171 | Successfully Implement business strategy leveraging the "business hierarchy of needs" with Jim Gitney, CEO of Group 50 and author of Strategy Realized

Defining a cohesive business strategy is not easy, but implementing it is even harder.

After successfully implementing business strategy in major companies, Jim Gitney perfected the process and wrote a book about it - Strategy Realized

In this fascinating interview, Jim shares a detailed blueprint on how to successfully implement business strategy. He developed a concept he calls the Business Hierarchy of Needs (the business parallel to Maslow's Hierarchy of needs).

This is a highly practical episode with a step-by-step process you can follow, with great examples and powerful business concepts.

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Hi, It's Isar the host of the Business Growth Accelerator Podcast
I am passionate about growing businesses and helping CEOs, business leaders, and entrepreneurs become more successful. I am also passionate about relationship building, community creation for businesses, and value creation through content.
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Transcript

Jim GItney: 0:00

We walk through a process. There's 29 elements in the business hierarchy of needs. And people go, oh no, I can't manage 29 elements. The reality is they already do every one of those 29. Okay? Right. So the business hierarchy of needs really summarizes what businesses do on a routine basis. The issue is that they don't align all those activities to something that something is what we call the most important goal.

Isar Meitis: 0:29

Hello and welcome to the Business Growth Accelerator. This is Isar Meitis, your host, and the person you're listening to is Jim Gitney. Jim has helped over 200 companies in implementation of business strategy, and before that, he held senior leadership positions in multiple companies and has done this for his own businesses. So he has an immense experience in strategy implementation, and he's gonna share with us the step-by-step process you can implement in your business to effectively implement strategy in order to grow your business. Hello and welcome to the Business Growth Accelerator. This is Isar Meitis, your host, and I have an amazing guest for you today. As you know, business strategy is a critical aspect of the success of any business. The problem with business strategy, and there's a lot of problems, but the problem is it's a very big word, and it's not so easy to actually go and do this and do this, right? So too many businesses either don't do it the right way or don't do it at all, or make it too complex or more complex than it should be, and the other half of it is obvious. Implementing the business strategy. So now you have the strategy. How do you actually put it in place and put it to action so the business becomes more successful? My guest today, Jim Gitney, is the author of Strategy Realize, which is a book about what he calls the business hierarchy of needs. So kind of like Maslow's. needs a period of needs, but instead of for people, for businesses, and he has an incredible clear approach on how to implement business strategy for success of businesses, but different than a lot of other coaches. He has held. More or less every leadership position you can name through his career from VP to C O O to c e o, to a board member, to chairman of the board, to executive chairman. And in the last 20 years, he's been leading a consulting company that helps companies put together business strategy and executor them in a successful way. So, He can talk the talk, but he also definitely walk the walk. Hence, I'm really excited and humbled to have Jim as our guest today. Jim, welcome to the Business Growth Accelerator.

Jim GItney: 3:50

I thought it is wonderful to be here and thank you so much for that great introduction. I'm glad it's recorded because I'm gonna have to steal it. Shamelessly,

Isar Meitis: 4:00

this is what we do here. I, I appreciate it. I'm glad you liked it. I wanna start with asking you more of a personal aspect of this. Like I said, you've done a lot of very impressive things in your career, in leadership positions. When did it occur to you that business strategy is a) such an important aspect of the business, and B) that this is the holy grail you wanna focus on in the rest of your career.

