Art of War & Strategic Thinking for Entrepreneurs in 2020

a recent study showed that if you put 20 liters in a room 20 liters in a room only one out of the 20 is a strategic thinker meaning they think about strategies on how to out maneuver their opponents one in 20 i know we've heard buffett say things like there's three qualities we hire for intelligence you know initiative and integrity and if you don't have the last one the first two don't matter i know we hear that but when it comes down to business at the end of the day the person that's able to out maneuver their peers say they all work hard say they're all reading books say they're all improving but one guy keeps becoming more and more and more strategic long term i'm just going to break it break it to you you're not going to be able to beat that guy even if you work the same amount of hours he or she works you'll eventually have to improve your strategy game so today we're going to talk about what you can do to improve your strategy game [Music] so by the way today whatever i talk about i'm going to give you a pdf so i hang titled let me get right into it when it comes down to strategy most people think oh he's a strategic thinker he's a strategist what is it really about when you talk about strategy and i'll leave an article below that you should read about this topic here's how it works out strategy comes down to three different ways of thinking there is the short-term strategist the midterm strategist the long-term strategist you may be watching this and you don't even know it you're a better short-term strategist you may be watching this and you don't even know it you're a better midterm and some of you are good long-term now here's the challenge some people are great with long-term strategies but they suck in short-term and mid-term you can't compete with somebody that's good at all three and some people are good at term strategies but they're not good at midterm and long term so what is the difference between short term midterm and long term let me kind of unpack so that makes sense to you short term thinkers are problem solvers meaning something happens here's what i think we need to do immediate decisions wait we move on midterm thinkers they think like a strategist long-term thinkers they're planning their next strategy now timeline wise the short-term thinker could be a second problem solver somebody comes up hey here's what you're saying what should we do i think we should do this okay great let's move on that was seven seconds right hey this what's going on what should we be doing with this well let me have we asked this person what about this and give me the data what's the report look like what did they say what are they saying the email 45 minutes later decisions been made but that's a second to an hour strategist short-term thinker immediate immediate immediate you're a problem solver the midterm one is day to day so you know tomorrow we have a board meeting and the guy's going to be asking this question and i really have no answer from what are we going to say when we say our expenses are high in this one year we spent seven million dollars and last year same time we only spent 2.8 million what do we say well let's go back and look what we unpacked the 7 million for me we did this and why do we spend the money over here is it fair to say that the 7 million we spend it's going to help us out next to yes it is boom okay can you get this research within 24 hours you have the info next day at the board meeting 24 hours here's why we have 7 million here instead of 2.7 million and you actually bring it up with all the data and they say okay we're not happy about it but it makes sense timeline on the long term is planning for next month what are we going to be doing next month what is the plans next quarter what's the plans in q4 what's the plan 2021 2022 2023 or what's the plan the next five-year vision 10-year vision 20-year vision there are many people who are very good here but they're not good here again so next one short-term strategist is a street fighter you go into a street fight it lasts less than a minute boom boom you leave it's done fight's over with right that's short term one small little brawl a bar fighter brawl second one is a battle this is this is something that's going to be going on it's a battle it's a lot of people involved you it's going on maybe it lasts a little longer you're trying to win this battle the last one is a war so the war knows how to look at everything because war typically lasts a long time so they have to look at that street fight was won by this gang that little battle we lost but what did we learn from this battle that left us clues and the data to know that next time we're going to flank from this angle and we're going to send to people and we got to create an alliance there that's a different level of thinking that very few people spend a lot of time most people are here believe it or not most people are not here next short term you're putting out fires you're a firefighter middle one you're preventing fire the last one is you're building and deciding where you're going to put your fire stations so oh my gosh put out the fire oh we got another fire let me put that on oh another five we're going to put this one we got to make sure we have 19 you know hoses everywhere this one is no no we need one fire station and that zip code one fire station and this zip code one fire station this school we need to teach courses we need to make videos we need to make education we need to go to schools different way of thinking again band-aid short-term thinking surgery midterm long-term lifestyle if you stop eating sugar if you drink more water if you exercise you're going to be able to avoid the band-aid or the surgery because you're more prepared and it's a long-term lifestyle are you kind of getting the idea of the difference between these thinkers right this is just to kind of give you an idea you got to ask yourself and even comment below are you a short-term strategist a midterm strategist or a long-term in which one of these areas can you improve and comment below so now let's set this aside and let's talk about what a real strategist thinks about number one everything about a strategist is about anticipation remember this guy anticipates what could happen so he prevents a band-aid and a surgery this guy's not anticipation like oh