Driving Success and Effective Strategic Planning with Carl J. Cox

Dane Groeneveld: Welcome to the Future of Teamwork Podcast. My name's Dane Groeneveld, CEO of HUDDL3 group, and today I've got Carl Cox joining me. Carl's got a few titles, CEO of 40 Strategy, author of the new book, Lost at CEO, and also podcast host of Measure Success. So lots of cool work that you're doing, Carl. Thanks for joining us.

Carl Cox: Dane, thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be on.

Dane Groeneveld: So tell me a little bit about your background. We were talking before the show and you're doing some really interesting work with a number of organizations. Obviously it's taken you part of your career to find this real energy and drive that you've got. How did you come by it?

Carl Cox: Well, it's definitely a story, right? We all have our little stories. There was a point in time where I thought I was going to be teaching history and coaching high school football. I thought that was going to be my purpose in life, but I found myself in the business realm and that's where I found I created the greatest value was actually within that piece. And so the abbreviated story, I started out on bean counting a long, long time ago. I was in public accounting at PricewaterhouseCoopers, became a CPA, and was with multiple small firms with a publicly traded company. Eventually at the age of 30, became a CFO of a privately- held company. And we grew three and a half X in five years. And it was awesome.

Dane Groeneveld: That's big. Yeah.

Carl Cox: Really fun growth. And what was neat about it is even though we were a small company, we had Fortune 500 executives that were running it. So I got to learn strategy and execution. We ran it like board of directors and governance. And I had an audit committee that literally had three Big Four partners in it.

Dane Groeneveld: That's unusual.

Carl Cox: Yes. It was really brutal, actually. And so we had these really intense, really good, really thoughtful, very vision, mission driven, frankly, one of the best experiences I ever had was doing that. So when I thought it was going to be there forever, then I got recruited away to join a company that was in automation and metrology in particular. We worked with one of the largest companies in the world, helping to do micro measurements. We grew from 70 employees to 450 employees in three years. It's unbelievable. And so we had that opportunity, and then we were trying to find a better way to track our strategy and we found this company called Cascade Strategy based out of Sydney, Australia. And it was so fun. It was just one of the greatest experiences I've ever been in. And we grew that company from 50 clients to 350 clients per year, became 50% on the global business. But we found this problem. And so my experience, once again, with both those latter two companies I mentioned that grew a lot and, Cascade to some extent as well, we knew how to do things. We knew how to grow. I thought everybody knew how to do this. So my experience was this myopic, " Of course everyone does it successfully." Well, people were buying our software like they buy a Peloton bike. Now, bear with me. There's some people who get on that bike and rock it every single morning. They get up at 5: 00 AM and they do their... But there's a lot of people where their bike has become a very expensive towel rack, right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. I've seen it.

Carl Cox: Yeah, exactly. So what we've tried to do is there was almost this urgency of, " Hey, there's some people that aren't using our software. Let's figure out why." And so we started initially giving free advice and eventually started charging for it. And three years later, started having tremendous success and Tom Wright, very kind to me, he's like, " Hey Carl, why don't you start up my global consulting business because we need this. This is a key part of what we do." And it was such a hard decision, but I had still a couple kids at home, two kids in college, two kids at home at that point, and they're athletes and I knew I'd miss their careers and going through because I would've had to have been gone to 80% of the time, so I started 40 Strategy. So that's how it was built. It was built out of a desire to still be present with my family, but more importantly where I thought I could give more focus in the US as opposed to a global basis, stay and four time zones as opposed to 24 time zones, if that makes sense. And then also to really focus on my core, which is more the design of the strategic plan, but also keeping them accountable to get it done. So I do work on both halves of the equation. And that's how I got to where I was. It's been a fun, incredible ride. But what I didn't tell you along that journey is I still coached 20- plus seasons of youth sports. I get to teach every day, right? And every time I'm on a podcast or writing the book that we just recently posted, we do this regularly with clients. So it's been really interesting how you think sometimes something you're going to contribute in the world in some way, and you still end up doing it in a completely different method, right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Carl Cox: And so I've been just grateful. I'm just very grateful to get to, frankly talk to you, talk to your audience, and share the good news that there's a better way of doing things.

Dane Groeneveld: It's a good story, and I love that better way of doing things. And it ties into your point, I thought everyone knew how to grow businesses like this, and then you realize they don't. And you wonder why. Are we not teaching people properly in school? Are we not running these businesses appropriately? Are big businesses getting too busy? There's probably a lot of different reasons, but it ties back into the world needs a lot more teachers and coaches.

