In this podcast episode, Scott De Long and Vince Moiso discuss the importance of strategic planning, particularly in the context of the 12-week year model. They debate the merits of shorter-term planning versus traditional annual planning, emphasizing the need for both vision and execution. Drawing from various strategic planning methodologies, they stress the significance of accountability, team buy-in, and clear communication in ensuring successful implementation.
Transcript | Season 1, Episode 9
Scott De Long
Hi, I’m Scott De Long, and this is Vince Moiso with the CEO podcast. A couple of weeks ago, we talked about a beer that I had never tried. I thought this was the best-rated beer I’ve ever heard of. And I hadn’t tried it with the Pliny the Elder from the Russian River Brewing Company. And I was a little bit jealous that you knew it. And you were drinking it already and all that. I had to run out and get some. By the end of the podcast today, we’re going to talk about the rating and what how we rated versus, you know, the Brewmasters.
Vince Moiso
Well, I know you already had some, and I know it went down smoothly.
Scott De Long
We had a few technical issues going on here. And it took a couple of extra beers to get started. We’re going to see how that works for us. Today, what we want to talk about is strategic planning. We’re coming into the fourth quarter, which is a good time to start thinking about strategic planning. We shouldn’t be talking about the process prior to this. But let’s talk about our process. What books do you recommend, the 12-week year, written by Brian Morgan and Michael Lamington? It talks a lot about strategic planning, but not in the traditional sense, which is a little bit different. And I know that your company, the one you’re running now, uses this 12-week year process with our good friend Marc Koehler’s. Lead with Purpose program. Talk a little bit about that and how you operate, and then want to compare how we do it.
Vince Moiso
I’d start with the 12-week year. Just gaining some background and understanding and context of a 12-week year is intuitive because the book’s name says it all. We’ve compacted a whole year into 12 weeks. Somebody might work within a quarter of an hour. That’s a year for us, okay, imagine that our strategic planning is happening every 30 days, then we break down those 12 weeks into 30-day increments, and we’re strategic planning every 30 days, and we’re running that strategic planning at the end of the previous month. Moving into the next month, we’re building out what the priorities are for the tasks, and for those 30 days, imagine what would be a quarter for anyone else is only 30 days for us. Just gaining some background and understanding and context of a 12-week year is intuitive because the book’s name says it all. And what I’ve come to learn in implementing that into my multiple businesses is that psychologically speaking, you know, people in general just have a hard time retaining long-term information, like we’re not built as human beings to really think long-term. That’s why people have really struggled to save money over time. Like the whole thought of retirement and saving for retirement, there just aren’t a lot of people that can do that. Because we are built for instant gratification and set survival mechanisms, when you think about it, you start to break it down for business. And when you plan for five years, it’s hard to get your team to connect to that, or for three years, it is still challenging. And even when you plan for a year, you say, hey, I forecasted, and this is what I’m going to do for this year. It is no surprise that teams oftentimes struggle to connect with that. That’s why I love the 12-week year so much, because what you’re doing is you’re saying, hey, I’m going to give it to you in bite-sized chunks. And I know that that’s going to give you clear directions in a shorter amount of time for you to execute the plan. Does that make sense?
Scott De Long
Here’s my first debate. The manager-level supervisors and line workers are day-to-day executors; they are the people who get the thing done; they do the thing that we’re supposed to be doing. But those of us at the executive level should be able to think out and plan longer. That’s how we get promoted to where we got promoted to in the first place; it’s because we think more strategically. You said something that was important. I will give it to you for 12 weeks at a time, great. But what I like to do, and especially at the level of the folks that we deal with a lot, the when in a consulting business that you do and the work that I do, that’s at the executive level, and that’s where I think one of the things that the 12 week year talks about is throw away at the annual plan. I absolutely disagree with that. I liked the annual plan for the whole 12 weeks and the rest of the 12-week year, which I liked a lot. I like the execution portion of that. But the issue is that we need to think long-term. In fact, the 12-year-old even talks about starting with the vision back to Stephen Covey. Begin with the end in mind. At the executive level and in this group, that’s doing this strategic planning, we start with a vision. Who do we want to be when we grow up? What do we want to be out here? A vision is something that has not yet been realized. That’s great. And can the line workers understand all that? Maybe not? Okay, got that. But the people who are hairy executives should be able to. I don’t want to throw away the annual strategic plan for that reason. Now, that doesn’t mean I’m not going to do it more frequently. We do quarterly, not monthly, as huge as it is within your organization. That’s a little bit different.
