The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking: Leading Your Organization into the Future by Michael D. Watkins

Episode Date: January 11, 2024

The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking: Leading Your Organization into the Future by Michael D. Watkins https://amzn.to/3TSsBdh International bestselling author of The First 90 Days Michael D. Watkins presents an actionable new framework to help aspiring leaders learn to think strategically—a set of skills more necessary than ever in a world of constant change. Pattern recognition. Systems perspective. Mental agility. Structured problem-solving. Visioning. Political savvy. For every good leader who has mastered of one of these disciplines is a great leader who knows and has mastered all of them. Michael D. Watkins, an expert on leadership transitions and organizational success, returns to the page with a new how-to guide for the modern leader. Here, he presents the six disciplines that separate the great from the good. Developed over the course of his storied career, Watkins’ approach to strategic thinking—"a set of mental disciplines leaders use to recognize potential threats and opportunities, establish priorities, and mobilize themselves and their organizations to envision and enact promising paths forward”—is the model followed by some of today’s most successful first-time CEOs and new business leaders. The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking is a comprehensive and practical guide to strategic thinking, offering a wealth of insights and tools for leaders at all levels.

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She never liked you anyway, folks. So we've got an amazing author on the show today. We're going to be talking to him about his newest, hottest book. He's a multi-book author. And one of the original author, he's the original author. I was going to say authors, but he's the author of The First 90 Days, Proven Strategies for Getting Up to Speed, Faster, Smarter, that came out, I believe, 2003 and updated in 2013.

His newest book, The Six Disciplines of Strategic Thinking, Leading Your Organization to the Future, comes out January 9th, 2024. Michael D. Watkins will be joining us on the show today. In the meantime, we beg, plead, all that sort of good to guilt and shame you into referring the show to your family, friends, or relatives. For 15 years, the CEOs, the billionaires, the White House presidential advisors, the governors, the Congress members, the Pulitzer, I covered Pulitzer Prize, U.S. ambassadors, astronauts, all the smartest people are on the Chris Voss show. That's just it. We don't let dumb people on this show.

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So getting into it, the six disciplines of strategic thinking, Michael D. Watkins is an expert on leadership transitions and organizational transformation and author of the international bestseller, The First 90 Days. His newest book is a how-to guide for the modern leader. Here he represents the six disciplines of strategic thinking that separate the great from the good. Developed through his storied career, his approach to strategic thinking, the set of mental disciplines leaders use to recognize potential threats

and opportunities, establish priorities, and mobilize themselves and their organizations to envision and enact promising paths forward is the model followed by some of today's most successful CEOs and new business leaders. Welcome to the show, Michael. How are you? I am super well, Chris. I'm just really delighted to be able to spend some time with you and talk about what is my current favorite subject. There you go, leadership. And we're delighted to have you as well. We love the topics of leadership. Give us your dot coms, Michael, so people can follow you on the internet. Sure. So GenesisAdvisors.com, Advisors with an E-R-S, and IMD.org, which is the business school I teach at in Switzerland, where I'm a professor of leadership and organizational change. There you go, Switzerland. Switzerland. We did a show, I think, yesterday from Switzerland,

I guess from Switzerland. So we're doing a lot of Switzerland stuff there. We're getting huge. We're huge in Switzerland. Now I just need a numbered deposit account. Oh! I didn't hear you say that, Chris. They don't do that anymore, from what I understand,

or maybe they do. So, Michael, you've written 14 books now, is that correct? Yes, yes. And my standing joke about this is I wrote one book that sold, I think it's 1.8 million copies at this point, Chris, and 13 that are, you know, 25 copies each. So, I hit a home run and a bunch of foul balls, basically. Well, you know, it's the fallout. It's the journey, right? Yeah. But here's another 8 million right here in your newest book. So give us a 30,000 overview. What's

inside the six disciplines of strategic thinking? Sure. It was lucky I was able to start with sort of how I got doing this, right? Because I think it just gives you a bit of context. So you mentioned the first 90 days I wrote this book, it off i ended up building a consulting company but my own personal practice is working uh with ceo i was taking new roles right and that can be experienced ceo coming in from the outside it can be someone who's first time ceo moving inside those are my favorites the first time ceo is because there's just it's just such a big leap in the job right to to do that and so I worked with them on how to make successful transitions into new leadership roles. And that was the origin of the first 90 days. But, of course, you work with these folks and you're kind of seeing the way they think, right?