Jim GItney: 4:28

So, great question. after 45 years and of working inside of business, what I've noticed is that senior leadership teams are pretty good at creating strategy. But where they fall short is bridging the gap between strategy and results. And a lot of that has to, that's primarily driven by what I call knowledge and change management or level two of the business hierarchy of needs. It's about not only creating strategy, but creating strategy that people inside the organization, all stakeholders understand. And more importantly, understand their role in it. So how did I come up with all of this? Well, during my career with corporate in corporate America, I was primarily a fix it guy, and pe, and Black and Decker and Sunbeam would send me to locations around the country that were in trouble. What I realized was that in order to create improvement quickly, You had to leverage everyone, every stakeholder, they had to understand exactly what their role was and what their contribution to that strategy was. And as I got into it further, I realized that strategy is the primarily the domain of the board and a C-suite. Implementations of strategy is primarily the domain of middle level and what I like to call others, with no disrespect to the professionals or to the influencers or other stakeholders such as vendors and customers. And so, About 20 years ago when I started Group 50 Consulting, it was actually 18 years ago, but who's counting after I started only, only, only 18 years ago, only 18 years ago, after I started Group 50, I've worked with over 200 companies and have refined the concept of the business hierarchy of needs, which I created in 2013. Trademarked it in 2015 and have used it as what I like to call the litmus test of everything we do. Because even if I'm working with a client deep in a project, let's say redesigning a business process, and I haven't been engaged, we haven't been engaged as the strategic planning folks even working on an individual project, I always ask. What's your business strategy? What does a future state look like and what's your most important goal? And that, that pulls people back for a second because they go, well, we want you to, to redesign a business process. And I go, yeah, I understand that. But what we wanna make sure is that when we redesign that business process, that we are not making any recommendations that are gonna get in the way of the most important goal in the business strategy, but more importantly is going to create the appropriate base from which that process can grow and support the company achieving its most important goal.

Isar Meitis: 7:57

Got it. I, I think that's a great segue. So if, if I, if I need to summarize, you got there literally by getting enough scars and to prove during the process that there's, that there's a big gap, right? There's one thing in going through either with a consultant or on your own with an internal team and, and defining the strategy for the next five years, for the next three years, for the next one year. But then you're saying the organization. Execute in that, and you've seen that gap happen again and again and again of getting, I think there's, there's like three steps there, right? And again, you'll, you'll explain this much, much better than me, but A understanding the strategy, B, being on board, and three, executing it, which are three different aspects of being involved in that. And then you said, you know, the first step is being aligned with one goal. So really let's go to your process that you go with companies who do not hire you to just change one process, but to come in and really do business strategy. What are the steps a company should go through to really have a solid strategy implementation within the business?

Jim GItney: 9:04

So we walk through, we walk through a process. There's 29 elements in the business hierarchy of needs. And people go, oh no, I can't manage 29 elements. The reality is they already do every one of those 29. Okay? Right. So the business hierarchy of needs really summarizes what businesses do on a routine basis. The issue is that they. don't Align all those activities to something that something is what we call the most important goal. So immediately what, what I do with with clients in our creating your most important goal workshop is sit down and say, what is it? What will you have achieved five years from. now One statement, one goal. It might be double in sales, it might be increase enterprise value. It might be exit the business. And so once that most important goal with a very specific measure associated with it, because increasing sales, okay, how much by when? Once we have that in place, then we take a look at the existing strategies inside the business, because every business leader has a business strategy, and we're not gonna spend much time today talking about how good, how good that strategy is, or how you evaluate it. Because what we do is we use the most important goal as the litmus test we say. Here's the most important goal. Here are your strategies. Do they really allow you? Do they really support the most important goal? And do they allow you to achieve it? And from that point, we then go through each one of the strategies that they might have, and we often find that they're incomplete. And so we have to build them up further. So,

Isar Meitis: 11:11

I think the biggest stake from the very first step that you're describing, then we're gonna go through some of the other steps. The very first step, which is unique, right? Because usually you got a company saying, okay, what are your goals in plural for this coming year or for the next six months, or for this quarter, or for the next five years? It doesn't matter what the timeframe is, and there's usually a bunch of them. And what you are saying is crystallize it further. Keep asking yourself, what is that one thing that the. Quote unquote, smaller goals will support, right? This one thing that is the core thing you're trying to achieve within, like you said, a specific amount of time and set a measurable parameter both in time and in quantities so you can know if you're actually later on when you're measuring your stuff, you, it will tell if you're going there. So that's step one. What, what do I do then? So now I know my one goal. I people agree on it. What happens then?

Jim GItney: 12:08

So step two is to then once again, validate the existing strategies. Okay. Redefine them. Keep them, and move on or add more. Okay. Because you sit down and you go, what? The five, whats, once you have your most important goal, what is it we're going to do to achieve that? And when you ask that five times, you very quickly crystallize all of the major activities that you have to do, the major strategies, once those are in place, by the way, each one of those have to have a measurable goal as well. And we ask the team to prove that the, if, if I achieve each one of these measures, that it will move us forward toward the most important goal. Yeah, once those are,

Isar Meitis: 13:02

go ahead. Kind, kind of like an O K R process. It

Jim GItney: 13:05

is the business hierarchy of needs is an O K R process. Got it. Okay. Okay,

Isar Meitis: 13:11

so 2 cents for opening parenthesis for a second. For those who are listening who don't know what O K R is, it was invented relatively long time ago. I think Intel is the one that invented it, but then when Google took that as the way they run their business, it became a big deal and a lot of people are following it. Basically long term goal broker down to shorten term goals that are measurable that will lead to the longer term goals. There's multiple systems out there today that allow you to manage OKRs and so on. Closing parentheses, back, back to Jim. so, so now I have that. Now I have these other, you call them strategies that are in the company that we know that will support the longer term goal. What's the.

