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Episode #263
Roger Martin

How To Create Winning Consulting Strategies

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Summary

Want to learn how to create winning consulting strategies? Then this episode is for you! Roger Martin, a trusted strategy advisor to CEOs worldwide, shares his journey and tips on navigating various scenarios and personalities to achieve a successful outcome for your consulting strategy. Join us in learning from his next-level experiences and what makes a winning consulting strategy!

I am excited to have Roger Martin joining us. Roger, welcome.

It’s great to be on, Michael.

Roger, you are the Founder and President of Roger L. Martin Incorporated. You’re an advisor to CEOs around the world. You give keynote talks and workshops. You’ve worked with many well-known organizations like P&G, Lego and Ford. In 2017, you were named the world’s number one Management Thinker By Thinkers50. You’ve written thirteen if not more books, the most recent is A New Way to Think: Your Guide to Superior Management Effectiveness.

I thought we’d start our conversation by going back in time. You received your BA from Harvard College, your MBA from Harvard Business School, PhD from the Royal Military College of Canada. You hear a lot about companies these days that pay a lot less attention to someone’s educational background and where they went to school, and much more on their skills and their experience. Can they code? Whatever it is that they can do. I’m wondering, how do you feel about that? Where do you feel is the value of formal education? Have you’re thinking about the role of that formal education changed over the years? I would love to know your take on that.

I do want to make a slight correction, that’s an Honorary Doctorate from Royal Military College. I don’t want to give the impression that I worked my way through a PhD. That was so much easier to just go up and give a speech, which is great. It was lovely. Formal education is important. I do think that there are lots of great universities. As people may or may not know, if you apply to Harvard College, you get an alumni interview. A loyal graduate does the interviews in their area.

I used to do alumni interviews. What I would say to people is don’t fall in love with one university. You’re probably going to get disappointed because there are many people now applying for all the more prestigious universities. It’s a bit of a crapshoot as to whether you’re going to get in or not. Fall in love with a class of universities at a certain quality level or a certain kind, liberal arts colleges or big research universities. Fall in love with a category and then wait to see who you get into to fall in love. That’s because you can do great things at all sorts of universities.

Some high-techie people say, “Teach yourself coding. Don’t waste the time at a university for four years and the money.” I don’t subscribe to that view. You learn a whole lot and learn how to think and a lot of things. That is worthwhile. Past an undergrad, I think education should be much more love-oriented than functional. If you like a subject a lot and enjoy the learning process, go do it. If you’re getting graduate education because you think you’re supposed to, I don’t think you’ll do it all that well or get all that much out of it. That would be my advice.

My advice in general is to learn from everything you do. You can sleepwalk your way through four years of college and not learn much of anything, not interact with people in a way that makes you a more well-rounded person or a more thoughtful person, or you can dive into it and engage in the experience. That would be more my thought than going to any specific school or discipline. It’s more about the experience of learning.

You started your career as a strategy consultant in 1981. Before that job, did you have any other jobs you feel impacted who you are now or a springboard for your future and the success that you’ve achieved?

You don't need other people to come up with answers for you. You CAN answer. You CAN create answers. Click To Tweet

I went directly from undergrad to business school because you could do that in those ancient days. That was my first full-time job. I had summer jobs. I always think that I learned the most and many valuable lessons around the kitchen table from my entrepreneurial father. He started a business when I was two. I have no recollection of when he wasn’t running Wallenstein Feed & Supply Limited. I did work in the summers in the feed mill. I learned very much about what hard labor type work was, slogging feed bags, filling them up, and driving trucks. I said, “That’s honorable work,” but I would like to invest in ways of doing something that’s more mentally challenging for me. Maybe that’s a lesson I learned.

You often hear that during our childhood years, so much of those influences, the beliefs that we have, or even the limiting beliefs that we have later on in life. If you could take me back to those days when you were sitting around the table with your family and your father is this entrepreneur. Is there one thing that stands out to you that you remember that was either inspirational or had a big impact on you in a positive way? On the flip side, is there any habit around those conversations or anything that maybe your father did that you look back on now or maybe even you did it earlier on and think, “I wish he wouldn’t have done that. That caused some struggle for me.”

