Latest / The Action Catalyst / Survive, Reset, Thrive, with Dr. Rebecca Homkes (Strategy, Growth, Business, Leadership)

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Survive, Reset, Thrive, with Dr. Rebecca Homkes (Strategy, Growth, Business, Leadership) · The Action Catalyst

• 0:00
  Stephanie Maas: How are you?
• 0:34
  Dr Rebecca Homkes: Excellent!
• 0:35
  Stephanie Maas: Let's start with your book, Survive, Reset and
• 0:39
  Thrive.
• 0:40
  Dr Rebecca Homkes: Yeah, I'd love to thanks so much for
• 0:41
  asking. So Survive, Reset, Thrive was written in starting
• 0:46
  in the spring of 2020 but it was based on frameworks and guidance
• 0:51
  that I've been using for for a decade before that, you know,
• 0:53
  most of the book is things that I've been doing with companies
• 0:55
  who are looking to go on a growth journey, and what
• 0:58
  happened in that period of time, which was not dissimilar to
• 1:00
  happened in Brexit in 2016 here in the UK, or in 2022 is that
• 1:06
  entrepreneur leaders were calling me and saying the same
• 1:08
  thing they were saying. Why me? Why now we had this growth
• 1:12
  pathway. Things were working, and now we've got this crisis
• 1:15
  right. And I found myself saying the same things over and over
• 1:19
  again, like, yes, we're facing kind of a change situation, so
• 1:22
  we have to survive and stabilize. Then we need to
• 1:25
  reset, because the strategy we had before needs to update for
• 1:28
  the changing time, and then you can go back to being a Thrive
• 1:30
  company, but we've got to go through this loop, and after
• 1:33
  repeating the same guidance for weeks at a time, you know, I
• 1:36
  just finally wrote it down in an email. It was sent out on a
• 1:39
  Saturday night. I got, you know, 100% response rate on the Sunday
• 1:42
  saying, this is the most useful thing I've read. I'm going to
• 1:44
  send it to every CEO I know. And that article kind of became a
• 1:48
  workshop. The workshop became a program, and then about a year
• 1:50
  and a half, two years later, it became the book.
• 1:52
  Stephanie Maas: Super cool. So one of the things you just
• 1:54
  mentioned that I want to pull on this string a little bit is you
• 1:57
  mentioned it's a loop. Walk me through that, because I think
• 1:59
  when most folks hear this, it's more of a checklist. Okay, we
• 2:04
  survived that check. Now we've reset check throughout, but you
• 2:07
  mentioned the word loop, so walk me through that.
• 2:10
  Dr Rebecca Homkes: Absolutely. You know, everything in growth
• 2:12
  is a loop, not a line. And that sounds really simple to say, but
• 2:17
  we really love checklists as human beings and send us
• 2:20
  managers and leaders of companies we love to be done
• 2:23
  with things right when you finally check something off, you
• 2:25
  know, develop strategy done, communicate strategy done,
• 2:28
  execute priority done. And that's not how a changing world
• 2:32
  that we're facing and executing our strategies are in. It's
• 2:35
  constantly going to be moving and evolving. So we need to move
• 2:38
  from this checklist mindset of how we approach strategy and
• 2:41
  growth into this loop mindset. And there's a lot of power in
• 2:45
  doing that, right? So survivors that thrive is a loop, and what
• 2:48
  happens, let's make it more practical, is you can be in
• 2:51
  Thrive mode, and everything can be going great, and there can be
• 2:54
  a shock to the system that sends you back to survive. These can
• 2:57
  be external shocks. You know? You can have a surprise interest
• 3:00
  rate a surprise election, you could have a big macro event
• 3:03
  like war or COVID, but you could also have an investor pull out
• 3:07
  or lose a major customer, and when that happens, you've got to
• 3:10
  go back into survive mode. And we don't want to do that. We
• 3:13
  feel once we've gone through the steps to thrive, we'll stay
• 3:15
  there. But there's real humility in losing the ego and saying
• 3:18
  it's time to survive. Then they can go back to reset again. Then
• 3:22
  they can go back to thrive. So we need to embrace this loop
• 3:24
  mentality be able to grow through these different changes
• 3:27
  that we're facing as we're trying to lead our companies
• 3:29
  through this uncertainty.
