[00:00:00] Speaker A: So I'm curious of what your definition of intentional is.
[00:00:02] Speaker B: I think you easily recognize the outcomes and know that they're happening along the way.
[00:00:13] Speaker C: Welcome to intentional growth, a show that teaches you as a business owner and entrepreneur to view and run your company like a financial asset, which will allow you to enjoy work, create well health, and make an impact. This mindset will help you focus on building a more valuable business and give you the choices to grow, acquire, reinvest or exit and live the life you plan for all with intention.
And now, here's your host, Ryan Tansom.
[00:00:43] Speaker A: Welcome back everybody. Happy holidays. Thanks for tuning back in. I'm very excited for today's topic and guests. I've got a t for Feeq on this show. He was one of the first chief digital officers in history of the Fortune 500 and a pioneering role he held at McDonald's. And he's going to talk about what he did at McDonald's. I can't even imagine the amount of coordination that he had to take McDonald's and roll it into the digital age with all the stakeholders. And he rose to the president level in the Fortune 300. And he's an author and a sweet suite executive as well as a board member. And the book that we're going to be talking about today is called Decision Sprint, the new way to innovate into the unknown and move from strategy to action. And I love it because I can't even imagine the red tape that Atif had to deal with throughout his career and he had to handle how to take ideas and then roll them into action. And he's going to introduce a couple of concepts that I can't stop thinking about, which is input versus output meetings and how those have to do with coming up with the ideas, making sure that we have all the right inputs, and then we get into the output meetings where we're executing and how to do it with the unknown being part of the equation. I know you're going to love this conversation. He does a wonderful job at breaking down his methodology and I highly recommend picking up his book. Thanks everybody for tuning in and I really hope you enjoy this interview with Atif.
[00:02:04] Speaker C: This episode is brought to you by Arcona's fractional CFo services. Arcona's fractional cfos integrate into your management team and assume the responsibility of the CFO. They become your strategic financial partner to help you run the business, create your value growth plan, and build the financial roadmap to the valuation you want to achieve.
[00:02:26] Speaker A: Good morning octof. How are you?
[00:02:28] Speaker B: I'm doing great, Ryan. How about yourself?
[00:02:31] Speaker A: I'm doing great. I'm very excited for this conversation. I had got the clip about your background, the book, and I'll be honest, the book title, and then the book little phrase. I was like, oh, my God. It's just like I started juicing from the mouth. I'm like, how to take strategy and ideas into execution. I'm an idea guy. A lot of people listening in are idea people. And then the execution part, it's about kind of thread that needle, man, and you have a unique system and some very fascinating concepts that I can't wait to understand how you came up with, like, upstream versus downstream and input meetings versus output meetings. But why don't you just give everybody a little bit of an overview, your background, and then we'll kind of jump into how you started coming up with these concepts.
[00:03:15] Speaker B: Sure. Yeah, Ryan, I'm happy to do it. Well, I'm mainly a Silicon Valley background.
Very early on in my career, I decided that finance wasn't for me.
I worked at Goldman Sachs for two years, and I was like, this is, no, thanks.
I was like, yeah, this is not a real business. I mean, it's more transactions. I want to be part of the day to day operations of something where I can touch the fabric. You know what I mean? So I wanted to be more into an actual business, and I fell in love with technology quite early. So I got involved in the Internet space, really at the very early stages of the thing.
And that led to just being involved with companies like Yahoo and Amazon and some startups as well, for over 15 years. And I thought I'd pretty much do that for the rest of my career. But in 2013, about ten years ago, something in the world began to change. And that change was that every business saw themselves as potentially that they could take advantage of digitization and technology, or they might be disrupted by it, right? So two ends of it. So everyone from McDonald's to Starbucks started thinking about technology not as like a back office thing, but actually a customer facing thing. And I got a call from the CEO of McDonald's. And fortunately, I became the first chief digital officer in the history of the Fortune 500. So I said yes to that opportunity because it seemed like an opportunity to blaze a new trail.
As a result of that, I was able to help multiple Fortune 500 companies grow at a time when they really needed it. So that's my background.
[00:05:04] Speaker A: When I was reading in your book about your mcdonald's experience, and what did you say? It was like 100 countries trying to layer in an app that everybody, honestly, I was sitting there going, I can't even imagine. You probably could be a lobbyist now because of how many stakeholders you had to unify together.
Oh, my gosh.
[00:05:23] Speaker B: It did feel like government. Sometimes you're like, wait, are we a company or are we a bunch of different sort of political alliances here? And that's part of how the company works, is they call it three legs of the stool. You have the franchisees, the suppliers and the corporate that team up to really help that company reach customers.
[00:05:49] Speaker A: And I think about why that's so important to me because I've gone through sales of companies where you have so many stakeholders that are trying to get to one goal.
