How Disrupting "Strategy" Unlocks Real-World Growth

What is the chainlink set of issues that if solved, will unlock growth? What would need to be true to get create more value for customers? Okay, until we can teach critical thinking skills, provide the tools and frameworks that the big shot consultants bring to the table and just democratize that, get that in the hands of the people and then bring in leaders who can inspire and get the people designing the strategy to solve for the right issues and get the management team buying into those strategies, supporting those strategies and actually giving the resources and allocating them to solving those problems and not trying to solve too many things at once. We're going to keep having growth problems.

You've worked with outstanding leaders. You work with some of the best coaches in the world. You've worked with people who've had just astronomical, like literally astronomical success. What ignited your passion to disrupt the strategy consulting industry?

Honestly, Scott, I think it's a few things, right? When I was a kid, I was working at a startup called Infotech Research Group. They've since grown into a $500 million a year company. I'm really good friends with the founder and CEO and my whole dream when I was 15 years old was to get into the top business school in Canada called the Ivy School of Business and go work at like Capgemini or one of the consulting firms. That was my dream career. I wanted to be a consultant. I just thought it was the coolest career ever. And my path was a little bit different. My parents were poor, they didn't have a lot of money for school. So I got a loan, got into university and I went to school part time and I had to work full time to get through school. So in my full time work, I got a job at this startup called Infotech and it was owned by this guy, Joel McLean, who went through the Ivy Business School here. Okay, Our top school in Canada. And he was an instructor even there. And I was like, okay, this is perfect. It's aligned on my path. This guy's been there. He graduated from the school, he's a teacher at the school. Like, I'm close to my path in life and at some point I was working for him in sales and account management. And I told him, I was like, I really want to go to Ivy and I really want to go and I want to be a McKinsey consultant. And he literally crushed my dream. He's, listen, kid, he's a lot of things. You're a great sales guy, but you're not McKinsey material. And I tell this story in Jess because I give him a hard time about this to this day. Like, we're really good friends, and his daughters go to school with mine, but I'm like, dude, like, you literally crushed my dreams. And he's. And he's offended. He's a little bit, like, embarrassed that I, like, make fun of him over this comment that I still remember 25 years ago. But it was the start. And when I felt like I wasn't good enough to be a McKinsey consultant, it affected me somehow. And so that was the kernel. That was where it all started from there. I subsequently didn't get into an MBA program, didn't go to business school, and I decided instead to launch the world's best subscription for do it yourself consulting tools instead. So I took that chip on my shoulder, put. I wrote it through 18 years of developing playbooks and toolkits and working with all these MBAs and all these big companies around the world on product management, sales, account based marketing, whatever the new flavor of the month marketing or growth tactic was. And only recently did I get really purely into strategy itself. And so that's a backstory. But the way I perceive the problem, Scott, is that most organizations just don't know how to do strategy. And I learned that really, reading Good strategy, bad strategy by Romel.

Yeah, Yeah, I have at your push.

Yeah, that was the book. It was like this little bit grouchy guy. He's telling the world the way it is, probably doesn't care anymore. He's done consulting at the top levels of the industry, governments, that kind of stuff taught at UCLA for a long time. And when I read that book, the basic premise is that most strategy out there is pretending to be strategy, but it's not actual strategy. And it's because people don't understand how to define the word. In fact, Scott, you're a strategy expert. I'll put you on the spot. If you were to define the word strategy, how would you define it? What is your. What's your definition? How do you. I think everyone views differently.

I quote My friend Dr. Rebecca Humpkes, because I loved hers. The best strategy is just the story of how you create value. And that fits with Remelt. It's the story of how you create value and value. So then you have to define value. Value is the difference between what customers are willing to pay and your cost to deliver that. Creating that story is strategy. But I know that there's a couple of double clicks that Remelt has that you're passionate about.