Carl Cox: Indeed. It's interesting because within companies you fed off of each other, but it depends on your size and your organization. But you can't see things within the same way that somebody from the outside can see it, right? Everyone thinks their own baby's beautiful, right? And sometimes you need a separate human to just give a fresh look and a fresh perspective, and then you have these eye- opening experiences. I also know sometimes people hire us because they know they need to make change and they feel more confident with bringing somebody else to confirm what they already know.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. I think confirm's huge. I would imagine accountability too. Let's be honest. So many people will do the strategy offsite, come up with a bunch of great ideas, and they'll turn up at the same strategy offsite the next year and go, " Hey, we have this conversation last year?"

Carl Cox: Oh my gosh, it is so common. A matter of fact, it's one of the biggest reasons I'm in this business because$ 160 billion is spent each year on strategic planning consulting, and only 20% of it is executed.

Dane Groeneveld: That's low.

Carl Cox: By the way, and that's the data with the big firms. Forget about the small firms. I've seen data where it's much closer to 10%.

Dane Groeneveld: Wow.

Carl Cox: And PricewaterhouseCoopers, a matter of fact, my old alma mater, so to speak, of organizations I've been with, they said it's sometimes as bad as 2. 5%.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that doesn't surprise me.

Carl Cox: Right. And it's like, why? Well, you're right. I love whiteboards. That's a whiteboard I'm pointing at for those who are watching. I love whiteboards.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Carl Cox: Whiteboards is just your ideas. You have to get your ideas into the next stages and you have to work with your team to get buy- in. And then you actually have to have an execution plan because it's going to be change. Strategy at its core is figuring out how to get from A to B.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Carl Cox: And when you're focused on your customers, when you're focused on your supply chain, when you're focused on employee retention, you tend to forget about what key actions you have to make to actually grow your business.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. No, you're absolutely right. And going back to your point about getting stuff done, a better way to do things. We used the word" unlock" in our conversation before the show. That action of accepting change, of knowing you're going from A to B, it's important that you involve the people in the team to be part of the planning and then to be part of the execution. Because too often, I think the reason that you'll see 2% or 10% or 20% uptake of strategies is that a bunch of smart people went away into a room and came back and never involved the rest of the team.

Carl Cox: Yeah. Think about that, Dane, what you just described. There is there often, if any of you have been in the audience here, you know what I'm talking about. Whether you were in it or heard people going to it, they go to this lovely location with beautiful views. They maybe have a night or two away from the company. They have nice food, they have perhaps some nice beverages along the way as well. And there is a jealousy factor that they went in the first place. So that's number one. And then secondly, there is this, " Oh, here they come back again with these grandiose ideas and they're not even going to do it. And matter of fact, if I just keep on doing my work, they're going to forget about it because that's what they did last year."

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Carl Cox: There's data on this. Your greatest group of people who prevent strategic planning from actually executing is your middle management. 51% will not be on board. They're going to actively trying to stop you from making change. I mean, that's crazy, right? Because they're bitter and they haven't bought in and they haven't figured out the how. Our goal as key leaders is to figure out where we're going. The what and how. You need to have your team, if you have a team, involved. You need to get them involved with it because they're going to be doing the work. And yes, we can get them some guidance and some ideas and some concepts, but this is why it's important sometimes to bring in facilitator, is you want to bring out it to be their idea, right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Carl Cox: If it's their idea, then they're like, " Oh, that's a great idea. Tell me more. Tell me more how you could solve this." And the other unfortunate, arrogant thing that we often do as leaders is we think we know it all. And it's just like, " Really?" You rarely know everything. And honestly, those aren't very good clients of mine because you have to be open- minded. You have to realize that somebody who's doing the work every single day and you're asking them to change it, they have to be bought into that concept. So they're willing to make things faster, better, stronger, more customer service, whatever it is, right? Because they're probably frankly being incented to do their old work to begin with.

Dane Groeneveld: Absolutely. Yeah. And actually, it's funny you mention incentives and the middle management because a lot of our guests that come on, we're talking about how middle managers are squeezed. They're dealing with everything. All the latest buzz technologies that they're being asked to integrate into their business, all the new ideas for products or how we're going to treat customers differently, all of the employee challenges of, " Hey, work from home's hard. I've got a two- year- old running around," or whatever it might be. But they're just getting squeezed in the middle. And I think their incentives are, plain and simple, even without thinking about performance compensation, that their real incentive is, " How do I keep my job and my sanity?" So they're not going to be excited about rolling something new out unless it really improves their job security or their sanity or their time.