I'm kind of seeing inside your thoughts, potentially, of how you ended up with the material that you did. Before we jump in, your definition of transformation, because, I mean, the digital transformation wave you've been helping people with, how would you describe what that means and then how that impacts kind of the different stakeholders that need to get in agreement towards whatever this transformation means?
[00:06:21] Speaker B: Well, a transformation is basically a generational leap, meaning whatever you're going to set up, it's going to pretty much be the engine for the next 25 years. Pretty much. And so it's actually really hard because there's probably something that's already been set up and people are used to it. And now here you come along trying to paint a picture for something where a lot of things need to be rethought. So you get a lot of resistance, you get some advocates.
It's a lot of hard work. The good news is that on the other side of it, it can be like rocket fuel, like I said, for a long time. So the work we started doing in 2013 at McDonald's, it's ten years later, but they can annually look at several points of growth, percentage points of growth, and count on it because it just has a lot of tailwinds. And that's really what transformation is about.
[00:07:21] Speaker A: So when I hear the word transformation, my old, younger self would have been like, oh, I'm so excited for all the change and what's possible. And now, as I think about through my own personal experience of, I mean, we went from a copier business to a technology company, I gave out the book at our all company meeting to 100 employees of who moved my cheese because we had to break it down to the elementary of like, hey, we're going to be fine. So how do you address, did a lot of what is in the book stem from just like change management and how to have good conversations.
How did you start to realize that there was more to just executing some mobile app that people.
[00:08:03] Speaker B: I mean, I think very quickly I knew that wasn't the way to talk about these things, even though that's a tactic.
But the way I spoke about it at McDonald's, starting at the board level, was that, look, our company is a great company, and it's really about three things, taste, value, and convenience. And I can't help you with the first two, but the third one, that's where we need to set our eyes on what good looks like for the future and start to act on it right now. And so convenience is always something we've owned. When we talk about it this way, Ryan, basically, we're not trying to do something vastly different. We're doing something that's really part of the heritage of the organization. We're trying to recast it. And then when you break that down, convenience, you say, well, today there are two or three ways to use McDonald's and get your food from McDonald's. How about we invent two or three new service models? How about that? And then what does that look like? So you start working down altitudes of things and see if you can get people to come along on the journey. That's an important part of it. But yes, to answer your question, 100% of why I wrote this book and what I learned is because I was in a situation where I badly needed it and I wasn't going to be able to execute on my role if I didn't find ways to kind of get and mobilize an organization for change.
[00:09:29] Speaker A: Yeah, because the mobilization and the unification towards that ultimate goal that's unified is what the rocket fuel is. Right? It's like when everybody's chugging along towards the same direction.
You had mentioned it in your book, Atif, why in God's name did it take this long for someone to realize that there was a missing thread between strategy and execution? And at the Fortune 500 companies that you were dealing with, that there wasn't a playbook for something like this?
[00:09:58] Speaker B: Yeah. The reason I think, Ryan, is that a lot of Fortune 500 companies are really writing on a playbook of the past, of the 1950s, when Peter Drucker wrote about management theory, and then Jack Wells came along and for her generation, kind of ceded the idea, which was right at the time, that execution is king. And then that actually began to change probably 20 years ago, to be honest with you, where execution is not enough because the pace of change outside is just a lot. And that you need to figure out how you move as quickly internally to kind of process some of that external change and figure out what it means to what you're doing. And the world is not kind of the stable place where a business can make a six month plan and just stick to it. And I'm not saying you replan every day, certainly that's not the case. But you need to know that there's a lot of ambiguity out there and you don't want that to cause you to be stuck.
You want to do something about these unknowns that come up so you can be confident in the actions that you take. And that is something that's really more or less the chance and personality in companies. Usually there is no system for it.
[00:11:17] Speaker A: Yeah, chance and personalities, I can see that. Unfortunately, what I think a lot of people do is they grab onto those couple of examples and they think they extrapolate to like, that's the norm. But it's a lot of people sitting in these rooms trying to wonder, why are we headed in the right direction? So why don't you kind of break down decision sprint what it is? Because I know you've got a lot of components, and I really love your concepts because I think concepts are a way to think about and it just opens up your ability to do things differently. And you broke out some that were very fascinating to me. So break down strategy and execution, some of the couple concepts that we'd already alluded to.
