big auto OEMs make money selling cars with ice engines. It's simple as that.

And it's no surprise they've been doing it for 100 years. They're way down the learning curve.

They have scale, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And so these damn electric vehicles are kind of no fun. And so the Google situation you've described, I think is similar.

But my general advice is always the same, which is, you know, it can take a while, but in the end, the customers, will triumph. And AG Lafley, my friend who I co-wrote the book with, great CEO, was.

Very good on this.

And one of his big customers, big.

Ask customers, came to him and said, if you don't stop cooperating with Amazon.

We'Re going to delist all your products. Big threat, right?

Big threat.

And AG just said, if customers want.

To shop there, we can't.

We just can't not be where our customers want to shop. And so if you feel you need to do that, you're going to have.

To because customers want to shop there.

And we're not doing that. But what are you offended by that we're doing there? And it And they said, well, you're allowing them to ship products to their customers from your distribution centers. And AG just said, yeah, do you want it too? And they were like, and he just said, we don't do anything special for them that we wouldn't do for you.

They ask for things that you don't.

Ask for because of their their business model. But we're, you know, if you come.

To us with ideas of how we.

Can help you serve our joint customers better, we're all in. But we're not boycotting a place that customers have shown they want to shop.

As long as it's sort of an.

Honest, like, you know, if Amazon was sleazy and dishonest or whatever.

But an honest, upstanding place where customers can get our products.

And so that's where I'm at, which is you may have to scramble like hell, you may have to suffer from kind of economic downturn, but if you think you can, like, I always think of it like we, I don't know if you did this as a kid, Lenny, but when we went to the beach on family trips, you know, we would, we had four brothers, we would build, plus a baby girl later, but.

We would build sand castles and try.

To try to hold back the tide, like this would be in Florida or California, we'd try and hold back the.

Tide and we'd come the next morning to see if our castle, and it.

Was always gone, like it's like gone, but we keep trying doing it and it's sort of like you can't hold back the tide. maybe it can for a while, but you can't forever.

So you just have to figure out where are the customers going, right?

And if they're going someplace.

And Vanguard did this, right?

Jack Bogle, the late Jack Bogle, he died now a couple of years ago now.

He did not like ETFs. He said ETFs are not as good for customers as mutual funds. and he had all sorts of good reasons for that.

But the index ETF business started to kind of grow like crazy and Jack had to relent and say, I don't.

Think it's good for them, but they want it.

And so, you know, they went whole.

Hog into it and are the leading index ETF provider as well as the index mutual fund provider.

But for a while they weren't, but.

He realized it was the tide. and he was attempting to hold back the tide.

So good luck, good luck to you on that. So to me, if Google thinks they can, because of their power and the fact they've got a multi-trillion dollar market cap and they've got a near monopoly.

Position on something, they can hold back the tide.

You see, the water finds a way to flow, right? Think about Microsoft and its monopoly on.

PC operating systems or its near monopoly.

On PC operating systems. And I would argue that they abuse that kind of monopoly, right? I often ask people, when's the last.

Windows update that got you as a customer excited?

Yeah, Windows 95.

The answer, I think, is really clear. Windows 95.

Right?

Because that's when he took the graphical user interface that he bought rights to.

From Steve Jobs and put it on.

So he didn't have to do backslash, backslash, you know, you could actually point and click.

That's a long time ago.

Last time I checked, that's now almost 30 years.

Right?

And so they just abused their customer. Is their share of PC operating systems.

Much lower than it was then?

No.

But that's not the right measure of share. The right measure of share, in my.

View, in that industry, is your share of minutes spent staring at a smart screen.

Right?

Like that's what the share of operating.

Systems that you should care about.

And so what kind of smart screens do people now stare at? Most, right?

Right, most.

And what other one do a lot of people stare at who really like them? Pads, right? And so if you added up all those and said, what do you think? So what's their share of smartphone operating systems? Microsoft, last time I checked it was.

0.4 of 1%, yeah.

So effectively zero.

How about pads?

Apparently it's 4% there. So their share of people staring at a smart screen has plummeted. Plunged.

Why?

Because water finds its own level. People said, there are these other ways of getting around this, and I'm going to take those ways.

And I think the degree to which.

People use their smartphone for more things.

As a function of that smartphone is.

Advanced so much faster than your PC operating system because more people are using it. So that's what I'd say to Google.

I don't care how painful it is.

It is water flows downhill, the tide comes in, and you cannot stop that. Even if you're one of the most powerful three firms on the face of the planet.

And it may take time, but eventually customer tide pools. That's, I think that's really important.

Yeah, but start now.

Yeah.

Right?

If you don't start now, it's too late.

Yeah.

I want to end with one very tactical question for people that may feel overwhelmed. There's like, oh my God, I don't know what we're going to do. This is so hard, all strategy stuff. You have this really cool idea called Betterment. I think you wrote a media post about it, thinking betterment over perfection. And it gives you kind of like a first step of like, okay, here's a way to move forward.