To put this in context, I’m asking these from the position of everyone here who are entrepreneurs. They’re running their own consulting business, whether they have a team or they’re solo, but they may have their children or others around them. I’m wondering, are there any habits, characteristics, behaviors or attitudes that are positive, but also that maybe were negative and therefore people should avoid?

I also want to bring my mother into it because she was equally important, and lessons that I applied to business. I’m fortunate in that I can’t think of any negatives. I will dwell on the positives of this. I would ask dad question after question about the business because I was curious. One thing that I liked is he always gave me a thorough answer. He never volunteered anything about the business. He didn’t come home to tell stories and regale us with stories about the business. That wasn’t his thing, but he would answer all questions. From him, I learned probably more system dynamics than anything else. He was high school educated. He did not have a second in university. In fact, he had gone through high school in the non-university stream like the commercial stream.

He wasn’t highly educated, but he had a sophisticated understanding of system dynamics. I would ask him things like, “Dad, I know you have a policy. Your policy is at the start of a sales call, the salesperson hands the pricelist to the customer. It got every feed they make and what the price is, depending on quantity. There’s a quantity discount. If you order 20 tons, it’s less than if you order half a ton. You never deviate off that price list. That seems a little bit arbitrary. What if that’s handed out? Every farmer out there that got that week’s price list can give it to the competition and say, ‘This is what Wallenstein is offering. If you can beat it all, I’ll go with you.’ What happens if somebody undercuts you? Shouldn’t you have some more flexibility?”

How old were you when you were asking these questions?

I probably wasn’t all that old. I was probably 8 or 10 or something like that.

It just strikes me. My older daughter is six years old. I’m thinking about her asking a question like that. It’s such a thoughtful question to be coming from somebody that age.

He would say, “Roger, here’s the way I think about it. We want to win on the basis of the quality of our feed and our formulations that help animals grow, and our service. Service is a big deal, making sure the animals have the right protection and antibiotics. If there are problems, we’re sending them out to our vet and nutrition experts. We want to win on that basis. If the price is always up for negotiation, 95% of the sales call is going to be on price. I don’t want that. That will take away time from the message we want to send.”

CSP Roger Martin | Consulting Strategies

 

“If the farmer knows that there is not another farmer anywhere on the planet who’s going to get a better price than what’s on the list, there will be no discussion about it. They’ll look at it to check that we’re in the right column, ‘It’s this feed and this is my volume,’ but then we can spend 100% of the sales call on the things we want to spend it on, and we work hard on having a great cost position. If somebody prices under us, they’re cross-subsidizing. They have to be charging somebody too much. We shouldn’t be trying to win the farmer that they’re cross-subsidizing. We should be figuring out what farmer they’re overcharging and go and get that customer.”

What a conversation.

As a strategy consultant guy, you’re thinking about Nash equilibrium, competitive dynamics, signaling, what gives the customer confidence, and what you want to have the salesperson do. I was like, “You’ve actually thought about this a lot, Dad. It taught me that you got to think about a lot of things to make a decision and take into account a whole lot of dynamics. In my consulting career, I always paid a lot of attention to how the policies that you put in place will cause selection bias, and the way you want this would cause farmers to want to engage on other things other than price. It would cause the farmers to have confidence. It would cause the competitors to have to cross-subsidize to beat you.

All of those things are the result of a policy that seems highly inflexible and maybe a little bit doctrinaire and silly. No, it’s not. It has a specific purpose. I learned that from him, but not to leave my mother out, she’s a great contrast. Dad would always answer my question. Mom, on the other hand, was exactly the opposite. I don’t ever remember getting an answer to a question from mom. Whenever I asked her a question, I would always get back to the same question. I would almost roll my eyeballs.

She would say, “Roger, what do you think?” “Mom, why was Auntie Delphine mad at cousin Fred?” “Why do you think so, Roger?” I would come up with something and then she’d explore maybe the positives and negatives of that. Is there anything else you should be thinking about and whatever? Eventually, we’d get to an answer and it was a good answer. I understood the answer because I came up with it myself, but got nursed along with her. From her, I learned the thinking process and recognized that you don’t need other people to come up with answers for you. You can create answers. The act of engaging with somebody else to help them create an answer is a noble thing to do. That was a bit from both that shaped who I am.