Jim GItney: 13:53

So the next step is to take, well, number one. Number one, the next step is to have somebody in the organization who is specifically responsible for each strategy. Okay. Who's aligned with it. Okay. Has agreed to be accountable to it. Okay. Right. And then that person, each one of, for each strategy, we create a cross-functional. Okay. Not what, what that means is, so if you sit and think about it, marketing and sales is a business function. Sure. The marketing and sales can't do their thing if they don't have support from manufacturing or from finance, they don't have the money they need or from, you know, IT. Because they don't have the technology necessary to interface with the markets. Right. Okay. So we create a cross-functional team that's responsible for that strategy. And then start developing. Once again, that now is a most important goal, that strategy. And we break that down into its fundamental elements. But now we're starting to go to, to give it to in, we're starting to involve more middle level. People. Now we turn that strategy into a series of tactics, and when we do that, we create project charters, we create teams, we create goals for each one. We, we even go as far as calculating what the r o I is for it.

Isar Meitis: 15:28

So I wanna pause you for a second. I want to ask two clarifying questions. Okay. Question number, and I'll start with question number one, and then I'm gonna ask the second one. Question number one is, when you say those supporting strategies, give me an example. Is this a marketing strategy versus a financial way to do the business, or is it more something else that could involve other, like different departments within the company?

Jim GItney: 15:54

Well, it really depends on what your most important goal. Okay.

Isar Meitis: 15:59

Right. So, so gimme an example again. Let's, let's just

Jim GItney: 16:02

pick something. Okay. All right. So I'll give you an example. we were working with a company that has had, as its most important goal to increase sales 50%, which in within three years. Okay. All right. That was its most important goal. Now you stand back and you go, okay, what do I need to do to increase sales 50. Well, they needed new products. They needed additional channels of distribution. They needed a new sales, they needed incremental sales force. They needed incremental capacity in manufacturing and supply chain. Right. Because their existing supply chain was capable of supporting the existing business. Yeah. But was really gonna struggle in supporting 50% growth. Got it. Now, as it turns out, that wasn't as big a struggle. That wasn't as big of a struggle as it was identifying the new products and the new channels of distribution and how they were gonna sell into them. So in essence, we broke it down into the All right, in five, three years, if I'm 50% larger, here are all the things that we need to. And that's where we get into the conversation about operating gaps and strategic gaps. Operating gaps are those things we don't do as well as we need to. And strategic gaps are those things we don't do at all. Yeah. That we need to. So new products, new channels of distribution are two examples of a strategic gap.

Isar Meitis: 17:40

And so for each and every one of those, you now put a strategy in place. How do we develop new products? How do we get new suppliers? How do we get new distribution channels? How do we get increased capacity for our existing manufacturing facility? Each and every one of those has its own now little standover strategy with somebody in charge, with a multidisciplinary team that manages that

Jim GItney: 18:03

strategy. You got. You got it. Awesome. Every strategy, every tactic, every project has to have a sponsor. Let me ask you a question,

Isar Meitis: 18:12

so this is, now, I told you I have two. The second one is, what happens in smaller businesses like what you just said? Okay, corporate America, there's 50 teams, five levels of management. What happens in a smaller team, like I have a c e O, VP of marketing, VP of sales. And, coo and, and that's it. And each and every one of them has five people reporting to them. I should still do this process somehow, right? But then I can't assign people who are in charge of it because there's just not enough people.

