Why managers fail to turn strategy into real world results

If you really want to have significant change, take the time and do it the right way. And what's really exciting is we we spend our whole I spend I'm going to spend the rest of my career uh of doing that and what we found is when we can help people understand who they really want to be in the future, and then we help them figure out how they're going to get it done, and then we help them create a plan that it can get done by being focused on it.
Welcome back to this week's episode of The High Performance Leader, the podcast for leaders working in complex, challenging environments to gain insights and ideas which help you increase your impact without burning out and to help you build a high-performance culture in your team. I'm your host, Jimmy Burroughes. And if you're new to The High Performance Leader, make sure you subscribe or follow so you don't miss any of our upcoming episodes before you put down your device.
This week on The High Performance Leader, I talked to Cale J. Cox, the CEO of 40 NORTH Strategy. Cale and I had this incredible conversation all about the differences between running the operation and being a strategic leader, and some of the ways that you can think differently about the way you and your leadership team are organising yourselves, and focusing down on the things that really matter to make a difference in your business. Do you know there's probably some things you're doing that you don't even realise you're doing that are getting in your way, and there's some things that you might not have even thought about that you could start doing that are going to make a massive impact? So, tune in to this week's episode of The High Performance Leader. I guarantee you will absolutely love it. Speak soon.
Hello, and welcome back to this week's episode of The High Performance Leader. I am really excited today to have a new friend of the show guesting with us, the incredible Cale J. Cox. Now, Cale is the CEO of 40 NORTH Strategy, we'll hear a little bit more about that later. He's also the host of a fascinating podcast I recommend you listen to, the Measure Success Podcast, and then, finally, the author of Lost at CEO, which we'll also link to below, but we'll talk a bit more about that as well later on. Cale, welcome to the show. It's an absolute pleasure to have you with us.
Cale: Jimmy, it is a pleasure to be on your show as well. I've been looking forward to this, and I can't wait for our conversation today.
Jimmy: Absolutely. Well, let's get into it, shall we? Um, first of all, Cale, tell us a little bit about how did you end up as the CEO of 40 NORTH Strategy? What's your background? How did you get here?
Cale: Yeah, Jimmy. I'll give the longer, because of your podcast and how you work with professionals on moving up and changing who they are. I'm going to give a little bit of a longer one so they can see that regardless of where they started, they can be somewhere different. They can go somewhere new. And so, I'll first start out as I started as a bean counter, I like to say that in the most utmost way. I was a CPA, the old Coopers and Lybrand, which is now called PricewaterhouseCoopers. That's how I started out. And it was really fortunate. I worked with a couple private companies, then worked for the publicly traded company, was the corporate controller. And by the age of 30, I got hired to become a CFO of a privately held company. That company we grew from I grew actually grew five to three and a half times over five years. So, we had this incredible growth path with it. The really amazing thing, though, was is they gave me an opportunity to get outside of accounting, and two, to get into strategy. So, first thing is I remember at 30 being asked multiple times by Jerry Ramey, his CEO, and he said, "Cale, we need to be strategic." And I remember not honestly understanding what that word meant back then, because my whole life beforehand was about being tactical, get the financials done, right, get the budget done, figure out what the valuation of the company is, right. It was all this for the most part, it was rearview looking, and every once in a while, we'd look in the future, but it was just background look. Well, then I started understanding like, "Hey, we can change the way how we are and what we do." And so, they started saying, "Well, Cale, can you try helping us out with something different?" And so, they said, "Can you help us out with IT?" And I was like, "Okay." And now, I I can't fix computers, Jimmy. My IT expertise is turning off and on the computer, but I said, "Okay, I can help you out."
Jimmy: Yeah, that's about as far as mine goes as well.
