← Confessions of an Implementer
Confessions of an Implementer
S2E58 | What's More Important: Strategy or Execution? with Eliot Wajskol
01:00:31
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- [00:00]
A
If I have leaders at the table and they cannot come up with a rock, they cannot meaningfully come up with a way that they're going to advance their own function, any of those are signs that I don't have the right leaders at the table.
- [00:17]
B
Welcome to Confessions of an Implementer. I'm your host, Ryan Hogan. We share unique stories of EOS implementers and the companies they've transformed to give you a rare glimpse into the successes and challenges of the system in action. Let's jump in. Our paths have crossed so many times. I think you, you were one of. One of my first ish guests. Like, we're talking within the first probably three months. You came on, we had an amazing conversation, and then you and I have been, like, bumping into each other now for the last year and a half, which has been really cool.
- [00:48]
A
Absolutely. No, a pleasure, thank you. Pleasure coming on twice. I'm working on setting records with you.
- [00:56]
B
You are in rare air. I will say that. There's only two people that have come on twice. Mark Taylor, who's actually a vistage chair, and he came on EOS Implementer as, like, the special guest. And then when I launched the new podcast, he was one of the first people I recorded with, and then jbs. And so it's like, I need to get trophies or something for you folks for taking the time. Well, here's some interesting stuff is you and I have been talking over the last several weeks and trying to come up with a. A topic that's like, relevant and meaty and something that, that we can have a really good conversation around. And we kind of like fell into it last call because we were talking about a variety of things, and then we fell on this one topic and then like, you and I just got lost in the topic and there was like, actually pretty good debate over it and like, pushback and things like that. And so I think what we're trying to do on this show is we're going to answer the question of what's more important, strategy or execution?
- [01:58]
A
Love it.
- [02:00]
B
All right, well, I won't just throw. I mean, we don't want to spoil it right out of the gate with which one it is, but let's talk about both, because I think there's business leaders have this certain sense of, like, I already know what strategy is and I already know what execution is. And probably the second thought they have is we do both perfectly. But what is strategy? Like, how do you define strategy? What goes into strategy? And then we'll see where that takes us.
- [02:31]
A
Such a great question. I think every organization, every leader, every consultant probably defines strategy slightly differently. I sometimes don't know. Are we talking strategy? Are we talking tactics? I think where we started talking about this though is that my obsession for my whole career has been how do you help an organization go faster? For me, it's all about how do we deliver results more rapidly. And so in my brain, so much of my life has been around probably execution. Roundabout way of talking about strategy versus execution. Even the decision of how fast you want to grow is a strategy. It's a strategic decision. If you think about all the latest conversation, right, about you go growing, are you scaling? That's a strategic decision versus and then execution follows. So to me, I think strategy is. It's answering the bigger question about what are we doing and how are we going to play in this world? Which world do we pick? How do we want to play in it? What levers do we have to pull? How do we go about pulling the right levers at the right time? At that higher level, execution is about making that bigger thing happen.
- [03:43]
B
Execution, making it happen. You just brought up something super interesting, which is even understanding of like, how fast we want to grow or scale or where we want to be is strategy. Are there, are there some, are there some, like, fundamental things? Like let's, let's say there's a team strategy session, which by the way, like Alana and I have on Friday. Are there some, like, fundamental things before you go in and say, like, this is how we're going to accomplish it? What are some of those foundational things that you need in place to even be able to have those conversations?
- [04:17]
A
I think if you've got a team, there's so many ways of going about it. You could be a dictator and just go in and say, not in a terrible way, but say, look, I am going to lay this out. The team will follow. One of the most effective things that I've seen for teams when they're setting strategy is that they fight to create alignment. They fight to create a shared story in their mind. Because so often what I find is when I've got a leadership team, they don't share the same perspective on taking EOs. Who do we even want to be and who do we want to be around? What are our core values? What's our purpose? What's our why? How fast do we want to get to where it is that we want to go? Where do we even want to go? Those are all strategy level conversations. And if I've got a team of five different people and they've got five different pictures in their mind. I might as well have five different people running five different companies. I want to have different perspectives, I want to have different thresholds for how fast do we want to grow, how do we want to go about doing it, what does excellence look like, et cetera. But if we're coming at it from a totally different perspective, it's hard to have that conversation altogether. I think one of the first ingredients in figuring out strategy, oddly enough, is, is building a team that even has a capacity of beginning to have a shared story in their mind's eye. Because we're going to reset that story as we get clear about what our strategy even is, if that makes sense as a starting point. The second ingredient then is all the inputs that it takes in order to have a proper higher level conversation about where we're going and where we could be going and making those strategic decisions.
- [05:55]
B
When you talk about the team, like one thing that's super interesting and by the way, this is hyper relevant to me personally, professionally right now. And so these are going to be very selfish, curious questions about how you would handle certain things, which is, and I don't know if my thought just came from a place of ego or where this thought came from, but it's one of the thought as you were going through, making sure that everybody's on the same page and has a clear picture about where the organization's going going forward. And this notion of a dictator and probably just putting that type of information out, which to me would probably come from the visionary and integrator versus making sure that everybody is a part of some of those initial conversations. How do you reconcile that? As far as you've got visionaries, you've got integrators, startup environments, very ambitious growth, and this whole notion of bringing people with you versus just saying, hey, you know, our 10 year target, which ours is 10,000 perfect placements and we've only been doing this about a year now and we've got 107. So we've got a little bit of ways to go over the next 10 years, but we're on track, which is like, how do you reconcile that, hey, this is what we're going to do because we're a hyper growth startup, this is our ambition, this is how we think versus like hey, let's all sit down at the table and figure out where we all want to go together.
