2269 - Essential Decision-Making Strategies for Leaders and Boards with Rick Williams

0:04Well, hey, Thoughtful Leader. Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. On this show, I interview purpose-driven founders, experts, and change makers who are making a real impact in the world. Want to be a guest? Simple. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click podcast. I'd love to promote your story to our audience of over 100 ,000 and across over 2 ,300 daily episodes and counting. Want to get booked on other great shows like this? Simple. Go to podverified.com and get your free guest authority score. Thousands of hosts are looking for high quality guests and Podverified connects you the right way. Now let's dive into today's episode.

0:58With us right now, it is Rick Williams. Rick, you are keynote speaker, you're author. We're going to talk about your book for sure. You are a board member, so you serve on many boards of directors, which we'll talk about that a little bit. But your website, Rick, is rickwilliamsleadership.com. By the way, the book is Create the Future, Powerful Decision-Making Tools for Your Company and Yourself. Rick, thank you for joining us. Well, it's great, Josh. Great to be here. It's fun to talk with an exciting person like yourself and have an opportunity to reach out to your audience. Yeah. Well, Rick, before we kind of get into your impact professionally in the world, do you mind like maybe giving us a glimpse of like what kind of stuff you've been doing for fun or has been engaging you or has been entertaining you lately?

1:53You know, that's a great question. I have to say, I was just thinking about this earlier this morning. So this past Sunday was the start of the sailboat race from Marblehead, Massachusetts to Halifax and Nova Scotia. And this is the first year in a number of years I have not done that race on my own sailboat. So I'm a sailboat racer and have been, you know, winning regattas, not every regatta, but for a number of years. And I've actually written an article about everything I know about leadership I learned on my sailboat. So it's been a passion of mine and a great learning platform. So last year, a year ago, we did the Newport, Rhode Island, Newport, Rhode Island, the Bermuda race.

2:42And this year we're staying a little bit closer to home and doing some of the local races and just trying to spend a little bit more time enjoying the boat. So anyway, that's the short one I can give you. I can go into other things, my photography. My newsletter readers do see my photography and they seem more interested in that a lot of the time. they do the thought leadership that I think I'm sharing with them. But anyway, can I, can I just be a great passion? Yeah. Can I ask you about the photography a little bit? So we've got some, you know, in the spring we have some wetlands around us that have just amazing wildlife.

3:21And so I get to, I've seen a lot of photographers out there with huge lenses is what kind of photography are you doing? This is a really fascinating subject because my photography is what I call compositional photography. It's tended to be more, have an artistic element to it than I'm just doing photography of landscapes or people or what have you. I'm more interested in the composition that I'm photographing. And I have a leadership newsletter that goes out to 50 ,000 people, roughly leaders all across the U.S., mostly in the U.S., not completely. And I usually include one of my photographs at the bottom at the end of the newsletter.

4:13And often I get more comments on the imagery than I do on the great insight that I hope I'm sharing that will help my readers be more successful leaders of their company. And actually, I have an annual photo contest, which I ask people to judge which of the photographs was their favorite from the previous year. So it's actually been an important part of how I'm expressing myself to my audience beyond just my writing and publications. Yeah. Well, Rick, listen, I can talk with you about the fun stuff for the rest of the interview. but I want to talk about the work that you do. Do you mind just coming and give us a quick overview?

5:02And then we absolutely want to talk about your new book. You mean the work I'm doing? Is that what you're asking? Yes. High level overview. Rick, tell us what you do. So I'm somebody who started life as a physicist working on the space program, very high tech. Then I went to Harvard Business School, worked for Arthur D. Little, a big international consulting firm for 10 years or so, and then founded and ran my own company that was primarily in the real estate investment development field. It had nothing to do with my consulting, but it was a way of expressing myself and actually earning a few extra bucks that I did in doing my management consulting.

5:46Anyway, in more recent years, most of what I'm doing actually is serving on the board of directors of technology companies. And I write and speak a lot about how your board of directors can be a value accelerator for your company. I know that's not our topic today, but anyway, if somebody has been following my writing, a lot of it has been on how to have a board of directors that will really be a value accelerator for the company. Who do you want to get on your board? How do you manage the board? How can the board be both the boss of the CEO and the coach of the CEO, for instance? Because in order for the company to be successful, the leadership of the company has to be successful as leaders.