Cale: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. So, you know, I didn't have much skills, but I said, "Yes," fixed IT, and they were happy. And then they were like, "Well, can you help us out now with technical support?" Jimmy, same thing, you give me a hammer, I'm going to break that nail. I have no ability to fix things, like manual, you know, with the tools. But the good news is, we fixed the department, we had better success. And they're like, "Hey, Cale, can you now go to Europe and help us build distribution centres over there?" I had never been to Europe before in my life. Went over Europe, set up new distribution centres. They went well. Next, they were like, "Hey, Cale, that's going pretty well. Can you now help us out with manufacturing operations?" Sure, I had never managed manufacturing operations. Got it to work. Then, "Hey, can you help us so with supply chain in Asia, start going to Asia and understanding how that process works more deeply?" From there, I thought I was going to be there forever. We got really, really good at strategic planning and execution, meaning, Jimmy, I thought everybody was good at strategic planning execution. I worked with another company, we grew from 70 employees to 450 employees in three years. Crazy growth rate. And I had multiple different roles in there, including setting up a a WOFE, a Wholly Foreign-Owned Entity, in China. We invested in a company in the Bay Area, I got put on the board of directors for that. But the the most exciting thing was is we invested in this company called Cascade Strategy, based out of Australia. They had a strategic plan software. We were like, "Oh, we want to use it, but we also want to be become a partner of theirs." And next thing we knew, we became their northwest partner, became the eventually became their US partner. And that was the really cool thing was, it was like, "Oh, we get to help sell software for this, Jimmy." But this is the fun part, and once again this is I'm just sharing all this, once again, to understand, how did I get to here? Because it wasn't just I planned to go here from the beginning of my career. It was a journey. So, sold a deal to Johnson & Johnson. I convinced my wife and convinced my old CEO, "Hey, I think I want to do this full-time." I took it, an amazing experience going through this. We grew from 50 clients to 350 clients in three years, became 50% of the global business. The surprise, though, was this, Jimmy, is that I didn't know that most people didn't know how to do strategic planning and execution. Matter of fact, they're quite terrible at it. 90% of organisations fail to get two thirds of their strategic objectives done. So, had this interesting dilemma. So, people are buying our software like people would buy a Peloton bike, right. What that means is is that Peloton bike becomes a very expensive towel rack for most people, because they don't continue to use the bike, they don't continue to use the Peloton. So, from there, eventually, we had all the success. I started travelling around doing facilitations and consulting. Eventually, I got asked by a client they literally 2 hours into the meeting, they pulled me aside and, "Cale, we would have paid you 10 grand just for that last 2 hours because you provided us so much wisdom and knowledge on how to do strategic planning and execution better." And I went, "Wow, that's amazing," cuz especially that's like almost more than they paid for the entire software for a full year. So, I was like, "Thank you." Fast forward a year later, Jimmy, I got asked to run and create the global consulting business. The challenge that I had was is, if I would have made that decision, I wouldn't have been able to watch and be present during my four kids and their experiences. And so, I politely declined, opened up 40 NORTH Strategy in January 2020. And what's been so amazing is be able to carry on that success with our clients today. We Why we're called 40 NORTH Strategy is most organisations only spend 2% of their time on strategy. So, that's where the 40 hours comes in. It's basically equivalent to 40 hours, 40 NORTH Strategy. So, the the concept is is why don't you bring in strategic expertise to help you do strategic planning execution the right way so you can accelerate your process? And what we've found is our minimum returns with our clients in terms of value of bringing us in is at least 3x. Matter of fact, I was just working with a client this past week, where it's a 20x return. We do extraordinary things, it's super amazing, and we help out with employees, we help with CEOs, and we help them get to where they really want to be. So, there you go. That's how I got where I'm at. That's how 40 NORTH Strategy's been created and built. And I am fortunate to be doing exactly what I should be doing. It's so such a joy to help other organisations be more effective.
Jimmy: Wow. I mean, just super interesting, as well, how your career has taken those little moments of let's challenge you and let's see you deliver, and then let's challenge you again. I really love that. It's very reminiscent of my own career, where it's like, "Here's a new thing to try, and you've never done this before." I want to just go back to a specific piece that you mentioned there, that a lot of people are not particularly good at strategic planning and execution. And I think strategy is a bit like driving, we all think we're better than we are. And there is a fundamental difference between, as you said, the tactical delivery and strategic planning and execution. Can you do a bit of a compare and contrast on those two things for us? That Just so we can clearly delineate between what's operational and what is strategy.