Those are great examples that remind you of your mom working through a bit of a consultative selling process or helping you to ask great questions, which is very powerful. That’s amazing. After working as a strategy consultant, you worked as a Director for the Monitor Company. You did that for a while, then you went into teaching. You were the Dean of the Rotman School of Management, from what I understand. Why do you decide to leave the “business world” and get involved in education?

I was a strategy consultant for seventeen years, most of the time at Monitor Company. I’m in one of the small groups of people who grew and led Monitor Company for that period. That was a big international classic strategy consulting firm. We competed with McKinsey, Bain and BCG. In many respects, we were one of the four companies in that era that very large companies would trust with strategy advice. I liked it and enjoyed it. I was in one of the ownership groups. It was like my company and the like. I was minding my own business. As part of that, I set up their Canadian office, Monitor Company Canada Limited.

During that time, I met a lot of Canadian executives. One of them called me up to say, “I’m on the board of this Canadian company, Moore Corp.” It’s the world’s biggest office forums company. It’s officially headquartered in Canada as a Canadian company, but its operating headquarter is in Chicago. They needed some help. Sure enough, I went to work for them on the board and the strategy committee of the board. We interacted most with Rob Prichard, the President of the University of Toronto. He’s very charismatic. He was the boy president. He became president at a young age. He took a liking to me.

He had dinner for the management team and the board, and he invited me along. At the end of the dinner when I was getting my coat, he said, “I’m going to try and talk you into becoming the next dean of our business school.” I always thought that if I had a successful business career, I would turn to public service of some sort maybe when I was 50-ish. I was 41 at the time and was not thinking about this for another decade, but he was persuasive and talked me into it. I did it very much for patriotic reasons.

The absolute best way to market as a consultant is to do great work and maintain great relationships with your current clients. Click To Tweet

By that time, Monitor Company was dedicated to helping global companies be more globally competitive. What I realized is that Canada didn’t have a consequential global business school like a business school that was consequential on the global market. If it wanted to grow consequential global companies, it needed a business school in Canada, not one that you had to go to a US school or European school if you were a Canadian. I decided that I would attempt to help Canada have at least one consequential business school. I took a massive cut in compensation, a 94% cut in compensation, to do public service.

Were you married at that time?

Yeah, married with three kids.

What was the reaction within the family to making such a big shift? You’re on this track. You’re in ownership, director on boards, and all that to, “I’m going to be taking a 94% pay cut to try and grow this university.” Was everybody cheering for daddy? Was there some concern when you were considering that?

My wife was born and raised in Toronto, so it was a bit of going home. The kids remembered Toronto because they were born when I was running Monitor Company Canada Limited. It was disconcerting to a certain extent, but they had family and relatives. They weren’t going to a strange town. They were going to a town that they understood. My wife had enough confidence that we’d somehow figure out how to make ends meet. I had done that to date. It wasn’t that tricky.

I have to ask you because I know about fourteen years after being the dean of the Rotman School of Management, you went back to your business roots. You left Rotman, and you opened up your own consulting and advisory firm, which you still run now. Why make that shift? You went from business into education and back into the business. What was going on at that time that made you decide to make that shift?

I was dean of the business school for fifteen years. I kept my fingers a little bit in a strategy advisory world while being dean. I felt it would keep me current with business trends. It would also help me not be dismissed by businesspeople who I wanted to be involved in this school as just an academic who doesn’t know how business works, which they would often do. I kept my toes in it a little bit. When I stepped down in 2015 from being dean, I had a couple of years’ worth of sabbatical stored up. Sabbatical isn’t what people think it is. They think it’s a year off. It is not. It is a year of teaching relief. You don’t have to teach at all. You’re expected to do more research.