- [07:22]
A
I think someone has to be a clear leader in the process. There has to be a driver of that conversation, by the way, when you said X number of placements today and 10,000 in 10 years. If anyone's got it, you've got it. I've absolute confidence in it. Thanks. I think that ultimately you have to have a core leader who is leading that process, leading that conversation. And whether they do it on their own, whether they do it with one other person and then share it with the rest of the team, or whether they can build that team that can actually have that cohesive conversation at a broader and broader team, that makes a difference. I used to do a lot of work with Global 1000 types of companies, the Nikes, the Daimlers, the Prudentials, the Schwab's of the world. They've already built a leadership stable where you've got people who are peers, who have good judgment, who can think in a similar way, and you've got a broad group of people who are having that strategic conversation. Great. In smaller entrepreneurial organizations, I've got a team right now where it's only the visionary integrator who can have that conversation. They made a fundamental pivot. Construction business. They made a fundamental pivot in which verticals are going after how they're going about it, the way in which they're going about it, how they pull all the systematic processes and systems that worked in the prior world, but now they're going for a different, different lane. It was a visionary integrator that had the conversation. They got aligned. They established that fundamental strategic shift they wanted to share with the rest of the organization. The two of them were playing, for lack of a better word, at a different level. Great. But what they fought for was creating that shared vision with everyone else who was on the team. Have another team, happens to be construction related, but storage facility build outs. They have a tremendous team already. They had a fundamental strategic conversation we pulled apart in our last session, which was do you take private equity funding, do you take family office funding? And you're done. You don't have to look for any more funding. Do you want to continue to build funding with the current way that they were going about it or a different one, four fundamentally different decisions that would radically change the direction of the organization and ultimately what the purpose is for the visionary, what the why is for the visionary, the rate at which they're gonna grow. That was a conversation held with five people because they were ready and they all were on the same page about where they were going. Decision ultimately defaults back to the visionary. But the conversation was robust with the full Team, Long winded answer. But I think ultimately it's a combination of someone has to drive it and then it shifts from being an intellectual exercise to an emotional exercise because you've got to bring the rest of the organization with you.
- [09:52]
B
You just said something there that's like gold you talked about. Is the team ready? Are they at that level? Are they ready to have those conversations? And it sounds like in one of the examples, a lot of the core decisions, the strategic decisions really continue to fall on the visionary and integrator. And their challenge or their dynamic is how do we, how do we make these strategic decisions and then bring the rest of the team along with us so get them to buy into that vision. Then you just use an example of another team where, where everybody, it sounds like, is, is maybe at a higher level thinking strategically and the entire team was brought in. What are, how do you know? So if you've got a, if you've got a leader out there that's struggling to say, like we're ready to have strategic conversations, I have my core function areas, right person, right seats in there, like how do they know if it's, if they're ready to have those types of conversations across the entire SLT or if it still needs to remain at the visionary integrator level?
- [10:56]
A
I think ultimately we've got to bring everyone along. That's such the power of quarterly planning. One of the things I love about it with an EOS lens is every quarter we're going back and we're having that conversation. What are core values? What's our core focus? What's Our longer term 10 year target? Who exactly are we going after and what's our message to that customer? Because that has implications on process system. What is that three year longer term picture that's now a prediction? If we can create that vivid picture, the likelihood we're going to create it is that much higher. What are the implications that are one year plan? To me, the power of that is, what we're actually doing is we're creating a shared picture in our mind's eye. We're building the alignment of the team and helping to enroll our core leadership team in that story. And so to me, the power of it is we have to do that regardless. We've got to continually bring our team along on the journey, otherwise we don't really have a team. That said, if a leader, visionary, integrator, visionary themselves are coming into that session saying, I've been thinking about this, I got to bring you along. Awesome. If the, the Use of the. The best use of our time energy is for that leader to say, I want to make sure that we think through this together. Great. That's another way in which we go about it. Ultimately, I think strategic decisions are not about consensus. They are about having someone who ultimately makes a hard decision and says, here's where we're going. The mechanism in which we make that decision, greater input, less input, and the mechanism in which we continuously build and bring along a team to go with us may be different. Maybe I could just say one last thing with all of that though, is that one other sign for a leader is to what degree do the people around me have that ability to think strategically, have that ability to participate with me in that conversation? To what degree do I trust their judgment as we're having that, so that I can take their input with greater or less value? And to what extent did they have the ability to translate this vision so that they can operationalize and execute on it? Those are all questions that come up through the process and that then becomes that next step and that helps become sometimes a determiner. Either I need to have them at the table so I can make a strategic decision, or I've got to do it myself, but then I've got to spend more time selling and bringing them on.
- [13:16]
B
Ultimately, it's got to be both interesting and like. This might be more of a nuanced question, but you talked about this. You just said, trust their judgment. Do I have enough faith or trust in them to be able to be a part of these more strategic conversations? If the answer is no, is it, hey, organization, you have a right people, right seat problem. Because you don't have enough faith and confidence in this team that should be operating at this level to be able to have those conversations. Or are you of the mindset of like, hey, companies are at different stages and different sizes and there's different capacity levels kind of all across the entire org. Therefore, like, it's too nuanced just to say this is a binary. Hey, if I lack that trust in these strategic level conversations, like, that's an RPRS issue.
- [14:09]
A
Yes. You deal with this all the time, right? You've got folks who are coming to you saying, hold on, I think I may have this challenge. I do have a thought. Do you have a thought because you see it so often?
- [14:23]
B
I mean, I was going to say, like, the easy thought here is it's. It is nuanced like that. That's kind of like my initial thought. I also, I'm trying to Think through with like, if that cop out's the wrong word for this, but if that's just the easy answer. If that's the easy answer of, like, no, it doesn't matter, like, what size and stage, because at the size that you're at, the team that you have in place at that given time, like, should have the capacity for whatever those strategic decisions are.
- [14:52]
A
Yeah.