Cale: Yeah, that's an important distinction. A lot of organisations do what they'd call an annual operating plan, right. You basically design what your budget's going to be for next year, and you figure out how you're going to deliver it. This means how you're going to sell your product or services, how you're going to deliver your product and services, how you going to manage and operate the KPIs, and make sure you're making money for your particular organisation. That's operations. Which strategy is is how are we going to significantly change to get to a new location? It's the how. Really, strategic planning is built on long-term thinking. We want to be somewhere in three years from now, we want to be somewhere in five years from now. Because the problem is when you just do operations, you end up just flowing to serve the customer. Right. You do whatever it takes to serve the customer, and you should, by the way. That's how you make money, right. That's how you make a difference in the world. You try to make your bosses happy, right, if you have any bosses, and you try to make your clients happy, and that's what you do to move forward to be successful. The problem is when you just do that, you start being less strategic, you just start saying yes to everything. And next thing you know, you have a mix of customers, and you have a mix of vendors, and you have locations all over the place, potentially, and you're not focused. And strategic is about being focused on the most important things that you should be doing, eliminating the waste of things that you shouldn't be doing, and making sure in the your future place is going to be a greater difference. That's far different than operations. People are busy, Jimmy, right? Most people in organisations, they're busy. They're busy doing their work. I I rarely run to a company saying, "Oh, man, we're just laying around doing nothing." That's not typically my experience. My experience is people are busy. But the question is, are they busy doing something that's actually moving the dial? And that's the key difference between being strategic and being operational.
Jimmy: When you said that, it reminded me of Tim Ferriss's book The 4-Hour Workweek, when he was shedding his customers from his nutrient business. And he said, "I just chose my five best customers, and I got rid of all the rest of the customers because I just wanted to create 20 more customers like my best five, not the ones who were taking all my effort and all my time and spreading us super thin." And it is that strategic approach that is moving from trying to cover all bases doing all things to really focusing in on doing one thing really well, or a couple of things really well, and creating the results from that. Now, I'm What I'm sensing here, though, is that that's going to be requiring the leadership team to think a little bit differently. How should we start to move our thinking? What should we be dropping, er and giving to the operational teams? And what should we be starting, or keeping, that is allowing us to do better strategy?
Cale: So, number one, I like to pull back for a minute and going, once again, where do we want to be in the long term, right? Because if you don't have a vision behind where you want to be in the long term, even your strategic ideas could be putting in the wrong direction. So, and when I mean by vision, it could be a three-year vision, it could be a five-year vision, it could be a 10-year vision. But you want to create this what the future looks like in terms of your customers, your suppliers and partners, your employees, your locations, the products and services that you're providing. You want to create some clarity around that, okay. So, that's number one. And then, two, you want to start setting goals. And the challenge why the difference between strategy and operations, if you do in operations, you're just going to improve at the same level that you've been all the time just because it's what you've been doing. So, a maybe a typical successful company might be growing 5% to 7% a year, 5% to 10% a year, which is, frankly, not too different than inflation. So, even though they think they're doing amazing, they're really not. They're just keeping up with inflation. They're making themselves feel good, but it's not really impressive. Being strategic is going, "Hey, we want to grow 30% or 50% or we want to get to a new market or you know, we want to go to a different geographic region because we think our current market is not growing as much." That's being strategic. That's changing who, the how, the what to get to a new location versus we're just going to be doing operations. The challenge is most organisations have these big dreams and then they don't get buy-in with the employees who are actually doing it. And so, as a result, there's this massive gap. Leaders are like, "Oh, we're going to go and get to the moon," and the employees and the managers are going, "I'm really busy doing my day-to-day job, and I don't have time to make these changes. And matter of fact, you're not even incenting me to make this change." Perhaps, it's even like more drastic. It's like it could be eliminating employees out of their team. What incentive, right, does a manager