[00:11:55] Speaker B: Well, I think any organization, whether it's a small business or a large company, generally has this, what I call a problem solving frontier. And that's a fancy word, but in plain language, that's essentially, these are the meaningful areas where we can invent something or we can improve something that we already do. And that's pretty much what I'm referring to there. And this problem solving frontier, it can't be 40 things, right? It needs to be a few big buckets and maybe they break down into some other buckets, right? And so it's important to know what these are. And I don't care if you run a car wash or you run Lululemon or you have a world domination as McDonald's, you have a problem solving frontier, and no one can tell you what it is. You know what it is because you're the operator. You know what that is. I think it's important to be clear about that. Now, within that, what I try and elaborate on in decision sprint is the idea that some of the opportunities are ambiguous like, what should we do? And what I do in the book is break down, getting you from idea to execution in three phases. And those phases are exploration, alignment and decision making. And I'll just go into the first one because I think that's the key one to, of course, start with. So purposeful exploration is a really good use of time because if you're taking a problem that's meaningful for the company, meaning if there's opportunity, if it works out, there's really a lot of value there, then what you want to be able to do is before you rush to judgment or have a strong conclusion on what the right thing to do is, you need to slow down a little bit. And I advocate for building and running explorations, which are essentially making it clear what is the problem statement, and then basically gathering enough of the key questions or the unknowns and trying to get to the bottom of them and doing that before coming, drawing a conclusion or making a recommendation. And I think this is something that's often missed in companies. We often do alignment before exploration, and it needs to be the other way around.
[00:14:14] Speaker A: What do you think about that? Tiff is like kind of the bullets from Jim Collins book, good to great. Like the bullets versus the cannonballs. Like, hey, you're doing the A B testing before you put all your resources and all your bets on the thing that you're not sure will actually work out.
[00:14:30] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think the response to these unknowns is usually one of two things. It's either to be cavalier or is to shrink and sort of do a limited idea. So being limited is basically like, oh, we're kind of acting out of fear, so we'll shrink the idea and then you execute on something that's kind of a yawner. Right? Like the customer doesn't. Yeah, the customer doesn't notice you still do a lot of work. Or being cavalier is just wishful thinking. Like, well, there's a lot of holes we can poke in this, but let's give it a go. And that's not a great way to run a business either. And I know that business owners don't like that because they've probably been burned by that in the past. Right.
The better way is sort of the middle way where you're saying, okay, there are a lot of unknowns here. We're not going to shrink in terms of big thinking here, but we're going to systematically sort of identify these unknowns. In my book, I talk about doing that in the form of questions. So just imagine developing a good question list, enough of the right questions about the things that need to be understood and spending a little bit of time getting to the bottom of those questions with a little bit of your detective work and then pulling that together to then say, okay, what recommendations make sense based on this kind of exploration of the problem that's in front of us?
And that, I think, is I'm offering a methodology for this in the end.
And the bigger your company is, the more likely that you need a methodology, because otherwise, the trains will move very fast towards different alignment.
[00:16:12] Speaker A: They just don't stop. The trains don't stop.
[00:16:13] Speaker B: Right.
[00:16:14] Speaker A: So the bigger you are, the faster it's going, the harder it is to stop or pause.
[00:16:18] Speaker B: A lot of blind spots. In fact, the bigger you are, I think the more likely you'll miss input because you need a brain trust. We talked about this a little bit before, Ryan, where a good company has the brain trust moving where, like, okay, based on what we're looking at here or the problem we're trying to solve, what are the nuggets of input we need from this organization? That's why we have the people. Right.
And in a big company, sometimes it's big, it's cross functional. Right. And sometimes those inputs are missed.
[00:16:51] Speaker A: Honestly, your input versus output meeting. Oh, my God. I started using it right off the bat, and then I started even doing it with my wife. I was just like, can you break it down for the audience? Because it was, like, life changing because of how many times I realized I was in these meetings where everyone was conflating the meeting and the purpose of the meeting, which just leads to tension, drama, conflict. That's unnecessary even though there's a bunch of good people in the room.
[00:17:20] Speaker B: Yeah. Well, an output meeting is one where we've done the detective work, we've built an exploration.
We've done the fact finding. We've drawn conclusions. We have recommendations. And you can have this red thread between where you started and where you're at, and you can make that connection between these recommendations and the work behind it, and then you're ready to, let's say, make a decision or a commitment or buying or something like that. That's more of what I call an output meeting, and it's got to stand on its legs, right. Like, you don't want to be a stakeholder in an output meeting where you can poke a lot of holes or you can't follow the work. Right.
As a result, we also need the other kind of meeting, which is an input meeting, where we're shaping everything and we're not at a point where we're trying to have a strong opinion or create alignment or say, let's go right. It's not about yes or no at that point. It's more about like, hey, what do we know? What do we not know? How do we find out what we don't know? Out of all the things we don't know which ones are most important, how do we weight them?
What kind of brain trust can we assemble to make sure we do high quality detective work? Okay. And then obviously not just be in some ivory tower for two months, but say, okay, where do we want to be when? Okay, in ten days, we're going to be ready to kind of look at it while we've canvassed and roll up the sleeves and started discussing, have dialogue around the recommendations or the different options.
But we need to have that input meeting, of course, before we do the output meeting. And sometimes you find a situation where we haven't done a great job of the inputs and we're trying to get people to commit in an output session. And that, I think, is that's where things don't feel great to people involved.