You know what I Don't even really use. He wrote an article, it's called what is it? It's solve your gnarliest challenge with strategy or something like that. So if you look at like gnarliest drum out, you'll find this article. And the word strategy comes from actually a Greek word. It's a stratego or something like, I don't know. Okay. Okay. It means military general in Greek. Okay. And the way he defines it is a strategy is a design. The keyword is design. Okay. It's the design for solving a challenge. Okay. Or an obstacle. And it's generally leveraging a strength you have against a weakness of an opponent. So it's a design for solving a problem, leveraging your strengths and attacking a weakness. Those are the elements, the basic ideas. It's like a design. So the design is, to me, a design is like very intentional. Doesn't Not a hope. It's not, oh, we're going to go out there and beat these guys. It's. We're going to. This is our plan. This our plan that we believe will work based on X. We're going to use our strength against their weakness. They're. Imagine I always think of the movie 300, right? And you got the Persian army coming in. You got these 300 like amazing soldiers. And pound for pound, they're way better fighters than this Persian army, but there's just millions of them. And so their strategy was funnel them into this little gorge where like they can build their little wall and they'll have to fight like 10 on 10, 10 on 10, and just if they can just have the energy and sustain the energy to keep fighting, they have a chance. If maybe these 300 guys can literally just go through a million people, but it doesn't maybe pan out that way. They get betrayed in the end and all that. But the strategy was sound. It was like, if we can change the game, the footing of where the battle is fought, even if we're like 100 to 1, we might have a chance. And so the key is leveraging your strengths. We're better fighters in close combat. Pound for pound, individually, we need to take our advantage of many people away and focus on our strength. And I've asked hundreds of executives this question, what is strategy? And I usually get something like a plan to achieve a goal. That's usually the most common definition I hear. And it makes sense because I think the world has been superficially taught concepts of strategy that are completely out of date. I think that our whole paradigm in the mainstream of the World is grossly out of date. It's mission, vision, values, goals, objectives, KPIs, OKRs, initiatives, all this stuff. And usually what it is, the CEO says we got to grow by a certain percentage. And then all the leaders of all the functions are like, I got to get my function better. So I'm going to do this CRM project, I'm going to do this sales thing or I'm going to do this IT initiative or I'm going to do this data thing. And the sum total of all those activities, to me those are the premises of your strategy. We're going to do all these actions and then the hope is that we're going to get this growth. What they're often failing to consider is their customers decision making of where they're seeing value from your firm. What other competitive, like opposing forces are competing for that customer's attention in business. Okay. And so instead of looking at their team as we're this cross functional unit that needs to create more value for our customers than the next guy who's going for that business, it's more. We're going to send this lofty goal and then we're all going to work on the stuff that we think is important, that everybody thinks they want to do and somehow we make this leap that this set of activities in these functional areas should result and is correlated or going to cause these results in growth. I just think it's an, it's a fallacy of logic and reasoning. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I see that a lot. It makes total sense. I see it a lot. Everything from how goals cascade. People will leave that unclear. Like how does this really fit? And this idea that oh, we're going to state a goal and then everybody go figure out your cascading goals. That's not a strategy, that's just, that's a Gantt chart.

Goals. That's right. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. It's saying I'm the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. I like this analogy, right? I'm the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. And you're like, okay, I'm the coach and you're the quarterback and you're the defensive end and you're all the players. You're like, okay, my goal is I'm going to throw four touchdowns and I'm going to get three sacks and I'm going to win the game and I'm going to catch four touchdown passes as a receiver and I'm going to run for 200 yards. And I say, okay, you're going up against the New England Patriots or The Denver Broncos are a great team. Is there any reason to think maybe there's something that's going to get in the way of you getting those goals? What's your plan for the opposing force trying to stop you from getting that to happen? Do you have a. Do you have a reason why you think you can win? And I always like to bring up the analogy of I'm trying to help executives transition out of their, like, executive careers. You got these guys that are like really seasoned senior executives that were very successful, not just anybody that's been in the job a long time, but if you've survived, you've got your scars, your wounds from battle, and you made it as a senior executive in, like, big companies, and you've done successful turnarounds, you've held the P and L responsibility, you, you bought and integrated companies and got the value coming out the other side. You, you failed a million times, made a million mistakes and lost a bunch of time and money and all that. But you have proven that you can change a group's behavior. You can inspire as a leader a group behavior change to march down the field and get a win. And you've done that multiple times over. Maybe turning around divisions or doing successful transformation programs. Just being involved in programs that failed consistently, I don't think qualifies you for the job. I think that's where a lot of consultants, firms get into trouble. A lot of executives that want to get into this business aren't really qualified. You need a track record. So the analogy I like to use is I need to take a guy like Tom Brady and send him to the Bucks and get the Bucks, who are maybe a 7 and 8 team or something like a mediocre team, to get them to a believe that they got a shot to make the playoffs and maybe even go far in the playoffs. Teach them what the problems are with their team. Here's what's wrong with our defense, here's. Here's what's wrong with our offense, here's who we're playing against every single week and what their strengths are, what we need to mitigate and work against in order to win these games. He teaches his approach to the game. It's game tape. It's looking for weaknesses, picking apart defenses. So you take a guy like Brady in to a team that's okay, maybe going to make playoffs, probably not. And you all of a sudden, number one, you inspire the team that maybe they got a shot to win because they got this new leader. Two, you solve their main problem that's holding them back. Maybe they're not practicing enough. Maybe they don't have the right attitudes. Maybe they don't believe they can do it. Maybe there's a million reasons why you can. And he knows what those failure points are because he knows how to win. Okay? And then you actually teach them what habits they need to have to be a winning team. And so when I bring in an executive who's done successful turnarounds, pull them out of industry, pair them up with this toolkit that we built for strategy development, and then send them into a new organization to do that as a coach, right? I'm basically taking the Tom Brady and I'm sending them into the bucks to get them or the bad or whatever analogy, sports analogy you want to use to a inspire the team. That's the most important thing. How the people feel and then think and then maybe act. It starts with emotion. It starts with how they feel. They feel like they're going to lose. Management doesn't listen. We're screwed. We can't get out of our own way. If the whole attitude is, we're defeated already, it's very difficult to get any sort of results.