have to make want to make these changes? So, one of the big challenges in strategy, Jimmy, is that when there's that classic boardroom retreat and they're on a whiteboard and they're getting so excited about the future, that cannot be the finish. I'm a big believer in once you set those preliminary goals, we like I like to call them destinations, of where you're going to go to in the future, the next part is figuring out how you're going to get there. It's okay for the leadership team to figure a little bit of the how, but you really want your team to be a part of figuring out how they're going to get there because then they're going to be bought in. Once you get that buy-in and you trim down the essential few things that you need to do, you can't do everything, right? Because that's another problem, literally, we're working with a client the other day, they had like 79 ideas. And we got it down to 15, okay, cuz it's fun, right. It's super fun to have this ideation, "Oh, we can solve all the world's problems." Fantastic, but let's focus on what we're going to have the greatest likelihood of success and what's going to have the greatest impact. We marry those two things together, and that's when you get down to the essential few. What you're describing in The 4-Hour Workweek is the Pareto principle. Typically, our top 20% of our customers, our top 20% of our actions, our top 20% of our suppliers provide 80% of the impact. So, the goal is to eliminate the other 80% as much as you can. And just like in The 4-Hour Workweek, it's a great example of the Pareto principle, how do I find more of these great clients, cuz that's what brings us the greatest value. It's not the 500,000 tasks that we're doing that's keeping us busy, it's actually the core essential few. This is a hard thing to do, right? You know, it's really hard to do. But when you could be strategic like that versus we're just going to stay busy, it's the difference between great organisations and everybody else.
Jimmy: I'm so aligned there, and I think one of the things that you said that really resonated with me was the principle of, go do your away day, like there's nobody saying you shouldn't do your away day, but it's don't solve all the problems on the away day. Actually, come back with the destination, the vision, the goals, and include your people, because that creates some sort of ownership, doesn't it, among the operational staff to want to move beyond the, "Yes, I'm really busy in my day job, and I'm I'm busy making a rounder wheel, or a a better horse-and-cart design. We want to move them past that, but they have to feel like they own it, right?
Cale: That's right. Yeah. There's a a crazy statistic that Gallup had, which is 51% of middle management will actively try to sabotage your goals. Now, they might do it in a way that's subversive, "I'm too busy. I'm too busy. I'm too busy." But that's actively trying to make sure that the goals are done. You're finding excuses. This is really difficult. This is, once again, why typically things don't happen. But I blame leadership on this. Leadership has a duty to talk with their team on helping them to understand how to get done, because often we think we're the smartest people in the room in the boardroom. You know, there might be cases where you have a particular expertise where you do have more knowledge with, or you might have been with the company for a longer period of time, but it's the people who are actually doing it that are typically seeing the problems that you're having. And they can help you often figure out the the how the solution. But you we haven't given them those obstacles to get rid of in the past because we've been just saying, "Just go. Just go. Just get it done, right, move faster, move more effective," but there's no clarity over it, right, and they're not bought in. They're just working to get their day job done. So, getting that process to figure out the how, and then the leadership approving it, and then, ultimately, giving them resource, time, and and/or money to get it done is super critical, right. Like, how many times would like to say, "Oh, hey, you know, Jimmy Jimmy, hey, um you're already working 55 hours a week. We know, we appreciate you, but we're now going to put this a strategic initiative on you." And then you might ask the question, "Well, hey, I think I should probably get some time carved out." They're like, "Oh, you know, you're already a hard worker, you'll figure it out." That's not solving problem. That is just getting a great employee to be burnt out. And then, he's going to find another job. You know, it's funny how there's some times where we lose our best employees because we overweight them with, quote, unquote, "strategic initiatives" or operational opportunities. That's foolish, right? We want to keep those high performers. Jim, you know, you had examples, right, in your past of like where where, you know, you've you've done and tried to be yes to everything. And what happens is you end up getting burnt out. And so, we want to make sure when we develop strategical things, we're considering the operational and making sure, once again, there's time and money to help make sure that people are going to be bought in to getting it done.