• 3:31
  Stephanie Maas: So let's start with, you know when, and I
• 3:33
  really love how you said you have to, you know, embrace the
• 3:35
  humility to recognize, hey, we're in survival. How do you
• 3:39
  know, other than you coming in saying, Hey, by the way, you
• 3:42
  know, or the profits tanking, what are some key
• 3:46
  characteristics that, you know, okay, we need to go back, or
• 3:50
  this is where we're at.
• 3:51
  Dr Rebecca Homkes: I think most of us intuitively know when our
• 3:53
  organizations are in that mode. And part of what I'm trying to
• 3:57
  do with survive, reset thrive, is give you permission to make
• 3:59
  that pause to say, hey, the survive mode is actually not
• 4:03
  only opposite of growth, it's part of growth, right? Going
• 4:06
  through survive and restabilizing is a critical part
• 4:09
  of the growth journey, not antithesis of it. And like
• 4:11
  giving you permission, I know that sounds overly simple,
• 4:13
  Stephanie, but that's a key part of it, right? Is you've got to
• 4:16
  take that pause, because most of us know we just don't want to
• 4:20
  admit it without kind of the reason for it. So what happens
• 4:23
  when some of your basics are compromised? And I call the
• 4:26
  basics the four C's or cash cost customers communication. You
• 4:30
  know when something starts impacting our cash flow? You
• 4:33
  know when our costs are growing faster than our revenue for a
• 4:36
  reason, outside of hyper growth or doing something like a land
• 4:39
  grab, when we've lost a customer, or seeing customer
• 4:43
  churn, or having issues with our customers, or communication
• 4:46
  becomes broken or spotty, or lots of friction, because kind
• 4:49
  of go through your four C's. And what I recommend organizations
• 4:52
  do is set the baseline, not the goals, but the baseline, like,
• 4:56
  where's the minimum any of these four C's should be at any point
• 4:59
  in time? And when those get triggered, that's the pause
• 5:02
  point to go into survive mode. And there's real power again in
• 5:06
  knowing when you're in it and admitting it. Now, I always feel
• 5:09
  like I'm badly paraphrasing Fight Club. You know, the first
• 5:12
  step is kind of admitting it, but the first step of being
• 5:14
  survive is admitting you're in survive, because now we can
• 5:16
  handle it right now, we can take all those proactive steps to
• 5:20
  stabilize and move again out of survive, because you don't want
• 5:23
  to be in survive longer than you have to. But, and there's a big
• 5:27
  but, this is a yes, but not a yes. And the longer you refuse
• 5:30
  to admit that you need to take that stabilize, you're actually
• 5:33
  losing a lot of things that you need across those four C's. So
• 5:36
  the simplest is set those baseline triggers for cash cost
• 5:39
  customers and communication, and when you start approaching them,
• 5:42
  then it's time to take the pause.
• 5:44
  Stephanie Maas: So when folks take the pause in your
• 5:47
  experience, where have you seen leaders just really handle this
• 5:52
  well, like, what have they done to handle this pause,
• 5:55
  recognition of survive, etc.
• 5:59
  Dr Rebecca Homkes: You know, I actually had this experience.
• 6:00
  And, you know, you can just feel proud of an entrepreneur when
• 6:04
  they're like, wow, like, you know, you can handle all these
• 6:06
  steps. Well, I had a company who, one of their major
• 6:11
  companies, you know, spun out a subsidiary. The subsidiary went
• 6:14
  bankrupt, so they were facing millions of, you know, euros not
• 6:18
  going to be paid to them at the end of the year. And when you're
• 6:20
  a small to medium sized enterprise, a couple of million
• 6:22
  not coming in does impact you, right? When you're not a major
• 6:25
  organization. So we're going into survive mode. You know, a
• 6:28
  lot of that cash cost customer Well, actually, three of our
• 6:30
  kind of triggers, if you will, have been broken, and they had a
• 6:33
  Strategy Workshop scheduled to reset the growth strategy for
• 6:36
  the next year. You know, the classic response, which is not
• 6:39
  the right one, by the way, is to cancel the workshop, you know,
• 6:42
  all hands on deck, focus on operational metrics. He still
• 6:45
  got his team together, and they repurpose that time to go
• 6:47
  through their survive metrics, you know, make actionable plans
• 6:50
  on what they need to do across all the four C's look at their
• 6:53
  top priority and say, Okay, what still goes like? What pauses,
• 6:56
  you know, what changes? And the team left the most energized I'd
• 7:00
  seen them, you know, in a couple of years when what should have
• 7:03
  been, you know, one of the worst times they've been in the past
• 7:05
  five years. But they use the time to say, we know what to do
• 7:08
  here. We've already got the time scheduled. We're going to go
• 7:11
  through, survive, we're going to be stabilized. And they gave
• 7:14
  themselves a deadline, you know, by the end of key one next year.
