Strategic Thinking Skills
Guest Speaker Rich HorwathIn this episode of WiseTalk, CEO and Executive Leadership Coach Sue Bethanis hosts New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestselling author Rich Horwath to discuss his new book, STRATEGIC: The Skill to Set Direction, Create Advantage, and Achieve Executive Excellence.
Rich Horwath is the Founder and CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute, where he serves leadership teams as a strategy workshop facilitator, executive coach, and strategic advisor. His work has been featured in publications including Fast Company, Forbes, and the Harvard Business Review. Chief Executive Magazine has introduced him as “the world’s foremost expert on strategic thinking.”
As a former chief strategy officer and professor of strategy at the graduate level, he brings a practical, real-world approach based on strong foundational principles to help executives develop their strategic capabilities. Rich has appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX TV to share his perspectives on current business strategy issues. In addition to his work facilitating strategy workshops for leadership teams and providing executive coaching services and strategic counsel, he is a highly sought-after keynote speaker for groups ranging from 10 to 10,000.
Rich earned an MBA with Distinction from the Kellstadt Graduate School of Business at DePaul University and has completed postgraduate courses in strategy at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and the Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth College.
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In this insightful discussion, Rich provides a wealth of knowledge, offering practical approaches for leaders to enhance their strategic thinking and overall effectiveness. Rich simplifies the concept of strategy, highlighting the smart use of resources to achieve goals. This discussion covers strategic thinking, the necessity of perpetual learning, effective time management, and the significance of purposeful meetings. Throughout the talk, Rich underscores the value of leaders taking time for self-reflection and promotes a holistic approach to executive responsibilities.
Some key take-aways from this talk:
- This talk underscores the importance of continuous learning and the role of reading as a catalyst for strategic thinking. Rich emphasizes the need for leaders to be effective synthesizers, connecting ideas from diverse domains. He also highlights the significance of asking critical questions after reading, illustrating how this process aids in applying concepts to real-world challenges. (6:21)
- Rich offers a Strategic Fitness System, a comprehensive approach for leaders to strengthen their strategic capabilities. This system falls into four areas:
- Strategic: Involves decision-making, resource allocation, and competition.
- Leadership: Encompasses identifying leadership philosophy, values, principles, personal performance, and energy management.
- Organizational: Focuses on tools, techniques, and checklists for effective organizational management.
- Communicational: Emphasizes collaboration and effective communication and engagement with others.
- He introduces a three-step approach – acumen, allocation, and action – to stimulate strategic thinking on a daily basis. This involves gaining insights, reconfiguring resources based on new learning, and prioritizing tasks to avoid distractions. (13:03)
- Rich stresses the need for conscious time management and recommends tracking where your time is spent for one full week to see how much your time allocation aligns with your goals. He also suggests “mono-tasking” for at least 90 minutes daily as a means to enhance focus and effectiveness. (17:12)
- This discussion also emphasizes the importance of aligning meetings with specific goals and priorities to ensure discussions drive value. Rich highlights the need for thorough preparation prior to every meeting and to focus on decision-making within meetings. (26:13 – 33:47)
Rich provides valuable insights into the realms of strategy and leadership, his emphasis on continuous learning, time management, and collaborative communication serves as a beacon for leaders navigating the complexities of today’s business landscape. He encourages leaders to focus on their long-term legacy and think beyond day-to-day tasks, fostering a mindset of growth to create value and have a larger impact. His actionable insights on strategic thinking provide valuable takeaways for leaders striving for excellence.