Jimmy: I think you've really hit something that resonates with certainly the work that we do in organisations. It's the idea if if you want to get something done, give it to a busy person, because you then you know they'll get it done. But actually what's the the cost that is being paid by that leader, by that manager, by that individual contributor to deliver on the strategic objective? I think the other thing that really came up for me there, though, was you put this at the feet of leadership to get this right. But I think in organisations there has been a generation of underinvestment in leadership development, and so many of these leaders who are now at the top table, they don't know how to do strategy, they don't know how to do change leadership, they don't know how to roll out strategic initiatives. They're just kind of winging it with good intentions, and that's costing the organisations dearly. And hence, now why we have this epidemic of burnout, high disengagement, I think 73, 74% of people are now not engaged. It's a real challenge.
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So, what I'm hearing is we need to perhaps pay a little bit more attention to knowing our people, knowing what their capacity is, knowing what their strengths are, and leaning into those strengths. Am I along the right lines here?
Cale: You really are. And it's it's interesting, we're Jimmy, we're all I'm also a Gallup-certified strengths coach and and big believer, right, in helping to find and understand people's strengths, and then appropriately aligning the right things with people. For example, there are people who have strategy in their top 34 strengths, and they're near the top. Have them in that strategy discussion on where we're going, like and how to get there. There are other people that are more like just pure operations, and it's like they're going to actually get bored. They want to just know how it's going to get done and how to deliver it. So, it's important that piece, but going back to the original part, leadership, once again, has the responsibility to make sure that their team is engaged in getting things done. So, I'm going to give you a great example, and is I I took some of this from a book called The 12 Week Year uh by Moran, a a wonderful book. I used some of the principles, but we we've changed it a little bit because we don't believe that organisations can be always working on strategy, because things are get busy. So, we believe in doing 10-week strategy sprints. So, this is the concept: you have a a strategic concept, you have an action plan, and you're going to say, "Okay, we're going to we're going to go from A to B over this next 10 weeks, and we're going to build, create, do something, something new, something that we haven't done before." The difference is, in the most strategic plans just honestly, Jimmy, is people say, "Hey, great, we're doing the strategic plan, and we're either going to meet at the end of the quarter or in 6 months or in the end of the year to get it done." What happens is that nothing happens until like 3 days before the presentation, and it's a big rush and it's done very poorly. So, what we believe leadership should be doing is being engaged. Matter of fact, I just got asked about this particular question by someone who's working on their doctorate right now, "How can this be done better?" Well, this is the way to do it. You do these 10-week strategy sprints. This requires leadership to be engaged. You work with the player who you're working with and say, "Hey, over the next 10 weeks we're going to do these things." You literally write it out. You have a project plan, if you may. You work with them each week to review whether it got done. You clarify the objectives for the next week. We're not talking about meeting for hours, we're talking about just like a half-hour check-in, just to make sure, or a 15-minute check-in just make sure things are happening. But this is where leadership changes. What's going to happen is in 3 weeks into it, somebody's going to say, "You know, I was really busy because," fill in your blank, you know, "it was snowing outside. We were at the trade shows this week. We," you know, you name it, there's going to be something they're going to say that's an excuse. Now, most managers they'll say something like this, "I remember that was really difficult. Okay, well, we'll just get that done next week." Or even worse, they'll forget about it and they won't pay attention to it anymore because they're like, "Oh, yeah, that's no longer going to happen." What a great leader does is they do this. They say, "Hey," I'm going to use you again, Jimmy, "Jimmy, I understand, you know, you're really surprised that, because snow never hits it where you're located and somehow snow fell, and so I can understand you weren't working that week, but tell me how you're going to not only complete next week's objective on time, but you're going to actually get the previous week's objective and catch up." That all of a sudden sets a set of expectations that it's not okay to miss your deadlines. That interaction, that understanding, all of a sudden says strategy is more important, if not equally important is more important than than operations. Because we're never going to change who we are if we don't be accountable to those changes and actions. And then, when you go through that really tough spot, you're going to finish that 10 weeks, and you can have amazing success. You're going to way perform what you've done in the past on strategy, and and you're going to you're actually going to accelerate what you've been doing. I remember as we're working with one organisation, when we put this in place, we were going to do one sales playbook in a year. And I remember meeting, I literally had three sales people and they were working all on this together, and nothing got done for like like through May, and we started in January. And so, I put in this plan, I said, "Hey, not only are we going to do one sales playbook, but we're going to actually separate you into three individual players and you're going to create your own sales playbook for your industry." By August, we had three individual sales playbooks for each person. We literally tripled this success and got it done 5 months earlier, because of just changing the way how we executed and got it done. This is why I believe This See, this is Some people say, "Oh, that's micromanagement, or I don't have time for that." No, this is the difference between great leadership and good leadership is they get engaged, and then along the way when there are obstacles or there are challenges, they're finding out every week. They're not waiting until the end of the quarter or 6 months or years from now. Their job is to help remove those obstacles and create priorities. That's when you become a great leader, and that's how you become a strategic leader who actually gets things done versus just being a cool idea guy. And that, by the way, is not easy.