And that is the attitude in a lot of places. That is the attitude in a lot of companies like you. All you have to do is say the letters okrs and you'll just see the eyes start rolling.

Or McKinsey or. So to me, it's not enough to have a great strategy. And I like to give the consulting firms a hard time because I compete with them with a different model. But the truth is, the strategy itself is necessary, but it's not sufficient. That's a writer downer. As Alex Ramosi says, that's a writer downer.

Because I'm writing her downer to mark that. Say that again. And we're going to package that one up.

A good strategy is necessary, but not sufficient. Okay? And here's why. We've all heard the quote. I think it's Drucker, culture eats strategy for breakfast. Right? We've all heard that, but most of us don't know how to solve for that. Okay? So to me, in order to get culture not eating your strategy for breakfast, he says something like 70% of transformations fail. Is it McKinsey's fault? No. I don't know. Probably not. Maybe it's just the approach to how they solve the problem. But here's my thesis, okay? If you walk into a firm, okay, let's just say, sky, you get hired and you're going to Go to strategy, work for some firm. And they're like, this guy, amazing entrepreneur. We're going to bring him in, he's got a great track record. And you go in and you like, this is the current launch, right? You say, I'm going to go interview 30 people, okay? I'm going to hear them out, listen all the problems, right? And I'm going to the issues on the table and I'm going to think about it and I'm going to write this report and I'm going to pull together what I believe to be the necessary things that must be true to, to fix this issue, okay? As a consultant, that's what consultants do. They, they go, they listen, they analyze, they think, they report. And in the process of doing that, the employees are like a, they're like, oh, great, the consultant's here, we can all relax. He's going to solve our corporate problem here. I've had this happen to me personally and I'm like, guys, I'm an entrepreneur. I'm not a consultant. I'm doing some coaching for you guys to do your boss's boss a favor. But I didn't come here to consult. I'm not a. Don't label me as those. I'm an entrepreneur. I knocked on doors when I was nine years old. I sold flowers, I sold on the phone. Like, I'm a sales guy. Entrepreneur. I made $30 million in my life. Slang and subscriptions to content. Like, I'm not a consultant. I didn't get in. I didn't get an mba. I didn't get a job at a consulting firm. Shame on me. I'm not. I wasn't good enough to be a wicked. But what I have done is I've empowered 8,000 people to do jobs for themselves with tools that I've built on very specific problems they were having at work. Okay? So I used the lean startup method. I went out and sold a subscription. Here's an aside for you, Scott. Why isn't Lean startup and customer development like that management theory? Why isn't that the predominant theory of how to go do strategy and create value in the world outside of tech? Why is it only startups and tech that use in startup thinking?

I. I don't know. But like you, I was able to create a career helping companies apply it. It ought to be.

It's go find a customer problem that you can solve differently than everybody else in the world, communicate how your advantage can get them an outcome, and then work your ass off to make sure you can deliver that outcome, that is literally the story to create value. It's. I found, I went into a client, I found a problem, I figured out how to solve it, and now I know how to solve that differently, uniquely than anybody else. And it gives them a better ROI than the next best alternative they have in the problem. Okay, so bringing that back full circle to this whole what's wrong with the strategy industry and why it doesn't get the results that it's intended most of the time. This is my, again, my own personal opinion. Okay, sure, McKins will give you like a million other reasons why it doesn't work, but in my experience, consultant goes in, interviews people, does the report, spits back what everybody says they already knew, and then tries to get the people to then go execute the strategy. Management and the consulting firm are happy. They're like, we built this great plan. They show it to their board. The board's, eh, we've done this before. It didn't work last time. And a nice shiny strategy fit for growth or some name. They always got a name, a brand name for the strategy. That seems like every company has the same strategy name. It's like, increase working capital, get growth, cut costs. Okay. It's called do business right, do business smart. That's not a strategy. I don't think.

The scoreboard's not the game. The scoreboard's the outcome of the game.