“I define strategy as really the intelligent allocation of resources through a unique system of activities to achieve a goal.” (2:55)
“The best leaders are really carving time in their calendar to stop and think about the business individually, and then collectively with their teams.” (5:04)
“What I’ve seen is 20% of meetings are really about decision making and 80% are about talking about things, giving updates, and it really should be flipped. It should be 80% on decisions and 20% on that discussion.” (33:47)
“New growth comes from new thinking. So, if you don’t have anything stimulating your thinking and you’re not thinking in different ways, meeting different people, reading different things it’s Einstein’s definition of insanity: We’re doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. So, I’m a big believer that new growth comes from new thinking.” (36:49)
Rich Horwath:
Website | LinkedIn
Book: Strategic: The Skill to Set Direction, Create Advantage, and Achieve Executive Excellence
Sue Bethanis 0:03
Welcome, everyone to WiseTalk. This is Mariposas monthly podcast, we provide perspectives on leadership. Today we’re excited to welcome Rich Horwath. Rich has been described by Chief Executive Magazine as the world’s foremost expert on strategic thinking. As founder and CEO of the Strategic Thinking Institute, Rich serves executive leadership teams as a strategy facilitator, strategic advisor and executive coach. He has helped more than a quarter million people around the world develope strategic thinking and planning capabilities. That’s a lot Rich, a lot of people, you have been doing it for a while. Rich is a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today Best Selling Author of eight books on strategic thinking, and has been rated the number one keynote speaker on strategy at national conferences, including the Society for Human Resource Management Strategic Conference, he has appeared on ABC, NBC, CBS Fox TV to provide commentary on the strategic aspects of current events. And his work has appeared in publications, including Fast Company, Forbes, HBr. And today, we will discuss his new book, Strategic: The Skill to Set Direction and Create Advantage and Achieve Executive Excellence. So I really like to welcome you Rich, I’m just getting off the pickleball court. And I know that Rich also plays so we really want to talk about that today. But we’re going to try to talk about strategy, we could talk about, there is a lot of strategy in pickleball actually, but we will keep that later. For now what I want you to do, I’d love to hear your personal journey and why you decided to write this particular book. I read your bio, but now I want to hear the real stuff, the real good stories.
Rich Horwath 1:40
Yeah, thanks Sue, it’s great to be with you and excited to have the opportunity to chat with you all today. So my journey really started from this standpoint, about 25 years ago, and again, I’m dating myself a little bit. But at the time, I was working as a chief marketing officer writing a lot of marketing strategy plans for folks. And we were having a typical offsite meeting doing some strategic planning, and at one of the breaks were having coffee, and a manager came up and said, you know, Rich, I just had my performance review with my boss. And she said, I’m too tactical, I need to be more strategic. How do I do that? And Sue as you know, 25 years ago, most of the books on strategy by were people by planning, it was more corporate strategy. And so that was the light bulb for me that said, you know what, there’s not really a lot out there to help the individual leader be strategic day in and day out. And so that was really what started my journey, where people have a roadmap to move from tactical to strategic and change strategy from, you know, a birthday, where it happens once a year, there’s a lot of side of fanfare that kind of goes away to something that people do on a more regular basis.
Sue Bethanis 2:51
Yeah, like every day. Yeah. So how do you define it?
Rich Horwath 2:55
So I define strategy as really the intelligent allocation of resources through a unique system of activities to achieve a goal. So in simple terms, I really see strategies, how are you planning to achieve your goal? It’s not the plan itself. It’s how are you using your resources, your time, your people, your talent, your capital, to get to the destination that you want to get to. So that’s really what I see, you know, there’s lots of different definitions out there, I think 91 different definitions. So it is important.
Sue Bethanis 3:26
I think that all?
Rich Horwath 3:27
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So it’s really important I think for people in your organization, however you define it, to have a similar definition across the teams.
Sue Bethanis 3:37
Well, I know because it’s like, strategy is the what, is the how, I think it’s both frankly, I mean, it takes in what, in terms of the goal, and then the how to get there. And then what about the strategy, but I think that a lot of people do look at it and put it in the bucket of planning. So I’m wondering how you delineate between strategic planning and strategic thinking, thinking should be happening all the time, every day. So how do you define those?
Rich Horwath 4:05
Yeah, absolutely agree with you, Sue. I define strategic thinking as the generation of insights on a continuous basis to achieve advantage. Again, I define it simply as a learning that leads to new value. So to your point, Sue we should be generating insights, new learnings on a daily basis, and then the strategic plan, that’s when we channeled those insights into strategic direction.
I like that. I’ve not heard it that way. I like that channel insights. I like that a lot. I like that word channel. Good. Love it. Okay, because I’m gonna learn something here too, Rich now. I love that. So when you’re going into these organizations, these quarter million people you’ve been working with, that’s amazing. What are you seeing in terms of what’s going on with their leaders and them not being strategic? What are the challenges that they’re facing, mostly?
