Webinar 2 Replay - Beyond BHAGs
Beyond BHAGs: Why Strategic, Game-Changing Commitments Fall Apart
In the webinar on May 16th, I explored the limitations of using BHAG's - Big Hairy Audacious Goals. Why? Well, since the idea was introduced some 30 years ago, companies have searched for a systematic way to use them effectively, without luck.
In the book which introduced the term, Built to Last, the authors only shared their discovery - the best companies used the technique to inspire performance.
However, they didn't lay out a process for defining them effectively.
In this webinar, we explore the following:
- are BHAGs necessary for game-changing results?
- is there a discipline required for their development?
- what will it take to learn this discipline?
- what can be done to convince your manager/client that BHAGs are needed?
Discover why these aren't questions with simplistic answers. Instead, come looking for insights that help you see game-changing results differently - the kind of things you can't unsee them once they come into view.
P.S. In our next webinar on June 6th we'll explore whether BHAGs must be accompanied by long-term strategic plans. Don't miss it!
P.P.S. Not registered for our conference on June 20-21? Visit https://strategyconf.fwconsulting.com
Here’s a rough transcript. Notice the different ways “BHAG” can be spelled by Ai…
Event: Beyond BHAGs: Why Strategic, Game-Changing Commitments Fall Apart
“I know I should be inspired by them.”
That's what every CEO or managing director or president has shared with me when I've asked them.
About the idea of be hacks.
Big hairy audits of schools. So they all agree that they should have them they all agree that they should be setting these long-term objectives.
but
when you actually ask can I see them? Can you show them to me?
What you get back?
Is a dead silence?
If you're here today to answer that question while you're in the right place because my name is , and I am the host of today's session here at the long-term strategy conference pre-conference webinar. I'm also assisted abley by my colleague and wife Dale Pilgrim Wade, and she's in the chat and I am going to ask you if you're here and you're hearing me. Let me know that you're actually.
Tuning in to the sound of my voice or is there something in the way like my I think I'm talking to you, but you're not talking. I'll drop a note in the chat. I know that you're alive.
And that you have kicked in.
With that coffee has been sort of waiting for a while. I'm seeing some thumbs up.
I'm looking for the usual Hi. How are you that I see in the chat. Normally. I'm going to go ahead and start sharing my screen.
Oh, there's Tracey Wallace hearing me loud and clear. Welcome Tracy.
And there's Bill McLean. Hi Bill. How are you? Good to see you Bill is of the speakers at our upcoming conference.
And you'll be hearing from him if you go ahead and register.
Or conference on st.
Come more green Hi, how are you? JT? Oh, hey JT much. How are you futurist?
And um, Georgia Donaldson and it looks as if we have a fine crop today.
Let's keep going on then.
In the right direction to answer this question.
CEO should be inspired by beehives, but they are not some stuff start with a poll.
and
let's get some answers up.
to this question
How do CEOs you have met explain a lack of written game-changing strategies?
So I'm putting it on the stage. You should be able to see it. If you cannot see the poll just drop a note in the chat for some reason something is blocking it or can't imagine what but
How the CEOs explain a lack of written game-changing strategies or in other words a lack of B hacks? What do they tell you?
Or if you were to read their minds were some of the things that you think they would tell you.
Go ahead and drop an answer.
Um, so far the winner the way the winning vote is we are too busy.
Some people say the results take too long or some kind of a a concern that their board just wouldn't go for game-changing kinds of commitments.
But uh, we don't know where to start is actually seems to be pulling ahead. That's interesting because today is all about where where we need to think in terms of beehives and making them real and implementing them and having them actually turn into results.
Okay, I'll wait a couple of moments more see if there's anyone else who's going to drop a note.
just keep voting away.
alrighty, I'm going to put up that poll.
The winner of the poll is well. Looks like there's a tie between we don't know where our start and my board would never go for it.
Interesting. Well, no, it's more of what's coming in. We don't okay. We don't know where to start. It's going. It's going to be a clear winner.
We don't know where to start interesting because I'm going to I'm going to share some information with you today. That's a real.
Guys who came up with the gentleman who came up with the idea of bias?
Really assume that you know, it would be kind of an easy walk in the park for those who were engaged in it or we also chose to engage in it. Okay, but let me ask you another do another poll.
polls back to back
I know I know.
I'm being nosy, but this will help me to sort of customize what I have to say so that it suits.
Where you're coming from today?
What is the longest term strategy your organization has created or clients? So you could be a consultant?
Um, just drop on again just drop a number, uh answering in the chat.
What is the longest term strategy your organization has created?
what the distribution might be
so far
as you may expect we have a winner in the to year range.
Winning by a lot and the others are onesies basically onesies outside of the to year range.
So short-term strategy or short-term planning is where it's at.
Okay, clear clear winner.
It's a spike in that distribution. Okay, so I'm going to close that poll.
That seems to be pretty clear and then hide that poll from the stage.
what we're going to cover today, okay.
To take your going to be witnessing or be part of a interactive presentation. Let me just change a couple of things here just to lay out so that you can
see a bit more of me if that's what you prefer to do second.
Oh, there we go, and during this interactive presentation. I'll be dropping all kinds of questions. You'll see this little symbol that I have of the fingers on the keyboard and when you see that symbol, that means that I'm prompting you to actually put your hands on the keyboard and you'll do it several times today. So give me some feedback on a question that I'm asking because I want this to be a discussion.
That will be a giveaway Enterprise at the end.
And after the session is over, you can find me or my colleague Dale at the tables that will be at the session will automatically close and we'll be at the tables answering any questions using video and audio. It's not a been a private chat.
There will be an on demand replay of this webinar at the very same link that you're visiting at the moment.
and finally
if you have a question to ask the best way to do it is to put a question in the Q&A and the Q&A as you can see is that
it used to be purple. Mine doesn't look purple, but it looks like a thought bubbles which are just side by side to each other.
