Linkedin course by Dorie Clark

Why make strategic thinking a habit

We know strategic thinking is important. We’ve all heard time and again how valuable it is to take a step back, to look at what we’re doing, to make sure we’re optimizing, to make sure that we’re focused on the right things. And yet in one recent study, 96% of leaders said they didn’t have enough time for strategic thinking. It’s a big disconnect. But the truth is, it’s an opportunity for you. Because if you are one of the few people that’s actually stepping up and doing what everyone knows we should be doing, looking at how we spend our time and being insightful about it. That is going to give you a huge competitive advantage in the marketplace. I’m Dorie Clark. I’m the author of “Reinventing You” and “Stand Out” and I’m excited to join you on this journey about developing your strategic thinking as a habit. It’ll become an automatic process in your life, something that you do every day, not something that you have to exert a vast amount of willpower for but instead a part of your standard operating procedure. And that’ll make you a better, more insightful, and yes, more strategic thinker.

Setting yourself up for stratigic thinking

Making time for strategic thinking

1. Put time on your calendar. Even an hour a month is extremely valuable to step back and make sure that you’re asking yourself the right questions.
   • You can be looking at am I doing the right things?
   • Is the way that I’m spending my time right now lining up with what my future goals are?
   • Could I be doing something differently or better?
2. Multitask: during workout, during a non-demanding task that allows for thinking
3. Practice writing every day:
   • gets you in the habit of noting your thoughts and ideas and concerns so that when it comes time for you to be focused on strategy, you know where to go
   • helps you capture ideas that otherwise might dissipate or flit away
4. Leverage wasted time. e.g. jet lagged, not feeling well.

Making time for strategic thinking Selecting transcript lines in this section will navigate to timestamp in the video

• Let’s get something out of the way, you do have time for strategic thinking. Lots of people say they don’t, but frankly it’s an excuse. The truth is it doesn’t take that much time to be strategic, but what it does take is conscious, deliberate focus on carving out time. It doesn’t have to be a lot. Even an hour a month is extremely valuable to step back and make sure that you’re asking yourself the right questions. You can be looking at am I doing the right things? Is the way that I’m spending my time right now lining up with what my future goals are? And, could I be doing something differently or better? When you ask yourself that, it’s extraordinarily powerful. The truth is strategic thinking is never going to be the most urgent thing. And if you let yourself get distracted, you’ll never get to it. But by carving out that time, it’s an important first step. You can also really make time for strategic thinking in moments in between. For instance, when you’re doing automatic, physical activity. It could be exercising or jogging. It could be taking a shower. Those are great times to have strategic insights because your mind is just a little bit distracted, and so you’re able to make creative connections between things. Another great habit that you can develop to help with strategic thinking is having a daily writing practice. Now, that’s not necessarily strategic, per se, although you could sometimes focus yourself on strategic questions, but really it gets you in the habit of noting your thoughts and ideas and concerns so that when it comes time for you to be focused on strategy, you know where to go. Also, it helps you capture ideas that otherwise might dissipate or flit away, if you didn’t write them down. And finally, you can use wasted time. I personally like to use time when I’m jet lagged to focus on strategy. You’re distracted, you’re not necessarily feeling your best. It’s certainly not the right time to detailed work like doing your taxes or spreadsheets, but you can often make big picture, creative connections that can help you create insights that otherwise wouldn’t necessarily occur to you. By taking these steps, you absolutely will discover you do have time to be strategic.