Yeah, I think the biggest challenge that I see Sue is it almost feels like in many places that taking time to think is almost something that you can’t do. Almost that you need permission, because we live in such an action oriented society. Run that activity treadmill, what did you do today? What did you do last week? Tell me your numbers, what’s the metric right now? So we don’t get off that activity treadmill enough, and stop and really think about, what are we doing? Why are we doing it? And how can we do it differently or better. And really, what I found in the people I’ve studied is that the best leaders are really carving time in their calendar to stop and think about the business individually, and then collectively with their teams.
Sue Bethanis 5:53
And how do you fit in reading? So one of my thoughts, one of my frameworks I use is that, I actually use the word strategic influencing. I don’t separate those terms. And I think that, you know, one has to be able to read and understand markets, and then translate that and then message it right. Okay. So in that requires reading, okay, so it’s not just thinking time, so when you say thinking time, are you including reading time too?
Rich Horwath 6:21
Yes, absolutely. And to your point, when we think we need we need some type of stimulus. So whether we listen to a podcast, whether we read, I’m a big believer that the best leaders, and I know in your book, you talked about a lot about daily reflection. And I think that’s such an important piece, we’ve got to be able to reflect and reading oftentimes can catalyze our thinking even, it can give us different ways to think about similar projects. I mean, as you know, innovation a lot of times is about borrowing ideas, concepts, domains. Exactly. So to your point, reading is such a great way to do that.
Sue Bethanis 6:58
Yeah. Let’s talk about reading for a second. Because I get this a lot like people execs will ask me like, What do you read? And what should I be reading? And besides their particular function, they need to be reading an ad or CIO, they need to be reading about IT and things like that, clearly, and the trends for digital transformation, things like that. But there’s more to it than that, because what our hope is with an executive that they’re going to be able to contribute to the overall strategy of the company. So what are you suggesting that people read these days? A couple of things?
Rich Horwath 7:36
So I’m a big believer, first off, that you’ve got to be a good synthesizer today. Yeah, we’ve got artificial intelligence now, which is able to create and generate lots of content. To me, what’s going to distinguish leaders today is, are you able to synthesize? Are you able to connect the dots of certain ideas in different ways? Your point what specifically, I mean, things like Popular Mechanics, I think is interesting, Scientific American. So again, I just try to dabble in different domains. And then to your point, what I love to do when I read is I’ll have one or two questions after I read, that will help me start to apply some of those things and think about how does that impact a client I’m working with or challenge that somebody is going through? So if you read an article, let’s say on biomimicry, from a biomimicry journal, and we’re talking about how do you then apply concepts from nature to your business? So if I’m working with a client, and they’re doing succession planning, I read an article on biomimicry, I might ask myself, well, what principles of biomimicry would help this company do succession planning more effectively? And so we can talk about, you know, is there a way to take a one present state of their business, and then transform it into something different? So let’s say in science, you’ve got a solid state, and you want to get into a gas or liquid state? How would we do that in business? How would we transform people’s mindset from what is a solid state the status quo into a more fluid state? So that’s again, just an example.
Sue Bethanis 9:11
Yeah that’s great example. Yeah, I mean, I love what you said about borrowing. I mean, we use that a lot, metaphor, you know, from one kind of biology in this case to another. I’ve taken people to the museum and zoomed in zoomed out taking photos and using photography to look at zooming in and zooming out on ideas. So there’s all sorts of different ways to do that. But I think that I liked that you talked about the sciences, I think the Economist is really good because it does have a lot of different content to draw from. So I have a liberal arts education, so I guess I’m sort of biased, but I think it’s important that we read in different domains, and then and apply it. So this idea of having two insights from the reading and then two applications of those insights. That’s kind of the way I look at it, I’m the same way I try to take something from it, right? Yeah. So good. That sounds great. Okay, so let’s talk about your system. So you’ve got four areas of the Strategic Fitness System at strategic, leadership, organizational and communicational. That’s a new word. Talk about all four, but I’m actually really interested in the communicational. Okay, yeah, so all four of those strategic, leadership, organizational, and communicational.