6:37And I think the board or at least some members of the board can be important coaches and help help that leadership do their job better and be more successful leaders of the company. What is the distinct advantage that a board member has that a leader that's operating, you know, kind of more operationally within the company? Like what? Help me understand the dynamic there. Yeah. Yeah. No, I I. So the advantage, first of all, a lot of a lot of leaders think that, oh, I have a board and they're my lawyer, my accountant, my best golf buddy or somebody like that. That is not who should be on your board.

7:21Your board members should be people who have some contribution, perhaps, towards understanding the business that you're in or the business sector you're in. But really, they're people who bring a diverse set of experiences, points of view to you as a leader as you're going through. So the board should set expectations for you as a leader, for the company, and for you as a leader. They should coach you, as I said, in how to do your job better. They should review your performance. Are you actually performing, doing what you said you can do? And they also have the benefit of not having to deal with the day-to-day challenges that all of us as leaders of our company are dealing with, which are really demanding every single day.

8:14They're able to step back and say, well, wait a second. Have you really thought about this? Have you considered this different way of thinking about, you know, how we should get into this market or how we should be doing this financing? Or do we really have the right team? Do you really have the right team? asking those questions is an important part of that board member's job. And the board has to be, have that relationship with the CEO, where they can ask those questions in a respectful and supporting way, but really in a way that says, you know, you really, your job is to make this company successful.

8:52And as a board, our job is to represent the interests of the shareholders and it might even be mostly your family who are the shareholders, and that's fine. But that's what we're here to do. And you're going to be more successful if you allow us to play that role with you. Ask you the tough questions, respectfully, judge performance, give you coaching, and then review performance over time in a way that helps you be more successful. Yeah. Rick, let's talk about your book, Create the Future, Powerful Decision-Making Tools for Your Company and Yourself. Who needs to read this book and what is the transformation that you would expect that they would experience?

9:42Yeah. So first, I think the starting point of what I'm hoping people will take away from this book is that their primary responsibility as the leader of their company or any organization, could be a nonprofit, could be a division of a larger company, could be a government agency. But their primary responsibility is to create the future for that organization by the decisions they make today. They create the future for the organization, the company, by the decisions they make today, by the choices they make today. So the starting point is that decision-making, choosing, is your primary leadership responsibility.

10:34Now, we make decisions all the time. What any other book about decision making? When you're faced with a tough decision, you know, are we are we going to try to acquire this company? Are we going to go into this market? Are we going to take out this financing that could be risky and launch this new product? You you really should instead of sort of instinctively say, oh, well, I know what to do. I mean, I really understand everything that's going on. I'll make the decisions and just move on. what you really should do is to step back. Do you really understand all the dynamics? What's the opportunity you think you really have or the threat that might be facing you?

11:15I talk about decision-making in five steps. And I'm not going to go through all the five steps here, but the first step is what really, make sure you really understand the opportunity. But the second one, which I just want to spend a minute on, is think about success. What would success look like if you accomplish what you're setting out for? Success is a choice. You know, we think about, oh, success is what's going to happen and blah, blah, blah. No, you think about success. Do you want to take the risk to achieve higher success? Is failure okay? Do we want to take, are we going to achieve success because we're going to change the strategy of how we compete in the marketplace?

12:03Are we going to, is success having to do with our business model? Are we going to change our business model from being a product seller to selling a service? And that's kind of extreme, but what exactly would success look like? And then you go through the other steps. Be creative about the choices you have. Make sure you really understand the execution risks of the options you're actively considering. and then in the end how do you actually choose what you're going to do because choosing this the next step is that it is intended to achieve your goals express your risk preferences and your values and you need to be explicitly really understand what your goals are you understand what risk you're willing to take and what are the values that you want this decision to express about you as a leader, about the company, about who the company is in its community, or whatever the values are, because values are an important and often unthought about part of the decisions we make.