Jim GItney: 18:43

Well, that's a great, that's a great question. But even small teams have to manage the elements of the business hierarchy of needs. Okay. So the difference is the complexity. Okay. What I'm talking about is the complexity of all of the activities, not the complexity of the implementation. So if I have a 10 million business that wants to go to 20 million, their strategies and activities are gonna be completely different than a company that's 250 million that wants to go to 500 million. Correct. But they still have the same common challenges. Okay. And in small companies like that, one of those is the IT infrastructure. And the other might be, do I have the right people, even though I only have two salespeople? Do I need to add a third? And what skills does that person need to have and how do I get more products? Do I do them myself? Do I engage a third party to design those products or. I rely on a vendor, which would be a third party to supply me with those products. And so I still have a most important goal. It's measurable. And instead of having 30 tactics, 30 strategies and tactics, I might only have three. Right? But I still need to ask that question. Do I have the right people? To manage the future state. Yeah. Do I have the right resources? And, and when I talk about resources, I'm talking about financial and human capital. Sure. Do I have the right resources to do this? And if I don't, where do I get them? Okay. It's, it's inter, it's interesting, Isar that small businesses. Under, I'm going to pick a number. Around 30 million and down are typically run in the heads of two or three people because they're there. They can have their hands around it. They can feel it, they can touch it, but it's amazing when those two or three people get together agree on a goal and the activities to achieve that goal, how much more efficient they. And how much more efficient the business becomes.

Isar Meitis: 21:13

Yeah. And, and I've seen that firsthand, right? So I worked in an organization, I mean, we were bigger than that, but we were running very much like a more of a startup mentality. And we were very, each of the teams were very tied together and very close and knew exactly what's happening. And then we got acquired and merged with two other very large companies and became this very, very large corporation. And the ability to make stuff happen becomes dramatically more complicated. Even the same simple things you did before becomes way more complicated because your dependency on now 10 other departments that do something that you need for the thing, yet you've done yourself before because you had no option, becomes very, very different. So, I understand, I understand what you're saying. You're saying small businesses, mid-size businesses still do the same thing, not as complex and, and your cross-functional team is probably just a team versus cross-functional teams that that focus on on different stuff. What's the next step? So now I have, you know, I've defined the goal. I defined the strategies, I defined the people. I have people in charge, I have cross-functional teams. What

Jim GItney: 22:25

do I do then? So what we've just described takes you through level one of the business hierarchy of needs, which is strategy, analytics, and planning. Okay. We're now moving into level two, which is knowledge and change management. Okay? Okay. Level two is all about the organization. It's all about the people in the organization. It's about skills maps. What are the skills that I need inside the organization in order to implement all of these projects and tactics and also run the future state of the company? So now, now this is primarily the domain of the middle level managers. Right, because now we're talking about people, we're talking about the appropriate skills. Do I have enough skill in technology? Do I have enough skill in manufacturing or marketing or sales? Whatever's required by the strategies and tactics. Then I now break those elements further down in attempt to give individuals in the organization specific goals that they're in alignment, an agreement with and give them accountabilities. We call that cascading objectives. So just as we talked about the top level strategy, as we move through the organization, we break it down into more finite elements. So I might be an engineer. In inside the company that has an objective to double in the size, to double its size within three years or five years. And I now have the responsibility for inter, for creating a new set of products with very specific timelines behind it. So, And perhaps I don't have the, the skills or the tools that I need. Perhaps I need a new design system, or perhaps I need to learn a new technology, or perhaps I need to do any number of things that don't exist today. So it's incumbent on the middle level of the organization to make sure I have those skills and the resources necessary to achieve my object. I gotta ask a

Isar Meitis: 24:49

question. going back to the, the, the change management and the personal slash teams side of things. First of all, I, I, I was smiling a big smile when you started talking about this because I literally released an episode this week that talks about what I think companies should do to be successful in 2023 and beyond. And one of the things that I said is, once you define your strategy, you gotta, you potentially need to redefine your personnel and your teams because, The fact that these are the teams and the people that brought you to this point doesn't necessarily mean these are the people in teams that will support your future state. Because it's a future state. You cannot base it on your past setup. Maybe sometimes it's, it's a continuous, you know, linear growth. Then maybe. How do you actually do this? Like the practical aspect of this, because it's very problematic, right? Especially in bigger organizations. You have teams running, they're in place, they have existing goals, they've done something last year, they're on this, they're mach, you know, an organization's a machine at the end of the day. So the finance people know how to do A, B, C, D, and the, manufacturing people or code writers knows how to do these things. And then now you're saying, okay, no, no, no. Stop for a second. In the next three months, I need you to stop doing this and instead I need you to do that. But in between there's this, like the two states are clear what happens in between and how do you manage that in between process.