Vince Moiso
Well, I’m not going to debate with you because I agree. We don’t follow the 12-week year to a tee and what I’m a believer in, and I can tell you what we’ve implemented within our businesses; we’ve taken a couple of different strategic planning processes and systems. And we brought them all together. We’ve taken the essence of each one of them and bottom all together. We’ve been following, you know, utilize CEO Coaching International, you know, we have a coach, and I think it’s important for every business to have a coach. And, you know, we follow Mark Moses’s model. And if you read that book, it makes a big difference. He’s got a great, you know, it’s like he follows us, Steven Covey model, which begins with the end of the mind, he likes to start with a blank whiteboard, you know? And if you got a blank whiteboard, what would your business look like? If it was ideal? What would your organizational structure look like? Do you have the same people in place? Would you be doing the same things? Would you change things? What would you change? What works? What doesn’t work? And so, we do that, we don’t throw out the annual plan. Even though Brian Moran is talking about Throwing out that annual plan and just focusing on 12 weeks, we do that, but we do it without throwing out the annual plan. We do annual planning. At the end of the year, it’s a little bit of a look back where we’re saying what worked, what didn’t work, and what we want for the next year, and what that looks like, and we call them hots are huge, outrageous targets, which is taken from Mark Moses you know, planning. We also throw in, as you said earlier, that Mark Koehler’s leads with purpose, and his strategic planning is different than the other two that I just mentioned. But we also utilize a lot of what he’s talking about. We have a blue-sky vision, and we also have that annual goal. That’s up there for everybody to see. The biggest thing we used with the lead-with-purpose platform is that it is an online platform where all the priorities are housed. When we do our 30-day planning, all those priorities go up there for that month, and you can see it. It’s got different ways you can view it. You can view it quarterly, or you can view the most current. It’s great for us the way that we work in terms of pulling together those three processes, making the best out of what we like out of those three, allows us with that online platform to put everything there for the entire team to see and execute on.
Scott De Long
I’m not a believer in following any guru down the path. Take what you like and leave the rest. Pick from here and a little bit from here and a little bit from here, and blend those together for your personality.
Vince Moiso
Let me say this with what you’re saying: I’m going to agree with you on this: I don’t believe there’s a one-size-fits-all good for business. There just isn’t, and I don’t care what industry you’re in or whatever. The reality is you must take components of what works best for you in the business and the people that are within the business. You said it; it’s all about practice and execution. I’ve found that, as you know, a lot of strategic planning is great in theory. I’ve said this before, and I’ve spoken about this before, and I think that most small businesses don’t have a problem with planning. Most of them do plan, but they have a problem with executing.
Scott De Long
Blanket statements that are made in the book that I can argue with and others that I can agree with. And one of the things that he says is that most plans have an unspoken goal of making it a good plan. It looks good on paper. Let’s move. Let’s get on to the next thing. We had our three days off. And now let’s go back and tell everybody how brilliant we are. That’s bullshit. Sorry, it’s just bullshit. The planning process is important. And frankly, there are lots of ways of doing it. We use a method that is systematic and process oriented. And it gets the job done. And none of it matters if we don’t follow through if we don’t execute. The strategic planning process is not done. When our three days in the woods are done, it’s just not. There’s a communication process, making sure that people understand it, and then there’s a let’s get it done process. And that’s where the 12-week year makes a lot of sense. Breaking things down into bite-sized pieces that people can do, instead of this pie-in-the-sky process that these brilliant executives did while they were getting a tan on the beach of Costa Rica.