• 7:16
  We want to see progress on all of these. We're going to be back
• 7:19
  to growth mode at by the end of q2 and that's what we want
• 7:22
  people to do. The temptation, I want to repeat purposely. The
• 7:26
  temptation is to cancel everything related to strategy
• 7:29
  and just tell people to be heads down, execution mode. In survive
• 7:33
  mode. You are still in learning code. You want people heads up,
• 7:36
  listening, learning, getting these feedbacks, emails from the
• 7:39
  market, incorporating that in so we can move into reset as soon
• 7:42
  as possible.
• 7:44
  Stephanie Maas: Okay, so then we move into reset, and my mind
• 7:47
  immediately goes to, you know that that on your phone, when
• 7:50
  you can't get it to work, you go to the Hard Reset, but the trade
• 7:53
  off is you lose everything. I mean, it's like worst case
• 7:56
  scenario. You're starting all over. Walk me through what reset
• 8:00
  looks like from your perspective and your counsel.
• 8:03
  Dr Rebecca Homkes: You know that's funny, because hard
• 8:04
  resets do happen, but like all of us with our phones, man, you
• 8:08
  don't want them to right? But look, hard resets are, are not
• 8:12
  the normal reset. The normal reset. You turn the phone off,
• 8:14
  right? You gotta pause and wait a minute, which was probably
• 8:17
  good anyway, because you were getting frustrated, right? It
• 8:20
  turns back on, boom, you're ready to go again, right? So in
• 8:23
  a reset, you pause and with the team, you answer some critical
• 8:27
  questions that you need to answer for growth. And those
• 8:30
  questions are six, what's going on and how's it going to change,
• 8:33
  and what is success? So where are we going to play? How are we
• 8:36
  going to win? What could stop us? So what should we do? Go
• 8:39
  through those six questions, reset the situation. What are
• 8:42
  changing beliefs about the changing time? Reset their right
• 8:45
  to win. How are we really going to compete in that changing
• 8:48
  world? What's that mean for where to play choices define a
• 8:51
  new finish line or where you want to be at the end of the
• 8:53
  cycle, address the challenges and then figure out your top
• 8:56
  priorities. You know, a normal reset takes kind of a couple of
• 8:59
  months for any sort of mid size organization, a couple of weeks
• 9:03
  for a very small one could stretch longer for a big
• 9:05
  organization, though I'm never happy about it, but that's just
• 9:07
  what scheduling happens, kind of in these large organizations,
• 9:10
  and the majority of the time. Stephanie, that's what it is.
• 9:13
  You go through those six questions, you reset, you
• 9:15
  update, and there's power in doing that every three years,
• 9:19
  even if you don't feel the situation is fundamentally
• 9:21
  changed. Now, occasionally those hard resets do happen, and what
• 9:26
  happens is, as you start to go through those questions, you
• 9:29
  realize Everything's changed. All the fundamental assumptions
• 9:33
  you had that went into your previous growth strategies have
• 9:35
  now changed. Completely different situation. Your right
• 9:38
  to win is eroded, your where to play choices all need to update
• 9:42
  the finish lines you had are now completely outdated, are no
• 9:45
  longer relevant. And when that happens, you do need to declare
• 9:48
  a hard reset and to make it more practical. We're facing these.
• 9:51
  We're watching these in the market right now. We're watching
• 9:54
  Starbucks and Boeing and, you know, all of these companies,
• 9:58
  Nike, bur. Area going through hard resets right now, and
• 10:02
  that's what's happening. The board realized it wasn't
• 10:04
  working. CEO out, new CEO in all of these challenges of being
• 10:08
  revisited. Now this process take a couple of months to a year.
• 10:12
  But you know what hard resets can be? The most powerful thing
• 10:14
  that happened for an organization, we sometimes see
• 10:17
  the most dramatic growth journeys after hard reset
• 10:19
  happens.