Jim GItney: 26:20

So we seldom run into a situation where we make a blanket statement where you have to do this and you have to do something else. What we almost always run into is, what you're doing is cool. Does it support the most important goal or the strategies of the business, and what do you need to do differently? So it's usually more of a question about what do you do differently? Rather than stop doing this and start doing that. All right. Because what we find is, and I'll give you an example. I was talking to chief operating officer of a university who when I asked about what their strategies were, told me they were going to add more academics, they were going to add more athletic programs, they were gonna open some facilities in Europe, and he went on and I said, so what's your most important goal? And after asking the five, whats we came to? Well, it is about growth, but it was about growth in Europe, not in the United States. And so once we got to that most important goal, it became abundantly clear that they didn't have enough strategic focus on growth in Europe. So in this particular case, they slowed some of the things they were down, what they were doing in the United States and accelerated the, some of the things that they were doing in Europe and took some of the US strategies and actually added them to the European strategy. So if you said to think about it, when we got down to it, it was significantly grow in Europe. As the most important goal. That's when we found out that some of the things we were working on in the US weren't gonna contribute to that. So they had to make a decision. In that particular case, they stopped doing a couple of things, right, but it was after the team got together and decided that this was the way we, this is what we needed to do in order to achieve that most important goal. Now, two things

Isar Meitis: 28:20

that I love about what you just said. One is the importance of. Not just defining the goal once, but using it as a prism, right? The North Star, call it whatever you want to call it, of every decision you make in this interim, meaning, until you define a new goal, has to go back and say, is this really supporting? The thing that we jointly defined as the most important goal. And the second part of it that I like about what you said is the jointly part of it, right? Because if, if it's the c e o or one person or even the board comes and says, this is what we needed to do, but you don't have the buy-in. In the people that feel a part of that decision making process, that's saying, okay, we understand why this is the goal. We are a part of the decision, and hence we're on board. You are gonna have issues and, and it's not unsolvable issues. You may have to replace a few people, but the best way to do this is to have people on board. How do you do that? How do you, because you go to a too big of a team in the convers. You start losing focus. You have too small of a team, you don't have enough buy-in. So you said you've done this with 200 companies, you probably have best practices of who needs to be involved in which step and and

Jim GItney: 29:38

when. Yeah. So once again, it's gonna be dependent on what your most important goal is and what the supporting strategies are. But, but let's

Isar Meitis: 29:48

say, I wanna define the most important goal. Who needs to be involved in that conversation?

Jim GItney: 29:52

Oh, so that's typically gonna be the domain of the board of directors and the C-suite. In smaller businesses, it's gonna be the domain of the owner. So let's, for example, here's a perfect example. An owner of a company, we're, we're seeing the largest transfer of wealth in the history of the United States with owners transferring their companies to me, family, private equity groups. Employees. Yep. Employees. When we talk about business strategy for them, we talk about their, their personal most important goal. So let me break it down a little further. Say for example, I'm gonna retire in a few years, and what I want is to be able to sit on the beach and drink pina coladas for the rest of my life and have sufficient cash flow to do that. We can build a business strategy around that most important goal. Sure. But let's say I, that's not what my most important goal is. Let's assume my most important goal is I want to pull back and I want to do what I love to do, which is business development. We can build a business strategy around that as well. But notice the difference, right? I went from exit the business to here's what I as an owner specifically want. And even if the owner says, I want to sell the business in five years. So we go down a most important goal of optimizing the business, sell it in five years for X amount of dollars. We actually can build a strategy to deliver that as well. Yep. But each one of them are significantly different. So the most important goal is gonna be primarily board of directors, owners of the company, and the c. And what, what we find is that when we do establish that, and the C-Suite has gone through the exercise of the business hierarchy of needs and you know, detailing it down what needs to be done in the measurables boards and bankers and private equity groups and others are much, much more confident that the team is gonna be able to pull it.

Isar Meitis: 32:15

So from a personal human perspective, now that you have that, so the board or the C-suite members have decided on that, how do you get the buy-in of, of, like you said, the people you know? At the end of the day, it's about middle management, right? And, and you see that people call it in different names, the middle management. Usually is where things start is, is where the gap is created because you had the people who were in the room when the decision was made and they understand why. And now you have the people who are A) were not in the room, and B) are supposed to deliver the results to support that one goal. So when and how do you get the buy-in of middle management and people below them in order to really make that change happen within the organization?