Click on that put your question in and that way it will make it easier for us to find it.
Works really well.
So I mentioned before that you're in sort of a conference series The buildup of pre-conference and here's where you're at. Today's webinar.
Came after last month's webinar comes before next month's webinar, and it comes before our conference on June th to st.
So you're in the middle?
And you may wonder if I'm a for-profit or a non for profit, you know kind of where is this going? Well, the answer is
It's going in both directions, but today's conversation around setting B hags and going beyond the original definition of b hags is really mostly for for profits because for profits seem to be shy about setting bigger audits of schools.
That's not the way the book was written, but that's kind of what's what's happened.
If you're in the nonprofit world or a part of an NGO or if you're in government you may know or may have noticed that.
The world has no problem setting big hairy audacious goals in that world. For example, um, the the sustainable development goals are year on a year Horizon work created. They'll become due in .
Net Zero
Uh, Africa are other examples of long-term goals that were set in knossos governments nonprofits.
And as you sit there and listen, you may be a leader yourself.
or a change agent
someone close to a leader. You may be someone who Advocates change in some way consultant. Maybe you create content and you share you share it with audiences around making big changes.
And today what I can promise you is guess what no simplistic answers.
No easy little bit of formulas and no I hear a cliche here and there but no cliche. That's my objective instead. I want you to leave with insights.
That help you to see things differently from now on.
Help you view the world differently.
so imagine
being persuasive persuasive around be had in the sea.
So if establish that there's some reluctance to engage in Sea Suites in in be hags in the sea Suite.
There's that was the number vote.
uh, imagine being someone who
could be fluent.
Who could explain that even though they were defined years ago and not much has been defined since then.
That they are a valuable way to cause change.
But have them know that.
Be hugs are more than just Financial results.
They actually translate into.
That which makes a difference.
And that's what we are sort of really dying to do right?
Make a difference.
So
how do we Inspire game-changing results without getting stuck in some old conceptions? And I'm going to go through some old conceptions because
I there be hacks was as I said introduced but years ago, and it's I'm going to say it's decayed over time. I'm going to tell you how
Because the Decay has caused companies strangely enough to not go after what they really want the most what do I mean by that?
Let's keep going and we'll see.
But I want you to be able to see these obstacles go beyond them and any concern you may have.
In terms of sharing behaves with boards CEO Executives people who who your managers who you may suggest them to but feel a little bit awkward or concerned that may they may they may look at you like you're crazy and see you've got to be kidding.
And then you don't have the language to actually explain what you're talking about.
There's also some people who would just outright tell you that there's no company. That should be thinking more than or years in the future.
and you want to have
something to be able to say to them that
Could perhaps move the needle and move it in the right direction?
You had intuitions that there are things that you could say and today I want to encourage your aspirations to produce these game-changing results where whatever they might be and wherever they might be.
so Angela
is a new CEO.
She is joined a company which does not use the word b hack.
Why?
Well, years ago a pharmacy CEO of the company bet his whole career on a single Big Goal.
Which was never achieved in his year tenure.
in fact
rumor has it that he was fired for falling short.
Afterwards the word behag was forbidden now. There was no memo or email that was sent out doesn't work like that in most situations, but
people stopped talking about
goals, like the the CEO committed to
no, however
She has nightmares of becoming a bad case study like BlackBerry.
Because there are other companies which are threatening to disrupt our industry.
So probably everyone here used to have a BlackBerry.
And that industry has been so disrupted that had the last time I saw maybe years years ago.
Used to be that everybody had if you were in business.
So she's under that kind of threat. So she needs a game-changing strategy.
Even if she doesn't use the term beehag, she needs cereal stretch goals moonshot goals.
So, where would they come from?
All right, so she's like many CEOs. All right, let's get those fingers working most proffitt CEOs believe in game-changing results.
But let's examine their motivation.
Drop an answer in the chat. Why?
Do proffitt CEOs believe in game-changing results?
Go ahead and drop drop drop an answer so that we can get this conversation going.
The best insights come from not from preaching but from dialogue, right?
So why?
Why would they believe?
When I say believe, I don't mean act so George just says they want bigger bonuses.
So there's often a tie in to financial results that most CEOs are very keen to exploit.
And over time as you may know those financial results have become shorter and shorter in duration.
Until we now have a problem, which is many CEOs only focus on short-term results because that's what they're being compensated by.
Now there's a whole chain a whole whole move of foot and their organizations, um that are championing the idea of long-term compensation for CEOs.
If you do a Google search, you can join with these organizations because they're not profits and they're out to change business culture as we know it around the world.
uh, Sean says
they're searching for growth strategies.
Yes.
And they have an idea that a game-changing result would give more growth than a continuous Improvement kind of commitment.
They like the idea of JT says yeah, that's that's hey, you know that people are doing it so I should do it too.
And or reputation so reputation. I already addressed money reputation is a very big deal, right?
The idea so there's many CEOs. I've met who are somewhat ego ego-driven and the idea of producing great results at they would akrout to my ego and the way I think about myself people think think of me.
A good thing. I want that if I'm someone who's running a company. All right, lots of other as I'm gonna I'm gonna go on just in the interest of Time creators keep dropping your answers in the chat.
But this is real.
however
Angela and others like her
are
I would say is an unfortunate equation.
Why do I say unfortunately, I mean that it's a sort of an inescapable reality.
student or by luck
are really small.
instead
they need to be designed.
and the way human beings work and the way we work in organizations means that
There's a few things that are required.
So let's assume today that the equation that we'll work with is that these things give you are essential rather for game-changing result necessary, but not sufficient perhaps
So you need a vivid vision?
We'll talk about today you need bags.
