Think, Plan, and Act: Interview with New York Times Bestselling Author Rich Horwath
I recently went one on one with New York Times bestselling author Rich Horwath. Rich is the author of the new book Strategic: The Skill to Set Direction, Create Advantage, and Achieve Executive Excellence.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Rich: Twenty-three years ago, I was working for a marketing firm facilitating strategic planning sessions. At a break during a session with a healthcare company, one of the managers came up to me and said, “I had my performance review last week and my boss said I need to be less tactical and more strategic. How can I become more strategic?”
I did research and realized there were plenty of books on corporate strategy and strategic planning, but there wasn’t a roadmap for individual managers to move from tactical to strategic. So, I created one. That single question led me to start the Strategic Thinking Institute 21 years ago in pursuit of my vision to teach the world to be strategic. Since then, I’ve written eight books, 200 articles, and more than 1 million words on strategic thinking to give leaders practical tools and techniques to think, plan, and act strategically on a daily basis.
The idea for this new book, Strategic, was born out of the insights my executive coaching clients shared with me for the past ten years. When I reviewed the written transcripts of our conversations, one word kept emerging from the pages. That word was “navigate.” The CEOs, presidents, and senior vice presidents I was working with shared comments such as:
"One issue I’m wrestling with is how best to navigate that with the team."
“That's what I want healthcare to be like. That's what my family wants. Yes, it's fragmented. It's confusing to know how to navigate it, and how are we going to solve that?”
“As our market becomes even more competitive with nontraditional players entering, I'm just trying to constructively navigate this new space."
To navigate is to direct or manage something on its course; in other words, to control the movement from one place to another. To navigate means to determine one’s position and direction and make a way over or through. Historically, the field of navigation is most prominent in air, sea, and space as the primary skill in successfully guiding planes, ships, and rockets to their intended destinations. More recently, the term navigate has been used in an array of contextual landscapes including politics, relationships, ecosystems, and business.
Whether you are navigating a vehicle or a business, it’s imperative that you’re able to effectively determine your current position and then set direction. A study of 250,000 executives showed that setting strategic direction is the most important role of a leader and the number one factor that improved organizational health. Despite the importance of leaders’ ability to set direction, research by Gallup over the past 30 years with more than 10 million managers found only 22 percent of employees strongly agreed that the leaders of their organization have set clear direction for the business. Strategic was written to help leaders set clear direction and navigate their business from their current position to reach their vision.
Adam: What do you hope readers take away from your new book?
Rich: Research with HR executives shows that nearly 70% report their managers feeling overwhelmed by the business. I want leaders to know that they are not alone in feeling that they have to work harder and harder just to tread water and stay afloat. But there’s a better way. I created the Strategic Fitness System—a compass to help leaders ensure that they are covering all the important areas of their business on a regular basis. This compass has four disciplines: Strategy, Leadership, Organization, and Communication. Within each of these disciplines are hundreds of tools, tips, and techniques that leaders can immediately apply to their business to manage more effectively and efficiently.
For example, one chapter is titled, “Time and Calendar.” If a leader is not in control of their time and calendar, then they will never be able to maximize their ability to serve the people they support. I share ways to strategically manage time through techniques such as monotasking, reducing the number of transitions during the day, and scoring your interactions based on the level of value they’re generating. Included are examples from several CEOs who effectively use the batching technique to put similar tasks and areas of focus on the same days/times each week, so they are maximizing their mental bandwidth. The takeaway from this chapter and others is that we must continually challenge ourselves to think differently. New growth comes from new thinking.
Adam: What should leaders understand about strategy and strategic thinking?
Rich: First, we shouldn’t treat strategy like a birthday, where it happens once a year, there’s a lot of signage and excitement, and then it disappears for 11½ months. Strategy should be an ongoing dialogue about the key business issues. People are drowning in too many unproductive meetings, many of which are monologues where one person is talking for 50% or more of the time. Save the monologues for late-night talk shows and ensure that people are talking about strategic-level issues and not immediately devolving into the tactical and operational minutiae on a regular basis. Tactics and operations are important, but they often choke off conversations about strategy. Effective leaders separate the topics.
Michael Porter, the Harvard Business School professor, once said that the biggest problem people have with strategy is that they don’t have one. And he’s right. Many strategies are simply goals or other aspirations such as “Be the market leader,” or “Be the premier provider of X,” that are masquerading as strategy. Operational effectiveness is often the wolf in strategy’s clothing. Operational effectiveness is doing the same things in the same ways as competitors, only trying to do them a little better. Strategy is about running a different race than competitors, one that you’ve designed to win by pursuing different activities that create unique value for customers.