13:07We make decisions based on our values, but we don't often think about what are the values that are controlling our decisions. So anyway, the final step is you're going to choose, you will choose the next step. and how do you actually make that choice and be sure you're clear about why you're choosing that next step? I absolutely love this. By the way, this outline that you just went through, Rick, you go through this quite eloquently in your LinkedIn as well, which I'd highly recommend. So to our friend listening, you can go to rickwilliamsleadership.com and you'll find there, you'll see a link, Rick, to your LinkedIn.

13:49You're a good follow. And by the way, your book is in hardcover, it's in Kindle, it's e-book, and an audio book. So thank you so much for us audio learners. It's great to have that resource. If I could ask you a personal question, we are in the midst of trying to get a product to market, right? And so we're working on the beta. We hope to have that finished by the end of the month. it's essentially doubled or tripled or quadrupled the amount of things that as a founder CEO I'm consumed with. And I think what I'd really love, Rick, is if we think about specifically for our CEOs that are listening and likely maybe like an SMB CEO, when they're in the midst of a big project or a big push or trying to get something to market, What do you largely see the role of the CEO as being?

14:52And I suspect that it can be very tempting for those CEOs to maybe step into roles that are probably not what they should be doing. Can you talk a bit about on that? Yeah, I, boy, you're reminding me of saying something I didn't say in the decision making, but it applies exactly to this as well. So I said that your responsibility as the leader of your group, your team, your division, whatever, is to make decisions. but your responsibility, you are also responsible for managing the decision-making process. That is managing the process of getting your key advisors together and advising, making sure that the creative process, you give permission for people to put up the crazy ideas and things like that.

15:39So I'm mentioning that because that's a key part of this, but it's the same thing in what you're talking about, that you have a personal role of maybe coordinating who's going to go and actually talk to potential buyers, or maybe even do it yourself, or, gee, is the shipment really coming in? It wasn't really right. What do we do now? You have an awful lot of personal things that you're doing, but you also are the one who's responsible for managing the process to make sure that the right resources are in place, the right people are in place, and that people are working together in a way that they all understand how what they're doing relates to achieving the overall goal.

16:28So the distinction I'm making here is that, yes, there are some things that only you can do and you need to do. There are probably a lot of things you're doing you shouldn't be doing, but you are also responsible for managing the process and make sure everybody else is doing what they need to be doing in a way that they're coordinated, they know why they're doing it, they know what other people are doing, and they are collaborating constructively with each other. So I hope that's helpful, But that distinction between your role as the coordinator, decision maker, visionary, communicator is extremely important.

17:11But you also have to manage the process of what everybody else is doing. Yeah, I like that. Well, Rick, your website is rickwilliamsleadership.com. Just so folks are clear, you're a keynote speaker as well. Of course, you know, there's the book. Do you mind sharing all the ways that our listener might want to engage with you? Yeah. So I, okay, you already said it, but I'll say it again. Rick, my website is rickwilliamsleadership.com. So the first thing is I would encourage people to go and check it out because it gives you an introduction to create the future, my speaking. I do a lot of writing and published articles and blogs, and you can see the history of that and sign up for that on the website.

18:08LinkedIn, it's Rick Williams, R-I-C-K Williams, 100, 1-0-0 is my identification on LinkedIn. And you can order Create the Future from my website. It has all the connections to Amazon and whatever, but you can also order it directly from the publisher. If you go to Amazon, then make sure you put in Create the Future Rick Williams, because there is another Create the Future title out there, which is a different book. But anyway, those are the principles that I would at least make sure. I could also tell you about Chariad, my sailboat, C-H-A-R-I-A-D. It has its own website, Chariad.com, C-H-A-R-I-A-D.com is my sailing website.

19:01We were going to put, we'll put all those links in the show notes as well for a friend that's listening in a podcast app where you get notes that go along with it. It's like everything you need to know about this episode. Rick, listen, a great conversation. Thank you so much for your insights. The book, Create the Future, powerful decision-making tools for your company and yourself available everywhere. And it's at your website, rickwilliamsleadership.com. Rick, thank you for joining us. Josh, it's a pleasure. Anytime.

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