Carl Cox: That's right. It's so fascinating. You just nailed it there. I literally was just talking with a client yesterday and we were talking about potential incentives for a strategic improvement that we want to do with the client. Huge, massive opportunity here, and we did a good job of focusing on what they can control. But one of the leaders in the company that we're talking with, he said, " Carl, what they really care about is getting home earlier."

Dane Groeneveld: Yes.

Carl Cox: So it was such a great insight. It's like, " Oh, you're right." We could intrinsically motivate this anyways, which, as we know, the data shows it's far better if it's intrinsically motivated. But if we could have them come home and say... They can come home. They can, the person we're talking about here. They could come home at night and say, " Hey, good news honey," or whoever their significant other is, and they go, " Hey, yeah, good news. Not only do I get to come home earlier, but they're going to pay me more to actually accomplish it." That's when you've got the home run, where you intrinsic have motivation, and then you have the extrinsic motivation to create the change. The next thing you know, those things get done so much faster.

Dane Groeneveld: I like that tagline, Carl. " Get paid more to get home earlier." That would get a few more middle managers to turn up to the workshop.

Carl Cox: No, no, exactly. Well, it is a great time, but literally it was the reality of the situation.

Dane Groeneveld: It is.

Carl Cox: In this particular situation, they were batching all of the processes to the end of the week, right? And so they're doing everything end of the week because that's the way they do things. And by the way, successful, great- running company, but why not do this every day of the week for a smaller period of time so you don't have this bottleneck at the end of the period? Right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's a really good example.

Carl Cox: Simple opportunity, and literally it's the stress on the individual. They can't go home because they know they have to hit their weekly numbers. It's these type of things. And how cool, right? Once again, literally how cool. Get home earlier and get paid more.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Yep. I like it. So let's dig back into those couple of formative experiences. The first one you said came into a privately- held business as CFO, lots of Fortune 500 execs, and you guys three X the business, which is, for anyone that's been through that, that's breakneck pace of growth.

Carl Cox: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: How did you guys tackle strategy then? How did that inform where you've landed now, just from maybe some of those more anecdotal or case- study type stories that you could share?

Carl Cox: So at it's core, one of the things we're really good at is figuring out what our vision was. Who did we want to be? And the people side of this equation, I know you have a lot of people, once again, who are in the HR world that are listening to this, right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Carl Cox: I'm just going to touch on a small thing. Not only do we care about the vision. Once again, when we talk about vision I'm not talking about just a vision statement. I'm talking about what does the world look like and feel like as a result of the actions that you're doing?

Dane Groeneveld: I like that.

Carl Cox: Okay. It's the end result, right? This is what the world feels like, is like, does like. And then you could go further into an envisioned future, which is like, " Hey, and this is what our employees are going to be like, and this is what perhaps the planet impact's going to be like as a result." You can go into deep stuff, which is really meaningful. " This is what our buildings are going to look like in the future." So people start working to it subconsciously because they've already have this vision. So that's the beauty behind that. The next part of this is our being side, the core values. And... Oh, wow. One of my worst experiences was at a publicly- traded company. One day we get this plaque. I was a controller, I think, at the time, of this publicly- traded company. I get this plaque and it was, " We are these things. We are these six things. We have integrity, we work hard, da, da, da." And I laughed out loud when I received it, Dane. And it wasn't because they weren't good human beings doing it, it just was not even consistent with who we were.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Carl Cox: Okay. So core values, as you know who are listening, it is who you are. Your culture is who you are. It's your actions. It's what you're supporting on a regular basis. It's breaking the underwritten rules, right? That's your culture. So you have to actually document that, support it, the behaviors. So those two things we talked about, that's all about the beginning. And so company I was with that I said, we did a great job at that. Reinforcing not only who we wanted to be, but regularly, consistently rewarding from small to big things. We would have core value awards. We had an award on a consistent basis. What are we doing saying that, " Yeah, this action and behavior is consistent with who we want to be like?" So once you get the people side, because Drucker says culture eats strategy for lunch or breakfast. It's the core thing of, " We know we have to..." So that's important. You got to ideally begin with that, but then you got to figure out where you're going. And in our" Where we're going" thought, we had this desire of, at that point, we wanted to be a $50 million company. So that was our big driving, and part of this was the impact we were going to have. We worked in education, we had technology equipment to help out children and students. And so we're like, " We want to make sure that as many teachers had this that benefit the teachers and kids in the classroom." So we had a real passion around this. So we literally even created metrics of, " Hey, how many students are benefiting as a result of our..." So there was this stretch. So yes, we wanted to grow to a certain size, but we were measuring it in terms of the impact of the kids and the students.

Dane Groeneveld: Nice.