And you're observing the way they think. And you start to see some who are just kind of like, they seem to just kind of like hone in on exactly the right things, focus on exactly the right issues, you know, kind of see the future and know how to mobilize their organizations to get there. And you're kind of like, wow. And there are other folks where, you know, they may be very good operating executives, and I have huge respect, Chris, for operating executives, right? But they're not really strategic thinkers. And I mean, I say these days that we're living in perhaps the most exciting and terrifying time in the history of humanity. If there's a need for strategic thinking at a time greater than current, I'm not quite sure what that is. Strategic thinking is one of the

most important things i think in business and leadership strategy you know when i was a kid strategy was like my favorite game i loved the game stratego i was too sure i was too dumb for chess and i loved risk and i used to play Risk like obsessively. Start with Australia and take over the world, right? Exactly. Yeah. Once you could beachhead in Australia and lock that out so that no one could get in, you pretty much could eventually take all the things. And so I would play these games obsessively because I don't know.

That was what you did back in the day. We didn't have video games. But the strategy element of it was something I loved, the mapping, the forward thinking and stuff. And I didn't realize what game that was playing with my brain to where when I started my first business at 18 and then went on from there, how important that strategic thinking would be in my life as well and how I mapped out my life. Let's do, we'll get into this some more, but let's talk about you and let's hear your hero's journey. How did you grow up?

How did you get into leadership and strategy? So little tiny town in Northern Ontario, Canada, to electrical engineering in Southern Ontario, to a brief, somewhat unsuccessful career as a natural engineer, right? And then got super interested in business, to a brief, somewhat unsuccessful career as an actual engineer, right? And then got super interested in business, went and started to do an MBA at Canadian School, got even more interested in research and writing while I was there. And so I went to do a PhD at Harvard. By the way, you know, I'm sure at some point you've heard of the book, A Random Walk on

Wall Street, right? What I'm describing is a career that was a random walk around a whole bunch of places, right? I mean, I'd love to tell you that there was strategic thinking involved in my career, Chris, but no, absolutely none, right? More, I think, a series of pretty good decisions. And then after I finished, I taught at Harvard for 13 years. I taught at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, teaching mostly negotiation and diplomacy. And then I went to HBS where I taught negotiation, corporate diplomacy, as I then called it. And then I just sort of, you know, wrote this book on leadership transitions that I kind of just took off and took

over my life, basically. And I became Mr. Transition, you know, so all that work I did before kind of got, you know, set aside to a degree. So that's basically the story. And, you know, so all that work I did before kind of got, you know, set aside to a degree. So that's basically the story. And, you know, as I said, the more recent work on strategic thinking really flows out of all that coaching and consulting work I do with senior execs. There you go. Strategic thinking is just everything. It really is. And how much of a difference, if you could put a percentage on it, we're just guesstimating, no one's going to hold you to this. What percentage of being successful as a leader if you could put a percentage on it we're just guesstimating no one's going to hold you to this what percentage of being successful as a leader you think is being strategic probably in that senior level we're talking about like at the ceo level or c a c-suite level yeah 40 there you go there you go it's everything whether you're being strategic about i imagine

you know your employee strategy yeah your investor strategy, all the different variations of things you need to focus on. Where it bumping up higher is when you start including one of the disciplines that I talk about in the book, which is political savvy. When you start to include political savvy and strategic thinking, now we're up to 60, 65%, right? So I think it depends on how you package strategic thinking, which includes pretty important. Now, going through the book, the core structure of the book outlines six mental disciplines, as you mentioned, one of them that underpins strategic thinking. Can you tease a little bit of that out to us? Sure. So before I do that really quickly right so not a very good definition out there i thought when i started of what

strategic thinking is right you talk to people especially hr people developing senior leaders you say it's strategic thinking important yes strategic thinking is important what is strategic thinking i know it when I see it. Right? I mean, that was basically what I was getting, Chris. It was like, I know it when I see it, right? I know when somebody, like, well, let's push on that a little bit, right? Let's try to build up a bit of a better model because, you know,