We'll talk about today and you need long-term strategy, which we'll talk about in the webinar in June.
So these elements are required to produce game-changing results.
And sure you could point out a company that you know like Intel for example.
to produce game-changing results and when you read the story of their switch from memory memory chips to to to CPU chips CPU memory
CPU, um, um
By my technology fails me here, but when they move from type to the other.
They didn't do it because of a grand strategy they did it because they were about to lose market share. They had lost market share and we're going to lose more fortunately. There were some employees who were working on these new Chips quietly without the blessing of their senior management team.
So I would say that was kind of like look. Okay, and you may say I'm a lucky guy. So in our company, you know CEO May believe that
but for the most part
it's not a function of luck.
There are some requirements.
you've got to
Create a vision within that Vision there are specific accomplishments measurables.
and someone thanks John John just gave us the the answer there and
to accomplish those you need long-term strategy.
So we're going to focus on the top today.
Why are they so important?
Our first inkling you might say, um, maybe not the very first but it sort of came into our consciousness.
Arrived via calling some porous book built to last that I've I've mentioned, uh, they've defined the term beehive in a chapter.
And I read the chapter again this week.
Just to be sure.
And I tell you this chapter is it makes it sound like easy. They really didn't give much of a prescription as to how to do it. They just said do it. What we've done is we've surveyed great companies and they all do it just about
And we contrasted them against the failure companies and they don't do it just about there were a couple of exceptions but the overwhelming evidence was that the companies that are successful.
Create these visions and they feel some of the things that they said.
They chase a cluster of objectives and money is actually only of them. Not necessarily even the primary .
It's interesting.
Unless there's been forgotten over the years.
this they said
uh, oh.
Um, there's a question on the uh, let us popped up. I'm going to answer this a bit later.
with the term game changing
Let's get that up. Later.
Um, so to create an effective Envision in the future requires a certain level of unreasonable and commitment.
Keep man at the Beehive is not just a goal. It is a big hairy audacious goals goal.
So you can imagine that.
The game changing results are a function of B hacks.
for example
So here's a definition of a big hairy audience that's going to imitate. This is a definition of game-changing results if you would expand it out, but their language was around the goal specifically the goals.
clear and compelling
unifying focal point of effort
acts as a catalyst
As a clear finish line, the organization can know whether it is a goal because people like Finish Lines.
The Hags engage people
because they're so clear and they're so tangible people get them right away. You don't have to really go to a whole lot of explanation.
So the way this is really all.
the sum total of what Colin and porus said and you know, if you were to read this you would say oh
Pretty simple. It just set these goals and then we just go for it.
well
There are some complications.
The first I want to introduce you to is from Jeff Bezos. And Bezos said was when I have a good quarterly conference call people say great quarter.
And he says, thank you.
but he has another thought going on in his head which is
You're thanking me for what? We did years ago.
So it's not you can probably figure out what he's getting at.
He says that's what you need to be doing when you run a big corporation like this or frankly any Corporation.
Having long-term thinking a long-term thinking approach.
Means that businesses need to think years in the future and what's happening now has already been as he said baked.
We already made the decisions to produce the results. We're having now. So you're thanking me now, but who you really should thank you is me in years ago.
Because that was where the decision made that was made that produced the results today.
Hm.
So with that complication, let's look at a case study by Nokia.
So in .
No, Kia had the most dominant operating system by far.
% market share and I don't know about you, but I certainly had about of them and I imagine that if you're here, you're an adult you're over a certain age that you had also write.
In fact . Okay. They had of the Nokia the of the best selling cell phones and if you today someone told you I need you to buy a feature phone.
I need to buy of those forms that all you can do is make calls and nothing else.
You would probably think of Nokia first because they dominated that category so completely.
and they were making
all kinds of
successful numbers because they dominated the market share
nice nice picture, isn't it? You know, it's like amazing that
And compared to today in . They had more market share or sorry with . They had more market share than Samsung and Apple had combined if you were to compare with years later such was their dominance.
and their profits
were looking great a little bit of a dip there of the .
And then something happened.
So between and .
market share plummeted
operating margins
went not just the wrong way. They went negative.
to explain
What happened years later?
of their former CEOs, who was I forget the years he was there but he was there during that period
if you watch this interview on YouTube.
he said
we had
the right strategy
his of his previous either pre or post post.
successes rather
said similar words and other execs
we did the right things. He said.
But I don't know what the results were still weak.
Try to do exactly what Apple Microsoft and Google did later.
in other words a defense of the strategy that they pursued
so given the numbers that we just saw.
my definition of a sound strategy of a strategy at all is which is
game changing
in the right way.
Would have not resulted in the numbers that we're looking at.
So let's dig a Little Deeper to see well.
How come there's lots of reasons why that are given in the popular press but for the purpose of the work that we're doing today, let's imagine that sometime before .
maybe years before
no, kill needed be hags and
uh short and long term strategic plan
and they did not have
so if we imagine that that's the case.
And that they hadn't set a direction that was worthwhile or that would win.
Here are some evidence.
So I I invite you to download this paper. You can do screenshots as you go along. But as I said the replay is going to be available.
In probably about an hour and a half from now.
amazing the curse of agility
So what this paper argues is that?
Nokia had a strategy
of being agile
No, if I were to pause and have you think about that and even to respond to it in the chat?
You may see we're sticking to.
a strategy of being agile by itself
without having a long-term strategy and without having be hacks.
or a vivid Vision by itself
meant that by the time things started to change in .
You're too late.
The strategy you're pursuing.
all this time
Got you into trouble.
And it was the kind of trouble that you couldn't recover from not even years after have they recovered from the thought that they were doing the right thing.
So there's nothing about this in the book.
Built to last didn't address any of that.
But if you were to compare Nokia with
other companies at the same, you know that were ascending at the same time.
