70. Is This Strategy Working?

Intro: Duration: (02:31)

Opening music jingle & sound effects

Jeff Hunt:

This Human Capital Podcast is brought to you by Goalspan, a performance management app that helps you set goals, get real time feedback, run reviews, and align your workforce around what's most important. With Goalspan, you can integrate with all your favorite HR and payroll apps. To learn more, go to goalspan.com.

Welcome to the Human Capital Podcast. I'm Jeff Hunt. Today, we're going to talk about strategic planning, but before you roll your eyes and say that sounds too corporate or academic, or maybe even boring, let me give you some compelling stats as to why planning is so important and how it affects everybody.

These research stats come from HBR, Boston Consulting Group, Gallup, and the Strategic Management Society. Organizations that engage in regular planning are 12 percent more likely to achieve strong financial performance, 42 percent more likely to report high levels of employee engagement, 88 percent say it improves their decision-making processes, They're two and a half times more likely to enter new markets successfully, and 80 percent of them believe it has a positive impact on their corporate culture.

To me, this makes strategic planning a critical leadership discipline. All organizations, large and small, must plan regularly if they want to stay agile and competitive in today's business landscape. Today I have the pleasure of interviewing two exceptionally competent strategic thinkers and planners.

Lewe Atkinson and Barbara Collins. These two co-authored a great new book titled, “Is This Strategy Working?” Which I've read, and I loved it, and we'll have a chance to discuss today. Both Lewe and Barbara are strategic management facilitators, consultants, and global partners with the Haynes Center for Strategic Management.

Lewe and Barbara, welcome to the show. It's great to have both of you on, and I was just really appreciating our pre interview discussion about how like-minded we are about strategic thinking and planning. And so, we have a lot to cover today. And before we do, help our audience to get to know each of you personally a little bit.

Topic 1. Who or what inspired you the most along your career? (02:30)

Jeff Hunt:

And Barbara, let's start with you. I'd like you to just share a quick thumbnail of your career journey. And maybe along with that, share, was there any one or two people that really inspired you along the way?

Barbara Collins:

Hey, so I started about a year after getting out of college. I had the opportunity, I went, I was interviewed for a position that I was very much interested in as a headstart at a headstart program, coaching the teachers, because my background was in education.

And I didn't hear from them for, I don't know, two or three months. When they called me back to hire me, they told me I was now assistant director of this program, which was rather large. It had six buildings around the area and a couple of million dollars in federal funding. And six months into that stint, the director left leaving me in charge at 22 years old.

Out of 60 employees and six centers, no 90 employees, six centers, and a couple of million dollars with virtually no experience actually managing people, except from having had some good supervisors and managers that I had worked for, which was very helpful. And so I always say I, I got my baptism by fire. I really made mistakes.

I was at least smart enough to listen to the people who reported to me, but were considerably more experienced. And I made it through and have generally been in management positions and now have trained managers, have developed and coached managers and done a lot of strategic management with. Uh, people who are doing the jobs, so, and have really had a, a big focus on doing that well.

Jeff Hunt:

Was there anyone that was a inspiration to you along the way?

Barbara Collins:

Well, actually this, a woman, Valerie, who was the director who walked away, and I can imagine she must have had a very good reason for how she was being, how the parent organization was dealing with her. And she was very good, she was very good at building the team and thinking through problems and issues and plans with her management and leadership team. She set a great example, so I had something to go on when I was thrown into the fire.

Jeff Hunt:

Lewe, how about you give us a thumbnail and let us know who inspired you?

Lewe Atkinson:

Yeah, like Barbara, I was at a young age, immediately out of my graduate school, what early twenties, thrown into a, what we call in Australia, at least the deep end.

And I'm sure it's the same in other parts of the world where in a manufacturing environment working for Unilever, a big multinational company, I was put in charge of whole factories, hundreds of people, with a production schedule to turn out food products. And that certainly gave me an exposure. To the reality of managing people and managing to schedule and achieving goals in a very early stage of my life.

