1737 – Leadership with Strategic Thinking Institute’s Rich Horwath

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0:59with us right now it's rich horwath rich you are a new york times best-selling author and strategic thinking we're going to talk about your book for sure uh you are also the ceo and founder of the strategic thinking institute your website is strategy skills.com rich it's so great to have you josh great to be with you today i'm a big fan of your work so excited to chat with you Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you so much. Listen, I would love if you wouldn't mind kind of doing some table setting for us and tell us what you do with STI. Yeah. So I started this company 21 years ago and it was based on a single question I received.

1:36I was facilitating a strategic planning workshop. One of the managers came up at the break and said, hey, I just had my performance review and my boss said, I'm too tactical. I need to be more strategic. How do I do that? And so, Josh, as you know, at the time, there were a lot of books on strategy, but they were really around corporate strategy, business unit strategy, not really for the individual leader and senior executives. So what I tried to do over the last 21 years is really create a roadmap for senior leaders to strategically think, plan, and act on a daily basis. Too often, strategy is like a birthday where it happens once a year.

2:15There's a lot of signage and fanfare. We get excited and then it goes away for 11 and a half months. So the best leaders I've worked with make strategy and ongoing dialogue about the key business issues. Yeah. What would be some examples of how this might look in the workplace, right? If someone's kind of stuck in the tactical weeds and it's not truly based on a broader strategy? Right. So what happens is, and I worked with a group a couple weeks ago, and one of the interesting things. A lot of seasoned veterans in the room, this was the C-suite executives, the CFO, COO. And what they learned in the first hour was they didn't really have alignment on the organization's overall direction.

2:59They all had their own functional strategies for their part of the business, but there wasn't a cohesive strategic direction that put them all on the same page. So in order to elevate, to your point, out of the tactical weeds, they needed to really step back and say, what's our strategy scaffold? And the strategy scaffold is really three things. It's your purpose in the form of mission, vision, values. It's your business model, how you create, deliver, and capture value. And then it's your plan, your goals, your objectives, your strategies, your tactics. So we then talk through those elements.

3:35And at the end of the day, there is a much more unified understanding of what our direction is. What might be some ways as leaders that we might be able to identify if we are off track or on track when it comes to are we in alignment? Did we actually do anything with this strategy that we came up with? Because I think sometimes, you know, when we're in it or, you know, as a leader, sometimes come in, set the sail, and then maybe we're not monitoring KPIs to see are we actually doing that. But can you help a leader out, Rich? Right, Josh? Yeah, absolutely. And first of all, you don't need the help because you've done such a great job building your business.

4:20So and I've taken notes. Oh, no, my friend, I do. Well, I love the fact that we're both learners. So that's great. But I think in general, what a leader needs to first do is understand what's your position in the market? Are you the leader? Do you have big competitive advantage? Are you a follower? Are you, you know, small fish in the big pond trying to build your brand up? So where are you positioned? Because where you're positioned is going to start to dictate what your potential strategies would look like. You know, if you're a market leader, really what you're looking to do is to defend your position and then also to take new customers that are coming into the market.

5:00But if you're a challenger, if you're trying to get to the top of the mountain, really what you're trying to do there is you're trying to convert people who haven't really been in the market before. So what we call new users, and then we're trying to chip away at some of the weaknesses from the bigger competitor. And I like to call that judo strategy, where you're really trying to take the big player strengths and transform those into weaknesses, which becomes advantage for you. What happens, Rich, if we feel like this seems to be pretty solid strategy, like this is data-driven, we've gotten a lot of validation that this is the right thing to do, but we encounter organizational resistance.

5:42Yeah, Josh, that's a really important one because you can have the best strategy in the world on paper, but if your people aren't implementing it with their resources day in and day out, that's going to take things off track. So the way that you can really get buy-in and you need buy-in from your mid-level and even your first-level people is you've got to have strategy conversations with them. You don't just hand them PowerPoint deck and say, here's the strategy, go execute. That does not work anymore. What you've got to do is you've got to engage them. And I would recommend either quarterly or twice a year in a half day to full day conversation about the business.