Jim GItney: 33:00

So before I answer that specific question, I want to preface it with something. Sure. I rail against the idea that millennials and Gen Xers want to feel like they're more, they're involved in something more important. And the reason I said specifically said that is as a baby boomer, I always wanted to feel like I was part of something more important. So if I'm asked. To be part of, not the creating the most important goal, but creating all of the supporting activities around it. And I specifically see how what I'm doing is going to support the company being successful, and my opinion is asked, and I'm part of the planning team, and maybe it's only one project. But if senior leaders have taken the time to explain to me why we're doing this and how my involvement in the very specific thing or things I'm going to do, are going to contribute to the success of the business, I feel that my perspective and my contribution is much more value. And that's the process of getting that, that's what allows you to develop, buy-in inside the organization. You know, I've, I've done well over 200 Kaizen events and for your listeners who don't know Kaizen, it's basically where you, you get a group of people who own a process. It might be an assembly line, it might be sales operational planning. It might be in accounts receivables. And you get them together and you tell'em, look, we need to fix this process. Or We need to significantly improve it, and you put'em on a two or three day and can be as long as five day in a room. Redesign this process. The results are phenomenal because you've asked the people who are frustrated by things that don't work, that who believe that they have, their voices haven't been heard, who believe they aren't part of something bigger, and once you take those chains off and allow them to actually own their process and own the things they're responsible for, the results are phenomenal.

Isar Meitis: 35:22

Brilliant. so to summarize what you're saying is you're still giving them the keys to be a part of the process. They're just a part of their, part of the process, and hence you get the buying and hence you get people, excited about the thing that they're doing because they, it allows them, like you said, not only. To be a part of the process, but also to fix the things that they believe are broken. And they're most likely, the reality is they, people who know the best how to fix them. So if you give them that, flexibility and that, A missing award and that ownership of that owner part of the process, now you get their buy-in because this is now their baby, which now becomes a part of the bigger goal that supports the organization. Phenomenal.

Jim GItney: 36:09

Right. Let me, let me share, can I share an example with you, Absolut? Do you wanna move on to something else? No, no, no. For sure. So back in the mid nineties, in the late nineties, I was the head of Black and Duckers. I was a plant manager for Black and Duckers, appliance Factory in North Carolina. The sales value of goods that we manufactured was about 150, 200 million. We became one of the four locations in the United States for a Japanese, one of the, the, the most well known Japanese, Kaizen continuous improvement group in the world where they will hold quarterly meetings, quarterly kaizen events, people from all over the co all over the country coming in and working with our process owners, not people coming from all over the country and doing it on their own and telling these folks what they needed to do. They came in and they spent the five days in the room with them. The results were amazing. Within three years we were producing, we tripled the output of the facility. Wow. And we're producing almost 600 million in sales value of goods. And the other interesting piece that I'll share with you is I had almost 2000 people during the busy season and I did a survey. and I found that over 200 of them had master's degrees, bachelor's degrees, built computers, built race cars, did all kinds of really cool things, but they, they were there for a completely different reason, and that was for the security of having a job so that they could go off and do things with their coach baseball teams and do their other passions. Yeah, we engage them as part of our continuous improvement effort. In doing these Kaizen projects and statistical process control because they had the skills to do it and the results were phenomenal. I love what you're saying.

Isar Meitis: 38:07

I'm gonna take you 90 degrees to the right because I think it has a lot to do with what we're talking about right now. Specifically about the example you gave in the companies I run, and especially in the latest one that was very obvious to me that. If you want people to be productive and effective, they need to be happy. For people to be happy, they need to operate in their zone of genius and feel that they can take the thing they bring to the table, which might be very, very different than the person next to them. They have a outlet for their genius within the workspace, which is basically what you're saying, is, let people, okay, you're, you know, how to build cars from scratch. Maybe you should be involved in this process that we're doing right now, redesigning the manufacturing facility even though you're in accounting. And so how all of that is connected to vision, mission, and core values of the company, which is more the stuff that we're talking about right now is related.