Yeah, you're like, strategy's win. Okay, good. Appreciate that I'm being facetious, but like it's the process they use. So if I go suck up a bunch of employees, time to investigate the issues are in the company and the employees have the answers. They know the problems. They know what's going on in the market. They know how their competitors are kicking their ass out there. The employees have the knowledge. Right? We know that the employees have the knowledge. So let's just put that premise over here. Okay. I'm going to build an argument for you. I'm going to show you how to build a strategy. So premise over here, employees have the answers. In the process of the employees giving the consultant the answers to the questions. Consultants asking the right questions, good on them. That's the right job. We still need that. Right. Questions need to be asked. So we're going to put that over here. And what's required, what's sufficient and necessary to solve the problem. Right. Questions asked. Employees need to be able to respond to and articulate the problems and how to maybe solve them. But they kind of irritate the employees, I think because they're like, we got sucked into this project, and we got to spend, like, eight weeks on this thing. And, like, you know, they keep just asking us all this stuff we already know. And, like, so they. They waste a lot of time getting the consultant up to speed. And ultimately the consultant, like, free packages, puts it in a fancy deck and then shares it with everybody. And they're like, oh, great. Yeah, we know. I've been telling management this for two years now that you spent a million bucks with these guys. Are you going to listen? They're like, oh, and then these are the same people, Scott, Okay? These are the same people you expect to go, like, ferociously attack some market opportunity to go grow the business. And they're like, what about the elephant in the room that, like, we can't get out of our own way and prioritize work or get you guys to invest in thing that's holding us back? Like, we're not actually solving for the root cause issues here. And the employees, when they feel like they don't solve for the root cause. Let's just say we got Brady, and he goes in and he's got a center that, like, falls on his face every time he snaps the ball. We just go sack him every time. And Brie's like, no, we're going to win, guys. I. Brady, I'm going to. I'm a superstar. We're going to solve this. They're like, until we get a good center, I don't believe that to be true. And that's how the team feels. If they know what the problem is and the senior management team doesn't remove the biggest obstacle. Okay. The team doesn't believe the strategy will work. And fair enough, they're probably right. Okay, so what else? What do we learn from that? If the employees don't agree with, understand, and believe that the right problems are going to be solved to get the growth and to get the expectations we're setting of, like, more results to be true, they won't buy in and go try to do the strategy. They'll think they're defeated before they start. So employees must buy into and agree with the strategy, understand it, and feel confident that senior management's going to remove the biggest roadblocks holding them back from achieving that goal. Okay. That must be true. Okay.

100%. Like, what you. I just want to. I want to underscore that because I've seen that one play out.

Yeah.

The best laid strategies, if your troops aren't executing, if they're not buying into it, you typically won't have enough people to throw into the fray to get past all the burnout that's about to happen. And people, because people aren't going to give it their best. And the stats out there, yeah, all.

The stats support this. A, they don't understand the strategy. B, they don't agree with the strategy. C, they don't really do the strategy. So they don't understand the role of the strategy. So to me, the necessary condition to get strategy to work is that. And I'm just like looking at it as like an entrepreneurial problem solver. Like, the employees need to like get it, they need to believe in it, think that it's going to work, and they need to be excited and emotionally charged to go do it. Those are like, how can anything work without those conditions being met? Like at a basic level, okay. And I believe that the strategy consulting paradigm, like the process in which, like BCG, Bain, McKinsey, like all the big Deloitte, et cetera, like retailers, they go in there and do this. It's like the senior executives and the big consulting firm versus the employees and it's this big finger pointing game. It's the strategy was stupid. Well, they didn't execute well. The strategy was stupid. Well, they didn't like, how many times are we going to go around this circle and point fingers back and forth and not get the results? Okay, so I'd like to offer a new alternative way to solve this problem. Okay. Can I. Do you mind if I share it? Please do, people. Okay, so I believe you need three key ingredients to get a strategy to work. And I'm very curious to get your perspective. Scott. I know you've done a lot of really good strategy implementation work and got the result. Okay? So call me out of my bullshit here if you don't think that it's accurate. But this is what I believe to be true. First and foremost, you need an inspiring leader. Okay? If you can't bring in a leader who can actually make the employees that are responsible for doing some sort of behaviors to get some sort of results motivated to do the work, okay? To get the job done, whatever that job needs to be, you're probably not going to get much of a result. So I think like inspirational leadership and not, oh, this guy's my boss, but I don't really like him and I don't really think he's smart and like just his unrealistic expectations. I don't think that, like, you can't win like that. That's why I Like radio into the box, right? Like, you need someone who has a track record. And I think entrepreneurs are the absolute best consultants. I think second to that, business builder executives that have. I specialize in taking companies from 100 million to 500 million. I've done that five times. That's my MO. Private equity brings me in. I do this. I call those entrepreneurial executives, but they have an mo, a size of company, an industry, and they just do this over and over again. Or I was in charge of a transformation office, and we didn't fail miserably with our transformation. We actually got it to work. Okay. So successful transformations, guys that did turnarounds at divisions. So General Electric, who was like, you had to be number one or number two. And they would often test their top talent in a bad division just to see what they could do with a bad hand dealt to them. Anyone can win in a great division. Can you go win in a bad division? Can you go turn something around? And I got a guy in my program, he did that five times. A G, right? He was Jack Welch. And Jeff Immelt's like, golden boy. Like, he did this literally five times. When you bring a guy like that into a team, I got a guy who's literally a major two star major general. I think he's going to sign up. If you're listening, I hope you do sign up this week. Okay? This guy, 576 hours of combat experience. He flies F16s, F35s. This guy's a major general, two star. Like, he is a strategy expert and a hero. This guy walks into a room, I don't care what room it is, of what kind of people, and people literally immediately he has this energy, this aura about him. He's Captain America. Okay? You bring Captain America to do any job, you're like, hey guys, we got to do some sod in the backyard. We're going to knock this out and have a pizza. After that team is going to respond. They're going to get out there, they're going to lay that sod down so quick because they're not. They're going to want to live up to his standards just because they. They feel like they're in the presence of greatness. You look at the great, all the greats, Kobe And Jordan and LeBron, like they made everyone else around them better. Greatness, by definition, is making everyone else around you step up and be better. In order to do that, you probably need to have the highest standards yourself. You need to have impeccable character. You need to have a track record of achieving the results. And so if you got some, I don't know, senior manager who's leading this transformation that's trying to do this strategy, honestly, those guys are guys that bring us in and you know what I tell them? There's this book, it's about change management and funny, it's called Change the Management. Whole premise book is that the reason why managers bring in people to help them is because they've driven to their level of incompetency and they don't know how to solve a problem. And so they're getting help because they don't actually know how to solve the problem. And usually when you're trying to change a group's behavior and the leader themselves isn't able to do it, they want help with it because they don't actually know how to get it done. And so the first thing that needs to happen is they need to be humble enough to get the help. Okay. The second thing is they need to bring in someone who can inspire their group that isn't going to confuse them. Who's the alpha here? Is it our boss or is it this new guy? Is this guy look looking for my boss's job? And it's this whole like weird human, political, tribal thing. Okay? My theory is big companies start failing because they buy a bunch of little companies and the entrepreneurs get their earn out, fly the coop and these big companies are left with all the betas. They don't have any alpha inside of them.