Let's look at what Bill Gates said?
He wanted he and Paul Allen. They wanted to put a computer on every desk and in every home. So that's
not a % accomplished yet.
But take a look. Let's read read out what he said.
It was big hairy audacious game-changing and ridiculous at the time that he probably came up with it when he was maybe in his s.
Don't work says a guy without the end goal be spending a lot of time going the wrong way.
Yes, sir.
He says, you know today it seems as if that's no big deal. But back then it was a big deal.
Steve Jobs
similar if you look at the line at the very end to make a contribution to the World by making tools for the minds that Advance humankind.
but he even went a step further and said
what we need to do is start with the consumer customer experience.
And work our way back to the technology.
a precursor of what we call today back casting
now design thinking today is of course all about this approach. But at the time he said these things
it was a very opposite of what companies did which was to start with the technology and figure out how to sell more of that stuff so that people would buy more of it.
So what he was saying was by itself a beehive.
A way of Designing that would meet customer needs.
That other companies did not do and did not recognize.
So I've mentioned that built to last.
book
talked about sort of vary as I as I hinted very vaguely at
What is required to create a behavior?
interesting thing happened years later
They issued almost a revision of of the core ideas.
And if you put them side by side something interesting.
Is that they included the idea of a bhag having a time frame?
For the very first time was a mention in the book.
And hey, you don't have I try to reach out to the authors to find out why you know, what happened? I'm her back from them.
But what I imagine happened is that people started to talk about. Oh, we have a bhag for next year.
And they were like what?
And oh, it's big.
Is that people started to use the term loosely?
And maybe that's where we've gotten into all kinds of trouble.
Because if they had put this in the original book.
It would have forced business people to confront that big scary and audacious.
Don't happen on a short-term scale if you're thinking that short. Well, you can call it.
Kind of big kind of auditions kind of but real big.
requires time
no, we are leading up to the long term strategy conference.
But and you may think that the the of the things that we're seeing is that you have to have time.
What time is not the point?
Time is actually just a resource.
And it's a resource to accomplish game-changing results following that formula that I offered before.
That you have the Parts you get game-changing results.
According to them and according to the work that we've done with our clients in the last couple of decades.
same thing applies
game-changing is a function of
time
All right, so that says you're killing me here. I'm going to offer you another poll.
because this was Paul has a sort of a
I won't give the I won't give the story away. But here's a poll.
It should come up on the screen as soon as I share it properly. All right.
imagine
consecutive years strategic plans
versus a single
Which spans years?
Which is better.
So if you follow me on LinkedIn, you may recognize this from a poll that I put out sometime ago.
Go ahead and answer that question, which is better.
It's a wicked trick question. Okay, but go ahead.
And the assumption is by the way that they're both being revised continuously. So they revised every year each is each approaches involves a revision and annual revision you change and update and examine assumptions and all the rest of it. So it's not
set it and forget it in either case both are being revised.
Sorry, if that changes someone's.
Vote they didn't allow me to put any more words in framing of the questions. I didn't have a choice.
All right.
Okay, let's see.
Okay, so far we have.
a tie
and a tie is between
it's a straight tie. Okay, someone jumping and break that tie.
Can't have a tie.
% for the first answers. Okay. There we go. Somebody don't then instead of single plan for years.
now I'm suspecting that you are a
smarter Bunch that the folks who I pulled on LinkedIn if you're here at a conference like this, you're here on a webinar like this.
Well, you're probably leaning a particular way.
But uh, let me show you what?
I actually picked up from LinkedIn When I Survey.
Check it out.
And the punch line here. I'd like to have you consider.
is that
while % of the folks voted for
consecutive -year plans
today % the vote was split between the first options, but on LinkedIn there was a clear and obvious winner people voted.
consider that a vote for consecutive -year plans
is a vote against be hacks.
It's a rejection.
of the idea that a company should set
the carry audits for schools and have that be a part of its.
strategic planning
Now in the next webinar, I'll talk about but you can't have like a year plan.
You also can't you also can't have a so the B hacks with a year plan.
Well, that doesn't work.
I'll talk about that but
um, they can pop that pop that comment up on the stage for me to come and deal is pointing me to
but consider that
of people
huge majority of people are thinking along the lines of short-term and there's a reason that they are rejecting long-term commitments.
Sean says that neither is better planning Horizon are overrated without a Clear Vision. Absolutely.
Absolutely true.
you don't create a Clear Vision for game-changing results without continuing with the time that it takes, right?
All right. So tell me having having had the conversation so far.
Just a kind of an introduction to the problem that we had of had. Why aren't B hags a magic elixir?
What are you Gathering so far? What kind of thoughts do you have? Why don't they answer?
Fix the problem of game-changing results.
You need more than dreams. Yes Bill McLean. Who else?
Why don't they deliver what Horus and Collins?
implied that they should deliver
People execute them don't understand all the nuances. Yeah, so they're not connected to
they may hear a speech where it's unknown, but they're not connected to anything more than that.
So calling some porous and talk about any of the downsides that we're now we're now diving into.
Richard Donna. Oh hi Richard long-term is a short series of short terms like changing games on the freeways part of a plan to get there as quickly as possible true.
and the short term by itself
only by itself
leads to all kinds of trouble
people have trouble focusing out that far. Absolutely. It's very very very hard. That's probably why every company doesn't have a list of banks.
Okay, so here's some new thinking I thought I'd share with you. It's called a bank.
a big audacious Noble goal
Something that's game-changing for the planet.
So the author has actually mentioned they didn't talk about this but they did say they said before that. Sometimes the goals aren't necessarily.
only financial
In today's world, we would say that.
A bhag is a perfect compliment for a big audacious Noble goal.
for example, like cutting carbon emissions
Here's another way of thinking about B hacks is that they're involved with category creation?