Jimmy: So many overlaps with some of the concepts that we talked about. We mentioned the idea of icebreaker leaders. So, the icebreaker leader is the leader who helps to break the ice when it's a little bit tense and helps everybody feel at ease, you can call it psychological safety, you could call it well-being at work, whatever, but also the icebreaker is the ship that sails in front of the flotilla and literally breaks the ice, removes the barriers and lets the fleet go through as quickly and effectively as possible with the minimum disruption. And I think what you're saying there is, your job as a leadership team is not to run the operation, your job is to implement the strategy and make sure that you've got the right people doing the right work to make sure that happens, and that means you don't have capacity and time to be meddling in the operation. You have people for that, let them do their jobs, let them own the tasks, let them own the deliverables. Really beautifully articulated. Thank you, Cale. Um, a couple of things quickfire questions here that I think is important to know. What are the two or three most common flaws or errors that you see people or perhaps missed opportunities that you see when people are trying to get strategy done?
Cale: Well, we talked about a couple of them, and so I'm not going to repeat them in terms of they don't have a vision, they don't set stretch goals, they don't have buy-in, right. Those are some really big ones. But I'm going to hit a couple other ones that aren't as commonly known. One of the biggest challenges with strategic planning is when people are setting goals, they're all lagging indicators, i.e., we're going to increase our sales 20%, we're going to have a gross margin of 40%, we're going to have sale profits of 10%. These are all lagging indicators. What the reality is is it's the end result of the actions of all the actions you've been doing. It's okay to have that as a lagging, but the reality is, and and by the way, historically, most strategic plans, about 80% of their goals are lagging indicators. What you really want is the leading indicators to be the vast majority. These are the actions that we can control to have an impact on the outcome. So, what does this mean? An example would be in sales, like I'm just doing a micro example, so just to help put this into practice, we want to increase sales, fantastic. Well, how do you increase sales? Mm, we work harder. No, no. That's not That's not right. You know, we we need to have an action. So, we might find out that our one of our key performance indicators is we need to do a demo of our product. When we get a demo of our product, we find that we have a much higher likelihood. So, your strategies is all going to be built on how do we get more people to the demos? You're going to evaluate, now that's going to be one of your key leading indicators, and then you're going to say, "Well, how did we work in that process to get people to demos? We reached out and asked them to be on the demos, right, that's part of the process. We followed up to make sure they're there. And then, we had a follow-up meeting after the demo." What we can't control is whether somebody actually buys your product, right. That's why that should be a lagging indicator, right, at the end of the day, what your actual sale. But all the effort you do from A to B is what you can control. And so, that's one big thing, Jimmy, is having leading indicators more focus rather than lagging indicators. So, that's one key differentiator on great strategy. Number two, trim it down to the essential few. A wonderful book is called The 4 Disciplines of Execution, and they found, after doing 1,500 strategic implementations, that only the top three things you should focus on. Not 17, not even 15, not 85, but three. Now, what's really interesting, Jimmy, is after doing 15 hun 5,000 strategic implementations, they revised it. And they kind of quietly changed the tune, they said you should really focus on one thing at a time. So, we are big believers in when assigning strategic objectives, have one leader assigned to each goal, and trim it down to the essential few. When doing that, you're much more likely to have success. So, that's so we have one thing, being KPIs, two things, how few, like and having one leader uh be there. And then, finally, it's a little bit about that action plan, is you need to follow up to make sure that's actually getting done along the way. So, more frequent check-ins. This is why we're big fan of the 40 NORTH Strategy. We love 40 check-ins versus four check-ins. Think about that, 10x more time on it. And what's really great is when you do that, when you have your quarterly meeting, it's not a surprise. You already know you're successful. It's just a report-out on the success, and perhaps an ask for some critical changes that you need to make for the next quarter. But it's not this, "Oh, wow, I didn't know that," right? It is already well-known. It is known that you're making progress and you're having success. These things are easy. And Jimmy, I just want to say it's so important that people don't feel bad if you don't know this stuff. You probably don't know anybody who has a strategic planning degree. And if you're fortunate enough to go through one strategic planning process every year, that's not that much, folks. That's like That's nothing. You're spending, once again, 2% of your time on strategy, that does not make you an expert. What we've found is when we you know, we've read hundreds of books, literally we read three I read 300 books in five years about