Similarities Between Corporate and Personal Strategy

Episode 4: Similarities Between Corporate and Personal Strategy

Welcome to episode 4 of the DeskCussions podcast. We've got a pretty interesting one today… turn your thinking cap on because we're going to be talking about corporate strategy.

And we're also going to be applying that to personal strategy and how they're more similar than we might realize.

Now I've only got around five years of experience in the corporate world of being a finance analyst, but today I was lucky enough to have lunch with a close friend of mine who has over 30 years experience in the corporate world. And now what he does is he goes and works with large organizations to improve their strategy. So he'll join the executive team and help them align and improve and decide upon their strategy going forward.

And in our discussions today he kind of explained to me the framework he uses and at a really high level I'd like to share some of that with you. And what that can do for us is give us a new way of thinking about how to strategize, not just for business, but also for ourselves. So let's get into it.

My friend said when he joins a large organization one of the first things he'll do is he'll find out where they are now. And he does that by finding out what each person thinks as their “where they are now”. So it might be a problem if half the team thinks they're doing amazing and half the team thinks they're failing.

So he'll go and speak with all the different divisions and the main players within the team and he'll find out the consensus view is. And as a starting point he'll try to align those and get everyone to realize where they really are, because you can't know where you're going if you don't know where you are now. If you don't know the direction you're sailing, it doesn't matter how fast you go, for example.

So he'll help them find out where they are now and what direction they're pointing, then what he'll do is work out where they want to be, so he'll say “what does success look like?”. And a question that I often add to that is “what does failure look like?”. Because there's a few ways to be successful and you can also think of some clear ways that would be a failure, so you just want to make sure you avoid anything that you deem a failure, and pick the most optimal options of what you think success would look like for your team.

So he he'd work out with the organization where they want to end up, and now he said that there's a clear thing in front of them, there's a gap between where they started and where they want to end up, and then here comes the strategizing. He'll think very divergently with the team, and the team will come up with an array of options, let's just say 20 options of things they could do. And everyone will put their idea forward and they'll have these range of ideas so that once they get to the end someone can't say, “Why didn't you guys think of doing this? Why didn't you do this?”

You're kind of trying to think of all that now so that you can then choose the best one. After you do your divergent thinking to get all your options, you narrow those down with your convergent thinking and you get those down to say, the best option and a backup plan for example.

And this is just really high level things that I could learn in a friendly conversation, but they're going to apply to some personal strategy that I've used and it's worked really well for me. But before we apply to personal strategy, we'll just explain how he would need an organization to then focus on that strategy.

So they decide what is the best option and once they've picked one strategy he's going to have to get buy-in from everyone to make sure that everyone's goals are aligned with where the firm is going. And then they put all of their efforts into what they've calculated, with supporting numbers and that sort of thing and supporting analytics, to be the best strategy.

So I'm sure making all of those decisions at each step is very difficult and that’s why he's probably very successful in what he does, but as a framework it's all pretty simple. And when he was speaking to me about it, I realized that it's very similar to some of the personal development frameworks I've seen.

I'll read some self-improvement books for example and I'll see that the first chapter says “you need to know where you are now” and then the second chapter will “say you need to know where you're going, what is your vision, and what do you want out of life. Write down the 10 things you want to achieve.”

So we've done the first two steps, we've worked out the starting point, where we are now and where we want to end up, what would be success for us, and then we could apply some of this organizational strategy to ourselves.

I'd say it's common in business for people to come up with different strategy options, analyze them and pick the best one… but for ourselves, this is just a thought experiment by the way, but for ourselves we probably don't do that too often. I can't think of last time I wrote down “what are my 20 options for this month”, “which one is the most optimal” and circled the one I should focus on. But maybe I should if it clearly would work for an organization.

If we can agree that that's a strong framework for an organization to decide their strategy, that should be a strong framework for us to decide our strategies. So as a thought experiment we could go away work out where we are now, and there's some tools for that that we can discuss later on in this podcast, work out where we want to go.