Finding the right place for strategic thinking

change the place where you do your thinking. - travel abroad, perhaps on a vacation. And if you can’t do that, even watching a foreign film or reading a book about a foreign culture can be very powerful in terms of showing you ideas and possibilities, ways that different people do things. - Find a new location locally - Try a different spot in your office - go outside + reduce stress + increase creativity

A lot of the conversation around strategic thinking focuses around time. As in, I don’t have enough of it to do strategic thinking. But actually, I’ll suggest that we need to focus a lot more on place. How do we leverage the power of place to help us do our best thinking? There are a few ways. One is actually to dramatically shift where we do our thinking. If you’re able to, for instance, you could travel abroad, perhaps on a vacation. And if you can’t do that, even watching a foreign film or reading a book about a foreign culture can be very powerful in terms of showing you ideas and possibilities, ways that different people do things. And that helps you think about your own circumstances in a different way. It might spark creative connections. Another possibility is to change where you do you work in a more local sense. If you’re able to, you might, for instance, take your laptop to a cafe. Oftentimes the ambient noise helps people focus and concentrate better, and it might lead to different outcomes or more success in doing different types of work. You can even change things up around the office. Instead of working at your desk, you might see if you can do some work at a conference room or a lounge and that could spark new ideas. The place can actually help you see things differently. And of course, you can go outside. A lot of us, especially during a busy workday, forget to do it. We’re inside in the fluorescent lights all day long. But studies actually show that not only does being outside in nature reduce our stress, it’s also been shown to help us become more creative. And that, of course, is beneficial when it comes to strategic thinking. Because the more creative ideas you have, the more you can actually see possibilities that might have been invisible to you before, but might be just the ticket for your next strategic initiative.

Make small changes to spark strategic thoughts

1. record conversations: allows you to capture thoughts and ideas
2. Hand write things: unlock more creativity
3. draw your ideas

How do we train ourselves to think more strategically? How do we get in that habit? It may sound horrid or complicated or onerous, but the truth is it doesn’t have to be. There are some surprising ways that we can reconfigure the way that we think. One, which is very simple, it’s something that I’ve started doing recently and it’s become a lot easier now that many meetings are happening on remote, is that I’ve actually started making audio recordings of many of my conversations. Now of course, you need to ask the other person’s permission before you do that, but it can become really valuable as a tool to refer back to see patterns and also to surface ideas that might’ve been hidden or things that were missed the first time around. For instance, I actually had a call recently with a colleague and she said something during the call and I said, “Oh, that’s fantastic, you should write an article about that.” And so she did. The next day she wrote an article and she sent it to me. But it wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t quite the right focus and I honestly couldn’t remember what it was that I had suggested she write about. But we had the recordings, so I referred back to it, I was able to point her in the right direction and she wrote a terrific article and published it based on this conversation. So that’s the first piece is you can make an audio recording of your conversations to spark insights and to ensure that you’re actually capturing what’s talked about. Another possibility is that you can actually start to handwrite more things. Now this isn’t feasible for everything, but when you’re specifically thinking about strategic vision, brain storming, oh, where do I want to go, how do I want to do things, what possibilities are out there? Sometimes you can actually unlock more creativity by using handwriting. Studies have shown, in fact, that the mechanical act of writing actually uses a different part of your brain as well. So by tapping into that different part of your brain, you might be able to unlock something different and see the world in a new way. And similarly, finally, you can actually try drawing out your ideas. You can use a Venn diagrams, you can create pyramids, you can do charts, whatever it is, but sometimes looking at images or creating images can help you see things in different ways. So for instance, if you’re talking about a concept, it might actually be helpful for you to draw a pyramid because that helps reinforce the fact that there’s a foundation and there’s something on top of it and there’s something on top of that and you’ll see the concept differently. When you use these strategies, you actually are tapping into different parts of your brain and training yourself in these small but important strategic thinking habits.

Strategic thinking tactics

Forget to-do lists

Cons of to-do lists: undifferentiated, tasks of different importance, different duration all jumbled together, a mess for our strategic focus

1. To-focus-on list, have different duration of focus, 3 month, 1 year, 5 year.
2. To-Be list: e.g. loving parent, visionary leader, helpful colleague.