During those two years, instead of resting, relaxing and teaching, I went back to a little more consulting. There were a couple of companies that I was working with that needed a little more help than usual. I recognized that I loved it, I missed it, and I loved advising CEOs on strategy. When you’re on sabbatical, you can do whatever you please. At the University of Toronto, the rules are when you’re on faculty, you can do 50 days of paid outside activity a year. While I was dean, I never did more than 24 because I said, “I’ve taken a giant pay cut to do something for my country. I’m not going to screw up doing that well by doing too much of my old thing.”

During those two years of sabbatical, I ramped up my consulting to more than 50 days a year, and then I realized, “I don’t want to go back. I don’t want to stop doing this because I’m enjoying it.” It must have been the 2015-2016 academic year because 2013-2014 and 2014-2015 would have been the sabbatical years. I went to 50% of appointments which I kept until 2019. That enabled me to do as much consulting as essentially I wanted.

CSP Roger Martin | Consulting Strategies

 

In 2019, I decided that I don’t want to do any more academic administration. I actually don’t want to do administration of anything. I want to do the two things I love most, which are writing and advising CEOs. I went down from my 50% appointment to 0%. I retired in 2019, and have been a full-time retiree from the faculty of the University of Toronto ever since.

Have you ever had a challenge with marketing and getting clients? It sounds like things were always pretty solid for you in that area and there are always opportunities. Were there some challenges that you faced at one point or another, running your own consulting business in terms of getting clients and building a pipeline?

Not in this era. In the good old days, Monitor was a startup in the early ‘80s. People didn’t know anything about us. We didn’t have a track record. We were going against McKinsey, Bain and BCG. That was hard as hell. Essentially going back to doing it, no. At Monitor Company in the ‘90s, I was one of the handful, there were actually three of us, who were the biggest sellers of consulting services in Monitor Company. My job was probably keeping something like 150 full-time hungry mouths fed with business. If I was doing that, I have to think more about marketing. I don’t want to do that. I just want to do what I do. Mainly, people hear about my work from somebody else, or they read stuff that I’ve written, and call me up. We decide whether or not it makes sense to work together and take it from there.

Take me back to those days at Monitor. A lot of consultants find themselves in that situation, and sometimes it’s not the reality, where they believe that they’re competing against the McKinseys, the Accentures, and all the other well-known firms. It’s not even true. They just think about that. For you, it was true. You were competing with these well-known and well-established global firms. What did you do then to start winning businesses? If you look back at that time and maybe transport that information to today, are there any best practices or ideas that you would suggest to a consulting firm owner or a consultant who wants to win business but feel like they are competing for business with more established alternative firms?

It’s funny you mentioned Accenture. Monitor Company created Accenture. We did this study for Arthur Andersen and Company. I don’t remember when it was, ‘83 or ’84. They were trying to figure out with audit and tax businesses that were slowly but surely declining in profitability, what else they can do with their skills and capabilities. We came up with the idea with a study we did for Vic Millar who then became the giant of the systems integration practice of Arthur Andersen and Company, which became Andersen Consulting, which became Accenture. We created that. We created a competitor. They tried to buy us numerous times.

These are probably things your audience all know, but one thing that you don’t know is by far and away and not even close, the best source of business is existing clients. At one point, I did a study of our clients maybe ten years in and said, “Where did these all come from?” The vast majority of them came from somebody who we had done great workforce saying, “These guys are good.” That’s the absolute best way to market as a consultant. There isn’t anything even close. This is so far above anything else that you could possibly think about doing from a marketing or sales standpoint. It is to do great work and maintain great relationships with your current clients, and that you’re top of mind with those clients.

Even if you stopped working with them, you check in with them. When a friend of theirs calls and says, “I got this problem. Have you ever hired anybody to do anything similar to that?” They’ll say, “Monitor Company or Roger Martin.” If you are still busy marketing and selling that you don’t pay attention to your current clients or you don’t keep in contact with your current clients that they don’t have mental awareness, you’ve shot yourself in the foot. All the other marketing that you do is worthless.

During that process, you’re reaching out and asking your existing clients. Did you have some sort of process in place to try and get more referrals? Was it you just did great work, you didn’t ask, there was no process in place, and referrals came to you?