And, I certainly got the opportunity to move through the organization, large company to be exposed to a whole lot of facets of manufacturing and strategy first emerged in my career path when I took on the role of production planner, and that's the person responsible, of course, for. Ensuring that all the raw materials and staff and equipment is available.

At the right time to meet the production schedule for ensuring that the supermarket shelves were full of all our products as our customers demanded that. And I left Unilever to go and do a higher degree, a PhD in chemical engineering. And it sort of, that led me, that was a wonderful gift I gave myself to immerse myself in a group of people within a university in Australia that were two or three all good. Orders of magnitude smarter than me. I really felt like a, you know, a child in the presence of quite a few, quite extraordinary individuals, but it just opened my mind up to a whole range of different things that I'd never had the opportunity to be exposed to before. And fortunately, when I graduated from my PhD, I was able to step into a startup company.

And the fellow that inspired me in that particular role was the CEO, because this was late 1990s and we were a technology automation startup company supplying robotics into the meat processing industry. And this particular guy was so wonderful in ensuring you had access to all the resources you needed to be successful.

And in those early days, that was pre almost the birth of the internet. Mobile phones were just emerging as being a part of an hour day to day business tool. All of those things were made immediately available to you. What you need, you get to make the, make the job a success and that sort of support and mentorship I really value.

And I think even in reflection today, he's one of the best bosses I've ever had. And then another inspirational character is Barbara and the other partners within the Hain Center for Strategic Management, who taught me a really important. Set of skills in terms of facilitation of groups through planning processes, through to execution, through to being held accountable or responsibility for achieving the success that you set out to achieve.

And those facilitation skills have been really important to contributing to my success as a consultant and planner throughout the current part of my career.

Topic 2. Is this Strategy Working? (08:57)

Jeff Hunt:

Well, thank you both for sharing. I'm curious, so I've read your book, Is This Strategy Working? By the way, I love the title and I loved the book. And for listeners, we are going to put a link to the book in our show notes and it's also going to be on my books list, reading list on the Human Capital Podcast website.

So if you're curious about this book and you want to learn more, you can find it there, tell me why you chose to write this book together.

Barbara Collins:

I think that we've had a heavy. At the Haynes Center, a heavy emphasis on planning, on strategic planning, but I would say an equal focus that we picked up from Steve Haynes on the importance of execution of actually putting that into action and thinking through what it would take to make this a Happen and to actually have results and not just say, okay, here's the plan.

Go do it, which we know doesn't work. But the third element is really, what are we accomplishing? Or we may be doing all the things that we set out in our plan. Question is, is that any use? Have we accomplished anything at all? And if so, is it even close to what we thought we could accomplish? And what difference does it make?

And so, you know, our working title was, is this strategy working? And then we just never changed it because it worked.

Lewe Atkinson:

And I've cheekily added a subtitle to it in our promotion of the book. Is this strategy working? The subtitle being does turning this dial move that needle? And it's a, it's a really important concept of causality because at the hearts.

Of strategy is the fact that it's actually only a hypothesis. This is what we are going to do over the course of whatever the next time horizon, whether it's near term or one year or three years or five years, who has a five year strategy anymore is it's probably a very moot point. However, the notion that your.

In focused on achieving a particular outcome and ends via means that you've decided to implement over time is the really crucial step towards execution of strategy. And what often we see is where there is a lack of focus on the ends and whether you're getting towards those ends. But what people tend to do is get tied up in the means, the weeds of the day to day getting the job done, which may not necessarily because of a changing set of circumstances in the operating environment mean that those means that you originally identified or strategies that you originally identified to get you there may not be the right ones anymore.

Topic 3. If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it (12:15)

Jeff Hunt:

I really appreciate that. And I'm just reflecting on what both of you shared. And Barbara, from your standpoint, it's almost like you're saying, okay, you can be at the train station and get on the train. But if you're getting on a train that's going to the wrong destination, that's problematic. And Lewe, you're saying that if you are going.

After this destination, but you're not actually utilizing key success measures and that's going to be problematic. And so, in fact, I'm just going to refer to a quote that was in your book. It says, Measuring is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can't measure something, you can't understand it.