• 10:20
  Stephanie Maas: Okay, so we've realized things have changed.
• 10:24
  We're refocused. Now it's time to thrive.
• 10:28
  Dr Rebecca Homkes: Well, first, I appreciate your patience of
• 10:30
  asking about survive and reset first, because most people want
• 10:33
  to jump straight to the Thrive. All I really want to do is talk
• 10:37
  about thriving. Can I just skip to that part? And I originally
• 10:40
  joked with the publisher. I wasn't joking, but they didn't
• 10:42
  take me seriously. You know, let's only send people the first
• 10:46
  eight chapters of the book. And you know, once they've read
• 10:48
  those, they can apply because you got to do the hard work of
• 10:51
  the survive and the reset first before you can get to thrive.
• 10:54
  Because I know my entrepreneurs, right, they jumped right to
• 10:56
  chapter 10 because that's the part that they cared about. But
• 10:59
  look, thrive is not a given. It has to be earned. And just
• 11:03
  because you've reset the strategy, what you also need to
• 11:06
  reset is your execution capability. Now, different
• 11:09
  strategies demand different things from the organization, in
• 11:12
  terms of our hardware, like our processes and wiring, our
• 11:15
  software, like our culture and behaviors, the top team that we
• 11:18
  need to lead, it our distributed leaders to really guide
• 11:21
  execution in this shared understanding. So this
• 11:24
  transition from the reset to thrive is actually the really
• 11:27
  difficult part, and more friction happens there than the
• 11:30
  transition from survive to reset, because we assume that
• 11:33
  that's the more simple pathway. But resetting a strategy means
• 11:36
  you need to reset your execution capability and capacity as well,
• 11:40
  and that could take some time, but you got to be super honest
• 11:43
  about what's working and what's not, be prepared to rebuild and
• 11:46
  reset, then you can become one of these Thrive organizations.
• 11:50
  And it's a simple recipe. Thrive organizations have three things,
• 11:53
  strong balance sheets, strategic insights, and they execute with
• 11:57
  agility and learning, right? You bring your strong balance sheet
• 12:00
  through from the survive phase, your strategic insights from the
• 12:03
  reset phase, and then you execute with agility and
• 12:06
  learning, because strategy is a living, breathing document, and
• 12:09
  we're going to learn and adjust and change as we go. And that's
• 12:13
  a key part of being thrive is again, I'm going to say one of
• 12:15
  the things you can say to me that really makes me mad is two
• 12:18
  things. I'll give you two things not to say to me. Thing one,
• 12:21
  just say, oh, Rebecca, we're in heads down execution mode. My
• 12:24
  first response is, well, get out of that, right? I want you in
• 12:26
  heads up learning mode, right? And this second is, if you ever
• 12:31
  send me a document labeled strategy, final, all caps, I
• 12:35
  have this new thing now. I don't even open it. I just reply back
• 12:37
  to the email and I say, No, it's not never final. We're going to
• 12:42
  keep updating and adjusting as we're going.
• 12:45
  Stephanie Maas: Very cool. Okay, let's talk about that for a
• 12:48
  second, this continuous learning. I think that that's a
• 12:52
  huge difference maker between leaders that really do thrive
• 12:58
  and ones that don't. But oftentimes there. I think a lot
• 13:02
  of folks fight this natural state of, hey, we're here. Let's
• 13:06
  not rock the boat and just stay here. And they don't come out
• 13:09
  and say, I'm done learning, but their actions show that. So walk
• 13:12
  me through this idea and concept about keeping learning a
• 13:16
  critical part of this process.