[00:19:17] Speaker A: I like how you cracked a smile a little bit, because I can only assume that all of this came from personal experience of being in meetings where you're kind of banging your head against the wall going like, what's going on here? If this is not clear, what are the symptoms people should be observing of if they haven't cleared this up, how will that manifest in meetings for people? And how did you come up with this topic? Because obviously this came from you experiencing it.
[00:19:40] Speaker B: Well, the way it came up is absolutely what you said, ryan, which is being an executive and on the receiving end of a lot of hard work by teams, where maybe what I experienced in a meeting could be a very long meeting, number one. And then the last five minutes is where they're saying, oh, these are our recommendations, and they're big commitments. They're asking for a lot of money, and some of these things are one way doors, meaning, like, once you start building and assigning the resources, it's not that easy to kind of undo it. So you have a lot at stake. You got to be right, or you got to be pretty confident that you're right, but it's kind of a little bit out of balance because you're not convinced. And when they're walking you through, they're not doing a great job of how they got to the things that they're recommending. And that's okay. It's just that we're not ready for that step. So let's go back and let's help shape it together. Okay. What's the problem you're trying to solve?
Right?
[00:20:47] Speaker A: I'm tracking 100% and I think about the misalignment with that then is if someone's truly just trying to ask a question in a graceful, loving way, but if someone is trying to defend their position because of their job, their performance, their bonus, whatever it is, they're going to feel attacked, even though that's not even the intent. So literally, the emotional misalignment right off the bat of how they're interpreting each other's conversations breeds just waste of time, money, drama, all that kind of stuff.
[00:21:19] Speaker B: That's a brilliant comment. Because psychological safety is important in the workplace. And in an input meeting, you have psychological safety, meaning you're not being judged. You're not saying, hey, that's a crazy recommendation or option to recommend because that's not where we're at. We're at the point of what could go wrong. Or how would Amazon think about it? What would google do if they were in this industry? You're asking all these kind of questions. If you'd be a little bit more expansive, make sure you don't have any missed considerations, any blind spots. Right. Because that is the time to really corral some of the key things and then make them actionable, go do some detective work against that and come back. And psychological safety, when this doesn't happen, it's not because the teams did something wrong. It's because the leaders have not set up an environment where they actually give that space. So it actually starts with leadership to provide the space for things like purposeful exploration or gathering inputs.
[00:22:25] Speaker A: So I got an interesting question, because with my experience being disproportionately in privately held companies not backed by professional investors, my partners have got experiences in private equity roll ups and stuff like that. But the audience kind of a flavor, as we had talked about, privately held, if they don't want to do something, they kind of just don't have to. But coming from your experience where I think it's very fascinating about VC led companies, PE companies, or private or public companies very target financial targets that are clear financial targets that just drive behavior and timelines. And so I'm saying this because I've watched where with your book, you're talking about thinking. And I think I'm curious, honestly, your experience in your world has thinking always been valued the way it is now? And because I think a lot of the people in my space, they get sucked into the day to day. And it's the whole proverbial work on the business, not in the business. But people are like, I don't even know what that means, because you could be running a 200 million dollar company still playing the role as CEO. And I think people have this natural tendency to do, and if we're not doing, they get full of anxiety, which then forces them kind of just back to the doing. But your input meetings that you're talking about, I just think about the Abraham Lincoln, 6 hours to chop down a tree, 4 hours to cut.
Like, has there been a shift in the value of thinking and good thinking, or does the question make.
[00:23:58] Speaker B: Absolutely. I mean, I'd like to tell you the answer is yes, but I don't think we're there yet.
But I think it's coming. And I think the reason why it's coming is because of AI.
But let me go back and then we can go forward.
[00:24:13] Speaker A: Yeah, and feel free to justify or put some color to that comment. I like it.
[00:24:18] Speaker B: Well, I would love to tell you that in your Fortune 500 company, there's enough of the right thinking, but there's a lot of demands. There's day to day pressures. And actually people don't even know if they have permission to think, because if they start thinking or asking questions, will they come across the right way? Does it seem like they're just in a research lab wasting time? Those are some of the interesting cause people to say, okay, well, what is my objective and what does the organization want for me? But that's not a very empowered thing.
Instead, I think we find a balance where we say, like, okay, you're not going to set some random priority that's not linked to where your company is headed. But every company has a strategy, right? Especially bigger companies. They have this pyramid chart with some strategies, some pillars, each pillar has some key initiatives. So your company has put a stake in the ground. This is where we want to go. Within that, you should be able to work with a team and be able to look at new ideas and do things like purposefully explore them to see if they have merit, right. And be able to make the case or at least tee it up for further consideration, things like that. So we need to do more of that in the big companies. But the reason why I made the comment about AI is because AI is just really good at helping you surface things and all the existing knowledge in the world about a particular subject. I mean, if you're a company, and your next big idea is there. And then you start asking Chad GBT or other tools like that some questions, it's going to expand your mind right now that's going to come into the day to day workflow of companies. And so as a knowledge worker, basically, you're not going to be able to just.