So what is category creation? Well a category is a you might say a group of needs that sort of coalesce into a product. So a Nokia a feature phone was a category, correct and Nokia came to dominate that category.
Now what they could have done was to create a brand new category.
Or Pioneer a brand new category. It would have taken a long-term strategy to produce that particular game-changing result.
So category creation standing back and saying we're in this category today.
What's a another category that does not exist today that we can come to dominate that we can create Pioneer and if we Pioneer and solve problems in this today non-existent category, Maybe?
We could come to produce.
game-changing results
So another example.
So sometimes categories collapse.
And in when Kodak was producing record profits, you would never have predicted that a category category called film would collapse.
It was was in the cards.
Fuji
as they sat down and looked at their future.
realized that
they could not create a beehag in the film category.
as a result
They entered a number of new categories.
And I have a list of them there they still produce film.
But it turns out what?
Changed and changed their fortunes and allowed them to continue as a going concern and to grow it was all these new categories.
However, Kodak
failed
web bankrupt
was unable to define a new category.
No category creation wasn't written into the original built to last book by the authors. They didn't see B hags coming from category creation. But today it is a form a powerful form of.
creating a new beehive
and they take time.
Another kind of beehive is to take ordinary goals and put them all together so that they are packaged into some extraordinary outcome.
This is well known to us, isn't it?
This is the moonshot.
announced in by President Kennedy
Landing a man on the moon and bringing him safely back.
this we know is from we understand this we realize okay that definitely needed the time in order to make that work and
he chose a still a very aggressive time frame by singing what happened in the decade.
Furthermore he also added that there's a bunch of stuff. We don't know how to do and we're going to have to invent ways to do it.
Whole new category, right? We need to figure out how to do a lunar aircraft how to do rocket boosters. We don't know how to the funds the funds were considerable billions of dollars.
But great. The great thing is that it's actually For All Mankind.
Usually given as the example of a big hero audacious goal the the Prototype.
Following year on maybe unrelated. I don't know I wasn't born but Peter Paul and Mary came out with the with the cool song If I Had a Hammer I Had a Hammer in the morning. I am no single but you get the idea.
How may I know love between my brothers and my sisters all over this land?
And it was a time when there was a lot of dreaming.
All right in the chat.
my friends
are they both be hacks?
Lynette says I love that song.
and Lynette that song
that song describing a big hairy audacious goal.
Is the moonshot?
So it says yes.
Just stop by yes or no in that chat, then. We'll see.
When it says yes, everybody is saying yes.
Richard don't that says yes, who else?
Yes says mandurah welcome.
Charles
guess what? So I'm the is the song really a goal not the song JT but the aspiration that there will be love between my brother and my sister. That's the is that the is that a beehag also?
Okay, so I'm going to be the contrary area and see.
No.
That song is not a big hero audition school. Why?
in terms of the work that we do as strategic planners or futurists or
or strategic foresight us.
You can't build a future around a vague aspiration.
In the way that said it.
But let me make it even more sort of pointy and don't be free to disagree why I disagree so far.
Take a look at the following.
These are some you know, pretty pretty well. Some of them are well known aspirations in corporations. Are they be hags or are they slogans? Put that in the chat?
So John says how would we measure it?
In today's world, we would there's no strategy to go over it.
So it wouldn't shoot wouldn't produce a game-changing result as well.
No time frame.
Are these slogans or be hacks?
Scientists can say I'm kind of teasing you here because I'm leading you down a path to say that.
Peter Paul, and Mary's world's words were not
a be had they didn't create the beehag in their speaking. Kennedy's words created a bee hack in his speaking.
these words
don't create bee hacks either.
They're not specific. They're not smart among other things and there are no connectable or realizable strategies. They don't have a year attached to them.
So they're just hanging out there like balloons kind of, you know, balloons filled with helium that kind of just float in the air without any connection to the Earth.
The kind of bee hacks that are required in today's world need actual goals.
measurable goals
and are they all created equal well for the purposes of strategic planning and long-term strategic planning know?
You know these look like worthwhile goals to become a plastic surgeon or to be able to brush your teeth on her own.
But they have very different time frames.
And because they have very different time frames, they require a different approaches.
So there are some who say you can't do long-term strategic plan because it takes too long.
Short-term to years the other long-term.
And found that you could add years to a strategic plan it only extra hours now today.
this conversation is beyond the scope of what I said in that article, but go to long-term strategy info and check it out because where I'm headed to hear is an argument that says
There's a big difference between setting short-term goals and long-term goals.
And there's a discipline that's required.
That the book does not mention or the original concept of beehives.
Does not address the discipline of long-term strategic planning requires B hacks.
And it's a little bit like saying well, I know karate so I should know kickboxing.
Well, or I'm a black belt in.
Judo so I should be a black belt in kung fu
well, those are different disciplines.
And guess what?
Short-term goal. I can't goal setting and accomplishments and strategizing is an entire different discipline and its counterpart.
Okay, so
in the chat
if you buy my argument.
That we're talking about different disciplines.
And we've gotten into trouble because we've not distinguished cleanly.
discipline from the other
It's become a kind of a mishmash of ideas based on the vague interpretation. We were given by.
Person and person Collins, what would it take to master? The discipline of long-term strategic planning which includes being
top and answering the chat. Let's see where we're at.
Take a sip of water.
Get those thoughts together and those fingers moving.
Them a says a good Mentor.
boy
I wish.
I'm still looking for.
I mean there's but years that I'm looking for mine.
Pretty much says foresight.
that is interesting because foresight foresight is a part of every
Retreat I've done in the last years and
I've never had a foresight expert sitting so it means that the regular people are doing the foresight work.
A discussion for another time to see says a board strategy.