Just about every professional has a to-do list. Could be on paper, could be electronic, but somewhere we have a list and the problem is that it’s undifferentiated. It’s all the things we need to do, everything from buy milk, to prepare a speech to the board, to write a book. Those are projects of different importance, different duration, and they’re all jumbled together, which creates a mess, frankly, for our strategic focus. We don’t know what we should be doing on or where we should be spending our time when we look at a list like that. So, a couple of colleagues of mine have developed what I think are better ideas. Let me share them with you. The first one, from my colleague Marissa Fayer, is called a to-focus-on list. Instead of what you should be doing, it’s where should your attention be concentrated. She suggests having different durations of to-focus-on. So it could be three months, a year, and five years. That helps you understand where you really want to be putting your extra time and effort. It doesn’t mean, of course, that you can ignore everything and stop answering emails ‘cause it’s not on your to-focus-list, but it really gives you a sense of where to put in your discretionary effort. Making sure that the activities you do today line up with where you want to be. Maybe your goal in three months is that you will have onboarded a new employee. That’s what you focus on. In a year, perhaps you want to get a promotion, so you want to be focusing on things related to increasing your visibility. And perhaps in five years you’d like to managing a large team, so you want to be focusing long-term on things like developing your skills as a manager. It’s a helpful frame that you can use that gives you just a little bit more strategic insight than a regular to-do list. Another concept I love comes from my colleague, Angela Myers, and she suggests having a to-be list. It’s not just about what we do, it’s also about who we are in the world. So for instance, if you want to be a loving parent and spouse, that is an important priority for you to be aware of. Maybe you want to be a visionary leader. Maybe you want to be a helpful colleague to your team members. But understanding that and really knowing what you value enables you to make better choices about where you spend your time, and in the end that’s a lot better than a regular to-do list.

How to analyze your decisions

We make plenty of decisions every single day. But the truth is, most of us never bother to look back and revisit them. And that’s a mistake. Because if we can actually study the mechanism by which we make our decisions and analyze them, we can get better and smarter over time. So here’s a few ways to do that.

1. Write down your assumptions The first is to actually write down your assumptions as you’re in the process of making a decision. Now, retrospectively, you might fudge things a little bit, even inadvertently, you might forget what your assumptions are, or say, I knew it all along or I was always concerned about that. But let’s test it out. Write it down in the moment so you can see what your assumptions were. You might think that it was a great idea to launch a certain product, because you say it will take six months and you’ll sell 50,000 units in the first year. Well, if it turns out not to take six months, that gives you something to examine and study. It might turn out that you have a systematic bias toward over optimism. And if you learn that about yourself that you think it’s going to take six months, and actually it takes nine or 12, then you can correct for it in the future and become a smarter and more strategic thinker.

2. Practic scenario thinking: bringing forth ideas you might overlook, or possibilities that might seem extreme or improbable, which may prove useful.

Another possibility is to employ what is known as scenario thinking. So, basically what that means is that instead of coming up with one alternative, which is of course, what so many people do and say, well, that’s it, obviously. You actually take the time to come up with three different possibilities or scenarios and plan them out. Maybe option A is that everything goes according to plan with your new product launch. Option B might be maybe the sales numbers are much less than we thought. What do we do then? Option C might be the sales numbers are terrible. Nobody is buying this. And if you map that out, it enables you to ask the right questions to say, well, what’s our fallback? What can we do? What are the possibilities? It enables you and in fact forces you to be creative upfront.

1. Use premortem and postmortem analysis
   • premortem: if this initiative failed in the future, what could have caused it.

And that leads us to the third possibility, which is using both premortem and postmortem analysis. Now, most of us have heard about doing management postmortems, where there’s been some project initiative, and you get together afterwards. You recap it and you say, all right, team, what went right? What went wrong? That is a great thing to do. And it’s important best practice. But something that is as helpful, maybe even more helpful is what is known as a premortem. And that’s where you gather the whole team together, then you wargame it out. You say, if this initiative were to fail in the future, what would be the cause of it failing? This forces you to ask the question, where are the weaknesses? Where are the vulnerabilities? And of course, if you think about them in advance, it helps you figure out how to mitigate them. How to solve them, how to prevent them. Doing all of that enables you to be a far better and more strategic thinker. And those are exactly the kind of habits you want to cultivate.