If you can't understand it, you can't control it. If you can't control it, you can't improve it. Do either of you have a comment about that?

Lewe Atkinson:

I think, you know, We like to emphasize that the approach that we use to facilitate strategy, development and execution is what we call measured LED measures led. So we start with clarity of purpose.

That's really crucial, being really clear about what's to be achieved. And then the next step is, what evidence would you see vision or mission being executed? What evidence would you see of that happening? And that's the beginning of determining what is the right thing to measure. Over to you, Barbara.

Barbara Collins:

Speaking of measurement, some of the statistics you gave, Jeff, at the beginning of the podcast, I was thinking about how, you know, how much more successful. And I mean, way back in college, I read a study that said that people at, I don't know, Harvard, I think, who had written plans when they graduated were 20 years, they were studied then, and 20 years later, over a period of time, the same graduates, uh, were far more, I mean, incredibly more successful because they had thought through and put their plan in words.

And it also occurs to me that when you know what you want and what you want to accomplish, And when you engage the people who are doing it with you, they know what we're trying to do. They know why we're here, why we're doing what we're doing, and they're able to make sound decisions. They feel part of it.

They feel engaged. They feel valued. It makes a huge difference in the culture of the organization when we are in this together. Now, clearly, if there are owners, they have a different level of investment. People who feel valued and feel included in what we're doing and who understand it are going to be much better at accomplishing it.

And when you invite them in also to look at the data and say, how are we doing? What really are we accomplishing that values them as well.

Jeff Hunt:

And it kind of underscores the concept of if we can weigh in, then we can buy in. But if we don't have the opportunity to communicate and understand and be a part and feel a part of something in an organization.

It's going to be a lot harder to be engaged and feel the purpose that we are collectively pursuing. One of the people that I interviewed previously on my podcast was talking about the Enneagram and the difference between a group and a team, and the group being a cadre of individuals or an assembly of individuals that might share something in common, whereas a team Being a group of individuals that share something in common, but has a common goal or a common purpose and has interdependencies in achieving that purpose.

And so, Barbara, it's almost like that's what you described is if we can properly communicate this purpose and vision, then all of a sudden, we can get people on board and all moving in the same direction, right?

Barbara Collins:

And what we generally recommend is Bringing your initial ideas out as a draft and saying, this is what I think we ought to try to accomplish and engaging people at that level, even in creating the vision and envisioning and their role in it, their part, the part they could play and get their hearts engaged as well as their minds and their hands.

Topic 4. The primary job of a leader (15:52)

Jeff Hunt:

Lewe, what's the primary job of a leader in the midst of all of this?

Lewe Atkinson:

This is a challenging aspect of strategy and execution, because execution requires, if it means truly transforming the way you are today to achieve what you need to achieve in the future for future success and sustainability, transformation.

And transformation leads to change. And so one of our premises in the approach that we use to strategy. Is that the primary job of leaders is planning and change. Unfortunately, leaders have two jobs, working on the business of today to ensure you're effective and efficient in delivery of whatever your outcomes are.

For today's business and at the same time, like building, like the metaphor of building the plane in the sky, you're creating the whole new business as well as running today's business. And that sort of, you know, duality of role is quite challenging for busy executives because they're immediate. Intent generally falls to day to day rather than ensuring a sustainable future for the organization.

But I ask who else can do it if it's not the leaders of an organization.

Jeff Hunt:

It seems to me that what you just described underscores the importance of being proactive when defining these primary jobs of a leader to be. Focused around planning and change, because if we're not explicit, then what do we get?

We get ambiguity, and if we get ambiguity, how can we actually hold people accountable if there's only gray matter, right?

Lewe Atkinson:

Indeed, the case, and I know it's a bit of a throwaway line, and I, you know, in some quarters, Jack Welch is never, has, has not necessarily been seen as the best leader, but one of his sayings that we often use is one that illustrates that point.

When the right of change on the outside. Exceeds the right within the end is Nye. And so that notion of keeping that duality of what's going on in the outside the organization versus what we, what happening within and changing to meet those customer needs, competitive environments, and other sort of more existential pressures on an organization is really crucial role of leaders.