Carl Cox: So then we figured out that was kind of the key where, and then the next key thing was, well, how? Okay, how are we going to get there? And that how can of course be a million different stories. We happen to find out that in our particular case, once again, it can be different in so many things, but we found out one of our hows was we needed a direct Salesforce. We had an indirect reseller channel thing that didn't have Mindshare for our product.

Dane Groeneveld: Got it.

Carl Cox: And so we're like, " Oh, what if we did this more direct and actually they were our employees rather than an independent employee or a third party that was doing something?" And then once we found our magic thing, it was just reinforcing that crazy. We had another big concept of, " We need great products," so we changed some of our product design. We had a very complex wiry bunch... We developed a product that you didn't need wires, you just need a plugin.

Dane Groeneveld: Got it.

Carl Cox: So there was a combination. It wasn't just one thing. This is, I think, the thing you have to be careful about. I think people know this. There's the overused saying, " There's no silver bullet." You have to find key strategies and then going beyond this, we would regularly follow up and track it. So once we went live, we had quarterly board reports where there was a accountability to a very deep level board. Once again, the high- powered individuals, even though we're a relatively small company, where you did not want to show up to that meeting, not having your stuff done because it would've been very embarrassing. And so we got stuff done. We wanted to make sure we showed up to those meetings with effectiveness and accountability, and then we, of course, and kind of finishing, we rewarded the success, but we also learned for what didn't work. We weren't perfect with everything that we did because it's audacious to believe and know that every action that you designed on a whiteboard is actually going to come true. Who knows? Would've predicted COVID to play out? People didn't. Nobody would've predicted the supply chain mayhem that happened right afterwards. Nobody would've predicted working from home scenarios. But that doesn't mean you don't stop where you're going. You just have to adapt your tactics to overcome... If you view a river and then all of a sudden puts a rock in it, what does the water should do? It should go right around it. So that should be our same mentality. We need to learn to maneuver around those obstacles that are put in place on a consistent basis.

Dane Groeneveld: I like those phases. The who are we, the building the culture, behaving in a certain way, the where are we going, setting some targets, how do we get there, and the measurement that reinforces it. And I think that there's something about that measurement that shouts out to me, " Hey, if we're measuring ourselves, if we're holding ourselves accountability, if we have a scoreboard like a sports team has, then we're going to accelerate that learning because we're not all off doing disparate things and hoping that they're working. We're really checking in on a much more regular basis."

Carl Cox: And it's important to of what metrics we're tracking. So most organizations focus on the end number. We're going to be a certain level of sales or a certain level of profitability or an NPS score. Right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Carl Cox: Okay. That's great. And I mean it. Of course. I'm a bean counter by trade. Of course we need to make money because if we don't make money, we can't continue having a business. And by the way, this applies whether you're a not- for- profit or for- profit. I mean, you still have to generate positive cash flow or at least neutral otherwise you cannot continue your mission. So let's just get that out of the way just for a minute. So once you've figured that out, what you really have to do is change what type of metrics you're looking at. Those are lagging, what I mentioned. What really matters is that metrics you can control. So let's talk about it for a minute. People will say, " What are you talking about? I control revenue." Well, I disagree because you are not pressing the button to sign a sales order or to put a credit card. No matter all the actions that you try to get them to do it, at the end of the day, it requires an emotional decision by a customer to buy your product or service. So that's why it's a lagging indicator. What we need to be tracking is what leading actions we're doing to get people to create that action to buy. So this is, for example, a demo call. Typically, if we know that people need to see our product to be able to buy the product, then one of our key leaning hitters is, " How many demos did we do each week?" And then from there, you can have a whole series of tactics to support, what type of demos, who's doing the demos, what type of quality around it is creating the greatest conversion to the next step in the sales process. One of my favorite experiences, interestingly enough, was actually with a chartered school. And I asked them, " So what's your most important indicator?" And this was chartered school, and so they actually were like, " Number of students because if we don't have students, we actually can't be a chartered school." And so I was like, " Okay, interesting. So that's your most important indicator." So we started talking about it. They were like, "So how do you know you're getting towards there?" And they were like, " Well, we track our number of students." And I kept saying, " No, that's just like tracking revenue again." And then somebody said, " Well, we track applications." And I said, " Oh, that's interesting." I said, " Do you control the applications?" And they're like, " No, we don't." I said, "Okay, okay, that's closer." And then finally the superintendent got all excited. He said, " Oh, it's campus visits." Campus visits, that experience. And he started going on this path. He said, " Whenever there's a prospective student, they'd come in and I'd see him come in because we always had a certain person, and they'd come walk them through and they walk through the halls and perhaps they'd watch some classrooms, and they'd see our buildings and they'd see our students, and they would see our teachers. And then at the end, I'd get to shake their hand. And when I looked in their eyes, I knew whether or not we were going to have that student." So then I asked him the important question. I said, " Are you tracking that?" What do you think he said?