I'm an educator, right? That's the core of what I do is education. I love education. I love working with leaders, especially senior leaders and developing leaders. And that's just a huge passion for me. But you can't put together good programs to develop people if you don't know what the target is. What are you working on exactly? Right. And I know when I see it is not a good enough target for developing something like strategic thinking. And that was part of what got me going down this road, right? So six disciplines, real quickly, knock them out. Discipline number one, pattern recognition, right? Great strategic thinkers are able to look out in the world in all its complexity and all its noise and say, that's what's important about what's going on. That's an emerging opportunity.

That's a potential threat. That's what we need to be focusing our attention on. Pattern recognition is so important. One of the things that I went through when I started my first company was going through massive anxiety. And I didn't understand what it was. It was part of my HDAD that I'd had all my life.

And I was collecting stuff and counting. And so when I went in with the severe anxiety to the psychiatrist, he says, I told him that I counted stuff, and he was like, not Rain Man quality, but I count stuff. And he says, what are you doing? And I go, I do pattern recognition where I count stuff. I didn't know it was pattern recognition at the time, but it was part of my strategic upbringing in playing those games.

And he goes, what are you doing now? And I go, I just count things like billboards. I count billboards. I look at companies and I go, how many billboards do they have? How much are they spending? How much do they probably make? What's their ROI based upon the thing? I would be

trying to figure out how business models worked of companies through seeing their advertising and just counting stuff just like just like how many mcdonald's are there in the valley what's their marketing game what's their thing and seeing those patterns really helped the only problem is my psychiatrist said that if you didn't use this for business we'd have you committed right now because counting things for no reason is, but which I probably was a little bit at the time, but those pattern recognitions are everything. It helped me identify when Twitter came out and finally became a thing. It's helped me through so many of my, my, my things and other people's things. And, you know, recognizing what you've mentioned, those emerging trends.

That's it's just absolutely central and if you can't do that none of the other stuff really matters a whole lot and what you just said to really points out a key thing you do to build your pattern recognition of abilities right which is immerse yourself in something like deeply immerse yourself right there's this notion of the kind of the general purpose strategic thinker i don't believe that right i think that you build strategic acumen and thinking ability around distinct domains just the way you did right so that so that then when the number of billboards changed or something new showed up you kind of went ah you know you right away you recognize it right away you're on to okay what does that mean

yeah and that brings us to the second one which is systems thinking right thinking about things in system terms building up mental models of how the world that you're interested in works right if a happens then that's likely to generate b which is pretty you know likely to go to c and it's going to set up a feedback loop that's going to lead to d and beginning to see the world through those powerful but simple models of the way things work we would call the mental models i was trained originally i mentioned as an engineer so systems analysis was kind of central to the education we got and i don't do engineering but the discipline there's that word again of thinking about things as systems feedback loops

tipping points, right? You go to this point and it's all fine. And then, whoop, it goes, you know, heads off into the stratosphere. So that's the second one. Does that make sense, Chris? It does. It does, because you have to be able to have that to be able to activate it. 100%.

Now, there's one real important thing here, right, which is as valuable as those models are, you've got to be super careful that the world doesn't change in ways that your models don't track. Right. You know, you've in this sort of thinking, right? Mental models shouldn't be static. Yeah. Dynamic. And I think the important thing is, as you mentioned, recognizing that, as you said, mental models shouldn't be static. You know, I see a lot of entrepreneurs that will hold on to a model that sometimes is working, sometimes it's not,

and they'll drive it in the ground and not recognize when change is upon them. We've seen companies like Kodak and there's a million business stories about people, even IBM's like, why would anyone want a personal computer in their house? And so models change, especially now the way we're changing with ai they really do well you know we started out just talking about how just

incredibly dynamic the world is right now my goodness it's hard to even do the recognition when it's moving yeah but it's super important still to try right to try and figure out what's in the midst of all this noise is important that I need to pay attention to, right? And just back to your point, I mean, when you started out with Twitter, right, you saw something emerging. And you said, okay, that's something we're going to, it's going someplace, right? It's got energy. It's got momentum. We're going to ride that horse basically to interesting places.