leadership and strategy and excellence and operations, very, very few people are good at this. Once again, the data is there, it's really clear. You just have to look it up, how successful people are at strategy, they're terrible at it. But there is a way. There's a way to do it better, and and that's partly why we wrote our book, Jimmy, Lost at CEO, it's a fable to help people go through this process of you don't have to do it the old way. When I hear people go say, "I'm doing a SWOT, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats," and that's their thing, I I roll my eyes almost every single time. It's like, you know, this that was brought back in the '60s. Like, things we got to adapt, we got to change. And that, by the way, is not strategy, that's just an ideation concept, that's it! It's not strategy. So, these are the big things that I I those things what I talked about is what helps people get it done, be more successful with it, and actually enjoy it. Because, frankly, I can understand why people hate strategy, because they feel like it's just more work and more time, and they typically see it not getting done. And we have the opposite, 90% of our companies, actually it's way higher than that, but I I want to be careful, we only have literally of our so many different clients that we worked with, all but one that hasn't worked for, and that was for one not-for-profit entity that nobody was being paid in the organisation, so meaning that they didn't have they didn't have the time or resources to actually do any work on it. But literally every single one that we've been with has had an extraordinary success, but they have to go through a process to get there. And when they do that process, and they want to be somewhat rigorous about it, you have crazy success when doing those actions.
Jimmy: No, I I think all extremely valuable insights. But I think for me, what was really jumping out there is just that importance of focusing down, and I once heard that fable of, strategy is as much about what you don't do as what you do do, and letting go of the noise. And yeah, as you say, focusing down to three or potentially one, and I I love that The 4 Disciplines of Execution book, it's really interesting. I'm about halfway through it now based on our conversation a few months back. Really interesting, and we've touched on the topic of books, so let's stay there. Tell us a little bit about your incredible book, Lost at CEO.
Cale: So, I, yeah, I mentioned it briefly there, but I'll give it a little bit more detail. It's a a story of a CEO who is staying awake at night, and he's trying to figure out, how do I manage my life? How do I turn this company around? And how do I actually do this the right way this time? And he he didn't know. And this is the cold, hard reality, it's called Lost at CEO because CEOs can't tell the truth fully. You know, I know you do everything you can to get that to be the opposite, Jimmy, but it's really hard for them to fully be transparent about everything. They don't have somebody that they that they'd be a confidant of talking about the difficult challenges that they have on a regular basis. This is why it's so important for CEOs to have coaches to help them hear things before, because they, when talking with their team, they should be as transparent as they can. You know, they should be doing the right things. And so, this book is about that. It's about this, once again, the CEO, leader, entrepreneur who's trying to change his company, and he happens to be in a coffee shop and runs into, well, it's me, but I don't say it's me, called Charlie Joseph, and, basically, he gives him guidance along the way on there's a better way of doing it. And you hear the trials and tribulations of this CEO with his family, with the process, and then to ultimately getting to the end result where there is success. And the consultant along the way is giving him ideas and pointers and concepts of how to do it. And the book is written that way. So, we have seven principles, and the seven principles are built into the book, but it's written in a way that's really quick to read. And one of the most enjoyed um kind of funny backhanded compliments that I heard was, there literally was an executive at I believe they're actually from LinkedIn, if I recall correctly, and she literally said, "You know, I had bought this book to actually to go to sleep, because I was having trouble sleeping. And the darn book was so good, I could not fall asleep, and I had to put another book I had to put it down to get another book to help me fall asleep." So, meaning even when people are trying to use it to cure insomnia, it will not do that. It's a quick, wonderful read. And what I love is when people come out of it saying, "You know, I can take so many principles out of this and use it for my business, for my organisation." This, by the way, this book does apply for not-for-profits, it applies for business, it applies for anybody. It These are core principles that companies like Amazon have been using. These are strategies going all the way back to Sun Tzu, right? These are fact-based principles that are applied, but in a way that you can connect it with yourself, and you're going to love it. I hope you enjoy it. It is, once again, it's a great read, and I am saying that out of this is this the feedback we're getting from our clients, you know, this feedback we're getting from people reading it, and and it will be a quick, easy, wonderful read, and I know you're going to be able to take things out of it that's going to help out how you're running your organisation.