I can vouch for that because I've seen that of many times promoted because.

They'Ve been in the company a long time, but they never built a business. So the entrepreneurial skill set to us entrepreneurs, like strategy is not five year old vision. Like I don't even care about a five year vision, to be honest. I have one, but I don't. It doesn't do anything for me. Okay? For me, my strategy is where do I allocate resources to the biggest problem that's going to prevent me from hitting my goal? What's my biggest weakness that must be solved right now? I got to turn a weakness into a strength. And it's a matter of flipping negatives into positives, the right negative into a positive. So you go from being really, really bad at something to world class at it. And the more times you can do that in succession, the more times you can make payroll and you keep in business and you stay alive as an entrepreneur. So as an entrepreneur, there is like long term planning and strategy like this paradigm, okay, Do a five year plan, make a big budget. My CFO is always on my ass, is, build the forecast, build a plan. I'm like, dude, if we don't solve this problem the next 30 days, it doesn't matter the plant you can throw in the garbage. So what I'm focused on right now is solving this problem. Okay, so what do we learn? We need an inspirational leader to lead the charge and get the team to believe in some change that needs to happen and probably to accept that the company's made some mistakes before. Companies aren't ready to accept atone. Hey, we made this great plan. We took on way too many objectives. We went through the last. We didn't achieve. Didn't achieve. You need to go through this process of management coming to terms with the team, saying, you know what, guys? Like, we've been doing this wrong. We threw all this crap at you of all this things that we want to do. And then we changed it. We changed leaders and then changed strategy and then we changed all the objectives. Like, we keep throwing like all this like, junk at you and then. And we never actually do it all. And I know you guys have just given up on like management being idiots and being like, you guys are not, you're doing. And I'm just gonna do my job. The least amount of work that I gotta do to get through my day, get my paycheck, because this company's not the launch. How do you win with a culture of people that are like, management are idiots. They just keep changing the goals. They have way too many goals. They're completely unrealistic. We're getting our asses handed to us out in the market. They just, they just zone out. They're like, whatever, it's a big company, it'll probably survive. As long as I get my paycheck, I'll get my fulfillment in life with like my kids, my hobbies, other outlets in life. Maybe they gotta zone into media, I don't know. But they just give up on winning for the company. I think in a lot of cases.

Yes, I think that's very true, man. I've seen that from day one and I didn't understand it at first. I thought I didn't understand what the forces were at play. It's hard to when you're early in your career to understand that, hey, there's probably some things that happened that caused people to disengage, that caused people to react the way they do, to change. And understanding that is the unlock. And it took Me a long time in my career to actually go, okay, let's make sure we understand that going in. Because those forces are, they're massive. Like the effect they have. You can't overstate them on the one hand, and yet few companies are willing to go, we're just going to fire everybody and start fresh, which isn't really that good of a strategy.

We're not even really willing to do that. Like half the time. They're like, they're loyal to people. So here's the issue is fundamentally, people attack growth and solving for, like how you grow a company with a rational approach, hey, if we just did this and that and we got these things good, and whatever, this all worked out, this should work. And they don't understand that getting the result, whoever wins, I think go back to sports, right? You like momentum in a game, okay, Back and forth. What is momentum? Is there anything rational about momentum? There's nothing rational about momentum. You know what momentum is? Momentum is a feeling that a group of people have either positively or negatively about winning or losing. So you get a hockey game, it's a boom. They score two goals and then the other team comes back and scores two right away. And then it's okay, we're back even. And so this momentum swing is really just an attitude shift. It's an attitude adjustment. Okay? And human beings are extremely. Emotions drive their behaviors, subconscious thinking drives their behaviors. Rational thoughts, very little effect on people. I can tell my daughter all day, make your bed, it makes more sense and they don't care.