How to constantly improve your strategy

When it comes to strategic thinking, we can’t afford to get cocky. We can’t afford to rest on our laurels and say, “Oh, I’m plenty strategic. “I don’t need to get any better.” No. We need to constantly uplevel. That’s the essence of building strategic thinking as a habit. How do we do it even better moving forward? Well, here are a couple of things that you can consider.

1. Create an inspiration file

The first is maintaining a so-called inspiration file. Now, it could be physical on paper, it could be electronic. It doesn’t really matter. But ultimately, the key is that you pick a few areas, it could be your industry, it could be trends within your industry, it could be items of personal interest, that you want to be tracking, instead of doing what almost everybody else does, which is when you see an article, you see something interesting, you say, “Oh, that’s cool. “I’ll remember. “Oh, I’ll come back to that later.” And of course, they never do. What you do is you clip it in some way, electronically or physically, and you put items in this folder. And then, you make it a regular practice. You can even put it on your calendar to revisit and read things in that folder. And meanwhile, you’re keeping it, you’re maintaining it, so that it’s a resource. You can be staying on top of important trends that can spark ideas for you, enabling you to make connections. And so, you know that when you need to come back, and look for it again, you’ll know exactly where it is. That helps you be a broader and a deeper thinker.

2. Give yourself an assignment

Another tactic that I love is one that my colleague Joe Sprangle came up with. He’s a dean at Mary Baldwin University’s Business School. And he likes to actually give himself assignments, almost as though he were in a class. And his assignments are around areas of personal and professional growth for himself. So, for instance, as one example, if you want to get better at email, what Joe would do in a situation like that, is he would give himself the assignment, I want to get better at email. And so, he would read and research for several hours topics about best practices for email. Now, he might be investing two or three hours, but the truth is if he’s able to save even 10 minutes a day on his email, that compounds over time. Over the course of a year, over the course of multiple years, he has become dramatically more efficient. And so, we can think about areas that we want to assign ourselves. Don’t wait until you’re in a class. You don’t have to be in a class to be learning things. You can give yourself your own assignments and get better. And every bit that you’re shaving off in terms of time spent in becoming more productive, or every bit that you’re gaining in terms of being a better and smarter thinker, that is the bedrock on which you build your habits of strategic thinking.

Look at the root cause of problems

Have you ever played that arcade game, Whack-a-Mole? If you haven’t, the name is pretty self-evident. You’re given a mallet and there’s a bunch of moles that keep popping out of the machine and you have to keep bashing them down. Well, the truth is, a lot of business, unfortunately, is like playing Whack-a-Mole. Because the truth is, problems keep popping up all the time, almost out of nowhere. And if all you do is just solve problems, solve problems, put out the fire, you’re going to be kept busy for the rest of your life, and you may never actually get to focus on the right things, the important things, because you’re so distracted with all of the moles. So the real question, what we need to do if we truly want to be strategic thinkers, is step back and say, what’s the root cause of the problem? Where are all the moles coming from? That’s what we need to figure out. So here are a few questions that you can ask yourself so that you can really begin to look at what is causing the problem that’s manifesting itself right in front of you.

Identify the root cause of the problem and solve for that

Confirm the facts

One is to really get clear and understand what are the facts. So often, people have their own interpretations of the facts. “Oh, well she’s this way,” or, “Oh, this is why this happened.” Well, that might be true, but it also might not be. And so what we need to do is train ourselves always to ask, what is the evidence, what is the evidence that this is the case? And if you hear it and it sounds right, great, fantastic, but it’s also possible that another person may just be foisting their own interpretation onto something and you want to make sure that you are dealing with ground truth and not someone else distorting it, inadvertently or otherwise.

Have clear goals

Now, a second thing that’s really important when it comes to getting to the root cause of issues is making perfectly sure that you are very explicit and that everything is clear about your goals.