- [14:53]
B
So I'm kind of waffling a little bit and processing in real time.
- [14:58]
A
So I think there's a part where it's up to the leader in the sense that what they're looking for is their standard. That's what I meant to say. What I really think, though, is that every organization as it's growing, ultimately, if I'm looking at that leadership team, let's make it really simple. Who's heading up marketing and sales, who's heading up operations, who's heading up finance. And usually with most of the teams, there's other verticals, people, technology, whatever those might be, that are fundamentally the core functions that have to be led at that leadership level. I really think that ultimately, if a leader cannot look around the table and say, I trust the judgment of the folks around me, the way they're thinking about it is not just about how do they take their function to the next level, but how do they take their business, the overall. How do we take the business overall to the next level? I don't have the right leaders for me at any stage of what that means. And of course, that may mean something more basic. An organization might be a smaller organization. Basic blocking and tackling, great. I may only need so much out of someone at some point in time. There's an inflection point where we start saying, we're trying to do more, we're trying to do better. One of the best examples I think I have are those organizations where we've grown by growing our own people internally. I love that at some point in time, an organization oftentimes or will grow. If to the point where I need to have someone who's coming in with outside expertise, I need to have someone who's been there before. I need to have someone who's got a track record of taking an organization that's more complex, harder to run, trying to go at a different rate or speed, and it's no longer enough for me to work with the people I've got internally, I need to have someone coming in with outside perspective. Happens almost all the time. As an organization grows and part and parcel of that is can they lead, manage and hold other people at a different level accountable, at a different level than they ever have before? Can they execute a more complex organization than they ever had before? Can they have a conversation with us as peers about different problems than we've ever faced before, different growth challenges than we've ever faced before, different competitive challenges than we've ever faced before? Because I want their insight and I want to be able to have a peer conversation, peer to peer, where I can trust their judgment. And at that point, I have a right person, right seat issue. I've got to elevate my team. I'll give the best example that I heard it from was Jeff Bezos. And there's a podcast that's out there when he talks about that. He's got a strong point of view, he's seen the play before, he's clearly got a direction he wants to run things in. His ability to work with a leader and say, you've been here for 20 years, I know your track record. You might know this space better than I know it. And I disagree. But when we walk out the door, I commit to whatever we just agreed upon, even if it's not my perspective. That's an example of a leader who's got another leader where they trust their judgment, their perspective, and they are comfortable letting go and saying, I might disagree, but I commit to this direction. That only comes when you've got a great leadership team at whatever tier you are.
- [18:12]
B
I love that. I've heard that disagree and commit. And I've never thought about that through the perspective of the visionary, the integrator, the CEO of the CEO disagreeing with the director. Talk about a great leader. The humility that that must take and the trust that that must take to. Like you're the one that's disagreeing, but still committing to the direction based upon the people that you've put in place. Yeah, that's powerful.
- [18:40]
A
Ryan, We've been talking about this from a business perspective and I think toggling maybe between in my brain, you know what, what I see when I work with, when I worked previously with executives at the, at the global 1000 level, when we're talking about entrepreneurs, our world. But if you translate it to things that you've seen, you've also got the experience of having military experience and expertise. Have you seen the same thing in that context?
- [19:05]
B
Oh, 100%. Generally with flag officers. So like flag officers are sitting at such a high level and making very big strategic decisions, but the actual execution of those decisions and the real time data there's a lot of trust now. I'll tell you, the military has evolved over the last several hundred years. Like, basically, leaders used to have almost full authority. So back in the day, the orders would come by paper, maybe they were in Washington, they would take their paper, they would get on their horse and they would go back down to Portsmouth, Virginia, where their ship would be waiting for them. They would go out to sea, no comms for, you know, six to nine months, comes back and they made all the strategic decisions. Now, because of technology and everything else, like, you know, we're seeing the President. I mean, I think the most famous thing is you've got President Obama and the picture of all of them in the Situation Room while one of the biggest operations in history is going down. And like, the dynamic of that, like having the president so involved in maybe not the decision making, because it was probably observation, but surely he had some sort of communication available to him should he wanted to have used it. Completely different dynamic. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot of trust that goes into decision making and execution. That's well below the ranks of the people that are actually thinking strategically, you
- [20:30]
A
know, And I think actually something you said there to me, the best leaders that I've seen in every organization is that someone is acting as a chief decider. Someone has to ultimately make the decision. The big thing, I think, whether it's strategy, whether it's execution, is you're building a team around you where you can get the right insight, the right perspective. Right in quotations. Because we're always making a bet there is no true right. It's really how do we navigate the challenges and the risk that we're facing. But the best organizations or the best leaders, I would say, are the ones where there's someone who sees a role as being that chief decider. They're taking the input. They've built a leadership team that is, for our words, right person, right seat, groups of people who can provide insight, perspective, translate things to action, have the robust conversation. Because ultimately this is about having a debate oftentimes and figuring out what the right direction is. So they built that team. They've worked hard to make sure that they've got the right people providing the right perspective. And sometimes that chief decider will come in with a point of view. They're fighting to create that shared story and say, how do we translate it to action? Sometimes they're saying, I need everyone's input. Let's see what this is. And ultimately we're going to make a decision Strategy is not a. It's not a democratic exercise. Ultimately, it's about taking all of the input, making a decision, deciding how we're going to move forward at that higher level, building a team that shares that picture and then translating it to execution and then fighting for execution at speed.
- [22:00]
B
I love that. And some of the things that you've been talking about as far as, like, the trust, the confidence and the building of that team, you talked about, what you see it sounds like more often than not is an organization gets to a certain level and we'll call it evolution. Because I think the whole idea of change and people moving around organizations, that's a very kind of scary proposition, not just for the people that are on that team, but the people that have to make those decisions and then have those tough conversations. When leaders are looking across their team, what are they looking for as far as that inflection point? Like, should they be thinking to themselves, okay, well, when I hit 10 million, I'm going to need something that's much different than what I have today. Or there are other kind of signals that they're looking for where they're like, okay, in eos, we call it get it one and have the capacity. You know, are they looking for different signals from a capacity standpoint where they're like, all right, you know, it's not a monetary inflection point or size inflection point. It was something else.