We have this conversation, broccoli versus chocolate, right?

That's right.

It's hard to sell. We sell broccoli all the time. But people want chocolate. So you gotta somehow, you gotta get.

In the middle of chocolate. And then eventually when you build credibility, then you can explain why broccoli is so important. When they're ready to listen, my daughters, they're not ready to hear the broccoli message yet. They still want chocolate all day. So I like, listen, I'm going to stop going to jam some spinach in your shake every day, and trust me, you'll thank me later, but we're going to make sure you get your nutrients. Okay? So back to what is required, what is not only necessary, but like sufficient to get a result. Not just the strategy's intent is to overcome a challenge. And usually that challenge is it's growth, right? Profitable growth is the challenge. Every company, you need an inspirational leader, number one, okay? And usually that's gonna come from outside. Because if they had inspirational leaders inside, they probably already be kicking ass and they probably wouldn't be calling you. Okay, number two, you need to switch your thinking from strategy is setting a bunch of goals and then creating a bunch of activities against those goals to try to hit them. It's not goals first. Strategy, when done well, is identifying and diagnosing the correct problem and the right chain linked series of problems that maybe at a surface level don't seem connected. I had a client that was like, we can't keep people employed because they don't like the job. And because of that we can't run our line. Because we can't run our line, we have this backlog, but yet we don't have our line running full time. So I'm like, so your line's running at 50%, you got a 10 week backlog and then you want to go bark at the sales guys to go get short term orders. I'm like, do you guys see what's wrong with the picture here? Like you can't solve the growth, the sales problem until you get the employees wanting to work at the company problem solve and keep the line running. And so you have this chain linked. This is why strategy problems are hard. If there is an obvious solution to them, you would just go do it. And they don't realize that there's dependencies between issues. And so when you actually go through a process of chain linking the dependencies of problems, you call, I call it problem linking. And you realize, okay, if we could solve this set of issues, call that a theme, we could unlock some growth. Because this wouldn't cause this, wouldn't cause this wouldn't cause this, wouldn't cause that. So you got to identify the right problems, you got to theme them, chain link them together, and then you got to like literally pick between this theme and this theme. And this theme. You gotta. Alex, Rosi told me this last week. You gotta, you gotta let some fires burn, man. You gotta let some fires burn.

Yeah, that's a.

Anytime. Like you gotta pick the one that if this were just solved, nothing else would matter. Everything else would be unlocked and fixed. And that's the key to strategy is unlocking the right problem solved the right way. And usually the hard part is linking together what seem like unrelated issues into the crux of that problem. Make sense?

Yeah, that letting your fires burn. I like that idea a lot. Reid Hoffman, first guy I heard mention that.

Yeah.

He would interview founders though, and that was Masters of scale. I haven't listened to in a while. Sorry, Masters of scales guys. But early on it was like, I'm going to sit you down with a founder that was successful. We're going to get them to be brutally honest. And that was one of the things that came out of a lot of those conversations was you've got to let the fires burn. But that's prioritization, right? That's saying every single problem is not created equally, every single to do needn't be done. And this is what makes me nuts about all these project and task management platforms is they have no sense of priority and no, no context. It's just we've defined that we have to do it and because we said we have to do it, we gotta prove we can do it. And that will lead you down a. Yeah, lead you down a bad path.

Yeah. I did a whole agile like a failed software implementation. I thought I had this great idea of like playbooks inside of an agile software and then teaching the process but have all the process to define. Like I thought of this brilliant solution and Covid hit and that wasn't the real reason we failed. We undercapitalized, we didn't raise money. We probably should have. Monday in Asana, these guys were raising tons of cash. And honestly like the outcome, people don't realize what they need until they need it. And so Monday.com was like great. Oh this is the easy flashy platform on the subway. Can you roll out projects across all different things and prioritize and then scope and then see that on a board, a calendar or a list? And they're like oh, why do I need that? You're like do you want to manage your work? And they're like I just got this to do list. And and so they don't even care about the problem if they don't realize.

No man, like, like this has been going on for effing decades. It's been going on since the last century. Oh, there's a cool new project management tool. It's going to help us do more stuff. And yet the success rate on companies on their growth trajectories hasn't changed. The project success rate hasn't changed. All those project management companies, when they cite improvement and projects they're citing. There's a turn of the century study on what happens if you just put your projects into a database or spreadsheet.

That's right.

And so they all cite that study as why you should use our cool tool. And it doesn't get to the key issues. It helps you build beautiful plans and it helps you Do a little bit of, oh, if we move this thing, how does that hit our Gantt?

Honestly, in the corporate world, in the enterprise world, the public view of the strategy, the optics often rule out because it's a matter of COVID your ass long enough to go get your next assignment and then leave that job. And then the results of that job that you were in will be somebody else's problem. And so you got all these people in the corporate world, like big enterprise, they just shuffle around, they just move jobs around. And the whole thing is, seen this.