I like that idea because many boards have shied away from making long-term commitments just because
they don't have the discipline themselves. So they can't hold the executive teams to account because they don't really know what they're asking for. They might see. You know, how come you guys want to think long term or big or there's no
hiring or thing
groundbreaking no game changing they struggle to put the words together. Why because they don't have the discipline. Therefore. They don't have the language.
Clear thinking. Yes and also some some roots and I've been kind of brutal right? Everybody said yes, I said no.
but there's a kind of a rigor that I'm
bringing to the party here to say that long term strategic planning requires a particular level of
rigor
a kind of brutal is a wrong word.
But it's kind of a black and white.
Way of thinking about the discipline and when you met with with the discipline, the way many have done like Nokia you end up with results that you don't want or you end up with out of business or you end up with without game-changing strategy.
Well I said this is an unfortunate equation, right?
I'm seeing that you don't include those elements in that equation and you won't produce game-changing results.
All right. So my first
You know personal.
I would say the haggle I can remember was I made when I moved to the US.
And when I moved to the US, uh after about a couple weeks of being in college.
I said hmm.
I think I'm going to go back to Jamaica. So I made a I made a commitment to return now. I'm a US citizen. So I was born in the US, but I've been raised in Jamaica and I said I'm going back.
now nobody does that everybody moves to America and says
you know and McGregor comes and says this is the land of
Milk, and honey, right?
Well I said I'm going back and I remember talking with friends and other Jamaica friends and they also said hey we want to go back.
Until I made a trip to Jamaica.
when something funny on this trip, we're like I couldn't explain the finger on it on the plane flight back something weird. It felt weird weird feeling.
Came home. Um, I think I got a limo or whatever the drove home.
Opened my door to my house walked in close the door.
and started crying
like uncontrollable know I never done that before.
I could only compare it to the last of a loved which then came later and I've experienced that.
But this was kind of like that an hour of crying.
so fortunately I had a quote and I had a guy and I talked to this coach and
what it was was I had given up on my commitment to move back to Jamaica. It had become bigger hairier and more audacious than I had ever imagined as an undergraduate at at at Cornell. This was like no I was settled and established and I worked for a company that offered me lifetime employment and I had the American dream, right?
and the conversation we had made me saying I can't I guess I can't walk away from
my commitment
And here I am today, I'm in Kingston if you don't know.
um, it took a while, um share with it share more about it later, but
I want to introduce you to Secrets. Wait weeks. Where is to think about long-term goal setting?
That is gets us out of trouble allows us to learn and allows us to expand.
Uh, the first has to do with how to move yourself to game changing levels without being stuck alone and bored and as you hear discipline, you may think oh boy.
Here's this guy he's telling me about this conference, which is going to be about developing a discipline. I think I'm going to be stuck alone on a board if I
visit like attend this conference because oh my God, what's what's it going to be all about?
I want to introduce you to a model that I use that eventually got me back to Jamaica and it followed this these steps. I'm going to come back to this slide, but essentially
What made the difference was I moved to Florida?
And sort of got stuck in again.
And wasn't making much progress on my commitment at all. I made a move but I was still once again not doing anything much to fulfill with it.
And then things helped a self-help group that I joined.
And also a group I was a part of that took a transformational training to Jamaica. So both of these groups had sort of objectives of personal personal development for us who were in the group and the second was transformation of Jamaican. You might say work culture.
my engagement and belonging to these groups made.
All the different in my eventually doing more and more and more work in Jamaica to the point where I was living in Jamaica more than in Florida and didn't make sense to even have a Florida Apartment anymore and that completed the move.
Bottom line, is that bag?
Need more than just setting.
They need uh transformation.
There's always a culture. I'm not talking about personal here. I'm talking corporate.
There is something that happens and I've seen it happen in my long-term strategic planning retreats.
And I said before that there's a different discipline that takes place when companies doing short-term versus long-term goal setting. It's not the same thing just more years.
There's actually a phase change.
There's a transformation in the moment.
There's a shift in who people are being.
There's a change in the way that they're thinking they walk out of a session and they've seen some things that they can't unsee is what I want for you today from my explanation. And if you've not been in something like that before it's really difficult for me to just put it in the words and say that this is what happens.
But there's a level of generosity.
of Legacy building
of care
of sacrifice
of
devotion commitment that comes in a long-term planning beehive setting
activity
It's just not there when you're in a short-term planning activity a short-term planning activity is pretty much the same meeting that the executives have always been having every week.
Just couple more years.
But when you look at the long term, you need to make this shift.
rigorously
then people respond in a way that surprises them and surprises each other.
So here's a quick model that I've recommend you pick up and use.
Find people.
And our conference is a great place to find people who are of like mind.
Come and find some experts at our conference. For example.
Pick a real Target on a real outcome.
Communicate with people and we put in place mechanisms for participants to communicate with each other during our conference and after so it's not of those conferences you come and you just watch us on the screen and like you're watching TV. No your calm your your communication with other people who are also a part of your journey and on a similar Journey. It's a big part to the transformation that I'm describing.
And that's the way to get real insights.
that
force you to see what you cannot unsee.
So yes conference is designed as a opportunity to create a transformation.
And of the ways in which we've done that.
is to
record the change the way that we do our uh offer our some of our content not all but some so some of our content is going to actually going to be in the form of structural problem solving recordings where I interview an expert we pick a problem.
We tell a story about the problem to make a kind of real we diagnose it and then we craft Solutions. So this is not a typical interview with well. Tell me how why did you what is bad you to write that book? No, we're going to be doing problem solving and that's what can lead to the kind of insights that I'm talking about.
Okay.
All right, so moving on.
secret number
is how do you keep momentum going without?
Letting obstacles slip into kill your commitment.
So let's say you commit to picking up this discipline that I'm talking about. How do you keep momentum going? Well, these steps may look sort of.