- [23:06]
A
So one of the things I think is that as you as a leader is building a team, very rarely is it sort of this blinding. I know, or don't know, very rarely is it. This is just not the right person altogether. That's an easy decision to make. The harder decisions to make are, can I bring this person along? Can I coach them up? Can they rise up to what it is that we're looking for? Because ultimately, I think of it as, when you've got that right leadership team, things change over time. How hard it is to execute on the business changes over time. People rise and change over time. All of that said to me, I find that the signals are at three levels. One is, can we have the right robust conversation about where are we going from a strategic direction? What are the choices we have? How do we think through them? How do we rationalize through them? Not everyone may be able to think about it at that same level or same pace, but ultimately do I feel like I've got a group of peers here who could have that conversation, who can give me the right, give me useful inputs, and who can advance the conversation in a meaningful way. And sometimes the best conversations are the ones that are not easy. They're chippy in the room, there's debate, there's dialogue. People are passionate about what they're bringing to the table and their point of view. But when they're a high functioning team, they can absorb that. It doesn't have to look pretty from the outside. I've got a couple of teams where afterwards the owner might come to me and say, was that okay? Was I pushing too hard? Was I not listening? What the hell just happened in the room? And I'm sitting there going, that was beautiful. You got it, Everyone got it on the table. There were strong perspectives, points of view. And the more important thing was the way in which the team was able to rationalize the conversation and define an actionable next step was beautiful. Great. Some teams look like that. Some teams are very nice, they're very polite. Same thing. And if we're not having the right conversation, that's not effective either. So what it can look like can be different. What I say is one signal is do I have a team that can have the conversation at that right level, or do I have team members who just don't seem to be playing? And can I afford to have that? Because maybe I just need someone who's an operator in this function for now, but ultimately I need to have something at a different level. The other part, I think, or the other signal is for that function that the leader is, is running. Let's assume that they are. The seats are designed the right way, the function is designed the right way. Let's assume that the person in that seat has to lead, manage, hold others accountable. Let's assume that they have ownership and accountability over making sure we've got processes in place. Let's make assume that they're worried about executing and make sure we're executing on those processes. Let's assume that that leader needs to be able to manage cross functionally as well as up and down. If they're not keeping up, if there's cracks in how we're executing quarter by quarter by quarter, week by week by week in the US world, we know it from the scorecards, from your rock, execution rate, et cetera, that's another signal. And the third. So in other words, if they're just having trouble executing, and the third signal to me is using US terms, if I have people at the table, if I have leaders at the table and they cannot come up with a rock, they cannot meaningfully come up with a way that they're going to advance their own function. Any of those are signs that I don't have the right leaders at the table. They're not participating in helping us think through this at the strategic level. They're having trouble consistently executing on, on, on where our organization is going as it gets larger, more complex, we're moving faster, whatever that might be. And if they don't have ideas about how to improve their own function, all of those are signs to me that says we've got to evolve, coach them up or ultimately we've got to get the right people under those, those leadership team seats.
- [27:00]
B
That's gold, by the way. That's gold. That's what we're going to be clipping out and promoting. That is absolute gold. And just a quick tangent on this. I think one of the things that I've gotten wrong over and over and over is when I finally was able to acknowledge that hey, we've got a right person, right seat and generally it's always followed on competency or capacity for that individual because the organization had outgrown their skill set. And we, you know, what, what we try and do, and what I try and do is build people up as fast as possible, which is like, once we identify them that like they've got the potential to be a leader, to be a manager, we immediately start putting them into programs that can help develop them through peers and, and other things like that. Because we, we want them to keep up with the growth of the organization. Because in, in my experience, that's where I have seen magic. It's as soon as I start bringing people from the outside in, the culture starts to degrade a little bit. The tangent here though is one of the mistakes that I've made over and over, no more, but over was I went out and found somebody that was way ahead of where we were. So hunt a killer, for instance. Like we were probably a 30, 40 million dollar company at the time. And I was like, we're going to be a billion dollar company. Therefore I need the person that's sitting at a billion dollar company and that could not have been more wrong. And I won't get into all the details of it, but it's just, it's a different mindset, it's a different culture. Like what we really needed is somebody that took an organization from 40 to 100 and knows all the landmines in there. A little bit of a tangent there, but, but here you, Ryan, you're so
- [28:45]
A
much more of an expert at this than I am. But let Me, let me get out over my skis for a minute when someone's looking. I love it when, when we can coach and develop people. I, I would not be here if I did not have owners, you know, using U.S. terms that we didn't have when I was there. But visionaries, integrators, who were passionate about investing in my own growth and the growth of the other teams, other people around me. My first experience is that we grew the business to about 25 million. It was professional services, but you couldn't hire someone, you couldn't hire an MBA and drop them in to do what it was that we did. We did some unique stuff and you just had to learn it through jumping in the deep end. Trial and error. You either figured it out or you didn't figure it out. But ultimately, as we kept growing as an organization, we just found that we couldn't. It was very difficult to find people from the outside who could just understand our culture, the way of working, what it was that we even did. We had to grow ourselves from the inside. Every now and then there's a magical unicorn who could cover it from the outside. So. Absolutely. And different organizations are different. But I think that as a leader is growing an organization, it is that triangulating between what are the, what are the skills and competencies that someone needs to have the background, the life experience in order to do that job really, really well. And some of that is, that's wonderful. If you had great corporate experience, that's a totally different world than working with the scrappy entrepreneurial organization. Or someone has worked with that $500 million organization, totally working with the 25 that's just trying to get to 50. So understanding what are the skills and competencies that they need, understanding their personal personality profile, the unique characteristics that they bring for that role, but then also just understanding the culture and what that what the visionary, what the integrator, what the owner, what they bring to the table. And sort of in my mind it's triangulating between can that person, is it, are they the right potential fit given the unique culture of the organization, how the visionary integrator work, given what that seat requires altogether from personality, etc. Profile and just to require skills, knowledge and competencies, can they actually execute at the right level for where that organization is at any point in time?