let's just go let's just go let's just go anticipation is number one and how do you anticipate by gathering as much intel and data as you can for example what kind of intel can you get intel on the industry from the industry expert intel from somebody that used to be with a former competitor company and you recruit them until from an article you get intel from somebody that works for regulator intel from this is intel that you're gathering then intel from the inside store inside intel from hey my uh office that we sell our phones through at this radio shack the sales leader there does xyz and he has this issue and three employees told us that at work he's always smoking weed and the guys haven't hit their numbers for the last that is intel i need you need that intel to anticipate a problem you could face with that chop so you got to prevent it before it happens right intel then it's best case worst case strategies what's the worst case that can happen if we do this here oh that's pretty bad what's the best case okay great let's see what we can do to make worst case better number two non-emotional critical thinking i put ego out of the co it's very hard to do for a lot of people because i've been in a lot of rooms where one of my own guys that work for me maybe an executive or sales leader absolutely offended me and insulted me in the worst possible way in a room i'm talking about the worst way which is semi-embarrassing right and in that moment for me i can sit there and just trash this guy because i knew everything about him and just ruined his reputation but i didn't nothing was said i just stood there and i'm like okay let's take a quick break and we walked off boom we come back and bring the meeting together set the tone we start in that moment i know what i can do but that's based on ego if i go there if i would have done that during that time with my ego i would have potentially lost three accounts if i would have lost those three accounts to value the company for that time so i had to be patient to know that eventually everyone's going to know who the leader in this room is and everyone's going to figure out what the right decisions being made but if the ego was in the way that would have never happened so let's talk about this constantly challenging your own views constantly are we doing the right thing here this is how we've done this has it worked did it work is our philosophy the right approach because to have the right philosophy takes years sometimes people don't have the right philosophy that could take 5 10 15 years to get 100 confident about your philosophy that you have like coaches you know it takes a while for coaches to get their philosophy down your approach your leadership way of thinking meaning not you then you have to kind of start thinking and saying well my guy here the way he thinks i just think he keeps getting in his own way what can i do to encourage this guy i understand how he's wired i understand how she's what you're thinking about all this stuff in a critical thinking way being upfront with issues with your leaders for example for the first two three years when i started my own financial form i was not comfortable talking about real issues i had some data that was scary data the first two years and it almost put us out of business i realized as a 32 year old look if you're gonna go like this and you're worried about only giving positive data you're going to put yourself out of business so what did i do all right we're going to have a call i set up a call i terminated three people i fired my number one producer at the time hurt me a lot but i made the decision and we talked about exactly what things could put us out of business and everybody on the call was like whoa that was a different kind of call and the reaction i thought i was going to get from everybody was a complete opposite reaction people said thank you so much for being transparent this was great this is exactly what we needed and there was a couple people that weren't happy about me because i i talked about exactly what things they were doing that was hurting the company and eventually some of them changed some of them left but the company got bigger so you cannot be afraid of having critical thinking type of conversations then you got to challenge hypocrisy which exists we get it every single week here with some people that have hypocrisy in the field that i have to be able to manage and work with you have to challenge manipulation which happens in every organization and every war in every battle and every company in every organization there's gonna be manipulation and bias by executives and different organizations meaning somebody may want to make a decision that they have a certain bias because it benefits them and their department and their you know pocket and bottom line more than it does yours and you you cannot be naive to know why that person's thinking the way they do you have to know that because you're being a critical thinker and setting aside what ego non-emotional critical thinkers so that's number two number three interpret motive now you're not always going to get motive because you don't get paid to go out there and you know you didn't go to college or school and you have a lie detective test where you know everybody's motive what they're doing but you are a poker player and you're trying to read some people's tales to see what people's motives are some of them are in your organization some of them are clients some of them are enemies so when you break down motive looking at all options based on data with the best possible approach taken and then relevant and irrelevant data so if i'm looking at motive and i'm trying to interpret motive why are they doing what they're doing then i look at the data and i said this makes sense the reason why they're pushing this agenda is because the other number that's really the one that they need to work on would embarrass them and it's hurting them so their argument is to use the data that shows that they're doing something right versus the argument so i totally get their motive why they're doing what they're doing i got it i see their data it's not growing their organization you can look at the number you can look at the business it's flat line income's but i get the motive behind it i understand it's a little embarrassing when your business doesn't do well and you have certain motives