And that's part of what this is all about. So that's discipline number two. Discipline number three, I call it mental agility. It's a little bit of a combination of things. I thought about writing chapters on separate pieces, but in the end, I decided to combine them. The two things are, I call it level shifting or cloud to ground thinking. How do you go from the big picture, right? 30,000 foot level view of things down to the ground, to the detail,

but not get stuck up in the clouds and not get stuck down on the ground. Know when and how to move between those levels of thinking, right? And be able to do it with intentionality, right? To not just kind of like, oh, where am I? I'm up in the class today. Imagine that, right? Or gosh, I'm stuck in the ground, you know? So the leaders I work with, you know, that really are the best strategic thinkers, they have that capacity, right? They can move between those levels. They do it with intention and it's hugely powerful, right? Because they can establish the big picture, but the people working for them know they better be on top of the detail, right?

Because if I'm unsure about the detail, I'm going to dig into that until I'm happy. Yeah. Intentionality is everything. Sorry, say that again? Intentionality is everything. Absolutely, I think, right? And what we decide to pay attention to

and how we're intentional about what we're doing. Or figuring out what you need to pay attention to and how we're intentional about what we're doing or figuring out what you need to pay attention to too right 100 100 so so the other one that i packaged in with this around mental agility is you mentioned you did like chess as a kid but it's really that ability to think forward a couple moves and then come back and say which direction should i go and i mean stratego which i also played i'll have to admit right in addition to risk and hitting those bombs they always really hurt right i mean it was always like ah you know so anyway there it is right but but that ability just to kind of look forward and reason backward and say okay you know i make this move my competitors likely to do this my best

response is that you know or what moves might they make and what would my best responses be to that yeah and it's just a little bit of action reaction you know move counter move look out a couple of moves because you can't look far right you can't you can't map this out to you know the ultimate detail the best you can typically do in business is set good direction get the good direction going make good initial moves and see where it takes you and then start to adapt now that's what i used to do with the bombs used to create different traps i was really good at trapping and you know when you kind of know lanes i think it is if i recall rightly on on lanes. It's been a long time since I've played, but

I used to create little bomb traps. So they trip one bomb and they'd be like, oh, he's probably got something there. And then they come find all the other bombs. Well, someday you and I should have a Stratego match. Yeah, we should. It would be fun to

play that game. It's been so long, but I used to beat the pants off my someday you and I should have a Stratego match. Yeah, we should. It would be fun to play that game just again. It's been so long, but I used to beat the pants off my brother. He used to get so angry. The next one up was structured problem solving. Yeah. So this one is really about framing and solving the problems you and your leadership team are going to focus on. I've got a colleague at IMD, Julia Binder,

and she and I have written an article for the Harvard Business Review that's coming out in the January-February magazine issue about framing problems. And the tagline for it is not jumping to solutions, right? Not taking the time to figure out what's the real problem here, right? And how do we then work with that real problem and not just kind of focus in and say,

what's that? Let's go, you know, let's start generating solutions. You know, there's more, you know, machinery behind how to do that in large organizations and big teams. But the basic idea is, I think, pretty intuitive, right? It's just so easy to say this problem is like that problem, and that's the solution, so let's go there, right?

And not step back and ask and inquire and have curiosity about what's the real problem we're trying to solve here, yeah? Yeah, or what's the real problem in and of itself? We used to call that looking, I used to call it looking the dragon in the mouth and trying to flush out all the potential variations. Are we doing the right thing? Is this the right thing to do? You know, instead of just going, whoa, we're going over there.