• 13:18
  Dr Rebecca Homkes: Yeah, thank you for asking, Stephanie. It is
• 13:20
  not only a critical part. It is the most critical part is that
• 13:24
  in now close to 15 years of working with high growth and
• 13:27
  high performance organizations, I will say quite simply, it is
• 13:30
  the number one differentiator. Organizations that learn faster
• 13:34
  are organizations that grow faster. It is the ultimate
• 13:37
  differentiator, and frankly, differentiator because it's
• 13:40
  hard. A lot of us pride ourselves on being learning
• 13:43
  organizations, because we do monthly webinars, or we have
• 13:47
  town halls, or we have share sessions, or we have book clubs,
• 13:49
  or we go to business schools, like all really cool things like
• 13:52
  keep doing them, but that's being a teaching organization,
• 13:55
  not a learning organization, right? Being a learning
• 13:57
  organization is what you alluded to, saying. We don't have all of
• 14:00
  the answers yet. So here's the questions we need to ask, using
• 14:04
  your customers as learning partners, you know, not just
• 14:06
  transactional vehicles, encouraging kind of constant
• 14:10
  experimentation and testing and learning while executing, never
• 14:14
  assuming that every variable and every metric we have in the plan
• 14:17
  is the perfect one, right? Because things are going to
• 14:19
  change as we go. And this is a different culture. Now, being a
• 14:23
  learning organization doesn't mean that we're changing things
• 14:26
  all the time, right? Learning is actually very, you know,
• 14:28
  methodical, like engineers can do this learning velocity too.
• 14:31
  In fact, they're quite good at it, right? You know, you can
• 14:33
  build all of these things forward, but you've got to kind
• 14:36
  of, again, break the notion that once something is in a plan, the
• 14:40
  plan must be executed. I know it sounds silly, but words matter.
• 14:44
  I've said, let's stop calling them strategic plans. There's
• 14:47
  something about the word plan, right? It just frames our brain.
• 14:50
  Everything in this must get done, and I want it framed as
• 14:54
  I'm going to keep learning as I'm going this strategy is just
• 14:57
  my best hypothesis of where growth is. Going to come from
• 15:00
  over the next three years. Like any hypothesis, I got a lot of
• 15:03
  it right and probably some of it wrong. So I'm going to keep
• 15:05
  learning and adjusting as I go.
• 15:07
  Stephanie Maas: Okay, so now there are strategic hypotheses.
• 15:10
  Dr Rebecca Homkes: Yes, I'm just dropping the plan word again.
• 15:13
  Frames matter, right? And as soon as our brains are framed
• 15:15
  that everything must get done, I get heads down, and I want
• 15:18
  people heads up, learning and moving as we go.
• 15:21
  Stephanie Maas: Okay, I just have to go back and highlight
• 15:23
  two things that you said, because I think they're so
• 15:25
  critical and we just don't hear them. One is, you define the
• 15:29
  difference between learning and teaching. I've heard it 101
• 15:32
  times. People say, hey, we do all these things, but the way
• 15:36
  that you turn that, nope, that's when you're teaching. But then
• 15:39
  going back to ask questions. I think that's the second thing.
• 15:42
  And so many times when we get out of a learning mode is when
• 15:46
  we stop asking questions. And to your point, we don't have to be
• 15:49
  in a constant change mode, but that's real feedback. That's how
• 15:53
  we know are we going to get to where we think we want to go, or
• 15:57
  do we need to change our strategy? Because where we
• 15:59
  thought we were going isn't really where our demand is, and
• 16:02
  learning is asking questions, and continuous learning is not
• 16:06
  teaching. Talk to me about a must win battle.
• 16:11
  Dr Rebecca Homkes: Well, first, I'm agnostic to the language
• 16:13
  that you pick as an organization, right? So my only
• 16:17
  thing is whatever term you use for your top strategic
• 16:22
  priorities. That term must have integrity, so you can't use it
• 16:25
  for anything else. So if you're going to have five strategic
• 16:28
  priorities, great. The word priority is now protected. It
• 16:30
  can only refer to those five things, goals. Rocks again. You
• 16:34
  do you right? I said not to recently at a summit, you know,
• 16:38
  some of the President was saying, Well, you know, the CEO
• 16:40
  doesn't like the term must win battles. Can we call them so and
• 16:43
  so? And I said, Look, call them drafts. As long as you execute.