That’s correct. I have found that in outbound marketing of at least the consulting services I do, strategy is worthless. The reason is it’s so abstract. What exactly is strategy? Most people who are in a position of buying it can know that much about it. It’s like a doctor. You don’t know what appendicitis feels or looks like maybe. What they need is somebody that says, “These guys will take care of you. This person will take care of you. Don’t worry about exactly what they’re going to do. I might not even be able to explain it in terms that you care about. Trust me, they’re good.”

No more than 15% of Fortune 500 CEOs have a useful definition of strategy. How can you do strategy if you don't even know what its definition is? Click To Tweet

You go in and do something useful for them. It all works out fine. I ceased at Monitor Company long ago even thinking about outbound marketing, advertising, and all of that stuff. The only useful thing you can do from an outbound standpoint is essentially thought leadership, writing stuff that people will read and say, “This guy sounds like he understands my issue or my problem.”

It’s a great way to demonstrate value without having a conversation with somebody for them to be able to read or consume any IP you’ve created, ideas or insights you’ve put out there. Your company is your name. You do have a team that supports the work that you do. Is it correct that you’re the one providing the keynote talks, the workshops, and the advisory services? Is it all you?

Yes.

You touched on this a moment ago, but I’d love to dig a little bit deeper. Have you ever thought about building a business with a team in terms of your own consulting firm and what you provide, where you have team members that can also deliver the services so it’s not only you? What are your thoughts on that?

I did that once. We had a 1,000-person firm when I left, about probably 700 consultants. I’ve been there and done that. I didn’t want to do it before. I have bittersweet memories of Monitor. It was my home and I helped build it. It was a great firm. We got into business with the fundamental idea that, unlike the other consulting firms whose business is selling projects and consulting services, our view was great strategy should come from within. Our job is to do strategy assignments with the company in a way that while doing the assignment, teaches them how to do it themselves so that they are less dependent rather than more dependent.

You get more dependent when you say, “Those McKinsey guys or those Bain guys are smart. The next time we have a problem, we got to phone them up again.” That was our rationale and belief system. We believed it. We did that for a while. We would hire scores of people, had a pyramid, had offices, and had hungry mouths to feed. When clients said, “Can you do this?” We would say, “Yes.” I realized that we were falling away from where we started with our philosophy. It started to become apparent when Sears, Roebuck and Company became a $10 million a year client in 1990, which would be the more equivalent, given the pricing of probably a $40 million client now.

AT&T became a $50 million client in 1995. That would probably be a $150 million client now, then Merck in 1998. By the time I left, it was an $80 million client. That’s just professional fees, not out-of-pocket expenses and reimbursable. I said, “We have lost our way. We have a cost push force that is pushing us to do this. You’re not teaching Merck how to do strategy on their own when you’re billing them $80 million a year. No way.”

Lots of people came to me because they liked me as a leader. I was a very popular and beloved leader. Monitor Company created another mini Monitor Company. I thought long and hard and said, “We had the best of intentions, but the minute that you’ve got a pyramid under you, you sell to feed the beast. I don’t want to do that. There’s only one way to stop that, and that’s to have nobody,” and so I have nobody.

I have the people on the administrative side of the business who are enormously helpful, my COO and general counsel. I have two people who help with scheduling, billing, and all that who are fabulous, and an accountant. I got a handful of people who help me, but they do not provide consulting services. I provide consulting services. I have to get clients to do the vast majority of stuff. I have no choice.

I believe your wife is a lawyer. She also serves as the company’s COO. You have a legal analyst. You have also an executive assistant, maybe 1 or 2 other people. That is also very strategic. It sounds like you’re creating a lot of leverage so that for all the things that maybe you don’t like to do, you’re not good at doing, or aren’t your highest value creation areas, you have others focused on. Does that mean all of your time is spent either working directly with clients or writing? Is there something else that you’re spending your time on or just those two things?

CSP Roger Martin | Consulting Strategies

 

Those two things for the most part. There is some coordination with my GC and some coordination with my two EAs. For the most part, I advise CEOs and write. I like both of those activities.