Dane Groeneveld: No.

Carl Cox: No. No, absolutely not. So it's so fascinating that there's the most important metric that was driving prospective students to come to be in their school, they weren't tracking it. And Dane, I can't tell you how many organizations I've been to that their most important metric is not being tracked because it's not in their ERP, it's not in their CRM, it's not in their core stuff, because the old guys like me, the accountants, are driving what they have to do or driving towards the end result. And once again, we need to focus on leading here. So the moral of the story is most strategic plans are 80% lagging indicators. You need to flip the script. You want 80% of your indicators to be leading, not lagging. And then we can have far better control on the outcomes.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I like that a lot. And what's interesting in both of those stories, your business that you grew and the charter school, is that the leaders are playing a very active role in the exploration measurement. They're not just setting a strategy and saying, " Good luck, guys." That head teacher of the charter school is actually shaking hands.

Carl Cox: That's right.

Dane Groeneveld: So I'm getting the sense, if I'm correct, that the type of strategy you like to do is where the leaders are actually part of the getting stuff done. The bias for action.

Carl Cox: Well just talk about great companies, right? Great companies where the leaders walk the talk. The greatest leaders I ever met, Good to Great, which you can't see in our current screen, it's in my background, what did all of them have consistently? They were all servant- based leaders. The company was before themselves. And once again, there's a lot of great companies, honestly, that don't have strategic plans, but they're successful generally because they have a great leader that walks the walk on a consistent basis. And they've learned to realize what are the most important things they've realized that it matters to walk through the company and to ask people what's happening and going on, and to actually then go forward and make some changes with it. They've learned that it's important to talk with customers and go out to see them, not just rely upon their sales staff or their marketing teams to figure out what a customer wants. They genuinely care about the health of the company. They generally care about the people, and things get done. It works better when it's documented. It works better when we track it. That's the only thing those leaders sometimes lose out on is that instead of doing it at the normal pace, you could do it three times the pace.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, that's a great message. I mean, a past coach of mine said, " What does a leader do?" And he was like, " Well, a leader has followers, which allows a leader to get things done." And there's a quote that I've seen on LinkedIn more recently, which is actually, " Leader need to stop creating followers. They need to be creating other leaders." And that actually ties to what you just shared, which is if I codify the actions that we're taking and how we're measuring their success and the learning that comes with that, then I'm inviting other members of my organization, regardless of their job title or hierarchy, to be leaders in this growth effort, in this strategic change initiative. And that gives you the three X, the exponential lift.

Carl Cox: Yeah, it's so fun when we, once again, focus on the right things. We use seven principles in our process, and those principles are intended to accelerate what we normally don't do well. And Dane, I think it's important to say that I don't know about you, but do you know anybody who has a strategic planning degree?

Dane Groeneveld: Nope.

Carl Cox: No.

Dane Groeneveld: Never even heard of one.

Carl Cox: A few of them exist in England, a few of them overseas. It's not common here in the United States. And if you're lucky, you had a course in an MBA. If you had business school, perhaps you did, maybe as a small part of the course. And what's shameful is, and I don't mean this in any too derogatory way, but when somebody says, " Oh, I do a strategic plan once a year, so I'm an expert at it," really? One of the reasons we're called 40 Strategy is because most organizations from an individual basis leader spends 2% of their time on strategy, which is about equivalent to 40 hours per year. That's why we're called 40 Strategy. And the concept that we have is, " Hey, why don't you consider working with somebody who does this every day? No different that you would hire an expert for sales and you hire an expert for engineering, and you hire expert for product design-

Dane Groeneveld: And tax planning.

Carl Cox: Or tax planning.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Carl Cox: This is its own thing, and there's a reason why we're so bad at it. It's a reason why those numbers we talked about earlier, that 10% of organizations, only 10% get two- thirds of their objectives done. Well, it's because they have a rigorous process of doing the key principles to make sure they get done. And so that's what we do. That's what we love to help people out with. And by the way, I'm not the only human that does this, of course. But the reality is there's a lot of people who do one half, and there's a lot of people who do the other half, but they don't do both halves. And that's pretty rare. It's rare to have both sides. The data is actually clear on that too. So that's what we love. We have this passion for designing a great, we have a passion for getting done well. And on our book, Dane, that we came out with is... Have you ever read The Goal long time ago?

Dane Groeneveld: I haven't. No.