Topic 5. The SWOT framework (19:43)

Jeff Hunt:

For those listeners that are less familiar with strategic planning, one of the most critical aspects, and I think both my guests would agree, is doing an adequate situation assessment, so really understanding what's going on internally in the organization, what's going on externally in the organization, what SWOT.

Thank you. And Barbara, one of the things in the book that I really appreciated was a little bit of a different perspective on SWOT relative to your desired outcomes. Can you talk a little bit about this framework that you have in the book?

Barbara Collins:

I can, because when I heard this from Steve Haynes 23 years ago, it really made my, my brain light up.

It was that. If you begin with what are my strengths and weaknesses, you may have a strength in, well, say producing eight track tapes or, you know, something else that it really has to be in relationship to what you see your business being in the future, and that should be very closely related to who, who are we trying to reach and what are they, what did they want?

What are they going to want? So it's really a look at where are we going, where do we want to be in three years, in five years, in ten years, what do we foresee as a potential future for this function and this organization, and it could be The betterment of a community, it could be in curing cancer, but to see where we're going and to think of everything in terms of what's our vision, what is our future, what's the future we want to create.

And when you begin there. It doesn't matter so much what are we good at now, it matters what can we, or do we need to become good at. Maybe there are some skills we have, some abilities, some capacities that will be very useful. But if you ask it in terms of, Here's our vision, here's where we're going, what do we have now that will really work in that future?

And letting go of the things that really won't be relevant to where you're trying to go. And that for me was a whole different way. Of looking at strengths and weaknesses, it's really in relation to what we want to become and letting go of the things that don't fit that.

Jeff Hunt:

I really appreciate that because so often you hear about these SWOT exercises that companies do or organizations do and they, they're common is really then what, okay, so we have this, we have these strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats, these long lists of things.

Then what do we do with him? We don't really know. So I think you're giving listeners a very actionable set of strategies. For instance, with strengths, when you're looking at strengths relative to opportunities, you can look at the actions that are required to build on those strengths to take advantage of the opportunities, right?

Barbara Collins:

Absolutely. It does remind me of a client that had a legacy computer system that people kept adding things to. Individuals were adding software, trying to fix the things that didn't interact, that didn't work well together. And over 20 years, it became so antiquated that it was interfering with getting the work done.

Because no one had been asking what, how should we be evolving to keep up with the work we're doing and the programming we need. And they ended up having to go through a radical change. None of the staff had the skill to work on modern systems and modern platforms. And they ended up basically letting go, giving all those people notices.

And telling them they could reapply for the new positions to do the new work. And for some of them, you know, they just felt like they had been doing what they were asked to do at the company. They were working the legacy, making the most of the legacy systems, but none of them had paid, very few had paid attention to learning what else is out there in my field that I should be.

Learning, even if I can't do it here.

Lewe Atkinson:

That's a very good example of the dual role of leaders planning and change. So those leaders of that organization needed to be looking at the next genre of software platform delivery to enable a more orderly transition or growth to that new place.

Jeff Hunt:

And it seems to me that the highway of death, if you will, that is littered with companies that haven't made it, is littered with organizations that, where leaders did not focus on those two activities well, correct?

Lewe Atkinson:

Well, there's always a tension, I feel, particularly at a higher governance level. There's the executive team and often the board. Yeah. The people who often end up losing their jobs is the executive team, because the board would say, well, that's their job to keep that focus. But we push accountability up to the level it deserves to be held.

And certainly the board also of an organization has a role. To ensure the executives doing that scanning the future environment and ensuring that what the vision of the organization is, is fit for purpose for that new future and it's not. Either, or John, it's a collaborative relationship that needs to be established with the executive team and the board to ensure that that future is secure.

And we often see the disconnect occurring in a whole lot of different organizations. And so. Our mandate is to ensure that where responsibility should be born, it actually is, and that collaboration and handover between board responsibility and executive responsibility is well articulated and very clear in terms of roles and responsibilities.

Which is a bad strategy with development and execution.