Familiar to you because they are ones that we use when we need to execute something like a a long-term strategy plan or a big area audition School.
But my first sort of exposure to this kind of rigorous.
Milestone setting and accomplishment
that happens on a schedule as opposed to how you feel about it.
of them was when I did a an Iron Man Triathlon, and I ended up it took me hours. And if you're a tri athlete you may laugh because these things aren't supposed to take hours in my case. It did. I had a stomach problem which Sal goes on the ground for around the Scribe. But what I did to make it through the months of training was
and I just sort of the first my first trial Triathlon by any means but
I followed up, uh, a pattern that others had followed and did different things to keep me on the path to this particular outcome.
saying that to say
you can do the same if you're interested in developing this discipline.
Now I can't just tell you go to this book and pick it up and read it. I can't find I can't point you in the direction of my newsletter where it's all about long-term thinking long term strategy. But even there you won't find every answer and every Insight that you need in order to implement beehives the way they need to be implemented. So that moonshot
kind of results Apollo level Kennedy results take place.
So this prescription is really simple, but we're really paid off for me was when I became a columnist for a newspaper here in Jamaica.
of the
tough challenges we have right we did come across in the poll said before is that
we
Are concerned about what people in power may think of our pushing for long-term strategy, so we come and we say we need to have be hags in this company.
you know a chairman of a board looks so like
come again.
Or uh, uh, a CEO or a CFO says say what?
And we may not have the credibility to convince now.
Because they may say well where have you done this before but we don't have an experience of well, here's where we've worked on year olds and most of us don't have that.
So how can you develop the kind of credibility you need so that you can be taken seriously?
All right. So here's a
Strategies, I think I may have mentioned before that. We've done about of these over the last years all of them long term.
But anyway for me, you know, I I was able to stick to my sources stick to my tasks and do what I needed to do stick to my goal.
Way back in or . I did a course and in that course, it was a course for Consultants management Consultants.
of our care messages was that you needed to publish for a general audience?
So I was living in new New Jersey at the time, of course in New York and I was as far away from doing that in my target country of Jamaica as you could imagine.
Fast forward I eventually moved to Jamaica and the the move spurred me to start writing for the very first time and I started the writing like a blog like you wouldn't believe because I wanted to help the people who were thinking about moving to Jamaica to make the move as well.
So I started writing eventually I started writing about management topics.
A friend of mine eventually introduced me to Jamaica gleo and I started writing for them years later and I've written on a bi-weekly basis every weeks for the last years if you do the math.
You get a few hundred different columns, but it was created as a goal sitting in a conference room or a training session in New York somewhere in m.
So it's possible to follow a rigorous process just step by step to produce these kinds of results and here are the Steps. I'm going to explain them in just a minute.
long-term strategy
is all about
thinking in dimensions
social Dimension, uh analytical dimension
no, most Consultants focus on the analytical
As if they could write a strategy and send it to the client and that's all the client needs is the right strategy written on paper.
That's an attempt to reduce strategy to a logical challenge only.
I want to propose that the social Dimension the transformational.
Activity that takes place in a long-term strategic planning activity or a B hack creating activity same thing.
It's just as important and you got to pay attention to both.
That a long-term strategy written on paper.
is useless
if the social
cohesion building
Force has not been built to go with it.
The most companies most descriptions of long-term usually planning. I got this from chat GPT.
Have this method which I'm about to throw up.
And say that here's a method that we use.
When you start from a zero-based canvas.
You start from nothing almost like zero-based budgeting.
You start with no assumptions that allows you to do category creation, for example, because you're not trying to hold on to anything. Can you imagine Nokia had all these meetings?
Trying to hold on to what a category that was disappearing right in front of their eyes, but without the distinctions.
But understanding what was happening, they couldn't didn't really return to it to zero today. They're still not at zero. They still think their strategy was working.
It requires prior preparation before the retreat starts.
Which means getting people to start to think about the long term because most managers.
Have not been trained in thinking past produce the production of immediate goals.
or immediate targets
They know how to respond to an urgent firefight.
But ask them about the long-term and they're like we said the waste of time. Um, not my job board somebody else that that's not my thing.
They get promoted to the Sea suite and all of a sudden it's assumed that they know how to do this.
So I come into the retreat they do a snapshot which is where the company is right now.
They get a Target year as a team.
in The Sweet Spot for their company could be anywhere between
according to person and Collins and years
Uh, they choose an alternative to pursue or alternatives to pursue.
different possible outcomes and they pick single
possible outcome and they commit to that
so, um, I know it's :, and we're about from the end so that you know, but
that's the method that we fall. That's the first part of our method.
And it's the that anyone can use.
But the exercise that I would invite you to start to engage in is to ask yourself.
That I have in the steps that I just outline. They're the first part of our strategic planning Retreat. They're the first day.
All of the action before the retreat starts leading up to the first end of the first day almost.
so
Where's my expertise in each of the activities that Francis just said?
Where is it in terms of the social dimension?
And the analytic dimension.
Now if I know most Consultants, they really strong at the analytic.
Analytic side not the social side.
So we're talking about the combination of very different kinds of skill sets, but they are required.
They prevent problems like the problems that
look here.
ran into
how do you become credible?
We have a couple of hints here.
So we become credible by picking.
a big hero audacious School a future
that is inspiring.
We apply different levels of what I described here in this process.
Start from zero.
Prepare yourself. You create a snapshot you do a bunch of things.
bunch of these things
and you share them.
at scale
I need erotic same thing.
So these are people who should not have become world leaders in the causes that they champion.
But they did.
My friends this is available to all of us. It's not just those of us in companies or
this is a a company conversation, but it's not only available to leaders or to board members.
Anyone in any company?