Jimmy: Incredible, and we will link to that right below this podcast so you can get the link to Cale's book from the show note, Lost at CEO. Cale, if you had to encapsulate everything we've talked about today in one or two sentences, what would that be?
Cale: If you really want to have significant change, take the time and do it the right way. And what's really exciting is we we spend our whole I spend I'm going to spend the rest of my career uh of doing that and what we found is when we can help people understand who they really want to be in the future, and then we help them figure out how they're going to get it done, and then we help them create a plan that it can get done by being focused on it, the results we see with organisations, it's so exciting. It's so exciting to see leaders smile again, and get away realise that they can be and be somebody different than they were. And that's where the real joy is.
Jimmy: I love that. Thank you so much, Cale. And if people want to reach out to you to get in touch, to continue this conversation, what's the best way for them to do that?
Cale: So, several different things. So, first of all, you can go to our website 40northstrategy.com, 4-0-northstrategy.com, so that's number one. Number two, of course, we're on the Measure Success Podcast, so you can find that on all the major places to to find, so please, feel free. And if you do get a chance on Measure Success Podcast, please give us a rating. We really appreciate that, most of our ratings on Apple, uh or iTunes, I should say. Number three, you can, of course, buy our book at Lost at CEO on Amazon. Now, if you are non-US, please, just go buy on Amazon, it'll easily get to you quickly. If you are in the US, this is a gift to your US-based customers, send me an email to [email protected]. So, once again, [email protected], and I'll send you a free, signed book. So, this is a gift, once again, the US-based people of your show, Jimmy, this is my gift to gift to them for for having the opportunity to be here today and for them listening, a free, signed book, just send me an email with your address and we're happy to send it out to you. It's uh one of our joys to continue to spread our message of how it can help you and run your organisation.
Jimmy: That's uh extremely generous of you, Cale. Thank you so much. And, yeah, for those listeners we do have in the US, of which there are many, I really do encourage you to reach out. I cannot wait to get my copy of the book and get stuck into it over the Christmas break. Cale, it's been so interesting to talk to you, and I know we could continue this conversation about strategy, leadership, the intersections, and how to make businesses hum more effectively. But I'm going to close us out there just by saying an enormous thank you for the wisdom and the generosity of the ideas that you've shared with us. It's been absolutely awesome. Thank you so much.
Cale: Jimmy, once again, thank you. Appreciate you. You do a great job hosting, appreciate your questions, and I love what you're doing out there as well. So, it's just been a joy to be part of the podcast today.
Jimmy: Speak to you soon.
Cale: Cheers.
Jimmy: That's it for this week's episode of The High Performance Leader. If you enjoyed this episode, please drop a review on whichever platform you listened on. We really appreciate it, and it helps us to connect with new listeners. Also, if you haven't already, head to jimmyburroughes.com and download a copy of my latest best seller, Beat Burnout, Ignite Performance. It's the leader's playbook for building a high-performance culture, and it's packed with practical action tips to get you started. Stay tuned for next week's episode of game-changing insights and ideas on The High Performance Leader.