Carl Cox: Okay. So that's a really ancient book. It's like in the'80s. E- Myth is another book. A lot more people have heard of that. But it's written in a similar vein. It's a story. It's a story. It's a fable, if you may, of an entrepreneur who is stuck post- COVID like a lot of businesses are right now. And they're stuck with too much supply chain. Supply chain issues to overcome. They have too much inventory. They have rising interest rates in their business. They have a workforce that they don't know how to transition from remote to in person. A lot of major changes that have happened that accelerated things by 10 to 20 years, and it all happened in three. And now you have generative AI. I mean, it just completely changed the game again. And basically, it's a story of them doing what they're traditionally doing, and this consultant along the way is giving them insights. So what's fun about the book is they're going to experience their own story through it, and hopefully they're going to be on the inside of, "Oh yeah, you're right. This is how I have been doing it, and perhaps there is a better way." But I always want it to be their idea, not my idea. Because if it's their idea, they're more likely to do it. Right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, absolutely. It's like the middle managers. You said it earlier, the leadership's going to set where we're going, but the middle managers have to understand what and how and take it that way.

Carl Cox: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: And I love the title of the book, Lost At CEO, because I don't think there are many CEOs that can, in their honest moments, say that they're not lost with the amount of change that we've come through in the last few years and all the different pathways that are open to us now. Whether business is going great or it's not, we're all living in this opportunity- rich environment all of a sudden. There's so many different things you could try with tech, with social, internally, supply chain. And that's great that the opportunity's there, but it's also confusing.

Carl Cox: Well Dane, there's also no classes on how to be a CEO. Right?

Dane Groeneveld: True.

Carl Cox: And we get there typically because of so many different reasons. We created a great product, we proved to be a great manager, we found a way. We were great at sales, and we finally got to this leadership position. And one of the key things, a big key moment in my own management experience was when I was younger and had less experience and less authority, I would say a joke, and a couple people might laugh a little bit. When I became a CEO, people would laugh out loud. They would roll on the floor laughing. Same joke. See where I'm going here? Right?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah.

Carl Cox: Okay. Is that when you're at the top, people don't tell you the truth anymore. They are not authentic with you. And CEOs know that, and they're afraid to tell the truth because they know they can't say everything to their team. And they also are aware that they're not being told the truth because they've had that same experience. They've had that laugh joke experience. They've had that experience where all of a sudden they're saying something to them, but they find out somebody's saying something different. And by the way, I work with extraordinarily honest and high- integrity people, but they still recognize that reality. And so part of this is acknowledgement of just that truth, where unless you have a good guide, unless you have a good set around there, you can't talk about that. You can't even talk about it with your number two, because even your number two is at risk of not being fully aware or not being aware of perhaps the next strategic move you're thinking about doing, and you're concerned about their reaction of what they're going to do. So that's why I hire coaches and consultants on a consistent basis because why? It's like, I want to get there faster and I recognize I have my own gaps even though I've literally have managed every functional department and company. I'm not an expert in many of them still. And I have my blind spots and I want to do too many things. And so I ask for the same things. I need help with others to help me to see through my own... Once again, all of our babies are cute when they're our own babies.

Dane Groeneveld: That's right. That's exactly right. It's interesting, that concept you're touching on there too, Carl, about transparency. Ray Dalio came out with the whole radical transparency movement, which can actually be toxic too because there's this whole movement right now about empathy and being kind. So if you're just giving everyone both barrels of transparency, you're not really being empathetic, kind. You're going to confuse people. It's going to create more problems than it's not. So I think it's more about, to your point, bringing in the right strategic planning consultants, building the right mechanisms to meet with your team, gather feedback, measure success. I think it's about having an openness to share what's important to bring them along. And I think that goes both ways. It kind of talks to psychological safety. A team needs to share upwards in the business what's important about something that they've experienced with a customer, because that's going to need to percolate and change maybe the way that we're addressing customer success, sales, product delivery, and a leadership team needs to be honest in coming down around those things that are going to impact how an individual might be working with supply chain or some other key element of the business.

Carl Cox: Yeah, you nailed it there. There's so many different avenues, metrics, challenges that we're facing, and having somebody to bounce the ideas off of, to help give us confidence. And then they also become the trusted partner to help get that key strategic initiative or the next three to five year strategic plan going, to get it launched, get the additional parts going. So it works. It's interestingly enough, one of my steps, Dane, it's a silly step. It's" Start." It's literally" Start," and-

Dane Groeneveld: Just do something.

Carl Cox: Well, there's an absolute amount of fear. There's a joke in the consulting firm that nobody's gotten fired hiring McKinsey, right? But the problem is even McKinsey, only 20% of their stuff gets done.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, yeah.