Rich Horwath 10:39
Yeah, so what I’ve tried to do over the years is determine when I’m working with executive teams, I used to focus just on strategy. But as you know, Sue from all of your work, it’s not just about strategy, there’s lots of other things that senior leaders need to be good at, especially these days, when it comes to the different stakeholders that they have, the communities they serve. So what I tried to do is say, how do we holistically look at what an executive does? And so those were the four areas that as I looked at all the tools, the techniques, the checklists, the writings started to fall into those four areas. So I simply use that as a compass to help leaders think about those things. So strategy is really again, about, things that we talked about decision making, resource allocation, competition, you know, that’s going to be that strategy realm, the leadership realm is really going to be about have you identified your leadership philosophy, your values, your principles, your legacy. What’s your personal performance look like? What’s your energy management look like throughout the day? Are you doing those things, the mindfulness, the gratitude, the nutrition, the sleep, all of those things that contribute to that mental toughness? I think I know you’re a former coach, you’re a pickleball player today, you understand the importance of the mental side, in sports. And I think in business, we don’t borrow enough techniques like visualization, for instance, which you know, most of the Olympic athletes, a lot of professional athletes use. Those are important things, too. So those are just some of the things that I’ve thought about. And then you mentioned the communication piece. You know, to me, that’s really these days about collaboration. It’s about being able to, when you collectively get together, be able to effectively and efficiently engage with one another. Too often, what I see Sue, and maybe you see it, too, is that meetings are monologues, they’re not they’re not interactive dialogues they are to their mind. So what I really give people how are you collaborating more interactively versus, you know, just giving orders?
Sue Bethanis 12:41
Right, right. Well, let’s take that strategic one. And let’s dive deeper into that. In terms of some of the some of the ideas, some of the framework, some of the metaphors, even in terms of how does one bolster, boost their strategic thinking? Well, and as a daily activity.
Rich Horwath 13:03
Yeah. So the first thing, what I typically do is I recommend three A’s acumen, allocation, and action, so those three A’s acumen, allocation, action, I think, are a good way to trigger us to think strategically. So acumen, what’s the insight? What’s the new learning in this situation? So whether it’s a one on one meeting, it’s a meeting with a customer, it’s a meeting with your board of directors? What’s your takeaway? What’s your learning from that situation? So that’s always first and then based on that new learning, that new idea, how are you going to configure your resources, your time, your talent, any budget, or people that you have in order to realize or enact that new value that you can bring either internally or externally? And then that third A is action, how do you really prioritize what’s important so that you’re not getting distracted by the urgent things that pop up on text and email. And so we’ve got those one to three priorities that really are driving what we do day in and day out. So I think that’s the biggest thing, and maybe the simplest thing people can do is subtract, you know, there’s been some good books written in the last few years about the ability to not necessarily just think about how do we grow? But what could we stop doing or takeaway from either our individual business or collective business that would bring more value to people? So I would say those three a’s and the ability to subtract a really are some things I’ve seen people use to be effective strategic thinkers.
Sue Bethanis 14:27
Can you give us an example, you’ve done this with so many people, give us an example of something that’s come up lately, in terms of helping someone make the shift between being more tactical to be more strategic in every day?
Rich Horwath 14:40
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the women that I’m coaching, she runs a $3 billion organization. And so she’s moved from being a divisional manager to the CEO role. So she has a lot more people responsibilities. And so one of the things that she was doing was as we observed and as she journaled she was spending a lot of time with direct reports in her previous division. So from a tactical standpoint, she was even weighing in on things like who should be the speaker at the conference, what day should the conference start on. So things that she would do in the past. And so what we talked about was just the concept of lead at your level. And again, I think too often when we transition from one leadership role to the next, because we’re experts in that area, we want to dive back in quickly, but we’re not allowing people behind us or with us to develop their skills. So that would just be one example of, especially as a senior leader, leading at your level, focusing on the topics that are going to bring the most value, I think one question I hear a lot of leaders use is, am I the only person that can make this decision or do this task? If the answer is yes, then that’s great. You should be doing that. If the answer is no, than that should be something you’re probably delegating.
Sue Bethanis 15:57
And 90% of the time, it’s probably no, it should be no.
Rich Horwath 16:00
Exactly.
Sue Bethanis 16:01
Okay, so acumen allocation action. I like that. A lot. So what is stopping people in your mind from why is it so difficult? I think everyone, no one I’ve ever coached has said, oh, yeah, i should be less strategic. No one. Right. So no one, I don’t care what level they are. So they know they need to do this. So we could say that time is in their way. Okay, so then how do we as coaches, or how do we as managers, help our managers, our directs be more strategic? I get that a lot like, I work with somebody who might be strategic, but they want to have their directs be more strategic. Or in the case of that one client right now where she wants her directs, she’s the VP of PRAR, and she wants them to be more strategic partners with the business rather than order takers. Okay, so you know, thinking more like how consultants think, so more of that synthesizing. So what do you think stopping people?