but you have to be able to interpret everybody's motive number four you gotta have the guts to decide and what i mean by guts to decide is yes you need to build trust with the team but at the same time you cannot be afraid of not making a big decision just because one team member doesn't trust you just because one team member gives you a hard time just because one team member is never going to be on your side you can't allow that to get you to say well we have to make sure we have 100 consensus it's never going to be the case so you being able to take a stand and make a decision a few years ago i got up and i was trying to please everybody and the company you know i'm talking well i have to make sure i please this guy and that guy i left i came back and i said we're solving for one of two things either this company is going to become the company that i envisioned for it to be where we're going to have a half a million licensed agents and it's going to compete with everybody in the market you place northwestern mutual everybody in the marketplace we're going to compete with or we're going to be out of business but i'm not solving for the middle i'm solving for this and if i push too hard for this we'll be here i'm totally good with that it's almost like i don't want to stand up fighting and losing and telling the story to say i lost the fight but i lost the standing i would much rather take the ali approach who was knocked out multiple times but he fought you knowing he's going to give his best to fight you and if you knock them out guess what i salute you respect to you for knocking my ass out but i'm going to fight you if we're going to go at it right so that idea once i took a stand and i was i went away from being afraid of what everybody was thinking and i took a stand i had the gust to make a decision everything changed as a strategist number five align understanding every party's involved agenda so the idea is to try to get as many people aligned on the same page as possible it's very very hard to do it's hard to do in a family it's hard to do in a marriage all the time it's hard to do in a sports team it's it's the hardest thing you'll ever do right you hear a lot of experts you read about they say the toughest thing to ever do in an organization is to get people to work together as a team it's the hardest thing to do because the reason why it's hard to work as a team is why credit he wants credit she wants credit that guy wants credit this guy was because of me it's because of that guys because it is so it's hard to create an environment that's very competitive and people are working their assets up because they want to get the credit and you still want us to be aligned a little bit tough to do it but it's doable it's what great organization like the bulls did it's what great organizations and companies have done is what great military has done and it's doable once you get there and you have everybody on the same page and you implement the strategy you presented people buying and they execute it's game over from there especially if you have the right execution in place number six learn challenge constant improvement with leadership team why do i put challenge constant improvement leadership team here's why you know who typically is very open to learning and improving newer people you know it's typically very hungry we don't want to prove a point to you people that are coming up you know where the hardest people to challenge to constantly think and learn the people that have been off on the longest you know who i have the hardest time getting to read books those guys like well you know what i've read it's kind of like this but yeah i'll skim through it no no read the damn book you've been stuck for five years because you don't read books read the book ah it's okay i've read it i read it came through yeah i read it and you know they haven't read the book right because they keep declining because they're not doing this now i do have on the other hand i just promoted somebody chief distribution officer the company matt sappolo phenomenal guy that i promoted and this is a guy we're very happy by the last four or five years we paid him 5.5 million they're on track to make two million this year right he gets the promotion why does he get the promotion because till today he and his wife sheena are constantly taking my challenges of them improving and they constantly improve and they constantly improve and it can't improve while most stop so you got to constantly challenge your leaders at the top to improve because if they do people follow suit and they improve as well and last but not least in this section of learning is debrief both successes and losses most people only debrief a loss most people don't debrief a success meaning oh we won why do we win tell me why we won why do we win we won because of what instead it's like oh it's awesome we want oh why do we win we have to take the time out right now figure out why we won well we won because of dot dot dot okay good why do we lose that's also not easy to do you got to do that when you take this approach you keep constantly getting better and better and better with your strategies now a couple other things on here and i'll wrap up strategies there's conventional thinking of strategy oh how do they do it we're going to do that how does she do it we're going to do that then there's unconventional thinking which you become creative they ask napoleon which general did you study in the history books and you mimicked he says nobody i studied everybody but i come up with my own strategies because that's the shock factor that's how you shock everybody in the marketplace not doing everybody what everybody else said you shock them a little bit with slightly different strategies that you have in place inside the box strategies outside the box strategies only logical thinking is logic emotion and four-dimensional thinking what's four-dimensional thinking based on the data we are we ought to be doing these three things but emotionally we're not in a good place with her we're in a very good place with them they would be very happy with us they would not be happy with this okay emotionally four-dimensional if we did this the effects of this would go here that would go here this would upset this we're okay with that let's go ahead and do it but if we did this and we and it upset this person that person's