Topic 6. Accountability at the board level. The four critical questions for strategic planning (26:46)

Jeff Hunt:

That's very helpful because it seems as though, maybe I'm generalizing here, but oftentimes that installation to the board allows them to actually get off a little bit too easy. If you will, there should be a higher level of accountability at the board level if they are governing properly within an organization.

Lewe Atkinson:

Yes. That governance piece is really important and I'll let Barbara continue to. To share her view on it, but it seems to be a late arrival to the strategy conversation though, even though it's so core to success.

Barbara Collins:

Yeah, I agree completely with Lewe the, and it was a concept that was sort of brought to the Haines center that we've all benefited from the idea of what the role is of the board, the oversight role, the goal setting, the visioning.

Being involved in that, but also letting the people you hire use their expertise, not have the board telling people how to do their jobs. They, they set the goals, they set the measures, they conduct necessary oversight. But you also have to let the CEO and the experts within the organization. And in our case, it could be engineers and PhD scientists or all kinds of people that have been hired to actually think through and do the work.

So the board not telling the organization how to do things, only what to accomplish. And that relationship needs to be clarified and reinforced and both sides respected.

Jeff Hunt:

So, just to zoom out for a minute to the most macro level we can, and this question is really for either one of you, share with our listeners, what are the four critical questions? For a strategic planning framework,

Barbara Collins:

I got four. That's part of our whole systems thinking perspective. Where are we going? How will we know when we get there? What do we have now? What do we need to have to do it? And, you know, and then eventually we see what are our outcomes and do we need to do better or what can we do better?

Lewe Atkinson:

And just to build on what Barbara's just described, to keep ourselves accountable to the, our responses to those questions. We use this matrix. Remember what I was mentioning earlier about all strategy is a hypothesis. Okay. So we're still at the hypothesis stage based on what we think the world around us is doing and where we want to be.

What evidence will we see if we got there and what do we need? To move ourselves towards that, the measures and moving towards are the two parts of the hypothesis. So we have this matrix of core strategies, imagine down the first column, they're going core strategy, 1, 2, whatever. And then across each of the columns is key success measure 1, 2, And this matrix allows us to cross check.

All right. Core strategy three is likely to derive P success measure four and five, and maybe seven, particularly if it's a good core strategy that has co reinforcing capacity to do multiple things for us. And so if you can imagine, we end up with this causal matrix that then is the basis for what we continually test over time as we move forward and implement.

And it's telling us that this core strategy is effective because we're watching change in that dial. Remember what I mentioned right at the beginning is moving this dial, it's just moving this nidal dial, shifting that needle. And so the core strategy is the dial, the key success measure is the needle, and we're looking for change in the needle.

If it's not happening, and in our next review, we've got to ask ourselves. Have we got the right strategies in place or indeed, have we got the measures, the right measures or evidence to get us to where we thought we're going to get to as well. So the, at its essence, the book is about that causal relationship and how do you test that going forward?

Jeff Hunt:

One of the things I love about that is it moves you from a set it and forget it mentality, which is one that's static, so I create my plan, I put it on the shelf, I pull it out in a year and I'm really frustrated because I haven't accomplished those things, to a living and breathing sort of dynamic plan.

So your matrix, Lewe, provides a method for continual check in and updates, which is exactly what the probably most successful organizations are doing today. They're agile. It's continuous performance management. It's not one time and then it becomes irrelevant. Right?

Lewe Atkinson:

And yes, but it also, there's a vulnerability there, isn't there? You're saying. This is our best, we're the experts, we're the executive, this is the board has agreed to these measures and strategies. It's our best guess for where we at right now, but we know the world changes and uh, Mintzberg, the famous Canadian strategy academic said, there's this thing about intended strategy versus realized strategy.

But what actually happens is the realized strategy. And there's often a divergence between the two as we move our way forward, because we haven't got a crystal ball. We can't predict what's going to happen. It's our best guess at the time. So that underpins or emphasizes the need for that agility, that constant renew and possibly renewal, which is at the heart of what we say is a good approach to strategy.