Can you just talk about that approach?

So for me, strategy, this thing called.

Strategy with, yeah, with people, oh my God, oh my God, how am I going to do strategy, whatever. I just think of it as a problem solving tool, right? And what problem should you attempt to solve? You should attempt to solve something where your current outcomes that you're getting are lower than the outcomes you wish you were getting. That's what I call a gap. There's a gap between those two. And you should just conceptualize it as.

Your current outcomes are a natural result.

Of all the choices you've made interacting.

With the competitive environment.

Right. And so you should reasonably assume that probably those outcomes aren't going to get a whole lot better because they are.

The way they are for a good reason.

So you're going to need to make a different set of choices to make that gap go away. That's what I would work on. I would just ask the question, what is the single most painful gap currently that I'm facing? Customers used to do this and they're doing this. I can't find this kind of resources.

Our distribution channel has abandoned us and.

Whatever is the most painful thing, and then just tackle that and say, what.

Different choices could I make?

And I'd say use my cascade. What could I change where I'm playing? Could I change how I'm winning? Could I change my capabilities? Could I change my management systems in order to achieve a different aspiration?

And so don't try to solve the problems of the world.

Or even all the problems of your company, that's perfection.

Betterment is making that gap go away. And guess what happens if you make.

That gap go away?

You can turn your attention to the.

Next gap and the next gap and the next gap. And if you do that all the time, right, you're always working on the next gap, the next, they'll get smaller and smaller.

Over time.

I don't know if this is a great analogy, but I was a dean of a business school for 15 years. The guy who won the Professor of.

The Year award more times than anybody else and did it sort of teaching.

Tough courses, often executive MBA courses and the like, had a simple formula for doing it, which is he taught second-year courses.

And second year courses happen to be.

13 two-hour lectures or sessions of one sort or another.

It just pulled the students.

On what.

They thought of each session as they went along. And regardless of the reason, regardless of.

Anything else, simply chopped number 13 every year. Because in some sense, it's the biggest gap, the gap between what the customers, students, wished for and were getting. And he would just replace it with something.

He would try something else and replace it with that.

And you'd say, and that gets you.

Like professor of the year every year?

And the answer is yes, betterment. Because if you're teaching for 25 years, right, and you just keep doing that every year, every year, the Course keeps.

Getting better and better and better and better and better and better and better.

So betterment, you know, it doesn't make purists feel awesome, but I'm not here to make pure purists feel awesome. I'm here to help people get better.

This makes me think about your water metaphor, too, of just water eventually finding a way through. a little bit iterating.

Yeah, yeah. Things better. Yeah. Lots of what I think about in strategy is sort of natural, if you will.

I try to ask, how does the world generally operate? And is what we're doing kind of consistent with the way the world generally operates or not?

Roger, this was so much fun. We covered everything I was hoping we'd get through. I think we're gonna have a lot of people with the way they think about strategy. Is there anything else you wanted to just leave listeners with or say or before we wrap up and and let you go. And we covered a lot, so there may not be anything left.

Well, on strategy, there's one piece of advice I'd say.

People often ask me.

About people who.

Are natural strategists, or they say, I'm not naturally good at that. I'm more of an operational guy or gal.

And what I tell them is, I have never met this mythical beast called.

A great natural strategist.

And they often throw back in my face, laughably, they say, Look, laughably, he was known as a strategy genius, right? And I say, yeah. But when I interviewed him in depth about his background for a paper I was writing, what I discovered was when he was in the Navy as a whatever, I don't know, probably 25 year old in the Navy, he had a job. where he had to think about strategy and was testing things out and doing things and the like. And then I realized that he had been practicing strategy for decades before he became the CEO. Decades.

And so he just had more reps.

When he became CEO than almost anybody else that I've ever met.

There's another guy, Jürgen V. Neustadt, CEO.

Or ex-CEO, now he's gone on to a higher level Lego brand group.

Would be similar.

So great strategists that I have met have all one thing in common.

They just practice.

And anybody, there's no such sort of thing as a person who is willing to practice strategy who will end up saying, I'm kind of operational, I don't I don't do strategy well, which links to our last thing about betterment. Just work on making different choices to solve problems, not problems that I see. I'm not going to define your gap.

It's one that you feel in your heart. I wish this were better. Work on it.

If you do that, you'll be a great strategist. So be encouraged. Don't be discouraged. And the worst thing to do is to wait.

People say, well, I've got all these.

Operational concerns right now, and then I'll get to strategy later. Eh, you'll never amount to anything. Nobody says that ever amounts to anything. Wow, I love this. I love how empowering it is.

I love the real talk. Roger, you're awesome. Thank you so much for being here. You're most welcome.

Thank you for making it a fun journey for me.

I learned a ton, and that's always a good sign, and it was a lot of fun. Well, thanks for watching.

Good.

All right, bye everyone.

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