And then do that next step, write down all of the options in front of us, take a blank piece of paper, spend a couple days on it and see what 20 or so options we could do in the next few months. Whether that's three months, six months, a year and then analyze each one, kind of evaluate the probability of success and the reward at the end of the tunnel and work out which of those ones we want to follow, and then narrow that down.

That next step is the convergent thinking, cut out all the options we decided not to do, and that could mean in theory, instead of sprinkling our effort across a number of them focusing on the one that we determined was the best option. Just like my friend would get an organization to buy into that strategy that the one strategy that they decided on, we should potentially decide on one strategy and put all of our efforts into that.

And there's a couple ways to do that which we'll get into now. So we took that organizational framework and we applied it to ourselves, but everything's always obviously easier said than done. And here's some advice for personal development that I learned through a number of books throughout the years, and things that have worked for me.

So that's step one, it's really hard to be honest with ourselves where we are now in our life. It's hard to evaluate our flaws, we’re probably biased towards our successes or vice versa. It's probably hard to get an unbiased opinion of what we are, so whenever I do my self-reflections or self-evaluations every few months I like to do some journaling and work out where I am, what my missions are, what my short and long-term goals are, I'll do a thing that Tony Robbins recommends.

He breaks a life down into six or seven things that should be in balance. So that could be your health, your career, your finances, your general appreciation of things, your relationships and you break it down almost into a circle of the six or seven components of your life that you want to have in balance. And then you score yourself in each of those things.

So I'll go through and I'll score my health. I'll say my health might be an 8 out of 10 because I'm feeling really good fitness wise, but I'm having back pain, for example. And you now you've got an 8 out of 10 for that category. Then you move on to relationships. I'm seeing my friends a lot, it's pretty good, but I haven't gone on many dates lately, for example, so I might give that a 7 out of 10.

And you just go on like that but you're putting a numerical number on that aspect of your current situation and your starting point, very similar to what an organization would do when they're working on their starting point by analyzing the numbers of their business.

So then we move on to the next step. What is a way that we can work out where we want to go? For me what I did was took a really large piece of paper, one of the ones that you buy from an all-purposes store, and I wrote down all the things that I like, all the things that I enjoy, all the things I want to do in my life, and all the options in front of me that I would want to pursue.

Then I went through them and worked out which are the main ones. If I can only pick one on this list, what would it be? If I could only pick two on this list, what would it be? And I narrowed it down to the two or three things that are key for me to achieve, and that helped me develop a vision for what I want the end result to be, what success looks like. And alternatively, and just as useful, what failure looks like, to avoid the things I don't want to do, and move towards the things I strongly want to achieve in my life.

So that covers the next step, you've worked out a vision you worked at a starting point and now we've just got that gap to fix. And here's where a lot of us would just wing it and continue to try some things and see what works, but not really strategizing like we'd expect an organization to do.

So I question whether we should be taking a piece of paper and doing that divergent, convergent thinking process, working out what we believe is our most optimal strategy and then focusing on that. And focusing on that means dedicating the majority of our time on that one single strategy that we decided.

And we all know the 80 20 rule, 80 percent of your results come from 20 of your efforts. And once you have that strategy, focus on that's the thing that's you've decided will give you the best results for your efforts and then you put all of your effort into focusing on that one strategy that you believed was most optimal because that is what's going to bring you 80 of your results.

And when I think of the 80 20 rule, my friend once said to me “what's that one level we could pull when starting a business that would make everything more likely to succeed?”. And I said, “to me, it's the 80 20 rule.” My error is that I'll spend time doing things that aren't bringing me my main goal, and when I was applying the 80 20 rule to my day-to-day work, I realized that it's not just about deciding what are the key activities that bring you 80 of your results for 20 of your effort, but then also sticking to it.

And the way to do that is to quantify the number of times you're deciding to act upon the 80 20 rule. So the number of times throughout the day that you remind yourself “hey, am I focusing on a core activity that will take 20% of my effort and bring me back 80% of my results?” So I challenge you to crank up the number of times that you reflect on whether what you're doing is at 80% activity or a 20% of your returns activity, and the number of times that you apply that rule in the day is what I think really matters. so thanks for joining us for episode four of the discussions podcast And subscribe below so we can bring you more content.