Barbara Collins:

It reminds me of two more little messages that we got over and over again from Steve Haynes and have adopted wholeheartedly. One is the day to day will take up all your time unless you prioritize the strategic. And that certainly happens everywhere. The Executors.

Who fall prey to getting involved in day to day decision making probably aren't delegating enough and don't recognize that their priority needs to be the strategic and reinforcing and rewarding. People who are moving in those directions. And the other part, the other thing that we heard over and over again was culture each strategy for dinner.

It's your culture needs to be right as well, to care about the strategic change, to be part of that, to engage in it, to prioritize it in their own day and their own week and month. And so those things need to be tended to it. Leadership is a big deal. It's a big project.

Topic 7. Lighting round questions (34:15)

Jeff Hunt: Absolutely. Well, and as a leader or a manager or an executive, to your point, Barbara, are you day to day working for the business or are you working on the business?

There must be a balance of spending adequate time working on the business rather than for the business. In order to ultimately achieve those results that you're setting out for, so. Yeah. Well, I, I'm going to shift us into some lightning round questions. So I'm going to throw out some kind of fun questions for each of you to answer on the fly.

The first one is, what are you most grateful for? Lewe, let's start with you.

Lewe Atkinson:

Oh, look, I've got to be grateful to have been born in a wonderful country. I That I come from Australia, we don't have everything perfect down under, but having said that and having had the opportunity to travel the world and work with people like Barbara, I know that in relative terms, life's pretty good where we are.

Jeff Hunt:

Well, and ironically, two recent guests on the episode were both from Australia. So hats off to those down under. So Thank you.

Barbara Collins:

Thank you. I have to say something very similar. I'm finding Steve Haynes, finding the Haynes Center and meeting people like Lewe and our other partners. And we have, uh, certainly disagreed vehemently on a number of things, but working with people from other cultures, from other, that have other governmental structures that have other business philosophies and perspectives has just been so.

Enlightening and so engaging and so stimulating and I feel extremely grateful for having had the opportunity to work internationally and with people whose views on the world are different from mine. I really, I feel so fortunate to have that opportunity.

Jeff Hunt:

Barbara, let's stay with you for the next question, which is what is the most difficult leadership lesson you've learned over your career?

Barbara Collins:

I think it is for me about the balance between people and work, about understanding how important culture is and relationships in engaging people and working with them, that paying attention to both. I tend to be task oriented. And I need to remember to keep people with me to, and to be with them on what they're doing.

And that that kind of engagement is as important to get the work done. So if I want the task, I need to also have the relationships to support it.

Jeff Hunt:

How about you, Lewe?

Lewe Atkinson:

Values, values are so important and it's really crucial for a leader within an organization to ensure that they're in step with the value of values of an organization, because as soon as the, they begin to diverge your values as a leader and those of the organization, that's a clear message that it's time to leave.

We're really reluctant to move on. But if anyone wanted a litmus test, is it the time right for me to go look at your own values, look at the values of the organization? That's the answer.

Jeff Hunt:

Lewe, who is one person you would interview if you could, living or not? Lewe Atkinson:

Oh, look, I'm not going to sound like a geek now, but the In being exposed to systems thinking and understanding who's who in the systems thinking world, there's a fellow called Russell Ackoff who's passed away now.

But fortunately we have access to a lot of YouTube recordings of his lectures and speeches and et cetera. I'd love to sit down with him and just test some of my thinking about this whole body piece that we've been talking about in terms of strategy and, and is there really such a thing as backward causality?

Can we really imagine where we want to be and then construct a series of steps to getting there in an effective way? And so yeah, geeky Russakoff.

Jeff Hunt:

How about you, Barbara?

Barbara Collins:

Well, I thought about the Dalai Lama because I think there's probably a whole world of thinking and perspectives that I have not been exposed to.

And my guess is there would be leadership lessons there and followership lessons there. But I do, I also go back to Steve Haynes and wondering, was there more that I missed? Was there more in that brain of his? That brought us all together, that might have, might help me now that I didn't get a chance to do.

Fortunately, he was a prolific writer, and that has helped us a great deal when we're looking for missing pieces.