Rich Horwath 17:12
So the first thing I said, you mentioned time a moment ago, I think the biggest thing is, people are really not aware of or conscious of where they’re spending their time. So first thing I’d recommend is everybody, next Monday, on a piece of paper, you can use a journal, jot down every 30 minutes, where you’re spending your time for one full week, at the end of the week, put the categories together total up the time, and then I want you to graph it out visually. So on the x axis on the bottom, put email, one on one meetings, customer meetings, Board of Directors preparation, and then on the y axis, put the hours 1,2,3 up to 20, whatever it might be, then graph it out. And then once you graph that out, think about what are your top three goals for this quarter for this year, and then match up your goals, overlay that with where you’re spending your time. To me that’s the biggest thing is there’s a huge disconnect for where people have their goals and priorities and where they’re actually spending their time. So when I do coaching, that’s one of the first exercises we do. And typically 50% of the people we work with are shocked that they’re spending their time on things that really are not moving the needle for the organization. So I think that’s the biggest thing and as a build to that Sue. The other thing I’d recommend is idea of mono tasking. You know, we all multitask, people multitask all the time. But all the research out of Stanford from Professor Clifford Nass, and others talks about the fact that we make double the errors, we’re 30% less effective when we multitask. So I really tell leaders, have your direct reports mono task they need to spend at least 90 minutes every day on a topic that’s not email, that’s not reactive, it needs to be a proactive topic, something that’s on their agenda. And I recommended that first thing in the morning because once we start opening email and checking texts we head in different direction. What have you seen Sue from your perspective? I mean, what techniques or tips have you given folks are seen as best practices when it comes to you know, being more disciplined with where people are being strategic or not?
Sue Bethanis 19:18
They gotta a calendar it, they got to put in their calendar. Yep. And also my time with them, it tends to be like that, too. So I try to make it that more strategic, although, although most of the time I’m talking about their talent and their lack of, you know, the problems they’re having an issue with so and so. And, you know, that’s yeah, so that kind of gets in the way sometimes but those people you know amazing. I think we need to I think they need to definitely calendar it and I think that they need to, spend time on, I don’t care what you call it, strategy time, reflection time, reading time, and it’s all the same thing it’s sitting back and reflecting, and not being an action meeting mode. And I think the zoom just made it worse. Yes, I mean, much worse. So, but it also makes it easier to get away and do it too. So, I think what zoom did is it, I feel that this is gonna be a problem forever. It’s not going away, because most of our clients are remote first. So I think that what it means is that people can be so much more efficient at making meetings. So we’re in meetings so much more than we already were in too many meetings. So now we’re in even more meetings. And you just have to block it off and go for a walk, listen to podcasts. I don’t care what, listen to your podcasts while you’re walking, or in my case, I’ll get on the bike first and listen to something or read or whatever. I mean, I don’t think this is a silver bullet. I think that people, I am pretty adamant about this, I think people have to read. And I think they have to take the time to do it. I don’t know how people could just make shit up about, you know, what’s going on in the world, what they think their company should be doing if they’re not reading, right?
Rich Horwath 21:16
Yeah, absolutely. You got to have a good awareness of your situation, I always equate it with, you know, you wouldn’t go to your doctor’s office, let’s say you had a bad knee, right? Your knee was bothering you. And you walk in the exam room and the doctor comes in, she doesn’t ask any questions, she doesn’t take any tests, he just writes a script and hands it to you and leaves, we’d never take that because we know in medicine, the adage is prescription without diagnosis equals malpractice. But to your point, we’re not taking the time to diagnose and to read and understand what’s happening in our situation, before we prescribe a new initiative, a new strategy, a new project.
Sue Bethanis 21:53
Well taking your analogy even further, if you know you have a bad knee, or something’s up with you, most people would actually read about their situation before they go to the doctor, because that helps them ask better questions, right? Well, it’s the same process, right? It’s the same process in terms of like, before you start whatever, you need to be reading about it. And I mean, I think again, no one’s gonna disagree with me that we’d like to read more. Everyone wants to read more. Oh, my God, I don’t have enough time. But that’s the trick, how are we going to make the time? How are you going to set aside moments to do it? And I think that’s the hardest thing for an executive. Yeah, Kelly, please go for it.