Can have these kinds of conversations and change the way their company is headed?
to introduce the possibility of game-changing activity
we should be making game-changing commitments, but
So I'm bringing us right back to where we started.
Um and let me take some questions that are in the Q&A.
As you can see the are.
quite substantial
couldn't you also call?
B b as also loonshots moonshots are a series of rooftop shots.
Not sure what a loose artist or a rooftop shot.
But a moonshot certainly because you know Kennedy popularized the the idea of a moonshot. So yeah moonshot is given in the in the book as as a great example.
And as you see Kennedy went further than Peter Paul and Mary did it in defining what was required.
And if you read the details of some of the technology and the planning that had to be put in place some of the people management.
The folks at Nasa were asked to work overtime.
Which was not something that they had ever done.
Can we get more Precision around game changing results?
What's specific dimensions of the performance? Are you focused I'm so as you can see I've talked about all dimensions.
Why because a vivid future or a vivid vision?
For example, when our clients create them in our uh Retreats, they're not Financial only.
They Encompass everything that could be important to that company including some things that you may you wouldn't put in the normal strategy. So company actually decided that it needed different ownership.
Because the ownership was current ownership was corrupt.
So that became a part of the Vivid vision.
others do all kinds of category creation changing products it it's really
as far as the human imagination can stretch
these are the kind of commitments that they can make because they have enough time to meet them.
All right, so
I want to tell you about um what we have coming up for our conference, but let me ask you are you ready to hear more? Let's put a drop a yes in the chat. Let me see already ready to
No, there's a lot of comments. I did not get to.
Are you ready? Yes.
Okay, so this discipline of long-term strategic planning.
Is not something that's easily picked up and I I mentioned before that in the next webinar. We're going to be talking about what happens if you have be hacks, but you don't have strategy. What is that like and as you can imagine it undermines the very idea of the hacks?
But there are specific things to do if your company already has be hacks, but no strategy to go with it.
As you know, we have more than speakers and I can tell you from talking currently doing into the interviews are recorded interviews.
We have some amazing things coming up in the next webinar. I'll be able to give them more details about the topics that they're going to be addressed. But I really folks have been really hard to find experts in this area.
But their thinking is extraordinary and exquisite. The first day of the conference is all about the pre-recording and On Demand videos available.
hours to a global audience
the second day also has on demand videos, but it also has a live component where we're going to have talks and live panels.
the full ticket which gives you uh ability to
replay all the videos for an entire year is .
We also have
a limited number of visitors complimentary passes which give you access to the Live Events only and there's some restrictions as to what's available when because we can't put everything out there at the exact same time.
So it's impossible to see everything that's going to be offered on a visitor's ticket.
So I'm going to invite you to register for a full ticket.
To the video replay. I'm going to drop a drop a link here, which you can just click.
To register it'll take you to the website.
I trust
and we currently have a early registration code.
Take a screenshot.
Of that code so that you may go and make sure that you find the right place to register.
You don't end up in the wrong place and then you end up not getting the the early registration code.
It's about half off it but it depends on which country you're in because we're doing what's called.
Parity pricing which means that the pricing varies depending on the strength of your economy.
Good news good news for those of us in the developing world.
let's give away a ticket.
I promise that there would be uh a prize.
Worth $ as I mentioned and here's the question first person to drop an answer in the chat will receive a free ticket.
What year was built to last and how many years later did the to year correction that I mentioned appear in Harvard Business review.
That's very much for that comment, John.
First person to drop and I went through it really fast.
That was not a a mistake.
Do we have a winner?
Yeah and Killian. What what year was the original book?
So no no.
So what is going to get this far? Because it's not that bad, right?
That kind of give it the way a few times.
Remember, there's there's questions here. What year was it published?
There's a lot of strange answers here October . . No.
Unless I have the wrong year this possible.
But I want someone to to give me the year and the gap.
Someone's Googling both of them right now.
Oh, I see that with me and I'll have a winner.
I know I I know I went through it really really quick. So here's the correct answer according to my books.
so we don't have with us. So and years later.
With a little book came out in and years later.
So we don't have a winner today.
I was I wondered about.
You know asking being being being being a little bit too oblique about this particular . Maybe it was too hard.
and years later
uh Mash Mash mash asks
Should I be her generation session be embedded in the street development process or rather are bee hags categorized as an example of strategy development process the latter.
I
the days of generating we had on their own.
there was no description in the book as to how to do it, but
they should always be part of a strategic planning activity.
You don't want to create be hags that are floating out there like gas balloons as I mentioned helium balloons.
And we'll talk about this in the next webinar what happens when you create be hags and they're not a part of a strategic planning session not in other words, the the strategic planning session. Sorry the beehag session ends when the bee Hogs are created.
And when they're created without a strategy behind them.
There's no opportunity to correct the bee hacks.
And make them realistic which happens every single time.
in the Retreats that I've been in
chat b t says . Oh my goodness. Did I get it wrong?
That case will will pick someone who's the closest.
No, said and years ago, I don't think
ah
interesting. Okay. Well folks we are now at the end and um, I want to thank you for spending time.
There are our next webinar is going to be on June th.
And it's going to address as I said this different problem of having be hags, but no supporting long-term strategic plan.
So I invite you to be there and thank you so much for attending and for engaging I could see the fingers working which tells me that you are just treating this like an opportunity to watch television that you were.
engaged and answering questions and thinking and
In a moment, we'll flip over to the tables. If you want to talk to me. I'll be at the first table. I imagine thereabouts. Thanks for coming out during your lunch hour know you're very busy people and the chat is going to reopen.
To the right of the screen, but as I end the session you'll see the screen change and you can continue chatting and come and join me at a table. If you have a question or comment about anything that was sent today.
And thank you so much.
Take care signing out for on behalf of Dale and I all the best.