[00:26:18] Speaker A: Do things.
[00:26:19] Speaker B: Yeah. You don't want to be outshined by the AI. Right. You need to be able to turn your brain on.
[00:26:29] Speaker A: Right. And I don't know if what I find super fascinating, Tiff, is that you have like, ey, KPMG, Accenture, McKinsey, and all these companies where they're all supposed to be or are, whatever. I don't mean anything in particular, but they're supposed to be the ones telling everybody how to think. Right. And I think it's fascinating because my partners had hired EY during the private equity role. They were spending like $5 million a month with EY, with integration costs and all that stuff, disproportionately, a lot of kids in their mid twenty s that are billing out $400 an hour. And what I find super fascinating is I could sit down in front of a computer if they're sitting right next to me. And if you've had more experience and you know what questions to ask, your experience gives you the upside, almost. So there's the thinking and the experience. Actually, even though they're working at one of the technically the smartest, most powerful consulting firms, if they don't know what to ask the machine to get them where they want to go faster, there is no more down the stream meetings because we don't know what we're doing.
[00:27:37] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly. Right. And the only missing ingredient is a problem solving method that you can bring into your work, which is the purpose of why I wrote decision sprint, because you have the intellectual capital in your company. Often you hired the right people for the right reasons, so you have the brain power, and now it's more about activating it towards the problem you're trying to solve in a good way. And when there's a little bit of dysfunction in your company, sometimes people go with a consultant because they can come in, it's only a few months, they can interview a lot of stakeholders, they can step back a little bit, ask some of the frame the right questions, and then sort of like, solve for the dysfunction in the company. But there's better ways not to have the dysfunction to begin with.
[00:28:27] Speaker A: Amen to that. Yeah. So going back to you were talking about the three ways and I believe are these stages within your workflow where you got the exploration which you've touched on. And then the next one is alignment. Correct?
[00:28:40] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:28:42] Speaker A: Can you give us a little bit, some color and some backdrop of what do you mean by alignment and how does that show up?
[00:28:49] Speaker B: Well, alignment is personally meaningful to me because I actually banned know in the C suite role. When I arrived at Volvo, I was so frustrated with, not only at Volvo, but previously in my career, people using the word alignment in the wrong way where they might stop me in the hallway. And, you know, somebody on your team is looking at this brand new idea for McDonald's. And we really need to align on this before anyone does any further work. And what they really done was shut it down. Red tape, red tape, red tape. Delivery for McDonald's in 2013 will never work. Well, sorry, that's pre uber eats. And now obviously it's a big growth driver for the company. So it did work. So I didn't appreciate the red tape.
And the word alignment there really meant we need to take control at the very top. Decide at the very top. Yes, no. And then people can think in the rest of the organization. And that's not how I roll. I hire people who are very bright and I empower them. Now they don't get to do whatever they want. They're not working at a car company and building a water bottle.
[00:30:06] Speaker A: Right.
[00:30:07] Speaker B: They are working at a car company trying to look at the future of everything, the buying experience, the way the product works, et cetera. And so I did make a mistake, though, where I said, okay, I don't want to hear this word, a layman if I'm going to ban it. If we're in a meeting and you use the word, the meeting is over.
So the better way, and I did a 180, complete 180 was to, you.
[00:30:35] Speaker A: Clarified the definition of it.
[00:30:37] Speaker B: Exactly. We need to reframe it, which is basically alignment is actually really important. We need to have everybody, all the right people required for execution, understand how we got there.
And that is really alignment. It's shared understanding, but we need to do it on the basis of having done exploration. So I reframed it as exploration before alignment. And so I said, I love alignment, let's do alignment. But what kind of job have we done on exploration? I said, oh, we really haven't explored it. Okay, well, let's get some time for that. Let's spend a couple of weeks on that. Then we can do the alignment. And so alignment is basically how you look at what's been explored. To draw conclusions and create shared understanding, and that you have to do that step, but you have to be ready for it.
[00:31:32] Speaker A: When I was reading the alignment section, and obviously I'm biased because of the lens I'm thinking things through, which is finance. And by the way, you and I don't know each other well enough, obviously, but I was a copier, sales rep, and accounting was my worst grade in college. And here I am talking about finance all the time, isn't it? For some reason, the blue book about debits and credits didn't hold my interest in college. But now when I had to do with the value of my company, I'm like, okay, I can get on board with learning this, but when I think about alignment, I think about the misalignment of incentives and KPIs. You know what I mean?