How do we do it? What's the downfalls of this? What's the upside? What's the downside? All those sort of strategic thinking elements. maybe a little bit of overkill but if we could live with the looking the dragon in the mouth and we could deal with the downsides or we could mitigate the downsides then i don't think that's overkill at all i think that's good leadership right you know thanks because that's back to the whole the whole piece of but not assuming that the world is staying static and making sure you're tracking what the real problem is.

And, you know, there's nothing worse than, you know, solving a problem by putting a band-aid solution on it, knowing that, not knowing, but unsurprisingly watching it reemerge in some different form, right? And this is intended to kind of help you avoid that. Yeah, it's really important to do all that because, you know, sometimes you're just, you're trying to hijack maybe something that's popular. Like everyone's like, we should do AI now because everyone's doing that. And so we don't know how to do AI. We're in a bricklaying business. What the fuck? You know, I mean, I'm sure there's probably some future way that that's gonna ai's gonna play into that but maybe in marketing but you know it's it's it's one of those things where

you you just don't want to chase trends just because you you you know there's a trend any fallacy in that that you see i imagine you want to oh absolutely no there's no there's no question right i mean again it goes back to that knowing what's important right back to those trends you spotted with social media when you were you were launching right i mean there's probably a you know a hundred things you could have focused on but you focused on a few right because you saw the possibilities yeah yeah we definitely discipline sorry it. No, I was just agreeing with you. Go ahead. All right, good.

So fifth discipline I call visioning. That's one that I think is pretty obvious for most folks, right? That that's a part of strategic thinking. Yeah, but there's a little more to it than just dreaming. It's important, but it has to be realistic dreaming to a degree. So how do you do that? You have to work your way back from the vision you create to, okay, how are we going to get there, right?

How are we going to create a plan that's going to get us to that future? You need to bring people along with you as your vision, right? And I think that I coined a term in the book, powerful simplification, right? How do you make the vision simple but powerful so that people understand it, right? And they can tap into the energy that flows from seeing what could happen with the organization.

And of course, if it's too complicated, it may be a great vision. You may have a wonderful dream about where to go, but if your people don't understand and buy into it, it's not very valuable in the end. That's true. I think maybe that's where a lot of companies fail is they they maybe have a great vision the new ceo comes in he goes we're going over there you know it's the big the big ship captain and people are just like why and why should we care yeah what's in it for us. What's in it for me. Yeah, exactly. Exactly, right? Yeah. Which actually, what's in it for me brings us to the final one, the sixth step, the disciplines, which is the political savvy piece.

And that's the one that I think people kind of go, you know, okay, Michael, explain to me why political savvy is part of strategic thinking. And there's two pieces to it, I think, right? One is political savvy requires you to be strategic and how you try to influence people right you just don't go out and say you know pick someone off the street or out of your organization convince them about your vision right you decide who you're going to convince and how you're going to convince them and you think it through right so there's that that piece of it but there's also the reality that making your strategy a reality requires that you build alliances it requires that you influence people right and so

if you can't do that well yeah maybe the rest of it isn't all that helpful in the end you know maybe it's helpful you know if you're in a very large company, you know, strategic alliances are important. We recently saw that big fallout with Sam Altman at OpenAI and Kerfuffle about all of that. You know, Microsoft is the largest investor in OpenAI, which is kind of weird. They may be buying them next week. But, you know, alliances with the board, alliances with your employees, alliances with your vendors, all these strategic

alliances that help you get stuff done because, you know, as a CEO, you're not a master in one vein. You have to sell to everybody. You've got to sell your vision to everybody. You know, everybody from vendors to employees to investors, board members, you know, people vendors to employees to investors board members you know people working

on your team have got to be on board it's it's a full it's a full-scale press really super super super is right you know i used to teach mbas that you know some of them would think well you know when you get to the top of the organization you know you're the ceo you get to make all the calls you've got the power you can make the decisions you know and everything will be wonderful right i'm kind of like no you know actually as you get to the top things only get more complicated politically right you've got to balance all those stakeholders you've got to work the alignments you've got to create the alliances and that's externally right to shape what's going on outside. It's internally.