Let’s talk about your latest book, A New Way To Think. How do you come up with the title? Where did that idea come from?

Sometimes I have an exact title in mind long before the words are written. This has evolved along the way. At one point, it was Memos to a CEO to COO because I had written lots of what’s in the book originally were a memo to a CEO. I came to the conclusion that each of the chapters had a similar format, which I standardized to a greater extent when I came to this view. They explained why the current model that was dominantly used was not producing the results desired. It’s not “Don’t use this model because it produces these results.” I don’t like it. If you want to produce result X and you apply the model, you get Y and not X. Why is that happening? It’s because you’ve got the wrong model and here’s a better model. Here’s a new way to think about fourteen different areas.

You mentioned that you love working with CEOs and helping them with strategy leadership. What do you see as the most common mistakes that CEOs, consultants or advisors? What are the biggest mistakes that you’ll make in the areas of strategy, to begin with?

The biggest one on strategy is to do planning instead of strategy. Unfortunately, probably no more than 15% of Fortune 500 CEOs have a useful definition of strategy. How can you do strategy if you don’t even know what the definition of it is? It’s not because they’re dummies or anything. They’re taught this in business school. The whole environment of strategy is actually a plan. The most common characteristic of any plan is the person responsible for it, the CEO or the head of corporate planning, goes around every part of the business and asks what initiatives they want to engage in, and comes up with a list of initiatives that are all sensible. They are rarely stupid. They are all sensible in their own way. They say, “That’s our strategic plan.”

They often refer to them as strategies. We have twenty strategies. Asia Division is going to build a plan. The HR is going to hire some talent, then bad things happen out in the marketplace. They’re like, “We had a thorough strategic plan. What went wrong?” The answer is you didn’t have a strategy. You didn’t have a set of choices that were integrated and have it as their output, picking a field of play on which you’re going to play, where you will be better than all your competitors.

Is that your definition of strategy? Is there any other way that you would define it for people?

That’s the tightest definition of strategy I have. I have to say strategies are the answer to five questions. What’s our winning aspiration? Where are we going to play? How are we going to win? What are the must-have capabilities we need to have? What are the enabling management systems that’ll build and maintain the must-have capabilities to win where we’ve chosen to play to meet our winning aspiration? That’s strategy.

If people spent the time to answer those five questions, how much further ahead do you think they would be than most of their competitors in the marketplace?

It helps to be precise in your strategy. Everybody, every single organization, and every person has a strategy. We don't just make random choices. Click To Tweet

Because the practice of strategy is so pathetic, answering those five questions would put them ahead. As with any framework whatsoever, you can answer them in the most rote, dull, and drone-like way or with some real thought. I would say some real thought wouldn’t hurt. Out in the world, I would give the practice of strategy somewhere between a C and a D.

Roger, as people work through those five questions and give consideration to them, what are the most common mistakes that they make? What are the things that maybe they overlook that they should pay more attention to?

One big mistake is they do them individually. They go to an offsite and come up with the vision, mission or whatever to fill in that winning aspiration box, and say, “I’m done.” They go and make a list of all the places that they could play, and then they pick some places and say they’re done. They then get to how to win. Often, that’s where they get bogged down, then because they realize they can’t win in a way that’s inconsistent with the winning aspiration where they’ve chosen to play. They are stuck because they’ve locked and loaded on those. What you have to do is constantly vary them and think about a set of five that fit together and reinforce each other. That’s the single biggest mistake.

I would say the other mistake is to feel like you’re in a chess match against nobody so you can come up with all these, “I’m going to move here.” They’re not going to be thinking about anything. My competitors are going to stand there and wait around until I annihilate them. While you’re doing everything you’re doing, they’re doing a bunch of stuff to try and do the same thing to you. They don’t take into account that competitive dynamic. I would say those are probably the two biggest ones.

Is there ever a time when you feel an organization should not pay attention to the competition? They know the competition is out there. They have a sense and an idea of what they do, but their strategy should not be thinking too much of the competition. They should be focused on them and making themselves better. Is it always important to consider how you have an advantage over the competition?