So for instance, someone might think that an advertising campaign that you created is no good at all, but if you’re advertising to the parents, and they assume that you should be advertising to the teenager, well of course, there’s going to be a disconnect. Those two audiences would like very different things. So you want to be explicit about everything. What is your goal? Make sure that you know it and make sure that you understand what the goals and intentions are of the people around you.

Use the five why

And finally, a great tactic is to make sure that we’re always vigilant about practicing the five whys. Now this is a practice made popular by Toyota, the automotive industry used it, but it’s penetrated popular culture, and it goes like this. When you see a problem, you want to ask, why. But you don’t stop there, you keep going and you make sure that you’ve asked it at least five times, because often, what manifests itself as the initial problem is not the right problem.

So for instance, you might say, “Oh, we have an issue about budget overruns.” Well, okay, why? Well, it turns out that the employees are having lots of overtime. Well, why are they having overtime? Oh, well, it turns out that there’s a machine on the assembly line that keeps breaking. Well, all right, why is that? Well, it turns out that we switched suppliers. Oh, well, why did we do that? Well, a certain subpart wasn’t available.

You chase it back and back and back and what ultimately seemed like a budget issue may actually be a supply chain issue, it may be a safety issue. You have to ask the question so that you understand. When you do that, when you are diligent about seeking out the true answers, not the easy answers, not the surface answers, you can actually be far more successful.

The most important strategic questions to ask yourself

How can this be easier?

We would all love for things in our professional life to be easier. But yet, ironically, so often, we are the ones complicating things for ourselves. We need to peel back the layers, and truly ask ourselves, “Are there blind spots? “Are there assumptions that we’re making?” Because if we can identify them, we can actually get to that level of simplicity that we crave.

List every step in the process

Here’s the first step, for a given process that you have, write down literally every single step that you do. Now, that might seem overly onerous or overly obvious. Why are we doing this? But the problem is that there are things that are hidden to us that we need to raise to the surface.

So, for instance, if your client presentation best practice is that your team meets

• you decide who’s going to say what
• you have minutes for the meeting
• you send around the minutes
• they get approved
• someone’s assigned to create the deck
• they have to look for images for the deck
• they put it all together
• the deck gets evaluated.

Okay, that’s a lot of steps. You may say, “Well, you know, they’re all essential.” But the truth is, let’s go to the next point, and that is you comb through that, you evaluate it.

Determine which steps are essential

And I want you to literally put a check mark next to every step in the process that truly is essential. Because, ultimately, what’s truly essential is deciding what you want to say to the client, and then, literally presenting in the meeting to the client. All the other elements, looking for images for the deck and approving the minutes, they may feel essential, but they’re customary, not mandatory to what needs to be done. And it’s in those places that we often make a lot of trouble and a lot of extra work for ourselves.

Conduct a test of new process

So, the final step is to find a low-stakes situation. Maybe you practice with a team meeting, or maybe it’s a minor client meeting that isn’t covering important ground, and it’s with a safe, trusted client. And you try out a new way of doing things. The truth is maybe you don’t even need a deck after all. Maybe you can create a one-page document laying out your recommendations. Maybe you can give an oral presentation. There are many ways you could try to do things simply. You certainly don’t want to do it at first in a high-stakes situation. But run a test, see what happens. You may find that people complain. They say, “Where’s the deck?” And if that’s the case, okay, great. You have your feedback, you’ve tested your assumptions. You do need to do it. That goes in the mandatory category. But it’s also possible maybe no one will notice. And if that’s the case, don’t do it. People might even compliment you about the new way of doing things. And you’ll have discovered an amazing time savings, and a better of doing business.

__We have to question our assumptions__, we have to constantly ask, “How can this be easier?” And when we do that, we become more strategic thinkers.

What can you cut out?