Vince Moiso
Well, and it incorporates more people. I think what you’re forced to do with the 12-week year plan is incorporate more of your team to collaborate on what the priorities are going to be. There’s a lot more ownership; at least, that’s what I’ve experienced. There’s just a tremendous amount of ownership and accountability that happens with that. And then the feedback that I’ve received from my team is that they love it because it’s so much easier to swallow what I must do for the next 30 days instead of trying to connect to this pie-in-the-sky plan for the year, like how am I going to connect to that? What am I going to do? What am I going to do today? When you plan for 30 days, the whole month is planned for you because you know, from week to week, exactly what you need to do to get it accomplished because you’re assigning dates to the task and the priorities. Like you’re saying, get this done by such and such a date. And it’s not this. It’s not four months out; it’s a week out. The language that we use is that here’s what we need from who, by when. That’s the whole accountability process. Rather than at the end of the meeting, have you ever been to a meeting where people say, Okay, what we need to do is, bam, bam, who’s we? Nobody takes ownership of us. It’s like the email that goes out to 12 people, and it’s not addressed to anybody. And it’s like, hey, I need this by whenever, and then nobody responds to it. No surprise because you didn’t assign it.
Scott De Long
Let’s take it back to what we talked about in our second, third, or fourth podcast. A third one, we talked about email etiquette. What we do is, if you’re on the two lines, you respond, it’s to you; if you’re on the CC line, it is for your information. If I put 12 People in the two lines, there are no bodies as well.
Vince Moiso
And if you do put more than one person in the two lines, you need to address it in the body of the email. Let me tell you, it’s the beauty of lead with purpose. And this is what you know: I love Mark Kohler for coming up with this online platform. It’s so genius because that’s exactly what it accomplishes. You assign it to a person; you put a date on it. And then there are these auto-reminders that go out your email. This task has been assigned to you. And you get a reminder that these are your tasks. And so, every week, you must go on and update whether you accomplish the task, if you’re on track, or you know if it’s not going to happen or anything like that. You’ve got this mechanism now that holds everybody on the team accountable organically. In addition, though, its what people want. Scott, have you and I talked about this? What do employees want in a business? They want? Clear direction? They want to know what I am expected to do. What am I supposed to do? And they want that to be clear: my role and responsibility is this, and they want to be clear about it. They want to do a great job. They want to do well. Do they want to feel accomplished? Well, how you feel accomplished is when you’re measured on what you’re getting done. Imagine a platform that measures you on what you’re accomplishing you miss throughout the month, and it’s in line with what our priorities are.
Scott De Long
Not just you know that, but everybody on your team knows that. That’s what I really liked about Mark’s software. We have a similar software program written similarly. There are some things different based on how we teach how to do that. And it is a communication process as well. And we let folks know that it’s time to update your plan. Because it’s third-party software, they’re not going to just think about it first thing in the morning; think about this. They must plan. Oh, and management will get a report on this tomorrow. 24 hours later, management gets a report saying who’s behind schedule, who’s way behind schedule, who’s killing it. And that gets people to log into the software and get it done.
Vince Moiso
Let’s boil it down to this: I’m just going to say this: whether you implement the 12-week year plan, whether you use lead with purpose and that platform, or whether you use the lead to goals platform, whether you’re a CEO, Coach international or lead to goals or whatever, it doesn’t matter, you have to do it. You can’t strategically plan on your own. I think it’s like the fallacy of representing yourself in a court of law, you know, doing anything like that. It’s like, no, you’re not going to go represent yourself any more than you think that you can strategically plan on your own. The problem is, you’re too close to it, you’re too emotionally attached to it, and you’re not going to see what others will see. You must have a moderate strategic plan session.
Scott De Long
Even more than that, you’re not going to get buy-in from people; if you are Moses and directing down from the hill, you’re not going to get by, and people are going to give you compliance and not commitment. And that’s one thing that I did like about this 12-week year: It talked about the difference between a commitment versus just an interest. I’m interested because I’m not going to get in trouble for it, or I’m really committed to this. We encourage involvement. In our process, after you get through the two-and-a-half, three-day strategic planning session, we then break it down into the teams that must do things and get those teams together to work on the implementation. What does this mean? How are we going to do it within the year, not the 12 weeks? It’s a little bit different, but it can be broken down into quarters. It all flows. I mean, I really liked that process of getting things done in that 12-week year does get things done. What can be done in the program? Or in the quarter that we’re working on, and if we don’t follow through with it, management looks at it and sees what’s working and what’s not. And we don’t give recognition for what is working. The whole thing falls apart.