Jesse, I've seen this in $20 million companies too. Even when a company like 20 million, you're still, you ought to be an entrepreneurial, high growth scale up. But I've seen the same problem is people are so exhausted from these kind of old school command and control, hey, we've come down with this plan. Thou shalt go execute and not really listening or improving based on what the organization's contributing, which you get to in talking about how you have to energize the people. And I know we're going to come up on time, but that engagement of the employees is part of your strategy creation I think is really key, is.

You need the employees to design the strategy. That's my premise. Okay, Number one, the employees design. Two, the employees need the analytical frameworks and tool sets the big strategy consulting firms bring to the table. That's their like secret IP is like the approach, the methodology. I've democratized that over 18 years. So I built this whole content subscription business, building playbooks, building toolkits, reading books, and then turning them into like simple practical tools. And I've done that 1500 times for these 800 or these 8000 executives we've worked with, right? All the Fortune 500 companies, all these MBAs, hey, you got a tool for this? So they need the tools so they can articulate and analyze and communicate their thoughts. So they have the confidence to actually step up in a meeting and say, hey, I think we could solve this problem this way. Or I here's the way I look at the market, or here's this customer value and here's how we could message like they just need structure. It's, we've created like a paint by numbers set of tools. But it's not enough to just give the people the tools. I tried that. I did that for 18 years. I just sold the subscriptions. And then people will be like, yeah, we didn't get the transformation one. I'm like, okay, why not? So like the tools are Necessary, but not sufficient. The people filling out and thinking through and deciding on how to solve the problems and put a plan together and then actually buy into it and go execute it. That's important, but it's not enough. They need a leader who can hold them accountable but also take responsibility for some of the failings that have happened in the past. But to me, bringing in a third party superstar like the F16 fighter pilot or an entrepreneur rock star, or a turnaround artist, that was at GE five times, you bring in this person as a buffer, okay? A buffer between the management team and the employees. Because that rift between them, that's not going away, like, overnight, okay? And if you just keep bringing in consultants for senior management, it's like us versus them. And then you switch jobs, and then we stay here, and then new consultants come in, new manager comes in. They're like, oh, my God, another consultant, other management team. Oh. And then that. That happened, okay? So you need this buffer person. And the buffer person. These are my strategy coaches. I'm like, transitioning from the corporate world into these new jobs, okay? And these poor guys are in their mid-50s. They're at the peak of their career. They literally can't get a job. And they're at, like, the most wisdom, like, tacit knowledge that they could possibly ever have to add value in the world. And then they go to talk to recruiters and HR people, and they're like, you're 55. I got a guy who's 49, and we work in succession planning, and we need to, like, make room for the new guys coming up through the system. We don't have a job for you, and you're really expensive. So we're going to pay this guy 50 grand a year less, give him the next job. But the reality is, like, that generation, that's like our generation, we're like old millennials, and are we really ready to take over the world? Like, I'm 41, and I got to say, the guys I know in their 60s, they got a hell of a lot more experience and wisdom about what works, what doesn't work, what's going on. Yeah, we're inheriting that generation's kind of policy decisions, but I don't believe that. It's like a clear handoff. Boomer's just, here you go, guys. Take over. We need to train the next generation of problem solvers because we're inheriting a world of major socioeconomic issues, environmental issues. The world has issues. It is harder to get by. As a 26 year old graduating from school in this generation maybe then I don't want to say ever. Depression was tough. There's been war times. It's not taking anything away from other tough generations. But right now, even on minimum wage, you can't afford to get your own apartment and actually get by. Like the, the poverty line to the minimum wage thing. Like it's, the systems are broken. And so we need a generation of problem solving leaders.

This is the first generation that or time period where people have actually grown up in, in a truly globalized economy. And I know everything's not globalized, but you or I can hire. We've got, you know, result maps. We have people in the Philippines, we have people in Australia, South Africa, Latin America. Like it doesn't matter for companies that understand how to manage that way where people are located.

That's right.

And, and I think that what it does that people aren't catching is everybody's, oh, should we go back in the office and all this. That horse left the barn, man. Or what? Whatever leaves the barn. I don't know all my barn analogies. What really makes the difference right now is how well you communicate, how well you define where you want to go and how well you align to get there. Which I think is really powerful about what you are teaching people to do. Because all these problems you've mentioned, they're out there. They're in most companies. 99% of companies have these issues.