• 16:46
  It's like pick one word, right? That's all I care about. So I
• 16:50
  started using the term must win battle. I've got some colleagues
• 16:52
  at IMD who use it as well, because we have a massive
• 16:55
  language inside organizations. Now you go to any company from
• 16:59
  10 employees to 100,000 they have goals, priorities, aims,
• 17:03
  rocks, OKRs, KPIs, targets. I could keep going and going,
• 17:07
  right? And this isn't small organizations. That happens. So
• 17:11
  put yourself as an employee. If I've got all of these lists of
• 17:14
  things, which in the English dictionary all translate to most
• 17:16
  important thing, what am I working on every day? Right? And
• 17:20
  you need something that cuts about the noise and says, No,
• 17:22
  these are the must wins. And I love the language of must win
• 17:26
  battle, not nice to have battle, not business as usual battle,
• 17:29
  but these are must wins for growth. And there's really
• 17:33
  power. The absolute clarity of this is what we must do to get
• 17:37
  to that finish line you want, the midterm you want them
• 17:40
  clearly focused on value creation, and you want them to
• 17:44
  cut across the organization. A great test for Do I have the
• 17:49
  right list of must win battles is that I just rename my
• 17:52
  departments. By that, I mean if you have a marketing one, a
• 17:57
  sales one, a product one, and a people one, you don't have a
• 18:01
  strategy. You've just renamed your departments, right? A great
• 18:05
  must win battle cuts across the organization, because that's how
• 18:08
  we truly create value. We pull from the best and do this
• 18:11
  integrated approach to what it takes to drive growth. And
• 18:14
  that's what you're looking for in a must win again midterm, two
• 18:17
  to three years, focus on value creation, market oriented cuts
• 18:21
  across the organization to bring out the best of what you have.
• 18:25
  Stephanie Maas: Give me, if you can, don't you to violate any
• 18:28
  confidences. But can you help us point to a real life example of
• 18:32
  a company, an organization that you've seen go through this loop
• 18:35
  successfully, just so we get a real life idea of what it looks
• 18:38
  like?
• 18:39
  Dr Rebecca Homkes: Yeah, you know, you know, I've named, you
• 18:41
  know, luckily, I've got wonderful companies that I work
• 18:43
  with, so almost all of them were willing to be named in the book.
• 18:46
  So, you know, Deputy 40 company has gone through this cycle a
• 18:49
  couple of times now. And I love that example, because they're
• 18:53
  one of the, also the very few companies I work with where
• 18:56
  their culture is actually part of their right to win and their
• 18:58
  must win battles are focused on where growth is coming from,
• 19:01
  right, not necessarily where growth has been. So great
• 19:04
  example there Gorilla Glue company, another company based
• 19:07
  in the US, but of course, growing globally very quickly.
• 19:10
  They're on their second cycle of muslin battles. So successful,
• 19:13
  we had to reset a year early right from the original plan,
• 19:16
  because they're going to that next stage of growth. And the
• 19:19
  company I just mentioned, they're smaller than in Primex,
• 19:22
  based in Latvia and Riga, Latvia one of my favorite places to
• 19:25
  visit, by the way, and they're on their third cycle, and
• 19:28
  they've doubled every three years since I started this
• 19:31
  approach. And they're in concrete and construction, and
• 19:33
  that's about as much as we want them to double. You know, when I
• 19:36
  work with FinTech companies, you know, I just wrapped up one with
• 19:38
  one this morning, based here in Europe. You know, we want you
• 19:41
  doubling every year in the scale up phase. But if you're doing
• 19:44
  anything hard, like construction, concrete
• 19:46
  manufacturing, I only actually want you doubling every three
• 19:49
  years. And so I've got lots of them who are having that kind of
• 19:52
  success. But this takes discipline. And what I've really
• 19:55
  realized when I look at companies who do this well and
• 19:58
  others who go through the process. And don't is, growth is
• 20:02
  a commitment. And I know you're thinking, of course, Rebecca,
• 20:04
  eye roll, growth is a commitment, but here's what I
• 20:07
  mean, you can't just commit to the strategy. You've got to
• 20:10
  commit to building the capability to execute the
• 20:13
  strategy. Now, I don't care how smart people are in your
• 20:16
  organization, throwing a new growth strategy isn't going to
• 20:19
  get it done. Are you as a leadership team saying, Not only
• 20:22
  am I committed to this growth strategy, I'm committed to
• 20:25
  growth, which means I'm going to slow down, to speed up, I'm
• 20:27
  going to make sure I'm building the capability of my team. I'm
• 20:30
  going to be prepared to change things as the situation changes.
• 20:33
  I'm going to make some tough decisions on people or markets
• 20:37
  or products, because that's not where growth is coming from.