- [30:56]
B
I would say those are the only two reasons I ever got hiring wrong in the past. Number one, the person was well ahead of where we were and just couldn't figure out have never experienced where we were at. And the other, what you just said is core values. There's two things that we talk about quite a bit and one could not be more anti self serving which is when, when someone comes to us and says hey, we need to go hire for this role and it's a manager, it's a leader. Our first question is, have you looked internal? And as a recruiting shop that makes money off of us being able to assist and partner with clients and help them go find talent, the first thing we ask is, is this person internal? Because that should be the first place every organization looks. Because there's never a perfect fit. And what I mean by that is when you look at core behaviors and core values and you bring someone in, somebody used the word virus. I wouldn't go that far and say like it's a virus. But there's a difference in how that person thinks and how they operate. And you can get close, but you can't get perfect. And especially when you bring that new human into an organization that's been operating and trucking forward and you can almost like you know, predict the next move of the person next to you. There is a degradation to the culture, there's a ramp up period. But yeah, so those have been the two kind of primary mistakes I've made along the way. Which you just brought up right here. Because everybody can read a resume like, you know, if they've got the experience, the expertise, ask good inter. Like those things are pretty basic. The things that aren't is like have they accomplished exactly what it is that you're trying to accomplish and understand how to navigate. And then number two, do they fit the organization?
- [32:41]
A
Yeah. And to your point, my gosh, if you can elevate and grow someone internal in the organization into a role, it's a beautiful thing. And you know, I'm in such admiration of. I like watching coaches or leaders. Coach K. If you look at Coach K at Duke and you look at how many other coaches he has spawned off that are in other either within Duke or at other colleges, it's amazing how many coaches he's grown and developed. Pepsi. There's an old world in which the chief HR I believe it was, that was his role officer at Pepsi. We used to call it the Pepsi mafia. This is back in the day we had a close relationship with that leader. But the number of leaders that he created that then went on to other Global 1000 companies that we then have a connection and work with was amazing because he was amazing at growing leaders internal to the organization. And and having them so strong that there wasn't another place for them internally, they went somewhere else. And that was a huge point of pride was his ability to grow leaders. So it's an amazing thing when, when someone can grow leaders within an organization so powerful at the same time, that is a rare skill.
- [33:50]
B
Yeah, I agree. One of the arguments that, that I would make there is, that's almost how I define a great leader. Like a great leader is someone that can grow and build people to, to accomplish the things that they want to accomplish. Like what I found is everything else just kind of takes care of itself. And what's interesting about the story you just shared, like, I don't know that individual's name. You know, I don't know if they have a book. I don't know any of those things. I don't know if they've ever been published in Forbes. And like all these fancy things, like all these other entrepreneurs. And that is the epitome of great leadership. And so it's just, it's interesting, like what gets the headlines and what gets the highlights and like what's really happening behind the scenes in organizations that drive success.
- [34:33]
A
Yeah, absolutely. I think the best leaders sometimes are the quiet ones that you don't hear about. And they build great organizations, great teams.
- [34:41]
B
All right, quick break friends. Do you find it impossible to hire and retain top sales talent or worse, are you paying insane recruiter fees who are all using outdated hiring processes? Yeah, I was too at Hunt a Killer. We were spending hundreds of thousands on recruiter agency fees. And after I sold that company in 2025, I started Talent Harbor. And the whole vision here was to make sales recruiting accessible to small and medium sized businesses. Because the organizations that can hire and retain world class people are the ones that ultimately win. Most organizations rely on things like ZipRecruiter or, or LinkedIn and they get hundreds if not thousands of resumes. But we find that the best salespeople are already perfectly placed somewhere else. And that's why our approach is to go after them. And we do that through a business model called recruiting. As a service, we do not charge commissions, we do not have success fees, we don't have contracts, we don't have long term engagements. And we become an extension for your team as expert sales recruiters. If you're tired of the same old recruiters and want to actually grow your sales team, check us out@talent harbor.com. that's Talent Harbor. T A L E N T H A R B O R dot com. Let's get your next sales superstar hired. Okay, one, one last question on the strategy part. And, and we can flip the switch to the execution part. So we talked about kind of the foundational things that need to be true in order to have those strategic conversations and make sure that we're talking about the right things. And we talked about having the right team in place. Let's say we've got all of that, we've got the core values, we've got the right team, we've got our 10 year target, we have all of those fundamental things that we need in place to be able to have the strategic conversations to now build the road. It's like, it's like we know where we're at, we know where we want to be and we've got all, all the pieces, all the parts in the recipe to like get from point A to point B. But now we need to draw that line. What are some things that, that leaders like, don't think about constantly, that they need to do, Prepare, research, whatever the case may be, to bring that into the room so that we're drawing a straight line. Not that everything's ever, ever straight, but we're at least drawing the strategy where there's a straight line from point A to point B.