And that's in the end exactly, Chris, why I included it in the book. Definitely. You've got to do all the things when it comes down to it. So six different strategies, pattern recognition, systems analysis, mental agility, structured problem solving, visioning, and political savvy. So one of the conclusions you have in the book is developing your strategic thinking ability. What are some things that we can do to get in that strategy mindset? Well, so this is super, super, super important, right? Because you could well say this is all

fine. It's great. Lovely model, you know, like the disciplines, all very interesting. But can I realistically develop this capability? You know, it's not totally helpful if you tell me all the things I can never be. Right. Because by virtue of, you know, birth and upbringing, I'm either one of these or I'm not. Right. And it was, by the way, it's the same conversation we had when I was teaching negotiation. Right.

Because again, you have people absolutely who are naturally better negotiators than others, but you know, we always found we could make people better. Right. Now you can debate five, 10% better,

20% better. You know, maybe it's somewhere in that range. That means, that means a lot if i can make you a 20 better negotiator a 20 better strategic thinker than you are today that has real value for you for your organization right especially if i'm already good at it right so then we're just adding on exactly but even if you're not super good at it right sometimes that's even more important but that we make you at least average at doing

it. Right. Because otherwise. So if you suck, I'll make you average length. Well, yeah. We won't push too hard on that one. No, but that's actually good though. Yeah. But, but the idea that this is something that can be learned, this is a set of skills that can be learned. That's a foundational idea because, because otherwise it's not much point in trying to do

stuff right but if you if you believe that which i do deeply and if you believe that these disciplines are important ways of thinking then you can begin to construct i think of it as like an exercise program right your strategic thinking exercise program the mental work you do on a regular basis to start to build up these mental muscles of yours, you know, pattern recognition, right? Just starting to read lots of newspapers and see what do I think is important here, right? Or diving deep the way you did into, you know, all those billboards and what are those, what decisions are those people making, right? So you can begin to accelerate the process. You can find somebody who's a super good strategic thinker and work with them and learn from them about how they think about the world and how they see the

world. Provisioning, you can start to do, I mean, it's a simple exercise I talk about in the book, right? Where you go into a room you haven't been in before and rather than just, you know, nice room, you go, well, okay, if I were going to change this room to make it a better a better room a more enjoyable room perhaps to be in or a more functional room to be in what changes would i make that helps work the little the little visioning muscle a little bit right because there's an imagination component to doing that

so for each of the disciplines i try to lay out some basic things you can do to start to work on it. And as I said, the analogy is to physical fitness, only it's mental fitness, right? It's mental muscles you're building up. And having that idea of, you know, you need to have an exercise program, right, that you pursue on a reasonably disciplined, reasonably regular kind of basis. And I think the importance of having that last item you talked about, where you look at things and how to improve them, kind of keep you from, well, we just need to copy what everyone else is doing and go do it. You've got to have, you know,

Tom Peters talked about creative swiping, but you've got to be able to take, you know, maybe what's going on in the marketplace, you know, wherever it's hot, like AI. How can we build something that's unique? How can we, how can we build something that, you know, isn't what everybody else is doing that's chasing the, everybody, everything else or where everybody's doing model, I suppose. And so sitting, sitting in that and going, you know, how do we make this different? That's, that's the beauty of entrepreneurs that i love so much especially young small up and coming entrepreneurs that you know they take a widget and they and they do some sort of innovation or improvement on it they're like this thing sucks i can make this better you know we we had an author on yesterday

where she used to read a lot of romance novels and, and, and rom-com novels sort of things. And, and she's like, yeah, I would have done this better. And after several years of reading these books, she, she's like, I know I can do a better book.