Carl Cox: Okay. So yeah, you didn't get fired, but still nothing happened. And so we put" Start" in there because it's interesting. Often people will come up with the end goal, but they won't say when you need to start by.

Dane Groeneveld: I hear you. Yeah.

Carl Cox: And there's fear around that. There's always fear and trepidation. When you go in this journey and voyage, and that's probably why use the sea analogies and metaphors regularly, It's kind of scary. You are literally going into the unknown when you get to a new location. And it's interestingly enough why we also use the term" Destination" instead of" Goals." I use the goals commonly because people understand goals. But frankly, when I say the term" Goal," you think New Year's resolutions and you think failure. But when you get on an airplane or a ship and you think about going to somewhere, that's the destination. So I like to change people's mindsets of, " Hey, we're going to somewhere new. We're getting on this ship. We're getting on this boat to go to a new destination, and we need all of our concepts and all of our ideas and all of our people on board with this, because if we don't, we're not going to arrive together. We're going to sink along the way." And so that's a key part, is we want to start, focus on the leading hitter in the journey because we know we're getting closer to there, and you're going to eventually see that bird fly from the new shore. I mean, eventually you're going to know you're getting closer and closer and closer, and then you can have that excitement when you've reached your new destination. But that scary part is that start. It's really fascinating. We did a study, this was an internal study we did with clients, and when we do speaking engagements... And let's see if I get this right. I think it was 80% of the organizations didn't start on time.

Dane Groeneveld: Oh, yeah. I actually think emails a big reason for that too, because once upon a time you'd have a meeting, you'd have to decide on something that day. Now it's like, " Well, I'm going to send you a link and then you need to look at this," and no one takes accountability for what is it that we're going to start, and there's this huge procrastination cycle.

Carl Cox: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Drop off an email and do your next thing as opposed to, " Let's actually focus and get it done."

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. So when you think about that work, and you talked about working with the product, I think it was Cascade that helped put some of this into a system. How do you perceive OKRs and the rather wide adoption of OKRs out there, particularly in the tech market, as far as goals or destination- setting? How do you see that play out?

Carl Cox: Oh, OKRs are fantastic and Cascade can use any type of terminology. And so we were platform- agnostic. Whether using a balance scorecard, OKRs, it didn't matter. Cascade for us was just a central repository. What was more important about Cascade was if you were traditionally doing it on Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, those-

Dane Groeneveld: Just put it somewhere.

Carl Cox: Yeah. Those become very cumbersome and you can't update, and it's not telling you you're behind. You want a system that's telling you you're behind and then giving you really easy reports so you don't have to go to a PowerPoint presentation, and it can integrate with all your other systems as updating. So that was the value of Cascade. We saved 70 to 80% of our time when we moved to the system because we were tracking on six different systems. And so that was the value, if that makes sense, from the system perspective. But OKRs are fantastic. I think the one observation I see in OKRs is they're typically shortsighted.

Dane Groeneveld: Right. Tell me more.

Carl Cox: Well, what I mean by that is often people are like, " Hey, we're focused on our OKRs for this quarter," and quarter, quarter, and then they're heads down, quarter, quarter, quarter. And then it's like" We don't get this quarter," and they're really good at it. And by the way, OKRs, for history, they've been around since the'50s with Intel. This is not new information. Measure What Matters, what John Doerr talks about, who he's worked with, this is not new. This has been around a long, long time. It's just been repackaged to the name.

Dane Groeneveld: Got it.

Carl Cox: Okay. OKRs are fantastic, but I found one of the biggest challenges is the short- term thinking on it. And so when working, I like to think about once again, that three to five year time period and having stretch goals for those three to five year time periods, knowing we're not necessarily going to hit every single metric, but it forces us to change our habits to get to the end result. So that's my general impression of the only... I don't want to call only, but one of the shortcomings of... And it also sometimes forget about the people side and the mission, the vision.

Dane Groeneveld: Yes. Could be siloed.

Carl Cox: Oh my gosh, yeah. A company I'm working with, they don't use OKRs, but it's a similar concept. The concept is this. They would do all these micro goal- oriented sessions, which is all OKR is, right? Objective and key result once again, for those who don't know, and they come up with their objective, do the key result, but they were so not coordinated with the overall strategy that it's just noise and it's just busy work. And even if they have a micro event, if they're not solving a bottleneck in the company, they're literally wasting time.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Well, I think that's a risk for a lot of teams is they always say perfection's the ene enemy of improvement. You can easily get stuck fixing a small problem without thinking, " Well, that's a problem for the three of us who are using that tool, but how much is it impacting my customers, my suppliers, other functions I work with?" Which is cool. So as far as a view for the future, really unlocking teams, allowing leaders to take their teams to a new place, I like your three to five year window because that actually creates a bit of clarity on one hand and psychological safety, " Hey, there's a lot we need to do in the next three to five years. We're inviting you to be a part of it." And on the other hand, it's not creating this onerous, busy schedule of, " You got to knock this and this and this down," and if you haven't, it's a disappointment. So it creates room for innovation for improvement, which I really like. What do you see as roll forward? You said it yourself. What's the impact of your work? So 40 Strategy, five, 10 years time, a bunch of customers have worked with you. How do those teams look different? Are they going home earlier and getting paid more?