- [37:09]
A
One of the things I think that start seeing these major strategic decisions, I think of those as those are large decisions that pare the decision tree down. Tactics. There's a lot of different ways to go about tactics, or those are short strokes. But when you make a fundamental strategic decision, you're making decision where you're eliminating decision options. You may be opening up the possibility of new doors. If you're playing chess, I sort of think of a strategic decision might be that it's a move that actually creates more openings. But by and large, when you make a really large strategic decision, you're actually saying no to a whole bunch of stuff. You're really focused on the big signals that truly matter and you're saying we're going to double down or we're going to focus on those big signals rather than all the little signals that might be popping up. I think translating that then into, into a plan takes time. One of the things that I focus on, let me just translate it to the EOS world for a minute, is that oftentimes organizations and leaders, sometimes it's easy, but oftentimes we have big decisions, they take time to think through, to knock around, but we don't have a discipline in how we go about it. One of the best tools that I bring in that is from, from a different world is what questions do we have to answer by when? If I've got a strategic decision, sometimes it's a series of questions that I need to answer. Do we do this? How much time, energy would it require? What's the investment? What happens? Or what are the implications if we choose door number 1, 2, 3. And that takes time. And at times I'll say that's, that's a rock. That's a quarter's worth of work. The milestones for the rock could actually be the questions that I need to answer by when. Because we can't talk about this forever. I love strategic procrastination. That's a thing. Let's just delay the decision and see how the information unfolds, folds. But oftentimes what we're really doing is we don't have a discipline about how we're going about thinking through the big questions that we need to answer and by when so that ultimately we can make a decision. And so one of the most powerful to your question about what should someone have in the room so that we can create a roadmap, so we can create a path. Oftentimes what I find is we just actually need to block enough time to think through this in a disciplined way and then have an answer by a particular point in time. And so sometimes the input is, let's take a quarter, let's answer these questions by this point in time. It's an actual process that we need to go through whoever needs to be involved. This isn't talk just for talk sake. But sometimes we need to brainstorm. Sometimes we need to knock it around. Sometimes I need my cfo, my head of operations, etcetera, to go do some homework. But by the end of the quarter, as an example, we will have answered these questions to the best of our ability and we will make a decision. Great. And that's an input to what that roadmap is. Sometimes the roadmap itself is another quarter's worth of work. And let's just map out what we're going to do. The work doesn't stop at the organization. We keep plugging forward, but we're answering questions.
- [40:08]
B
Huh? I love it. I love, like, I feel like we just put a. We put the biggest bow ever now on strategy. And I don't think, just my personal opinion, I don't think execution takes us down another, another path like this. And we're going to get to the actual core question here, which is which one's more important? Execution to Me is now very simple because of this book called Traction. It's not simple, it's not easy. Well, it is simple. It's just not easy. But because of this book, Traction, because of eos, everything else, it's like if you've got a sound strategy, you've got the right people around the table. Is EOS to you the execution component of all of this?
- [40:53]
A
I really think it is to me. If you took entrepreneurial operating system, put a strike through the world entrepreneurial and just dropped an execution operating system, to a large extent, that is what EOS is for me. It is the execution operating system for entrepreneurial companies that will get them very, very far. And so to me, that is, I can't execute effectively if I don't have the right people in my. In my team. And with the os, I've got a framework for thinking through what does it actually mean to have the right people in my team. And at times I have those hard conversations to make sure that I do. It's really hard to execute on anything if I don't know what my measurables are. It still fascinates me that every kid growing up, most everybody knows how a game is played. They know how to keep score. The number of kids running around with a fantasy football team and a fantasy baseball team, somehow they all know how the game is scored. Most of us in business don't actually know how to keep score for the game that we play inside of business. We don't know how the game is played. Truly, a scorecard helps with execution because I can focus on the measurables that actually matter. If I don't have a discipline in getting to the root cause of stuff and dig, dig, dig, and then figure out how we're going to parcel this thing out. So we put the right proportional effort against the issue in our language, idsing a methodology to be able to have those conversations. Radical prioritization, because I can't focus on everything that we got to have. It's really hard to execute if I don't have anything standardized, if I don't have any processes, any systems, I got to keep reinventing the wheel. In fact, without that, it makes super hard to diagnose what the heck a problem is. But when I have a standard and a process now, I can figure out, is it people issue, is it process issue, is it a systems issue? And ultimately, if I don't have a cadence so I can chunk the work out, figure out what needs to happen by when, and then we have conversations every single week. To keep our eye on the measurables that matter. The big things we're trying to do quarter by quarter to advance the organization so we can execute on the big things that we could change to move toward that strategy. And if I can't figure out how, we can have conversations about the fires that keep on coming up, get to the root cause of those so we can keep executing day to day with the business itself. That's all essential to be able to make that strategy happen. So to me, yes, absolutely. EOS brings to an organization a framework for an execution operating system to radically improve the way that we're executing.
- [43:27]
B
Love it. Love it. So we've got strategy now, which is getting the right people in the room, making sure that everybody understands what the vision is, where we're going, long term vision, what that picture is over three years and then starting to have the conversations of how do we map this out, how do we draw this line? And I love what you said about this idea of eliminating elimination. Good strategy is really the elimination of options and then execution. And I loved where you said execution operating system. So fundamentally, like are there components of strategy? Yeah, everything we just talked about in strategy, minus like actually drawing that line is, is basically the vto. But you've got, you've got eos, which helps everybody understand the scorecard, what we're tracking, how we're tracking, what we're getting done, the conversations that we're having from, from an issue standpoint, the roadblocks or challenges that are getting in our way. Okay, so now, now we've got strategy and we've got execution. So I think the, the question that, that we were trying to solve here is, well then which one's more important? And obviously they're both very important. Is there one that's more important?
- [44:38]
A
Such a great question. I don't know if you can say one is more important than the other. What I will say is in my experience it's very rare that an organization can have a great strategy and not execute well and still win. It isn't impossible for an organization to not have a great strategy, but they're phenomenal at executing and they win. There's a book, older book out there by Larry Bossidy and Ram Sharad and I believe it's called Execution. And in there there's a quote about execution eats strategy for lunch. And I still believe that there's a component of that which is that yes, great strategies are phenomenal for many organizations that sets the tone. You can't win without a Good strategy. Ultimately. Sorry, it's difficult to win without a great strategy. Ultimately, it's very, very difficult to win if you can't execute on what it is that you're setting out to do.