a partner it's a very important part like sono ceo comes out and says we think amazon is selling our prod products cheaper than it's really what we sell it to them what do you mean we sell our products to amazon say for 400 amazon is selling them now for 380. that's breaking the law and bazel says yes we do sell the products cheaper than we buy them but because it's on a promotion and then the ceo says that is illegal you shouldn't be able to do something like this well first of all ceo be very careful who you're saying that to number one you produce your products in china so you are the one that's producing your products in china to save money you just raise your prices 50 in january because you not want to build it in america and imagine if bezos turns around and says sorry sonos you are so upset with us moving forward you can no longer sell sonos on amazon because it's upsetting you so much did you see the four dimensional thinking that you're not thinking about you're calling out amazon amazon's selling your products what are you talking about here maybe not the best strategy the ceo of sonos is taking maybe not the best strategy especially since there's nobody bigger than amazon you want to be able to be on amazon with the product that chef and i'm a sonos guy god knows how many sonos have i got sonos all over here all over my house and i don't think that's the best strategy because he's not thinking about the four dimensional thinking surface question deeper questions potential threats deeper threads there's got to be an element of paranoia with the strategies some people that are strategists that are not good at strategic thinking they just do the work and execute they lack paranoia the higher you go up and you're an executive leading bigger armies you know general mattis is one of the guys we just booked to speak at one of our leadership meetings one of the reasons why bringing them bringing general mattis is because our 1.200 000 soldiers reported to this guy he was a leader of 200 000 soldiers and marines and he's been to war many times there's a great you know serious on hbo you can watch it tells you the story of matters right the mad dog mattis is an element of paranoia there's an element of what if the enemy does this we do this there's an element of that and sometimes strategists don't have that and last but not least if you combine your philosophies that are true proven philosophies that you hopefully eventually have took me 15 years i just want you to know this it took me 15 years to get clear in my method of leadership philosophy challenging communication what audience took me a long time to get there but say you get crystal clear with your philosophies you can't compromise the big values and principles of your philosophies now you value money in an organization to help you have more leverage meaning the bigger you get sometimes people don't have that money because they use it more freely they're like ah it doesn't matter just spend the money spend the money the thicker you get with money now there's more opportunities for you to capitalize this form of a strategy because if you don't have any money and great opportunities come up so what if you have great strategies one of the mistakes you made is you don't have the cash to buy the other company that's on sale right and last but not least if you have the right differentiation against your competitors potentially as a product as an approach as a target audience as a way of getting your client you combine those three togetherness true to your real vision now you're eventually going to find yourself competing with the big dogs of your industry when you get to that point let me tell you it's exciting it's cool but it's almost like your entire dream was about one day fighting for the heavyweight championship and going into the big rink and you walk up to mgm grand arena and it still hasn't hit you did you see your picture going up against the heavyweight champion still hasn't hit you then you're in there training with the mirror still hasn't hit you then you watch the monitor they're about to introduce you still hasn't hit you then the music comes on you play whatever song you want to play and you go up with your trainers behind you and you're going whistle still hasn't hit you then you get into the ring and then the champion shows up and he walks in with confidence and he looks at you and you never had a championship fight before and then you face him and he said it just got real hopefully by that time based on how you've strategized you're ready to knock him out and beat a new champion or else if you're not prepared he will knock you out gladly so having said that this is why you ought to spend a little bit more time thinking about strategies that's one of the reasons why i wrote the book your next five moves that comes out august 18th by the time you watch it's probably going to be out already anyways if you haven't purchased your next five moves we'll put the link below for you to go order the next but the whole thing is mastering the art of business strategy and i go into the stuff except deeper for 300 pages if you want today's topic that i talked about in pdf text us the word strategy to three one zero three four zero one one three two strategy text strategy to three one zero three four zero one one three two again three one zero three four zero one one three two text award strategy send you a pdf of today's video and if you want any other articles about this topic i'll put it below a couple of them for you to read last but not least if you want to watch a video that has to do with a grand master strategist thinker like how they think in the world of business i gave a talk on this last year in long beach if you haven't watched it go watch us thank you so much for watching everybody take care bye

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Keywords: Entrepreneur, Entrepreneurs, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneur Motivation, Entrepreneur Advice, Startup Entrepreneurs, valuetainment, patrick bet david, How to think strategically, Strategy, Strategy in business, Your Next Five Moves, Strategic thinkers, how to be more strategic, why strategic thinkers are important, What strategic thinkers do that others dont, Thinking Strategically

Id: x9dgZQsjR6s

Length: 21min 41sec (1301 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 11 2020