Kelly 22:41
The first thing was very, very interesting years ago, I had my senior leader used to have us write all of our tasks and how we spent our time on either strategic, operational, or administrative, those were our buckets. And then we were to bring them in and have a discussion with her, and then to determine, really, it was to show us that we spent way too much time not doing the strategic things. But it’s really hard as HR executive to be able to have those conversations and to explain so this is really helpful to hear. When people say, well, my boss just says I need to be more strategic. I just need to think more strategically, what does that mean? And I thought, Oh, okay. So, you know, if I could have $1 every time I’ve heard that. One other thing that I’ve recently heard is that, I want to say it was Albert Einstein, but I do not recall exactly is that you cannot make a decision or come up with a decision or an idea at the same level of consciousness that you had it. And so that’s why they always say you come up with good ideas right before you go to bed or in the shower or whatnot. So I always try to you know, coach my executives to like get go on the bike, go for a walk, go to the beach, go do something different change the environment, unlock that lock and then that really comes out. But this has been really helpful because if anything, just validates the wrong of doing similar things and, and just spending that time away for thinking it’s very similar to recruiting like, I don’t have time to recruit, but I need somebody and it’s like, well, if you don’t spend the time to recruit that you’re never gonna get out of the tailspin that you’re in. And so really getting it on the calendar. And back in my early days, when I did ergonomics, when I had software engineers, they had to put on their schedule when they would do their stretching, because otherwise they would never get out of the chair. So I think that was a really good point Sue, about putting on your calendar, but it’s just a matter of you got to put it into a behavioral pattern and as a habit. So thanks for letting me chime in.
Sue Bethanis 24:35
I mean I would say that about everything like everything needs to become a habit and and I think particular strategic thinking needs to be, it’s not just only on the calendar because I think that you’re right that there is gonna be those in between times when you’ll be doing some thinking as well. But I actually I’m really big on people understanding the market and not just your market, but the economics, the world. It’s understanding the world. And I think that if there’s ever a time that we need do to understand the geopolitical issues of our world, it’s right now. And so. So I mean, my gosh, unbelievable what’s been going on. So and this affects business, you can’t help but affect business. Not to be an expert on it, but we need to understand what’s going on. So great question or comment, Kelly, I appreciate it very much. Very much. Okay. So you talk about these four areas. So we spent some time on strategic can you spend more time on the communicational and effective cooperation? And especially with hybrid it’s rough out there. I mean, we spend a lot of time on this with people. Yeah, it’s like, okay, let’s do a hybrid. Okay, let’s have you come in the office one to two days a week and then be on Zoom when you’re in the office. Yeah, so what’s you’re thinking about being strategic about hybrid?
Rich Horwath 26:13
Well, the first thing that comes to mind is we need to have a common understanding of one another’s goals. What are we trying to achieve? Too many times when I when I do audits, with executives on the meetings that their teams are attending and leading too many times the meetings are not attached to specific goals and priorities. They’re legacy meetings, they’re legacy interactions. The meetings themselves really move into the tactical realm much too quickly. And so one of the things that I’ve seen be effective is, and Kelly talked about it in her comments, which I thought were great. She talked about the strategic, operational, administrative, I do think, to build on Kelly’s point, your agendas should almost be color coded, to say these are going to be strategic topics, administrative, operational, because what I bet is most people out there, their strategic topics for meetings, they may have one or two on there, but they’re probably spending five to 10% of that meeting time, energized by the adrenaline of the fire drills and what’s not working to your point, I need to get rid of this person, they’re not doing as well as they need to, or we’ve got a communication issue here. So we get into the firefighting mode in these meetings, right? Not spending enough time talking about the things that are really going to drive value.
Sue Bethanis 27:32
I know, it’s, I mean, and what happens invariably is that and we do it on my own company, we have the strategic thing there and then it gets thrown off, because we have to do all the other stuff. The other stuff gets in the way, because we got to worry about the holiday party or the color on the website. Yeah, I know Allison’s laughing right now. Yeah. So yeah, I think that you do have to devote time and be disciplined about it? For sure. But I love what Kelly said about those three areas and figuring out where are we spending our time? I mean, when you have your executives that you work with or you know, you’re in your workshops, and also in your coaching, what are they what are they spending their time on? Is it mostly admin stuff?