I can’t think of a situation where ignoring your competition is a good idea. Being cowed by your competition or being obsessed with your competition, I would say those things aren’t helpful. Paying attention to your competition helps you hone, refine, and still make more specific your strategy and what it means. You need reference points to be specific. “What would cause us to spend $2 million on this rather than $1 million on this aspect of our strategy?” “It’s because we’re going to win against them on a scale. We’ve got the capacity to spend $2 million when they are going to find $1 million as much as possible. That’s why spending $2 million is important.” That is a blog example in an attempt to be generic. It helps you be precise and specific in your strategy.

I feel the same way that strategy is a word that people throw around without understanding it. Oftentimes, people interchange strategy and plan. I also see tactics and strategy being interchanged all the time. People are talking about a tactic where they’re actually describing it as a strategy. Is there a point at which strategy is maybe premature? Take the solo consultant. Should they be thinking about strategy? Do you think about strategy in your own business? Is strategy having a process and making the time to think strategically to develop a strategy? Is that in your mind only when you reach a certain level of complexity or size or infrastructure? How do you feel about that?

I’ve written about this. Everybody, every single organization, and every person has a strategy. We don’t make random choices. When you decide, “I’m going to get a sandwich now,” that’s a choice. There’s not a random number generator in your head that says, “Sandwich time.” There is one in your stomach that says, “Grumble grumble.” You make choices. You can’t not have a strategy. It doesn’t matter how little you are or big you are, you have a strategy. It’s what you do. The only question is, what was the thinking process behind that that caused those choices to add up to something that you want?

RMLI has a strategy. It’s an extremely clear strategy. I do some things and I don’t do other things. When somebody calls, I operate in one way, not another way. When my dad started Wallenstein Feed when it was tiny, he had a strategy. Could have he articulated it? Probably not. Many entrepreneurs can’t always articulate why they’re doing what they’re doing. By the time I was asking questions, he always had a good answer to every question but I’m not sure that he did day one, although there are probably some things he did on day one that was extremely strategic. Some of the attributes behind the question are influenced by the dominant view of strategy, which is planning.

CSP Roger Martin | Consulting Strategies

 

If you’re little, do you have time to plan? That’s because this strategic planning is big, long, onerous, and generally useless. If you’re a little company, you don’t have time to do something big, long, onerous, and useless, but you will make decisions. That’s your strategy. There’s also a connotation about the strategy that says, “Unless you’ve done a whole bunch of analysis, you don’t have a strategy.” That’s a red herring. That’s not what defines a strategy. Bigger companies where they’re spending billions of dollars on initiatives and have a board of directors that they have to assure that they’re being thorough will do more analysis for their strategy choices than two kids in a garage, but the two kids in the garage may beat the snot out of the gigantic company because their logic behind the choices they’ve made is more robust than the logic behind the big bureaucratic company.

We’ve seen that play out many times over history. Roger, before we wrap up, I want to make sure that people can learn more about you. I want to encourage everybody to check out your books. You have a lot of work, a lot of Harvard Business Review publications, and other ones you put out there. Before you do that, a couple of quick questions. In the role that you play, for you to feel like you’re making the impact you want to have, and creating the success that you want to create, what are 1 or 2 habits or things you do on a regular basis that you feel contribute most to your focus, to the progress you’re able to make, and to the impact that you’re able to have?

One is understanding what customers feel they need. If I don’t know what they need and what they care about, it’s hard for me to focus on that. I’ll focus randomly.

How do you identify that? Is it just by having conversations with them?

By asking them a lot. It’s not about solving the problem that I think they need to solve. It’s more about solving the problem they think needs to be solved. Even if they’re not completely right, you’ve got to earn in with a client by helping them where they’re at. Once you’ve earned in, they will increasingly say to you, “Roger, this is what we should be working on, but what do you think?” When they ask you that, then you offer. Before they ask it, don’t offer. That’s a habit that I try to go back to say, “What client-identified problem am I helping them solve?” If I don’t have a good answer to that, I say, “How exactly, Roger, are you going to do stuff that will be helpful?”