6:20And as a senior leader, you want to do that because those folks are the closest to the customer and they have a pulse on what's changing in the marketplace. And if we know what's changing, then we can be more proactive instead of reactive. So the biggest thing a senior leader can do is to engage people at other levels in strategy conversations on a more regular basis and really start to get their insights to help form and to calibrate the strategies we go throughout the year. I saw that you recently posted about organizational flow. Is that what we're talking about? Yeah, exactly. Organizational flow is a big part of it.

7:00the reality is our organizations are basically a combination of systems and conversations. And the challenge is after we've been in business for a while, sometimes our systems become bottlenecks and they actually prevent us from being successful. And many of your listeners probably have experienced times when they've had silos where one group is not really talking to another group. They probably experienced fire drills where there's this urgent flurry of activity, but it's not really important to what's going on in the business. So one of the keys for all you leaders out there is ask yourself about your velocity when it comes to insights and decisions.

7:42Velocity is speed in a directed way. And so when it comes to insights, if you're talking to your mid and junior level leaders on a regular basis, and then taking their learnings, their insights, and then sharing them across the organization. Now we've got a powerful learning system that we're developing. And then the second piece around velocity as a leader is decision making. Sometimes as leaders, we feel like we want to be involved in every decision. It's hard to let go and to delegate, but the best leaders understand that in order to increase decision velocity, we've got to be able to delegate to our people.

8:20Yeah. Rich, if let's say someone's been, they've been a little distracted as they've been listening to our conversation and I want to maybe have you share this, right? And doing what you do, and you've been doing this for decades, based on some of the observations and some of the biggest pain points that you see among the clients that you work with today, if you were to say, listen, if you don't remember anything else from what I've been sharing with you today, it's very important that you, and, you know, kind of give us, you know, one minute TED talk here on, you know, the most important thing that leaders need to be aware of today and implement on.

8:55Well, research has shown that the number one role of a leader is setting strategic direction. And if you want to set good direction as a leader, all you have to remember are three A's, right? Let's keep it easy. Three A's, acumen, allocation, and action. Acumen is the new value. What's the new value that you and your team are bringing to your internal and external customers? Acumens first. Second, then, is allocation. Based on the new value we want to bring, how do we configure our resources, our time, our people, and our money in order to bring that value to the market? And part of allocation is your trade-offs.

9:38What are you choosing not to do so you can focus where you're most successful. And then that third A is action. Action is the discipline as the senior leader to keep your team focused on what's important and not get distracted by the urgent. So they should always have one to three priorities. Yeah, that's brilliant right there. So to our friend that's listening, go back, re-listen to that again, write all that down. That was solid. But you, Rich, have worked with clients like ESPN, Google, Intel, FedEx, L 'Oreal. What does engagement look like? I'm curious and I suspect here's what we know about the Thoughtful Entrepreneur.

10:22A lot of people find our episodes down the road after they're researching for topics or maybe even your name, right? And so they might be curious about what does it look like to actually work with Rich? How can you help us within our organization? Well, yeah. Thanks, Josh. I appreciate that. So the two main prongs, I would say, are collective development and individual development. So collective development means you as a senior team meeting at least on a quarterly basis, not about operations, not about tactics, not about the calendar, but about strategic direction. And you carve out a half to full day with your senior team around strategic direction.

11:04And typically I come in and facilitate those conversations with a handful of tools and techniques that are customized. There's about 200 tools. So we want to customize and select the three to five that are most appropriate for your team, where your business is in the competitive landscape and the market aspirations that you have. And then following those quarterly collective interactions, then typically I meet individually with individual leaders as an advisor and coach to work with them on specific skillset development. So it might be things like emotional intelligence, succession planning, developing a mission-driven culture, strategic planning, whatever it might be, but for those individual needs, because everybody's needs are different.