There is a big problem with most people’s strategy, and that’s the overtime, they keep layering on more and more things, more goals, more objectives, more initiatives. And eventually, their strategy becomes bloated and unwieldy and untenable, because you can’t focus on all those things at once, you’re pulled in too many directions. Conversely, we should be asking ourselves what can we cut out, what can we pare down? And here are a few ways that you can think about it.

Ask Questions

The first is to ask yourself on an ongoing basis,

1. The urgent vs important question:
   • what is most critical
   • and what is most time sensitive?

Fans of the leadership books out there might be familiar with this, it’s knows as the Eisenhower Matrix, because President Eisenhower popularized it, Stephen Covey talked about it, as well. In other words, what’s urgent and what’s important? Those are the things to keep your eyes on.

1. Delegate
   • what can be delegated?
   • What can you systematize? Another important question you can ask yourself is, what can only be done by you and what can be delegated? It might feel in the moment like everything has to be done by you. And of course, it’s true, maybe other people can’t necessarily do it as well as you can, but the truth is, in many instances, people can do things pretty well if you train them. It takes more time up front and that can be a hassle. But if you actually work to systematize your processes, if you write down what you’re doing and take the time to coach someone, eventually, you can actually free up quite a bit of time by that process. So think carefully about what you realistically can delegate to others.
2. Simplify processes
   • Where can you make cuts and actually improve results? And finally, it’s useful to ask yourself a question that might seem a little bit counterintuitive. Where can you make cuts and actually improve results?

There’s a well-known study by Columbia psychologist, Sheena Iyengar, about jam. She and some colleagues actually set up a booth at a grocery store and in the first experiment, they had six jams for customers to sample. And in the second one, they had 24 jams. Now, the customers really liked tasting all the jams. It was very exciting for them when they had 24 options. But the truth was, they ended up buying less.

And the reason is that when we give consumers, or anyone for that matter, too many options, it leads to paralysis, it’s confusing, they feel like, “Oh, I’ll never have time to evaluate “the merits of all of these things,” and so they just stop, they freeze, and they do nothing. We want to make things simple, we want to make it simple for our customers to buy and we want to make it simple for our colleagues and the people around us to work with us. So think through, are there areas of your business or your processes, how you do things, that have gotten too complicated, too many steps and can you slice down and pare back and in the process, actually improve your results? By asking yourself this critical question, what can you cut out, you may, in fact, actually be able to do things better, and that is an incredibly strategic move.

What is unlikely to change?

One of the places that strategic thinking can be really useful is in understanding long-term developments and long-term trends. Now, it’s also a place we have to be careful because we have to learn to tell the difference between a legitimate trend and a passing fad. And also, there can be a lot of hype upfront, even for legitimately important developments. People will often say, “This changes everything, everything is different!” And eventually, everything might be different, but usually it takes time for the full scope of changes to unfold, and so we have to understand the pacing of things. So here are a few things that you can keep in mind.

Be ware of the landscape around

• keep up on industry trends
• finding out what’s important to your boss
• know your company’s priorities
• read newspapers and industry publications

The first is that, when it comes to actually following these trends and understanding them, that is not your boss’ job or your company’s job for you. Of course, they need to keep on top of it for themselves, but the point is, you need to be responsible for that, you cannot just sit back and be spoon-fed this information, or assume that somehow it’ll come to you. You need to keep on top of it. And that means being aware of what your boss is thinking about, and what he or she is following, reading the company’s annual report, or listening to the CEO’s speeches to see what’s on their horizon and what they care about, and also keeping up with the daily newspaper and with industry journals, so that you know what’s happening on the ground. That allows you to see around corners and make better strategic decisions.

Know the basics of your industry and of business

You also want to get conversant with the foundational principles in both your industry and in business in general. Think about what is unchanging. For instance, if all else is equal, customers will always want the lowest price option. Now, all things might not be equal, there might be different variables, but if everything is, low prices are a good move.

Learn what customers want

Now, another thing to keep in mind is things like what will customers always want.

One example is food. People intrinsically need food, that’s necessary. Now, the delivery mechanism might change, the type of food might change, but people will always need food in some form.