• 20:40
  Growth is an absolute commitment, and a lot of
• 20:42
  organizations aren't prepared to make that commitment. Frankly,
• 20:46
  it's hard, right? And I'll share something with you. Stephanie,
• 20:50
  when I wrote the book, one of the first big feedbacks I got
• 20:54
  from one of the editors was Rebecca, you say stuff is hard,
• 20:58
  too much. No one likes hard stuff, and they wanted me to
• 21:00
  rephrase all of that language to make it feel more approachable.
• 21:04
  And I started to do that, and then I pushed back, and I said,
• 21:08
  I can't do that, because this stuff is really hard. But you
• 21:12
  know what? That's cool. Why? Because when you do the hard
• 21:15
  stuff, well, that's differentiation, and that's what
• 21:19
  we're trying to do with growth strategies.
• 21:22
  Stephanie Maas: Most people, when they hear commitment or
• 21:25
  discipline, I think the loop in the brain is going to the
• 21:29
  strategic plan and being committed to the check and the
• 21:33
  must dos. But what I just heard you say, correct me, if I'm
• 21:35
  wrong, is the commitment is to the growth. Yes, that might mean
• 21:41
  altering or changing, but it sounds like it's a it's a verb.
• 21:45
  Dr Rebecca Homkes: Growth is a verb and a noun, right? Is it is
• 21:47
  constantly changing and moving. Go back to our strategy
• 21:50
  hypothesis. Now, people here that are thinking, No, Rebecca,
• 21:53
  we're too big. We have shareholders, we have boards. We
• 21:56
  need to stick to the plan. Plans are hypothesis, right? This is
• 22:01
  not advocating for chaos. You're having the strategy in place at
• 22:04
  all times, but you have the humility to acknowledge that we
• 22:07
  didn't get everything right the first time, and our situation is
• 22:11
  going to change. We're going to constantly be bringing that
• 22:13
  change in, and that means you've got to build this capability for
• 22:17
  an organization that can handle and adapt to this change. Now
• 22:21
  people try to do this, and they do this by cheating. What do I
• 22:24
  mean by that? Instead of five growth priorities, they have 10,
• 22:27
  or they have 15, or they have five, but each of the five have
• 22:31
  five sub bolts, each of which have 15 under it, they're trying
• 22:35
  to caveat for every single iteration the market will give
• 22:38
  them right? Which means you're actually starving any of those
• 22:41
  growth priorities of the time, treasure or talent they need to
• 22:44
  succeed. This is why it's hard to be a high growth company.
• 22:47
  You've got to be ruthlessly prioritized on those few areas
• 22:51
  of growth, but build the capability of an organization
• 22:54
  that can adapt and change as the situation around you changes.
• 22:58
  Stephanie Maas: Okay, there are so many additional strings I
• 23:01
  could pull on here to lean in on your expertise, I mean, but in
• 23:04
  the spirit of time, is there anything else you want to make
• 23:08
  sure that we address here today together?
• 23:11
  Dr Rebecca Homkes: I think we'll just repeat hard is great,
• 23:14
  right? So just because we've said a couple times things are
• 23:17
  hard or difficult or only a few people do it, if you've got any
• 23:21
  sort of entrepreneurial spirit that should light something in
• 23:24
  there and say, Hold on, like, Tell me more, right? Things that
• 23:28
  are hard are great, because when you do hard things, well, that
• 23:31
  is differentiation. Everything in survivors that thrive is
• 23:35
  doable. I've seen companies of employees from 10 to several
• 23:39
  100,000 you know, from 10 million revenue or even smaller
• 23:43
  to, you know, over 30, 40 billion are working on, survive,
• 23:47
  reset, thrive, you've just got to make the commitment. And I
• 23:50
  think have an honest conversation with yourself and
• 23:52
  your team. You know, do we want to commit to growth? And not
• 23:56
  everybody does. That's also Okay, right? But then, you know,
• 24:00
  I'm going to annoy you, Brittany, you have a
• 24:01
  conversation with me, because I am absolutely passionate. Wake
• 24:04
  up every single day on what we can do to do this lead high
• 24:08
  growth journeys.
• 24:11
  Stephanie Maas: Incredible, incredible. Thank you so much
• 24:14
  for sharing such meaty content. Very energizing to hear you
• 24:18
  talk. Thank you.
• 24:19
  Dr Rebecca Homkes: It was absolutely my pleasure to be
• 24:20
  here. Thanks so much for having me. Thank you so much for the
• 24:22
  great questions.