- [45:42]
B
I love that. And one of the things as you were talking about that, that I thought about is like if a part of BOS is the people analyzer and the accountability chart, if the foundation of strategy is people and these people can execute very fast, it's almost like if you've got the right team, then they both are taken care of to a certain extent if you're running this process correctly. It's so hard because I was in that camp and last week you asked me, you were like, oh, well, what do you think? Like execution immediately. And then you, you brought up a counterexamp. I was like, oh, that's a, that's a tough one. Okay, well, in that situation, like strategy is incredibly important. Do you think that there's like times throughout an organization where like one thing is kind of more important than the other?
- [46:39]
A
For sure, yeah. I mean, I'll give two, two examples. Two different clients. One, we had a, we had their annual session earlier this year and one of the things, the visionary, and there's a beauty, right, of a visionary integrator visionary always seems to always want to run faster. Integrators obsessed about the execution and there's a healthy oil and water relationship there. We recognized, or they recognized that what they had accomplished this past year of putting process systems and they figured out how to routinize something that's really hard in their business, that they were looking at their 10 year target and the visionary said, I think we can do this in five years. And what is it our three year picture, we should be able to accomplish in five years what we thought would take us five years. We should be able to accomplish that in three years. And this year there's some implications if we're going to do that. Really healthy conversation speed and using time as a lever is a strategic decision. That organization this year may not have to execute so well on one component of it. The strategy itself will drive it. They have to build an entirely different leadership team if they're going to be able to go at that speed. So the opening that they had in the conversation was, okay, this may not be crazy, but there's no way we can keep doing this as we did before. Great. They have three years to build that right team in order to be able to get to where they want to go at the speed that they're going, there's no way they can do it without that right team. And if they don't execute perfectly this year on building the right team, but they execute on everything else, they're fine. They've got time, There's a Runway. So I think it's really a Runway question. There's another team that I'll go back to had a fundamental decision about do you take money from the family office? In which case you never need to take money from anyone else again. But now you're beholden to the family office. Other parts of your vision about creating wealth for a multitude of people, that part totally changes because now you're creating it for one. And there was a window of time that they had to make that fundamental decision and that just that door will close. And so that's a different, different speed at which they have to make a fundamental strategic decision, and that is about picking. But once they make that door, door one, door two, they've got to execute perfectly whichever door they have, because either they're answering to a whole bunch of investors and they still have to get a whole bunch more, and they have to execute really well on investor management, etcetera, and all the things they're doing there, or they've got to execute really well for the one family office that they just signed up with. Either way, they've got to execute really well, but a very short window for making that strategic decision.
- [49:28]
B
It's so funny you bring up speed. I've been thinking about this constantly for the last couple of weeks of, like, the importance of speed. Like, how important is speed in business? And, like, not just how important, but, like, where does it rank and everything? And what do you do with speed when you have it? Because you could speed right into a brick wall. I mean, like, there's. There's a lot of different components of speed. Like, how important do you think speed is in business?
- [49:54]
A
I think that we undervalue speed in a lot of different dimensions, but it all has to tie to where it is that you want to go as an organization. And it has to be put against what truly matters at any point in time. We can't do everything. We can't be moving fast everywhere. We can't be moving fast against the things that don't matter. But I do think that we undervalue speed in the sense that sometimes there's smaller decisions to make. We have a fire that keeps on burning in this organization. What are we going to do to close that thing so that once and for all we don't have to worry about it. Can we just move fast on that? If that matters? Sometimes there's a larger decision to make and we keep kicking the can down on that. And sometimes it simply is that we can use speed as a lever for how quickly we want to move as an organization. What I tend to find is that in retrospect, when teams look back over a 90 day period, over a one year period, there tend to be a few things that they can look back at consistently and say, I wish we had made that decision earlier. I wish we had just called it for what it is. I wish we had stopped working with that vendor. I wish that we'd stopped working with that partner. I wish we resolved that people issue a long time ago. I wish we made that strategic decision a long time ago. I wish I picked up the phone and had a conversation with someone earlier. I'm watching my competitors move way faster than me. I wish that we were moving at a different rate. So to me, those are all speed decisions. The question really is, what are we applying that speed decision to? What are the big things that truly matter? And for those things that truly matter, considered a strategic conversation or a tactical one, how fast can we move against it? That's not too fast, but not too slow. And the real question to me is, if we're not moving at speed, is it because we don't have time, we don't have energy, our priorities are spread across too much, or I'm just afraid of making a hard decision? Either way, let's make sure that we're moving at the right speed for the right reason.
- [51:48]
B
One thing, and you might not berate me, but you might be disappointed in me. But I'd love your perspective on this, which is. So I bought this book called the One Thing and I was trying to buy another book that's called the One Something and I bought the wrong book. But this book had more reviews and better reviews. And so I was like, well, it was the wrong book, but I'll read it because it's, it looks great. And so I read it and there were some really, really interesting principles in it. This idea of like, you just focus on one thing and if you focus on one thing at a time and that domino falls, then you can focus on the next thing and that domino will fall. But when you focus on a variety of things at one time, like you're, you're just like, you're not toppling them, you're just like, you're just budging on moving them. So one of the things that, that we recently did, and this is still in, in trial mode right now, which is for our quarterly rocks, we only picked one. Just one. One, One per person. So this whole idea, like a lot of things, especially because we're, we're growing so fast and we're still very new and like, we're figuring it out. What we realized is that one to two of our rocks, out of everybody had about three. One to two of our rocks were either changing or not relevant anymore after the first 30 to 45 days. And I realized the argument, and I agree with this argument, which is the whole idea. Well, it's like, well, it's still on that leader. Like, they did not have the. It doesn't matter. That leader, which most of the time it was me, did not have the foresight to be able to predict and anticipate whatever that change was going to be and didn't set the right rock. And so we were like, well, wait, let's just set one and let's get crystal clear on what that one thing is for each individual. And if, like, if we spend that much time getting it down to one, which kind of goes back to your elimination. What is strategy? Strategy is the elimination or the deletion of things that. Of options. Give me, give me some feedback on, on this, this whole idea of like, we all only have one rock. Are you, are you an advocate for that? Are you like, no, you're not moving?