Rich Horwath 28:15
Well, for a lot of it is what I would bucket as firefighting. So it’s things that they didn’t plan on doing that week, but pop up. And again, sometimes it’s a customer issue, it needs to be handled, but the reality is most of the time it does not need their attention. So the first thing I recommend is, when they have those meetings, when a topic comes up, that’s really not something that’s goal or priority oriented. Let’s just say stop for a moment, let’s put that on the side and then let’s come back to that at the end. And typically when we get back to that at the end, it’s not something that people feel strongly about, or we don’t really need to spend as much time on that. Because again, we love the urgent, the urgent seems to dominate things that we do. So I’m a big believer that you’ve got to audit what you’re doing. And I like scoring, you know, it’s super easy. You were a D1 volleyball coach, you know the importance of scoring. So I like to say score every interaction you have for a week, whether it’s a one on one interaction, it’s a meeting, zero is no value., three is high value, and then categorize that at the end of the week, what are your scores? And again, sometimes it’s on us, sometimes we’re leading meetings that maybe aren’t as valuable. So we’ve got to sometimes look in the mirror and say, was that a three? Was that a high value for people in that meeting or in that interaction? What value did I bring? So to your point Sue, the biggest problem I see is people are not preparing for meetings because there’s so easy. They’re so quick to do it on Zoom. People aren’t preparing for those.
Sue Bethanis 29:50
Because they’re going from one to the next.
Rich Horwath 29:52
Exactly. So what I tell folks is it should be a one to one, if you’ve got an hour meeting, you should be doing an hour of prep. And people fall out of their chairs, are you crazy? But if you start to try to implement that, number one, you have much higher quality meetings. And number two, you’ve got to eliminate meetings because there’s too many meetings on the books already. And a lot of them shouldn’t be there.
Sue Bethanis 30:15
My hope is with AI. I was just reading an article about this the other day, that the number one way we can, actually one of the number one reasons where we can use it is just to at least delineate what’s important in the meetings, and you know, they can be recorded, and then the bot can record it, and delineate stuff that s most important and relevant and then people can get it and go, I mean, at least we can do that. Because it’s ridiculous how many meetings we have, I mean, when I have like five or six meetings a day, I’m like, first of all, I’m exhausted. And the only reason why I like to do it is because or maybe it’s probably more like seven or eight. It’s like that’s what my clients are doing, so at least I understand how they feel. But I just, it’s exhausting. And it doesn’t make a lot of sense. So I mean, I don’t want to turn this into like meeting management. But that is a part of it in terms of if you’re having meetings just turning things out and trying to make decisions and then not make decisions, then it’s a waste of time. It’s not, there’s no value. So I do like the idea of your thesis scoring idea. It doesn’t have to be a score, per se. But just figuring out was that valuable and what value am I adding to the situation? And can someone on my team add just as much value by them being there instead of me?
Rich Horwath 31:41
Yeah, and I really believe in, you know, what I found in my work with senior leadership teams is that the proliferation of meetings oftentimes is because there’s not clear decision rights in the organization on who’s making what decision. So now we got to get everybody together, we’ll talk about it. A lot of times they’re trying to use consensus, when at the end of the day, yes, you want everyone’s input, but everybody should not be weighing in on the decision itself. You don’t have to have consensus for every decision, you know, Amazon, Stripe, some of these other companies have really bought into the idea of disagree and commit, here’s my input, but at the end of the meeting we’re gonna move forward with a direction. So I might disagree but I’m going to commit to that direction. I don’t see enough people doing that.
Sue Bethanis 32:29
Well, right. And then the answer is to have another meeting about it.
Rich Horwath 32:35
That’s exactly right.