Carl Cox: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're having crazy results. It's been fun to package together. I've been with seven different companies, within seven different companies, I've tripled in size. And then once again, I want to be careful being crazy well- read, but I've read a few more books on the average bear and specifically research on leadership and strategy and really focused in on that. And so we use research combined with practical experience to get this to actually work. And one of the things I don't pretend is to know what another company's doing.

Dane Groeneveld: Right.

Carl Cox: So I don't come in as" The expert" to come in from what they do in their business. I come in with an extraordinarily open mind with every single client and go, " Okay, let me understand what you're doing today and let's talk about where you want to go in the future." And yeah, we have crazy results. We have double, triple of income. We have double, triple in size of top line, complete transformations and management teams in a positive way. It's really exciting to see the results we've had. Our long term goal is to positively impact a million people in 10,000 organizations.

Dane Groeneveld: Love it.

Carl Cox: So that's our long- term BHAG. We also give the first 10% of our net revenues to charity with a goal of giving at least$ 1 million to charity. We're well on our way of doing that, and those are just our beginning numbers. And so that's what gets me out of bed each day is to give.

Dane Groeneveld: I love that.

Carl Cox: And when we give and when people adopt our principles and they buy into the process, they have awesome results. And I want to be careful of this statement. If they go through both parts, the design and the execution, we haven't not had a three X return on their investment in the time. So if I don't get a three X return where they're spent on me, just being frank about it, or our team. If they're not getting a three X return on that, we failed. We've completely failed.

Dane Groeneveld: Not many people can promise that kind of ROI.

Carl Cox: No, no. But why I'm so confident is this is because we use all the strategic concepts we talked about, we use lean principles in this. I have a CFO background. We combine strategy and numbers with best practices and operational management and wise leadership development. It's not just a one- trick pony. And then when I don't know what I'm doing, Dane, and that's a lot of things. Once again, I'm not the expert in the people business. We have a broad array of experts we can bring in. So we have a wide community and we're part of multiple different organizations we connections with. And if we need a real expert who knows how to develop a sales team or a CSR team, or they need outsourced recruiting, whatever it might be, we call them up and, " Hey, our client has a problem. Come on in. Talk to them, and let's accelerate that tactic on that strategy." Because once again, I only have so much time and our team only have so much time to help with the bigger picture behind it.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, no, I love that, Carl, and I like what I'm hearing, which is it's not just come in and roll out some education or some coaching. It's be part of the team. Extend the team through that community that you're a part of, which is great and sustainable. And those metrics, a million in 10, 000 organizations. That's real. That's impact. So thanks for all the work that you are doing. I'm definitely looking forward to getting a copy of the book.

Carl Cox: Thank you.

Dane Groeneveld: And if any of our listeners want to find you, the podcast, the book, how do they best connect?

Carl Cox: Yeah. So I'm on three different metrics. So number one, the easiest way is just go to our website, 40strategy. com. You'll see a link to Lost At CEO there. We just already have become bestseller. The book just launched. We were in three different categories, we were number one. It was super exciting. Some of these books behind me, we were number one in the category. It was crazy.

Dane Groeneveld: That's unreal.

Carl Cox: So I'm pinching myself right now and in a very sincere way. Our team who put this all together did such an amazing job, so it's very exciting. But yeah, you can find Lost At CEO just by going to Amazon and ordering the book. We have right now a short period of time... Well, I won't go through the short period of time thing, but key thing you can find on there. And then we're on the Measure Success podcast, so all the major platforms you could find us. You could also, once again, go to 40strategy. com. We're also pretty active on LinkedIn, so if you don't want to go to our website, go to Carl J. Cox, and we do a lot of stuff we are printing out regularly about what's taking place. So yeah, it's very exciting. Thanks for the opportunity to share those ways of getting connected with our team.

Dane Groeneveld: You bet. Well, thanks for your time today, Carl, and we'll talk soon.

Carl Cox: Thank you so much, Dane.

Dane Groeneveld: Thanks.