Jeff Hunt:

Lewe, do you have a top book recommendation?

Lewe Atkinson:

Well, again, very geeky book because I'm in this mindset of causality at the moment. The concrete of the universe is a guide book by a fellow called Maggie.

He's actually an Australian who back in the mid seventies wrote this book. It's philosophy of causation, which comes first, the means or the ends. And I'm really enjoying reading that book at the moment.

Jeff Hunt:

Barbara. Do you have a book recommendation? Barbara Collins:

I enjoyed Stephen Covey's Seven Habits and those have stayed with me over a long period of time.

And there's another author that I'm at the moment just blanking on. I'll have to think about who it was that also, informed and inspired me in the area of effective management. What's up Drucker? There you go. Peter Drucker. Thank you, Lewe. How do you read my mind?

Jeff Hunt:

Well, you wrote a book together, so, you know,

[00:40:43] Barbara Collins:

He had formulas for what a leader, what an executive needs to do.

The, you know, 80 percent on strategy and strategic things, big thinking. And 20 percent on day to day if necessary. So we actually had, and the lower you're on the organization, the more you're focused on the day to day work that needs to be done. But for the people at the top to have their head in the future of the organization.

Jeff Hunt:

Lewe, what's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

Lewe Atkinson:

Good question. Good question piece of advice. Don't be in such a hurry. You would be, you've got more time than you think. And to me, when I was given that advice, it was something about, you know, be in the moment what you need to be in the moment with.

Don't try and get ahead of yourself. So that notion of being present, because you've got more time than you think.

Jeff Hunt:

That feels so applicable, especially today with social media and all of the media around us that is tugging at our attention. So. Yeah. Thank you for that. How about you, Barbara? What's the best piece of advice you've ever received?

Barbara Collins:

I think what Lewe just said is definitely on my list. And the other I think is, well, and it is related to being present. It's just really hearing what other people are talking about and trying to understand their perspective and not. Go off on your own, on your own path without bringing others, without, and always listening for a better idea, something that someone else can bring that you hadn't thought of, or at least a tweak on what you're thinking that makes it even better.

Jeff Hunt:

So, as we wrap up, can each of you share what one or two most significant takeaways are that you'd like to leave our listeners with from our talk today?

Lewe Atkinson:

The planning part is just the beginning. The real heavy lifting comes after the executive retreat and the, the glossy booklet is created as a consequence of here's what we're going to do.

The now we're going to do it is the challenge. Take comfort and be vulnerable in the reality that it's all just a hypothesis. Uh, your real job. Is to test whether it's true and respond to what you learn to make it better.

Jeff Hunt:

Barbara, how about you? What are a couple takeaways that you'd like to leave our listeners with today?

Barbara Collins:

I think the thing I've seen the most that has been hard to watch is organizations and people who cling to the familiar. And can't let go of it because generally change is going to happen. Being able to see that, you know, that it matters if this strategy is working, if we could be doing more with our resources or better with our resources and hanging on to things just because they're familiar.

Is not a productive thing if, unless, you know, for sure that they're making the kind of difference and the amount of difference that you intended, if there is something better, we don't always want to be chasing just something more fun, more interesting, better in some other way. But it's really about what is going to be the difference in the world that we're trying to create and are we doing the best of that?

Jeff Hunt:

Well, once again, the book is titled, Is This Strategy Working? It's in the show notes of our podcast website, and you'll also find it on my books list. And Barbara Collins and Lewe Atkinson are both from the center for the Hain Center for Strategic Management. And Barbara and Lewe, thank you so much for coming on the show today.

Barbara Collins:

Thank you, Jeff. This has been a really interesting conversation for me and really reinforcing.

Lewe Atkinson:

Great fun. Thank you very much.

---

Outro(45:41)

Closing music jingle/sound effects

Jeff Hunt:

Thanks for listening to Human Capital. If you like this show, please tell your friends and also take the time to go rate and review us. Human Capital is a production of Goalspan, your integrated source for performance management. Now go out and be the inspiration to other humans. And thank you for being humankind.