So many times there's arbitrary KPIs coming out for people's. Because when I boil it all the way down, the way I think about it, we all are human beings. We wake up every day, we want to have good connections. We want to have some fun. We want to have some autonomy over what we're doing, but we also want to be aligned with everybody else. Back to your word, alignment. And then so many times I see there's a disjointed alignment of KPIs financial incentives. And then the goal, and I kind of boil it down to one of my favorite examples, is with Steve Jobs when he went back, odly enough, we got the whole comparison with Sam Altman today with Steve and all that kind of stuff. But when I think about when Steve came back, what I found super fascinating is I think he ended up creating one p l, from what I gathered, because they had all these products and services, and there were all these incentives for everybody to hold their know, have their autonomy. And he can collapse them all into one p l. So that way he could unify everybody. And then kind of the last part of context.
Know the book bold and abundance by Peter Diamantes. I don't know if you're familiar with those books, but I think it was bold where he was talking about, or was it exponential organizations? I can't remember where he was like, hey, create your own p l for the company that you want to overtake your company as a way of kind of circumventing these incentive misalignments. But that's a lot. But I just wanted to give you a little bit more of my thinking. When I'm coming to the alignment, how do you see the KPIs and the financial incentives either as a hindrance or as an enabler.
[00:33:42] Speaker B: Well, I do think things need to add up, right. So I think of it like the tip of a spear, where it's like, what is the tip of the spear from, let's say, even a metrics or objective standpoint. And let's say I'm rolling back, it's McDonald's and it's 2013. It could just be not a financial thing. It could be more that basically we're rolling out a new way to use McDonald's. For example, you come in and you order on a very large tablet like thing, and then you take a seat and we bring the food to you so you don't have to stand in line. And we call it table service. And let's say it's a brand new idea. We may just be organized around whether people actually like it or not. Right?
There may not be a lot of people using it, but the people who use it. Is it nine out of ten stars or is it five out of ten stars? That's where we're at. And if it's nine out of ten stars, that's great. Well, now let's get more adoption. So it might be that customers love it and we have growing adoption and the rest will come, but it can't be the ultimate measure of like, well, it's incremental frequency at every sort of retail location. We're not at that point yet. Right.
So I think that, to me, would be the tip of the spear. And then they say, okay, and by the way, teams, this is, again, a leadership issue because if you define that as the tip of the spear, the teams will say, okay, well, how can I contribute to that? Well, I'm in insights and I'm in operations and I'm in digital media marketing. Okay, well, here are my KPIs, that ladder up there. But it's the work of leadership to make that clear, starting with sort of the strategic pillars.
[00:35:36] Speaker A: Well said.
I don't know. This is why I just like your book so much, because there's just such a lack of the clearly identified outcome of what is it? That is, what does success look like for everybody? And then we can then go down through alignment. So then after alignment, what's the third bucket?
[00:35:57] Speaker B: So we have exploration, alignment and decision making. And so decision making is basically committing to the necessary actions.
And the reason why I call this out is because for several reasons. One is that once you make a recommendation and stakeholders are bought in, the very next thing is to define, hey, what are the actions that actually bring this to life and you don't want to just stop short of saying, wow, I'm so excited. The stakeholders liked what we were recommending.
That's nice, but you should really leverage that to create a lot of momentum for execution. And so then you should break that down. Decision making is more about the things that naturally flow into an execution plan.
Let's take an example. Let's say you're Amazon.
It's a real example. It's 2010. We're working on a new program. We're saying, okay, well, hey, if you are publishing a book through Amazon, which is a business unit I was managing, you can put your book up on Amazon or Barnes and Noble or anybody else, that's great. But if you do it exclusively with us, here's some extra incentive we're going to give you.
But it's your choice, right? And there's some pros and cons to that idea. Eventually, we did go with it, but it's not about just deciding internally, hey, we're going to go for this, right? It's like, okay, well, what are the necessary actions if we're going to go for it? And it's a lot of operational things, right? It's being able to provide customer support. It's monitoring whether people are honoring the exclusivity. So we've got to do a lot of web crawling to see if they're really up on Barnes and Noble or not. We have to interact with the authors. We have to change how we're paying them because we're providing them a lot more incentive, just various things like that. So just all the things that are actionable then that feed into the execution plan. That's where the decision making step is. But of course, leading into decision making, if you want to get the buy in, you have to draw the red thread between, here's the problem we were trying to solve. Here's what we looked at. Here's how we arrived at the conclusions, and here's the recommendations.
[00:38:14] Speaker A: When you were writing the book, did you just like, I'm curious on the thoughts in your head where, because these are so basic, but then they're so important, how do you reconcile with how basic yet and fundamental, but how important this is and that you're the one writing this book?
[00:38:32] Speaker B: I think Ryan is basically human factors, right? Like business is complicated.
There's people and personalities. No one is in charge. Most companies are not run by Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos or Sam Coltman. They're run by, quote, unquote, professional managers. So no one is really in charge.
[00:38:54] Speaker A: Put some color behind that. What do you mean? When no one's really in.
[00:38:59] Speaker B: Is when you're a founder led, you probably have somebody who's thought very deeply about the culture and everything. So it's just a privilege of being a founder.