11:49And again, you know, Josh, the thing I talk about a lot is strategic fitness. You know, if we run once a year for two miles, we're not going to be physically fit. It's not going to happen. But a lot of people approach strategy that way. They do strategy once a year for a day and hope that they're going to be strategic. It doesn't work that way. So we need to have individual collective conversations and development to make sure that we're at the top of our game strategically. I want to, Rich, talk about some of your recent books here. And no joke, I mean, you write bestsellers. You have quite the following here, but some of them, Strategy Man.

12:28It's Strategy Man versus the Anti-Strategy Squad. Is that your newest book? That's my newest book. I've got another one coming out this fall, which will be Strategic, The Skill to Set Direction, Create Advantage, and Achieve Executive Excellence. So that'll be coming out later this fall. So keep an eye out for that. But yes, Strategy Man came out a few years ago. I'm proud it's the first ever graphic novel on business strategy and really a fun way, 180 pages of a lot of content around strategy, but in a fun story-driven format. Yeah. So strategic, which again is upcoming here, and this is published by Wiley.

13:05Strategic, the skill to set direction, create advantage, and achieve executive excellence. By the time this episode publishes or by the time, certainly our friend is listening to this conversation. That should be available. Rich, I know you know what this book is all about. What would you expect the transformation to take place from the reader as they read and implement what is inside strategic? Yeah. So Gallup, and we're all familiar with Gallup, they do a lot of great research. They've interviewed 30 million managers over the last few decades. And what they found was only 22 % of managers felt that their senior leadership team set clear strategic direction, only 22%.

13:47So the reality is there's a lot of businesses out there that need help navigating. And so this book provides a simple framework. If you think of a compass with four areas, strategy, leadership, organization, and communication. So you as a senior leader, there's about 200 different tips, tools, techniques within those four areas to help you navigate all aspects of your business from the competitive landscape to, again, building things internally from process systems and culture. So it's a really comprehensive book based on my strategic coaching work with CEOs from the last 10 years. Yeah. Rich, at your website, strategyskills.com, you have all of your books and courses there, but I see that you also offer workshops, facilitation, and executive coaching.

14:39To our friend that's listening, it's like, I'm interested in learning more about that. What would you recommend their next steps be? Yeah. So first of all, take a look around the site. I'm really proud of the fact that we've got nearly 100 free resources on that website. It's a very rich website. Well, thank you, Josh. I appreciate that. And that means a lot coming from you because you've done such a great job with the podcast and your business. So I appreciate that. So again, take a look at the free resources, the articles, the white papers, the images, infographics. My goal is to take strategy from this theoretical textbook world and really bring it down to how do we use it day in and day out to outthink and to outperform our competition.

15:23So once you've read some of that information, just simply send us a contact us form and we'll follow up right away to set up a chat to see if we could be of service. I also want to put a plug in for your newsletter on LinkedIn. You have over 3 ,000 subscribers. It's called Strategic Thinker. It's a newsletter for C-suite executives published by you and your team and super, super high value content that's absolutely free. I just subscribed. I'm just going through some of your content, Rich. This is really, really good, actionable stuff. Very well researched, too, I might add. Thanks, Josh. Gosh, yeah.

16:00You know, again, to me, we've got to be able to take the concepts and the foundation of strategy going back 2 ,500 years ago to Sun Tzu, the Chinese general philosopher who had the book, The Art of War, take all of that information and really distill it down into what do you as a senior leader need to know to be better tomorrow to run your business? That's what it's all about. And that's what my articles, my books, and so forth are really about is let's make strategy practical and usable day to day. Yeah. Rich Horowitz, again, founder and CEO of Strategic Thinking Institute. Your website is strategyskills.com.

16:39Rich, it's been a pleasure. Congratulations on the launch of your new book. It's called Strategic, The Skill to Set Direction, Create Advantage, and Achieve Executive Excellence. Rich Horowitz, thank you so much for joining us. Josh, I've been a big fan of yours for a while. So thanks, it was an honor to chat with you.

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