Vince Moiso
I’ll strip it down even more; you have to the strategic plan, no matter what I mean, you’re running on a hamster wheel, year after year; if you’re not planning, period, end of the story, you have to plan, and you have to plan year in and year out whether you’re planning for a year, whether you’re following a 12-week year model, it doesn’t matter, you have to plan and you have to begin with the end in mind. And you must work backward from there and create all the action items and priorities that go into all of that. Then, the number one thing, as we keep saying, is the execution of the plan. It’s putting into practice what you put on paper; otherwise, it’s just a theory and will take you nowhere. I mean, for me, Scott, I’ll say it like this. If you’re not planning, there’s no way you can grow your business scale or do anything with it. Thomas Jefferson says I’m a great believer in luck; I find that the harder I work, the more I have of it.
Scott De Long
I want to get back to one point that I didn’t make about the 12 years in the book, and it talks about, and we talked about this in an earlier podcast, accountability and what they claim as accountability as ownership, not as checking up on people, is getting your team to embrace accountability, self-accountability, own the thing. And if you have a whole bunch of people doing that and you must plan that they can follow clear expectations, it rewards recognition. A little bit of accountability. You win
Vince Moiso
You called it buy-in, and I like that word. I think when you’ve got team buy-in, that’s what I love so much about the 12-week-year model. We’ve got total team buy-in, which creates that accountability that you just described. And then the problem with that on its own, you know, is left to its own accord. Accountability only goes so far with your team. That’s the beauty of the lead-with-purpose platform. Is that true accountability? Because you must measure it, you must track it, you’ve got this metric now that holds you accountable on your own. Whether you want to be or not.
Scott De Long
Similar in that we have a rag status red, amber, green, which is a project management kind of thing, the rag status, and it measures things that say, here’s what I’m expected to do. Here’s what I’m expected to do by how far I’ve gotten through. Now, our platform doesn’t stop people from lying about what they’ve done. We don’t know that. But some sort of platform sensitivity measurement tool that management can look at and say, Hey, what’s up? And honestly, not micromanaging. But hey, what’s up? I see this as yellow. Oh, I just didn’t get to it. No, we need you to because I count on that. Management’s responsibility is to ensure that you’re following up on the things you say you’re going to follow up on too. Can’t just give you all the tasks and say do them. Because I’m going on vacation, I got to follow up. I got to do my part two, and part of my part is doing my thing but also checking up and saying, where can I help you? What do you need? What are we missing? How can I help? That’s our job as leaders.
Vince Moiso
I totally agree. We want to hear from you. We’d love to get feedback on this as a great topic. And what are you doing to plan and what works, what doesn’t work, and what resonates with you here? We mentioned a lot of books during this conversation; by the way, I’d be remiss without, you know, just giving that to you. Twelve weeks, year, of course, by Brian Moran. And then Leading with Purpose by Mark Kohler. We also mentioned Mark Moses and made Big Happen. We talked about The Seven Habits for Highly Successful People by Stephen Covey and then Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willing, and I think you could read all these books and, you know, take a piece of each that could work for your strategic planning process and implement that into your business.
Scott De Long
Here’s an idea. Before we finish up, here’s an idea that I want to talk about: you can’t just read a book and be an expert. We talked about this prior to starting this. What does it take? Get some knowledge, bounce it against the wall, and practice; I want to do a whole podcast just on that process. How do adults learn? Let’s get back to the beer. All right. This was good. Pliny the Elder Russian River Brewing Company. Is all the recognition the world light? Still IPA? I can tell it’s an IPA, but it didn’t have the heavy aftertaste that most IPAs have.
Vince Moiso
Now they’ve knocked it down. They’ve done it, you know. They got the right amount of citrus in there. You can’t taste citrus whatsoever. But they’ve knocked down that hoppy aftertaste. And that’s what makes Pliny so great. Pliny the Elder, they have the younger blind pig rush, rushing rivers. It’s all good, by the way; they make excellent beers. And many people have tried to duplicate Pliny the Elder and haven’t really been all that successful. And there’s a lot of great IPAs out there. And still, I think Pliny the Elder holds out there as one of the best. Now, you might argue that, and I welcome the arguments, but I will tell you as far as all the IPAS that I’ve had.
Scott De Long
I will tell you; this is the only beer I drank today. And I liked it. It made the podcast better. We started off a little tense with his technical issues. It worked out. Cheers. Let us know what you think. Come back and tell us again. Thank you.
Vince Moiso
See you next time.