- [53:56]
A
I love it. I love it. I think that what we tend not to do, me included, is we tend not to radically focus on the biggest things. Now, sometimes we can't figure out what the biggest things are. You're an organization that does. We all place bets. Some things may work, some things may not work. But ultimately, when you're an organization that has clarity on where you're going, clarity on what the biggest levers are, the biggest thing we tend to do to ourselves is we dilute our time, energy and effort. And my gosh, imagine the power if we thought that we were picking the one biggest thing that we've got to accomplish every single quarter. Each leader does that four times over. However large your leadership team is, times X number of people for your leadership team, let's just pretend that all you have. A group organization has three leaders in that organization, and every quarter they did the biggest, most important thing. And they. It was big, it was meaningful, and they brought it over the line. And now we're bringing 12 things over the line that we could not have every single year. There's Huge power in that. I used to have a discipline where every Sunday night I would simply figure out what are the three most important things I've got to accomplish by the end of this week. That focus, it wasn't what it was 3, but that focus of with all the noise that's going on in the organization, with all the stuff that's going on in the organization, if I could just end this week with these three things accomplished and fight too, and it usually would be on a Friday that they would come through. My gosh, you did that 52 times and there's such power. Bring it down to one. If you're bringing doing one huge thing every single quarter, one huge thing that you know that you're going to deliver on every single week. Huge power.
- [55:38]
B
I'll report back on this. I almost had a LinkedIn post. I just didn't want to ruffle any feathers in the community. I'll report back on this once we get some data points. That's our thinking. Our thinking is like we were getting anywhere between 60 and 75% of our rocks completed and there was a lot of things that were changing, but we all knew which one was most important. And so last quarter, well, it wasn't last quarterly, it was our annual. Was our last meeting. But during our last annual, we were like, all right, well then let's just pick one and see how that works. And I'll tell you, it's working. Our early indicators right now is like, we are all locked into that one thing. It has not changed. The priorities have not changed. We were all able to pick the one thing that was most important. So anyhow, early indications say it's a good thing. But I'll let you know what I
- [56:31]
A
love about those a Less is more. At times, just doing less is more. And I think the other part is that every organization can only move as fast as it can. And I think of execution as you're building muscle in an organization. Over time the capacity of the organization may increase as maybe you have more team members as you have. I came from a world where you had to have project management and program management and all of these method outs, sprints and scrum meetings and all of these methodologies that had to be built up for the organization to be able to execute at greater speed. But as an organization is growing, you can only move as fast as you can move over time. Yes, the velocity of decision making, the velocity of the capacity to be able to handle more may change and increase. But at any point in time, let's Just focus on the biggest, most important things and if it's one, bring it across the line.
- [57:27]
B
There it is. All right, I've got four other topics in here that we were supposed to get to today. Maybe you're going to be my first part three. All right, Elliot, one thing is what do you look for in clients? I know you've got a lot of really cool, interesting things. Not just that you're in Joshua Tree right now, but a lot of really cool, interesting things on the horizon for you. You. What are you looking for in clients? Where are you looking for those clients?
- [57:54]
A
Absolutely. I'm based in both Portland, Oregon and Miami. Love working with clients in the backyard. I've got a couple openings for those who. Who are not. The teams that I love working with are teams that are, somewhat goes without saying, they're growth oriented, they like to win. I love working with teams who like to win, however that's defined. I like working with teams that have significant ambitions, they want to grow, they want to transition to a family member, whatever that is. They've got significant aspirations for where they are today and they see a future that's bigger, more exciting, and maybe not easy to get to. Love working with those teams. And I like working with teams that have a leader so often who's ready to roll up their sleeves, dive in and say, I want to be able to run my organization in a different way so that we can break through and get to next. We're successful already. My clients are anywhere between 5 and 500 million, sometimes actually a little bit larger, a few that are smaller. But what's common with all of them is that they have a key leader in the organization that says, I want to dive in, I want to operate in a different way. And I'm not afraid there is going to be a journey. I'm not afraid of making hard decisions as I go through the journey and I want to partner on the journey. Those are clients that I love working with every now and then, having fun too. Is that a terrible thing?
- [59:21]
B
I love it. That's awesome. So someone just listened to this and they're like, oh, that's, that's actually me like. And I need to get a hold of Elliot, what would be the easiest way for them to get ahold of you?
- [59:32]
A
Easiest way. And Ryan, I don't know if this will be in the notes. My name is hard enough to spell. Just find me on the link for my EOS webpage or on LinkedIn. Both of those are great ways to find me.
- [59:45]
B
Awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time. I realize you're on spring break right now, and so I appreciate you taking some time out of all the things that you have going on to drop this wisdom. And, boy, do we have some gold in this one. So thank you so much, Ryan.
- [60:02]
A
This is fun. I'll always make time for you. Family can wait. No, everyone's still sleeping. And truly appreciate it. Always fun. And really appreciate what you do for clients, the impact that you make on helping them build the teams that they need to have to win and move to speed.
- [60:22]
B
Thanks so much. I appreciate it.
- [60:24]
A
Thanks, Ryan.