Yeah. Like the main thing is the, the competitive landscape for people. Talent has changed. Like now that we can work from home, now that we can get labor from anywhere, now that it's about getting an outcome and at the lowest price. We've done all kind like decades of like business process outsourcing. And we figured those things out. The average American, Canadian, Western European, Australian, like there are people that will do your job for literally 20% of the cost and do it better than you, that are more well educated. Like they literally exist all over Asia, all over Africa, like in many places in the world. And, and we don't realize how lucky we've been that we, that the world was closed off and they thought, hey, it's gotta be made in America. It's gotta be this and that. That's not true anymore. And now that we've got so much immigration going on, truly global economies and cultures, they're not going to have preference for it had to be made in Ohio. They don't care. They're like, we need to get the job done. And this is the resource we're going to use to do that because they're effective. So everyone now is competing with a lot of other people in a much different way for their own jobs. And if they don't believe that's true, they're going to get blindsided. But basically, I know we're going to run out of time here, Scott. But to me, there's like really three key things. If the best CEOs in the world are the value investors that allocate capital and get the best return on invested capital, we already know that scientifically the best performance of Companies are from CEOs who are the best value investors. There's all kinds of research on this. They disproportionately allocate resources where there's opportunities for breakout, growth. Okay. In order for them to do that effectively, okay, what's required, you need all your divisions. They got to build a plan, they got to build a strategy, they got to build like a go to market. And then the senior management team needs to analyze and vet those strategies and then make decisions on where they should allocate their growth capital. And right now it's really difficult for them to do that because they often, I talk to all kinds of enterprise every day. They don't have a consistent standardized way of doing the strategy or the plan. And on top of that, the way that they are doing it is like old school annual operating plan with functional excellence projects. It's like they're terrible strategies in the first place. And so no, it's no wonder that like boards and management teams are like, I saw your plan, I saw the hockey stick. I don't believe it. You want all this money for Capex? You're not getting the money. I don't see the return. And that's the, that is the MO that is the standard operating procedure out there is terrible. Strategies don't get funded, employees get frustrated and it's, we got to fix this. So you need an inspirational leader as a buffer between senior management and the people. They need to help senior management atone for past mistakes, past failures to their staff to actually do great leadership and help them resolve the problems and issues that need to be resolved in order for the employees to actually go and create value for customers so customers prefer them and buy more from them. Okay, that's the first thing. So senior management needs to be humble enough to bring in a leader, needs to be this in between arbitrage, like conflict resolution between us and them. Second thing is the employees need to have the skills and the analytical thinking and critical Thinking capabilities that the McKinsey of the world bring to the table that they train and teach people how to do. We gotta transfer how to do that, not just to four or five firms and the best of the best MBA kids who didn't go into investment banking. We need to democratize that skillset of critical thinking that needs to be across the whole. Every entrepreneur would crush a McKinsey consultant in critical thinking and problem solving. That's my honest truth. I don't put me on a quote for that. I'll take an entrepreneur as a consultant a million times more than any consultant from any business who hasn't actually grown a business for themselves. Okay, I'm taking advice from Alan Posey, Dan Martell, guys that I admire that have built businesses better and faster than me. That's who I listen to. I don't listen to marketing consultants or guys that haven't built businesses. Okay, so the best consultants are actually entrepreneurs. Most big companies have lost their entrepreneurs because they're off starting their new venture. They lose their alphas. So you're left with all these people without good leaders that don't know how to do strategy, that keep bringing in consultants and telling the people what they thought they should do, but they're not actually resolving the issues. So you need inspirational leadership. You need some sort of atonement between the staff and the management team that like, hey, the old way didn't work. I'm sorry. We're going to try things different. We're going to listen to you guys, we're going to empower you guys. We're going to focus on the right problems. We got to stop peanut butter spreading and trying to solve 50 objectives. Okay, I really simply are going to have to say your division doesn't get resources, your function doesn't get resources. Right now it is not essential to solve our crux big problem to get growth. It's not a data issue, it's not an IT issue. So you know what? You don't get funding. I'm sorry, it's business, it's not personal. We need hr, IT or sorry, hr marketing and sales collaborating right now to go solve this value issue for the customer. And maybe next time it is it. And maybe sales isn't as important. It's marketing to figure things out with it. But this cross functional team needs to be identifying the correct problem to be solved and then consistently have a cadence for reassessing what is the chain link set of issues that if solved will unlock growth. What would need to be true to get create More value for customers. Okay? Until we can teach critical thinking skills, provide the tools and frameworks that the big shot consultants bring to the table and just democratize that. Get that in the hands of the people and then bring in leaders who can inspire and get the people designing the strategy to solve for the right issues and get the management team buying into those strategies, supporting those strategies and actually giving the resources and allocating them to solving those problems and not trying to solve too many things at once. We're going to keep having growth problems in every company out there, every division. Okay? It's actually to me, a pretty simple solution. Go get Tom Brady. Send him into the bucks. Show them how to watch the game tape. Put strength against weakness. Teach critical thinking. Level up the in house people. Don't depend on heroes to come in and do it for you. The inspirational F16 guy, he's in there for a short time to inspire the people in the company that need to execute the strategy to do the best work of their lives. Okay? Go make their career and this experience at your company something formative for them so they can go and get promoted and add more value in the world. Invest in your people. We're in a recession, guys. Consulting budgets are being cut, execs are being laid off. The only way to solve it is get the existing tool you have left better. How do you invest in them? Send in inspirational leaders, give them great playbooks, Give them the time and the space to work on strategy and do problem solving. Teach them how to do actual strategy, problem solving based strategy and then listen and implement what they told you needs to be done. That's my thesis.