Strategic thinking is often confused and lumped in with strategic planning. Strategic thinking is the generation of insights that lead to advantage. Strategic planning then channels those insights into an action plan to achieve the goals and objectives. Most plans are devoid of strategic thinking and research backs that up. More than 90% of companies allocate their resources in the same way and to the same areas year after year. It’s Einstein’s definition of insanity: doing the same things over and over again and expecting different results. I call the mindless filling out of strategic planning slides in the gargantuan PowerPoint strategy deck the organizational lobotomy—working without thinking.
Adam: How can leaders at all levels maximize their strategic potential?
Rich: Maximizing strategic potential begins with having a common understanding and language for strategy. I developed the GOST Framework which uses clearly defines and distinguishes the traditional planning terms from one another. A goal is WHAT generally you are trying to achieve, let’s say reaching the top of a mountain. The objective is WHAT specifically you are trying to achieve, so in this example ascending 3,000 feet each day for four days until we reach the 12,000 foot summit. Objectives are often described with the acronym SMART: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. The strategy is HOW generally you’ll reach the goal and objective, in this case your general approach to reaching the top of the mountain—hiking straight up, zigzagging, or ascending a path on the opposite side. The tactics then are HOW specifically you’ll achieve your goal—using ropes, pickaxes or maybe an inflatable raft to paddle around to the other side.
Here is an example for the business application of the GOST Framework:
Goal: Become the market leader in wearable biotechnology.
Objective: Achieve 40% market share in the apparel category by Q4.
Strategy: Neutralize competitor product entries through real-time innovation
Tactic: Product engineering platform contributed to by key customers
Adam: What do you believe are the defining qualities of an effective leader?
Rich: I define leadership as setting direction and serving others to achieve goals. The best leaders practice the concept of servant leadership by ensuring their people are equipped with the knowledge, skills, and tools to effectively perform their functions. Inherently, a leader must articulate a destination, a vision, and goals which concentrates the team’s resources into progress and achievement.
To help leaders excel in these areas, we can break these three responsibilities into skills that can be practiced and honed over time. The skills comprising the ability to set strategic direction include situational awareness, problem-solving, decision-making, resource allocation, developing goals, and thinking strategically. The second element of leadership is serving others. The skills comprising the ability to effectively serve others include empathy, listening, asking thoughtful questions, determining needs versus wants, turbocharging high performance, and managing underperformance. The third and final element of leadership is the achievement of goals. The skills comprising the ability to achieve goals include planning, communication, energy management, and execution. Goals represent desired ends or targets to be reached. They are supported by objectives, which are more specific, quantifiable, and time-based. Together, goals and objectives answer the first question of any quality plan: What are you trying to achieve?
Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Rich: I’ve seen the career ladders of a number of promising leaders cut short because they lacked executive presence. As a leader rises to higher levels within an organization, how they project themselves to both internal and external stakeholders increases in importance as well. The persona a leader projects to others through their appearance, communication, and behavior can be described as executive presence. The following seven factors contribute to the aggregate of executive presence possessed by a leader:
1. Authenticity: Leveraging one’s unique strengths and exhibiting vulnerability through communications to demonstrate sincerity in the development of trust.
2. Composure: The ability to control one’s state of mind and project that poise to others, especially in situations filled with urgency, confusion, or volatile emotion.
3. Empathy: Identifying with the thoughts, perspectives, and emotions of others and communicating that understanding to them.
4. Concision: Expressing written or verbal communication with brevity of form yet comprehensiveness in scope.
5. Energy: Display of an appropriate level of enthusiasm, emotion, and excitement when interacting with others.
6. Honesty: Respecting other’s time and perspectives by giving them candid input and feedback in a nonjudgmental manner to move things forward, versus the proverbial “beating around the bush.”
7. Self-Efficacy: Demonstrating confidence and assurance through clear and concise communication based on a foundation of competence and expertise.
To enhance your executive presence, keep a chart with the seven factors and make notes throughout the day on which you’ve excelled at and which need development. Use trigger questions to help transform these traits into habits. For example, “On a scale of 1-10 with 1 being low and 10 being high, what was my energy level in the executive leadership team meeting? Did I display empathy in the one-to-one meeting with my direct report? What was the level of self-efficacy I projected during the all-employee Town Hall meeting?”
Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?
Rich: Here are my three tips:
1. Think, plan, and act. Most people do none of these. They simply react. Bouncing from one thing to the next with no rhyme or reason is for bumper cars at the carnival. Don’t be a carny...be strategic.
2. A good plan answers two questions: 1) What are you trying to achieve? 2) How will you achieve it? Stop overcomplicating it. And if you don't have your plan in writing, you're less prepared for success than a Pee-Wee football coach.
3. Innovation is creating new value. Insight is a learning that leads to new value. All innovation depends on insight. Record your insights on a daily basis—they are the foundation of your expertise. If you’re not continuously learning from the business and generating insights, you will soon be obsolete.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Rich: Differentiate or die.
Adam—thanks for the thought-provoking questions!
Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally-recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one on one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.
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