Sue Bethanis 32:36
Yeah. And Astelle just popped in and said, Yes, I agree. So she’s obviously seeing that in her company. Yeah, I mean, I just think that the continuation of lack of decision making is, we have a very short and sweet communication checklist. And there’s four different things that are going on in meetings and so you’re not just delineating the content, you’re delineating and putting a process to each thing. It’s like, Is this brainstorming? Is this feedback? Is this decision making? Is this requests? That’s it, like I should get updates too. Shouldn’t do too many of those things in meetings. But that’s it. So it’s like, Okay, we’re gonna brainstorm then commit, brainstorm and make a decision. Great. So you just say that real quick before you started thinking, time box it, 15 minutes, we’re gonna discuss and then make a decision at the end. And maybe it goes 20 or 25, even, but you know what you’re doing, you’re not just sitting around talking about it. There’s just too much sitting around talking about stuff.
Rich Horwath 33:47
Exactly. I mean, what I’ve seen is 20% of meetings are really about decision making an 80% are about talking about things, giving updates, and it really should be flipped. It should be 80% on decisions and 20% on that discussion.
Sue Bethanis 34:05
Then updates should be an email and slack and whatever. Yeah, totally. And in fact, we made this communication checklists, because when we were working with Cisco, and this was 25 years ago, okay. 25 years ago when we started, and I was noticing the same exact thing, I might have even said 20 and 80. I said, people are updating in meetings and making decisions on email, this needs to be flipped. Yeah. So well, this is really interesting. So what else as far as we didn’t talk about leadership and organizational focus areas, is there anything you would like to add in those areas that would be helpful to the group right now and anyone who’s listening?
Rich Horwath 34:51
Yeah, the main thing I would say from a leadership standpoint, is really give thought and reflection to what your legacy would be when you finish. I think too often we’re in the day to day we’re in what’s my next job look like? What does this job look like? But really, you know, you talk a lot about it in leadership chronicles, I think you’ve got to step back and reflect on, you know, when, when I’m done, what do I want people to say about me? What what type of value will I have contributed? And I think if we start with that end piece, then as leaders, we can start to say, okay, what are the leadership principles, the guidelines that my team and I work through day in and day out to help us get to that legacy. So I think that’s the biggest thing is we’re just not thinking forward enough about where we want to be and who we can bring value to. We’re too caught up in in the minutia day to day.
Sue Bethanis 35:45
Right, right. Okay, so organizational, anything you want to mention?
Rich Horwath 35:50
You know, the main thing, and I know you’ve worked with hundreds of startups, and when you work with your startups, a lot of the work is around the business model, I mean, simply put, how do we create value? How do we deliver it? And then how are we going to capture it in the form of profits, subscriptions, sales, whatever. I don’t see enough of the mature companies, spending time on the business model each year, to startups are spending a lot of time, but once you get to be a mature company, people are not taking a close enough look at how can we create value? How can we deliver it and how we capture it? And that should be done, I think at the organizational level, and each functional area as well. So that would just be another take home is really think about how are we creating, delivering and capturing value?
Sue Bethanis 36:32
Nice, nice. I like it. Okay, so before I get into some more of your information, I want to put you on the spot here. What’s the one thing that people should take away if they want to be more strategic? What’s the one thing they need to do for sure?
Rich Horwath 36:49
Well, I’m going to build on what you said earlier around the reading piece, to build on that, new growth comes from new thinking. So if you don’t have anything stimulating your thinking and you’re not thinking in different ways, meeting different people, reading different things it’s Einstein’s definition of insanity: We’re doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. So I’m a big believer that new growth comes from new thinking. And I like the idea of reading to stimulate that.
Sue Bethanis 37:17
Right, right. Gotta stay curious. Yep, absolutely. Hashtag stay curious. Okay.
Rich Horwath 37:23
Sherlock Holmes, be a detective. That’s right.
Sue Bethanis 37:27
Be an antrhopolost, I love it. Well, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much Rich, and I want to make sure people have all your information. Your website is strategyskills.com. And that has all your information, your book and stuff, all your books, actually. And then you can find of course Rich on LinkedIn, linkedin.com.in/richhorwath the book, again is Strategic: the Skills to Set Direction, Create Advantage and Achieve Executive Excellence. I have really appreciated your discussion today. And I’ve also appreciated the input from our participants as well. So thank you for for that. So Rich again, thanks so much. Hopefully see you on the pickleball court.
Rich Horwath 38:16
Thank you. So it was great to be with you. I really appreciate it.
Sue Bethanis 38:19
It’s been fun. Thanks, everybody. We’ll see you next time. Bye. Aloha.
Rich Horwath 38:24
Bye bye.