Understand what is changing

Now, the final point is, we’ve been focused on what is unchanging, now let’s think about what actually is changing. It could be consumer preferences. If you think about hairstyles, from the 60s to the 80s to today, they changed a lot, that was something different. People always needed barbers and hairdressers, but the style was different.

Understand change and identify how your company can adapt

Begin to think about how your business can really conceptualize itself around the concept of what is forever. So, the buggy whip manufacturers, back in the day when everybody wrote horse-drawn carriages, if they had thought of themselves as transportation companies rather than as buggy whip manufacturers, of course, the competitive landscape would look a lot different today. But instead, they went out of business.

So it’s really important for all of us to be asking ourselves the question of what is changing, and what, perhaps more importantly, is unchanging in our business, and how can we focus on that and move toward that? That will enable us to make better strategic decisions.

Where can you get more leverage?

Leverage: getting more value out of the time, energy and effort you’re putting in.

These days almost all of us feel busy, overextended, we have the same 24 hours in a day, and 168 hours in a week, but the question that we need to be asking ourselves if we’re truly cultivating strategic thinking habits, is how can we get more leverage out of the time and the effort that we do have? Think about literally a lever, it enables you to lift something far heavier than you would of been able to otherwise, and that’s what leverage is in our business life. It is the act of finding ways to make your time and your energy and your effort count for more than it’s proportionate share. So how do we do it? Well, there’s a couple things to keep in mind.

How can we get something we’ve already done in front of more people

One, is that you can ask yourself a very useful question, which is how do I do something once and get that in front of even more people? So for instance, if I’ve written a blog post, that takes a certain amount of time, but if I say, oh okay, I did that once, now I have to create a whole new thing. Well, that’s a lot of effort. Instead, something that I can do to get more value out of writing that blog post, is I could say, well, is there an interesting quote in here that I could post on Twitter. Is there an interesting synopsis that I could write and post that on LinkedIn? When you do that, it helps leverage that work that you’ve already done in creating the content, because it ensures that more people will see it and get exposed to it.

Where else can we market this product

Similarly, you might have a product that’s done really well with one particular niche. But it’s a big world out there. You can ask yourself how can I take this product that’s been so successful over here, and expose it to this group of customers? They might also be interested in it.

How can I do two things at the same time

You can also ask yourself another one that I like. Which is how can I do two things at once? Now, that might sound totally counterproductive, we’ve all heard the justified criticism of multitasking, no human being is able to really pay attention on a conference call and be typing email simultaneously. Because that’s using the same part of our brain. But the way to do this right, is to actually use different parts of your brain, non competitive activities.

Look for complementary things you can do at the same time

So for instance, you can very easily take a walk, and call your parents at the same time to check in. Or, you can be making dinner and listening to an audio book. And improving yourself in the process. Think about how you can do two useful and important things simultaneously. And that’s a way that you can leverage more value out of your time. We all have the same constraints, we’re all busy, but if we can get smarter about our use of leverage, we can be even more strategic.

Conclusion

Think strategically every day

Just about everyone knows that strategic thinking is a good thing to do. And yet, they don’t do it. Sometimes it’s excuses. Sometimes it’s erroneously thinking that you have to have magical special conditions to be strategic, like a retreat in a cabin in the woods. But, of course, that rarely happens and so, therefore, strategic thinking rarely happens. And that is a shame because it is so important to make sure that we are focused on the right thing. How tragic to spend a huge amount of time and effort on something only to discover it was the wrong thing. The good news is that won’t happen to you, because you have invested the time now, up front, making sure that you have cultivated the habits of strategic thinking, that it’s not a nice to have, it’s not something you do every 10 years when you get a sabbatical, it is a habit. It is a muscle you flex and something that you do everyday. That is extraordinarily powerful in a rapidly-changing world, for you to have that north star of knowing what your strategy is and being able to make that a habit in your life. I look forward to hearing more about your progress and would love to keep in touch.