But when you're a professional manager, I mean, you're coming in, there's a system, there's a culture. It's something you're inheriting. You can try and modify it, but it's really hard. And so the issues are complicated. There's a lot of people involved. And so the human factors mean that we have pitfalls and we skip steps. Right. And it's hard to step outside. Like, how is this collaboration actually happening right now on this specific idea? And to be like, step outside your body and observe it and say, oh, my gosh, it's getting off the rails. Right. It's very hard to do that because you're in the middle of it. And that is, I think, the main reason why some obvious things are not recognized. And so rather than kind of that.
[00:39:59] Speaker A: Back to the defaulting towards action, right. Because I think when you have. I'm just thinking back to your point. If you're sitting as an executive and you need to justify to. Even if it's the board, if you're the CEO and even it's the board or the CMO, CFO, CIO, and it's the CEO, it's easier to justify action than like.
[00:40:21] Speaker B: And the communication could be an issue as mean. Let's just say you're netflix and someone comes out of a meeting with the CEO, and they. Reed. Reed says, we have a problem with password sharing. Okay, what do we want to do about it? So one person comes out of the meeting, they say, Reed says, we need to crack down on password sharing. And the other person know we have. It seems like we have an issue with password sharing. How should we balance the user versus the business? Right. And those are two different interpretations, I think. CEO is very busy, has 50 things on the plate. The team comes back in a month, went down one lane versus the other. You get two different recommendations based on what was defined as the problem from the get go.
And then things just get very late. There's so many more pitfalls, as we know, in collaboration beyond that. So my overall point is that the system needs to be above the personalities.
The system needs to solve for the human factors, because the collaboration can always have these defects. So if you were in a manufacturing system, you would look for what are the defects, and you would try and kind of reengineer it and make sure those defects don't happen. They have the same thing. When we have humans in the loop, there will be these potential defects. So the system needs to solve for them.
[00:41:50] Speaker A: Love it. That was very well put. How do you recommend that people monitor what's going on? So let's say they go through the whole process. Correct? Right. So exploration, alignment, and then decision making, and they're moving forward. But life and business changes. How do they measure and monitor whether things are working or not? And how should people handle that?
[00:42:11] Speaker B: Well, I think they can look at a few things that basically pulse with the teams in terms of pace and velocity. How quickly are we moving as an organization through our ideas?
How confident do we feel about the decisions we're taking? And then I think that it's also important that there's actually less burden, like fewer meetings to get there basically, at the end of the day. So for me, what it looks like is a team might implement decision spread, and after some period of time, they're like, wow, it's a lighter lift. It's less convincing, it's less meetings for meetings sake. Right. Some of the work is even being done outside meetings. And on top of that, seems like we're moving faster and we're more confident about what we're moving on.
In the end, all of those things need to be what we're shooting for.
[00:43:08] Speaker A: I can't remember where it was in the book, but I think you touched on your definition of culture. I think it had tied into the systems and workflow. But when you think about culture and how does this change what people might think of culture?
[00:43:24] Speaker B: Well, I mean, culture is more than slogans, right? Because I like the slogans, but the slogans need to be the cherry on top. They're not the layers of the cake. The culture in the company is really, you can tell by doing the day to day work experience of the employees. So they're in a meeting, they're part of a team, they're collaborating. There's something they're all responsible for, like what is their experience in contributing and working together? That is actually the culture of the company. So does it feel comfortable being heard? Are they able to contribute when they have something useful to say? Is that integrated into the thinking? Do they feel good about what comes out of the teamwork? Like where it's, wow, it's four people and one plus one. Plus one plus one is like eight.
Then you tell your brain trust is really humming. That is really in the end, the sign of what the culture really is. What I'm trying to do with decision sprint is create a culture where people are lead with questions, and that is a neutral thing. It's not something people take offense to. It is something that actually makes the work product and the ideas better, because the ideas are better. People feel like they're more confident in where the company is headed, and they get satisfaction because they feel like we're getting somewhere together.
[00:45:03] Speaker A: So many times, honestly, when I think about the people that I've worked with, people just want to execute at a high level with people that they trust towards a unified goal, and it's, again, back to so basic. But when you think about how many people want to leave to go somewhere else, I think it's like people are just wondering, what am I doing that's impacting what goal? And this is solving a lot of that, which I can only imagine increases the employee retention and satisfaction, et cetera. What are you hoping to make a mark on the world with the book? What's the long term?
What are you getting out of it? What are you hoping for?
[00:45:40] Speaker B: So for me, decision Sprint is part of a constellation of things, but they're all moving towards the same north Star. And that's really to offer kind of the system for how, kind of the operating system for how companies are managed. And I think spreading ideas and methodology is what I offer in the book. And you can read the book and take certain parts of it and make your work or your team work better today.