So she did one and it killed. So then we interviewed her for a second one, but yeah, this is the thing I love about entrepreneurs. That's such a super, super good example, right? Of her,

she immersed herself in a, in a, in a domain until she saw the patterns and how it worked and she built up a model in her brain about you know this is this is how a romance novel gets constructed with a beginning a middle and an end and then she knocked it into the park i mean that's a it's a wonderful example chris yeah definitely it's it and i think that's maybe where a lot of people don't do you think that maybe that's where a lot of leaders fail they don't do that immersion they just maybe try and hijack onto something that seems faddish

skipping over the surface of things right which is never going to give you the insight that that you need to have yeah or they even want to know no no for sure absolutely yeah i guess there's one one more piece which i it's it's's in the book, but it's in more detail in an article that a colleague and I just wrote also for Harvard Business Review, which is how do you talk like a strategic thinker? How do you help people see that you're a strategic thinker, right? And it's a bit of a chicken and egg because you don't get the opportunities to demonstrate you're a strategic thinker unless people think you're a strategic thinker, right?

But there's some pretty simple things you can do. And the way you engage in dialogue, the terms you use, that can signal that you're a strategic thinker. And that alone can open up opportunity for you. There you go. And it can offer an open opportunity for people who see you as a leader, if they see you think strategically, if you're smart, if you're wise, if you're not impulsive and doing stupid stuff, I think makes a difference. I think people see that in you as a leader. Do they not?

I don't know. I mean, I just might be narcissistic. They absolutely do. Boy, that's a topic we could spend a long time on. Narcissism or strategic narcissism both both right and and you know what you know we know that tech ceos tend to have certain kinds of personalities is that the personality who want to be making decisions about potential weapons of mass destruction right oh i don't i don't think so right i don't think

so i mean because what you mentioned, impulsivity, risk-taking ability, like seriously, plus huge financial incentives, oh my, right? Yeah, what could go wrong? Exactly. But indeed.

So anything more we want to tease on in your book before we go? So I think we've covered the foundations, Chris. You know, I think we've covered the foundations, Chris. You know, I think the basic idea here is to try and, you know, pull it apart, get pretty precise about what it is,

identify those key disciplines, right? And have those make sense to people and have them see that they're things they can work on and give them some tools to work on them with, right? That's the fundamentals of what I was trying to do with the book. There you go.

So give us your final pitch out to people to order up your book and.coms where people can onboard with you. I imagine maybe you have some coaching you do or one-on-one stuff maybe or consulting you do. I do. I coach C-level executives, mostly taking new roles, but their strategic thinking is super important, right? Because you're usually establishing a new strategy for your organization.

Look, has the world ever been more complex, more uncertain, more volatile, more ambiguous than what we're facing now? I can't think of a time when it was, right? I don't know how we got so lucky to be alive at this particular time in humanity, right? It's fascinating, terrifying, but it's also a time when it's never been more important to be able to engage in strategic thinking. It's what's going to in part take us through all this or take your business through all this. And I guess that's message one. And message two is no matter how good or not good you think you are at strategic thinking, you can get better. And this book can help you get better.

You can always get better. That's always true. There's never, it's a never ending, get better is like a never ending journey, isn't it? It really is. So there you go. Well, it's been wonderful, Michael, to have you on the show. Thank you for coming on and sharing your knowledge with us. I really enjoyed it. And I look forward to our Stratego grudge match. Let's do that. I've got to go learn to play the game again.

I remember vaguely about it. Thanks for having me on. Thank you for coming on. We really appreciate it. Thanks, my audience, for tuning in. Order of the book wherever fine books are sold, because it's important to support our authors that come on the show. The six disciplines of strategic thinking leading your organization into the future

comes out january 9th 2024 michael d walkinson check out all 14 of his other books and the original popular one the first 90 days proven strategies for getting up to speed faster smarter updated and expanded and remember we're almost to Christmas. So, like I said, it's not going to matter. We're releasing this in January. So, order it for next Christmas. There you go. Thanks, guys, for tuning in.

Go to Goodreads.com, FortunesChristmas, LinkedIn.com, FortunesChristmas, YouTube.com, FortunesChristmas, Christmas, one of the TikTokity, and Chris.com. Thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you guys next time.