You don’t know what help means, and you’re going to try and do something? What you’re going to do is help that if that were Roger. If that were Roger there, this would be helpful to that Roger. No, it’s not. It’s Bill, Jim, Sally or whoever that you’re trying to help. That would be one. The second one is, am I working on the hardest aspect of the problem in question? The biggest difference between super-successful people and not-so-successful people is not so much that they know what the ten biggest problems facing them are in whatever situation they’re currently in. They can both list them and be fairly accurate on the ten. Less successful people started at number 10 and work their way up. More successful people started at number 1 and work their way down.

The good thing about starting with number one and working your way down is that often when you’ve solved number 1, you didn’t realize it, but it partially or entirely solved number 4 and number 7. When you solved number 2, it also made numbers 9 and 10 go away. You get more over the hump of problems than not. It turns out that if you start from number 10, it doesn’t make anything above it go away, and 9 doesn’t make anything above it go away. You keep on having more big problems and you get overwhelmed. I want to work on the big client’s behalf. What is the biggest problem they would like to see solved? That’s how I try to keep myself on track.

How do you identify what is the biggest problem? Is it simply asking the client? Do you have certain factors or considerations when identifying what is the biggest problem?

I start from where they start, but often they don’t know exactly. They’ll give their hypothesis and then they’ll say, “What do you think, Roger?” I can say, “It could be this. What do you think about that?” They’ll say, “I don’t know about that, but what about this?” You get into a dialogue. It’s like doing linear programming. If you don’t have an objective function, you can’t have a solution. You need to objectify, “What problem are we trying to solve?” It’s a good discipline. I always ask them before I go into any meeting, “What problem are we trying to solve in this meeting?” If the answer is, “The hell if we know,” then you’re wasting people’s time. You should disband the meeting or have a conversation about what problem we’re trying to solve.

The difference between super-successful people and not-so-successful is not that they know the 10 biggest problems they’re facing. It’s that the less successful people start at number 10 and work their way up. The more successful people start at… Click To Tweet

You’ve written thirteen books. My final question before directing people to learn more about you is, in the last six months or so, what is one book that you’ve either read or listened to, it could be fiction or non-fiction, that you would recommend?

The last book that I liked was the Social Limits to Growth by a guy named Hirsch. It’s a fantastic book that had me thinking a lot more about economic growth in a different way. It’s the book that introduced the notion of positional goods. A positional good is a good that if I have it, you can’t. Back to college, a positional good is a position in the freshman class at Harvard. Somebody else can’t have it if I have it. Facebook page is not a positional good. I can have one. You can have one. Anybody can have one. I don’t know what the most prestigious shorefront property in the Vancouver area is where people would want to have an oceanfront property in Vancouver.

There’s Point Grey.

Point Grey then would be a positional good. Do you have a cottage or a house on Point Grey, yes or no? It’s a fascinating book about the economics of positional goods that I’d never thought about, and the great dangers of positional goods, and how they limit the growth of an economy. That one would be my book of recommendation. If you haven’t read Art As Experience by John Dewey, you’ll be a less good consultant. It’s a painfully difficult book to read. Dewey Decimal System among others is his creation.

Finally, I want to make sure that people can learn more about you, your work, and all of your writings. You have a lot of content. Where’s the best place for them to go?

For my content, I’ve got it all nicely organized on my website. That’s www.RogerLMartin.com. You’ve got to include the L for Lloyd, named after my father. If you do RogerMartin.com or send an email there, it’ll be to a Houston real estate agent, who is an extremely nice man. He and I have gotten to know each other because he gets so many emails and he always dutifully forwards them to me. I send him free copies of my books and everything. I do not want people bothering Roger Martin of Houston. I’m on Twitter, @RogerLMartin. For any strategist out there, I have now finished my 89th article in the Playing to Win Practitioner Insights series on Medium. If you go to Medium and type in Playing to Win, you’ll get over now two books worth of essentially practical follow-up to my Playing to Win book that I wrote with A.G. Lafley.

Roger, thank you so much for coming on and sharing some of your journey and lessons with us all here.

It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

 

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