Jim GItney: 39:14

So, there's actually a fourth mission, vision, values and leadership traits. Okay. Okay. Mission is our true north. Okay. Vision gives us more detail about how we're going to get to our true north, and perhaps there's even some measurable things in there, but mission and vision provides more clarity. Values tells us how we want our organization, people in our organization to treat each other, right? Leadership traits are the things that we absolutely insist our leaders have, and they need to be actionable. And one of the things I say in the book, as are, is that. Technology and the skill of using technology and leveraging technology is probably one of the top five leadership traits that need to exist inside an organization because today everything we do, especially businesses are run and are built around technology. And how the businesses operate it.. And I even go as far as suggesting that we should be organized around tech technology, but I digress for a second. So, mission, vision, values, leadership traits are all part of that foundation that tells us where we want to go, how we want to get there. Most important goal gives me the, the specificity around what that vision is gonna look like and strategies gives us much more specifics on the activities that we're gonna undertake to do it. You know, in in the book, I say all of us as individuals and contributors to the success of an organization or a team. Cuz this can be applied to church groups, this can be applied to just about anything, right? Sure. It doesn't matter what kind of business it is. I happen to be a manufacturing guy. Technology companies, service companies, all have the same exact challenge. All of us as individuals who are part of a team or an organization want to be led, but we want to know from what to what and by when. And so by cascading objectives and giving very specific measures around what we're going to do and communicating that down throughout the organization, we satisfy that. Now I was blessed. I was, well, maybe he was lucky. I don't know but the Gallup organ, the, the Gallup organization has CRE created a chart for my book. Oh, all right. Awesome. This is not group 50. This is the Gallup organization. Yeah. Let me share some of the numbers with you When you have a fully engaged workforce. Engaged by the process that we're talking about right now. I can expect 23% increase in profitability. I can expect a 66% increase in wellbeing and corporate citizenship. Stop there for a second. Think about all the organizations you've been involved with, where you talk to the people and they go, I hate this place. I can't stand being here. I can't, you know, 66% increase in wellbeing in, 14% increase in productivity, 10% increase in, customer engagement But here are the eye-popping numbers that are really appropriate to this post pandemic environment that we're in. An 81% decrease in absenteeism. A 43% decrease in turnover. Now think about that. Oh, you know, we've heard about the great resignation. We've heard about all of these different things. By engaging everyone and making sure they understand how they're contributed, contributing to a larger good, we can significantly impact the issues that businesses are currently faced with. Now, you can't do it overnight. Obviously, this is a journey. Right. But just by starting with the most important goal and communicating it to the organization and asking everyone to jot down on a piece of paper how they contribute to that goal is a really

Isar Meitis: 43:43

positive first step. This is phenomenal. I think what you just said is such a great summary and such a great. Note for, like you said, it's, it's a different, slightly different era than had we had before the pandemic. from, from two different perspectives. You know, one, I think there was a huge acceleration of adoption of technology just because we didn't have a choice in some cases. And the other side of it is there was a lot of money available so companies could develop these technologies faster. And the other part of it was we had to work from home and reevaluate strategies and so on. So we, we live in a slightly different era than we did just a few years ago. And what you did, I think is, is a beautiful summary of where we're today. What are the things to focus on, Jim, if people wanna find more about you, about the book, about your business, work with you, follow you, what are the best ways to do that?

Jim GItney: 44:39

So, w Strategy realized.com. Okay, is the website for the book, okay. And it's available in PDF today. It will be available on Amazon and Kindle on the 11th of this month, and available is hard cover on the 9th of February. Okay, so strategy realized the Business Hierarchy of Needs is the official title of the book. group 50 Consulting is my consulting. And that's group fifty.com. is a, and, and I have over 200 blog articles there talking about all of these, all of these various things. So that's how you can, listeners can get to either the book or to Group 50 consulting. I want to close. I, I, I, Just add one more thing to something you just said. Sure. With the significantly large amount of people inside of organizations working remotely, one of the things that we don't get is that day-to-day interface sitting in a meeting, having lunch with our peers, going out for drinks at camaraderie that we had been used to pre pandemic. Right? Yep. By, by implementing the business hierarchy of needs and taking that into consideration, now that person who's sitting some remote location in Idaho can, has a much more positive view about how they're Im, they can impact the organization to contribute to its success. And so in today's workforce, and it is so much more important that companies focus on that set of activities.