The other ways to do that are other parts of my consolation, which are ritual. And ritual is an app that actually any team can use to build and run explorations and produce recommendations and just go from a raw objective or idea to something concrete in terms of strategic narrative. Right. So I'm kind of democratizing this approach through software and so offering those things. Some companies have brought me in to do workshops or my team to do workshops for us to stand up some of these workflows, sort of a services engagement. So it's a constellation of things, Ryan, where basically we're trying to establish this culture and system of problem solving and continuous innovation in companies for the benefit of the companies, but also for the employees, so that our workforce can feel more empowered, contribute, and feel better about impact.
[00:47:14] Speaker A: You having fun?
[00:47:16] Speaker B: I'm having a lot of fun with it. I mean, the beauty is that a lot of times you don't know exactly where you're going, but when you start to see that the fish are biting, that's exciting. Right. Because then, you know, there's a need. There's probably a very deep ocean of need in there. So often it becomes a question of, like, how are we going to such a big need? How are we going to approach it? So that's why I have the constellation.
[00:47:42] Speaker A: That's awesome. Yeah.
Is it weird being kind of in your position now versus having all the overhead and responsibility at the previous positions you've had?
[00:47:52] Speaker B: It is different because my last role, I was at the president level in the Fortune 300, and there it's a different situation. But I think in this case, I'm motivated to kind of leave my personal stamp on the world. And I think building something is always different than sort of just sort of like, doing more of the same.
More of the same. Or making small tweaks. Right. You get to do that at the top as well, as long as you create the space for it and you're motivated and you have ideas, but it's just the amount of space you have is more limited. It might be like ten or 20% of your work versus, like, 90% of your work, which it is right now. So all my creative juices are flowing, and that's very exciting. Just look at OpenAI and things like that. Those are not overnight successes. Those are decade long, sort of missionary work, like big ideas, solving very complicated things. It takes time to build these things.
[00:49:05] Speaker A: Yeah. Here we have another 20 year overnight success. Right.
It's only what the people see. I know we're short on time here, so I got two final questions for you. Well, one would be, is there anything I didn't ask that I should have?
[00:49:21] Speaker B: I think you're really in touch with why I'm doing this and what it offers to businesses. So I think we cover a lot of good.
[00:49:30] Speaker A: I appreciate that. So, one of my questions is the word intentional. I love to hear people's definition of it because the name of the show is because of the questions that I've been asking people. So I'm curious of what your definition of intentional is.
[00:49:42] Speaker B: I think you easily recognize the outcomes and know that they're happening along the way. To me, that's really what it's about. So if I apply that, and I know you're a very applied person, because you explained how you didn't like accounting in theory, but you actually really like it.
But, yeah, to apply intentional to me is like, okay, every day you can wake up and know that you're actually really connected to where this thing was intended to go in the first it.
[00:50:14] Speaker A: I love it, man. All right, Atif, best place to get in touch with you, the ritual app. What are the links? We'll put all everything in the show, notes for the guests, for the listeners.
[00:50:24] Speaker B: Wonderful. So the book is
[email protected].
Ritual work is the name of our software company. And on ritual work you can click a link and get the product in the App Store and it's free to use for teams. So those are the main two ways to get in touch. If you're interested in getting in touch with me personally, and then LinkedIn is the best way. And I do look at my messages.
[00:50:50] Speaker A: And you have quite the following and you've got some wonderful newsletters out there, I will add for the listeners. Atif, this has been an absolute pleasure and honor. I appreciate your time. I had a lot of fun.
[00:51:00] Speaker B: Ryan, the pleasure is all mine. Thank you so much.
[00:51:06] Speaker A: Thanks for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed the conversation with Atif. I absolutely love his book decision sprint. I highly recommend going and picking it up. And I think it's really important because the better decisions we make, the faster we can get where we want to go. And I think with how many things are unknown right now, I mean, there's a lot of stuff going on and it's always going to continue as the rate of changes faster. We have to have a process for dealing with the unknowns without all the red tape and without being in planning meetings for planning meetings and meetings for meetings. So go check out his book decision sprint. There's input output meetings. He breaks it all down in his book. And if there is one thing that I would recommend if you got some free time during the holidays or you're feeling motivated, is check out the intentional growth online academy and start thinking about what do you want long term. Build a mental model on how your company valuation works and how to focus on growing equity value by creating sustainable, predictable, transferable cash flow. You get $500 off of the $1,500 using the coupon code below. And I hope you enjoy the content, bite sized chunks, animations and a lot of meat, but a lot of good information. And I appreciate everybody for tuning in. Next week I've got Rob Green on the show and we're going to be talking about how he is in the online e commerce and brand building business. And he's got a lot of experience rolling up his sleeves, a lot of experience in the operations. And so it's not just multiple arbitrage, or I should say product arbitrage. He has been building real businesses and he talks about why he's done that, how he's done that, how he's exited them, and how he's designing his life and these businesses around what he wants. And I like it a lot. And I really enjoyed the conversation because I think he reflects a lot about what we teach here on intentional growth. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in, and I will see you next week.