Isar Meitis: 46:31

I love it. I'll add my 2 cents to that again from my experience, because I think it's very, very important, critical for the near and probably long-term future. One is going back to, company culture is something that was always important and now became. Maybe more challenging, but way more critical because you could before through osmosis, get company culture. And now unless there's a very disciplined process to create culture and sustain it and grow it involving everybody in the organization, it's not going to happen just because a lot of people see it at home. So that's aspect number one. And aspect number two is, Because systems like this like enable you to manage and track specific individuals, and then teams and individuals, achievements and goals and so on, existed for a very long time. But again, you could get in a room once a week or once a month and go over everything and talk to people and see what's going on. Now, in many organizations, that doesn't happen. So com, so solutions like Jira or Monday or Asana, or click up, or whichever you are using, that enables you to really take that process, the O K R process, or call it whatever you wanna call it, and break it down into quarterly, weekly, daily tasks for specific individuals that you can. And see their completion and see how they're contributing to the bigger strategies and the bigger goal exist. And they're very, very good and they can help you in today's era to actually achieve this thing that, again, before was easier to do just because everybody was in a building and you can call a meeting and have 20

Jim GItney: 48:21

people sitting. Yeah. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And at the end of the day, if I've been engaged, I've been asked my opinion, I feel like my opinion is valued. I'm much more willing to have the conversation about being accountable. Because for far too long we had these formal tracking systems, right? And people found all kinds of ways to hide behind why couldn't get this done. Yeah. But by engaging everyone in the workforce or as many people as you can, and providing with them with the skills, the remember that I want to be led from what to what by when. Right. they're much more acceptance. They're, they, there's a much greater acceptance of the concept of cascading objectives and reporting on'em. As a matter of fact, if I own something, And I achieve it, I will run to the presentation to let everyone know Yeah. What I've accomplished. Yeah. That's just human nature. That's who we are. Right? Sure. And so that's incredibly, important. One last thing on culture. Sure. So inside the book, I actually talk about culture being a figment of people's imagin. So, more often than not, we talk about mission, vision, values and leadership trained traits. Defining the culture of a company, I've, I've heard that more than anything else, right? It doesn't define the culture of the company. It defines how we want people to behave. Right? Yeah. If you follow the business hierarchy of needs and you get everyone engaged, I'm going to stand out on the edge here and claim that you will realize a culture of strategic execution. And what I mean by that is that you have a culture where everyone's pointed in the same direction. They all have the same set of accounta. They're all accountable they're all participating. And the mission, vision, values, and leadership traits is defining how we really want you and I to work together how we want you and I to talk to each other. Right? Sure. And so at the end of the day, what we're really talking about is a culture of strategic execution here, and that's the culture that we want in order to achieve these kinds of numbers.

Isar Meitis: 50:59

Jim, this was really interesting, really deep like that. We touched on a lot of really important stuff here in a relatively short amount of time. I really, really appreciate you spending the time and sharing from your experience and knowledge with me and the listeners and thank you very much.

Jim GItney: 51:16

So it, so it's been my pleasure. to be part of this podcast and to talk with, talk about what you hope came across as my passion, awesome. Around the business hierarchy of needs and creating a culture of strategic execution.

Isar Meitis: 51:32

What a great conversation with Jim. He obviously has a lot of experience and depth in his knowledge in the field of strategy implementation. If you are looking to hear more episodes that talk about business strategies, there are multiple of them, but there are three I would like to recommend. One is very recent, it's episode 168 it is called WIN in 2023 and Beyond, based on interviews with over 150 CEOs and business experts. It's a solo episode that I've done just before the beginning of this year in order to give the best practices and the best tips I can give you of what you have to focus on in order to grow businesses in the next coming years. Another one is episode 98, A proven business growth acceleration framework shared by sought after business coach Jerry McNamara. Jerry is a brilliant coach and he helped and is helping multiple businesses in multiple industries. Crystallize their strategy so they can, like he said, grow the business while making it home for dinner. It's a great episode. It's fun and it provides a lot of great tips. And the last one, you'll have to scroll all the way back to episode 16. It's called Business Growth Guru, Dwayne Deville reveals his process. Dwayne is the trusted advisor of CEOs or some very large companies. His process is very strategic and yet very easy to follow. All three are highly recommended and attack the idea behind business strategy in different angles. If you enjoyed this episode, please listen to more. If you listen to a few and you like the content, I would really appreciate it if you subscribe and rate and review this podcast on Apple Podcast and tell a friend that could benefit from this podcast as well. I would really appreciate all of those and until next time, have an amazing week.