Strategic Planning: 15 minutes, 15 months, 15 years

On a recent Fri­day morn­ing, I had a lot of fun shar­ing the prin­ci­ples of grow­ing a great com­pa­ny with the team of front­line man­agers of Fos­sil Project Ser­vices, a fast-grow­ing company.

The best in their field deliv­er­ing impres­sive work for clients with excep­tion­al­ly high stan­dards, this com­pa­ny has grown tremen­dous­ly since its incep­tion and is get­ting stronger at the same time.

“Someone’s sit­ting in the shade today because some­one plant­ed a tree a long time ago.” - War­ren Buf­fett, investor

Like good, fast-grow­ing com­pa­nies, they have dou­bled in the last three to five years and, because a key dri­ver of their growth is build­ing great lead­ers for the future – they have more than dou­bled their inter­nal core competencies.

Our inten­tion, in this ses­sion, was to teach these cur­rent and future lead­ers many of the prin­ci­ples we use in plan­ning ses­sions and devel­op­ing senior lead­ers. So we taught them the prin­ci­ples of Scal­ing Up, Rock­e­feller Habits 2.0, Your Oxy­gen Mask First and oth­er valu­able tools.

When we were talk­ing about strat­e­gy, the Gen­er­al Man­ag­er Dave Kearns made an inter­est­ing com­ment to his team that, to con­tin­ue to make the com­pa­ny bet­ter, we can’t be look­ing just 15 min­utes ahead, we need to be look­ing 15 months and even 15 years ahead.

That was pro­found because the long-term vision of a com­pa­ny is meant to be 15 years ahead and the strate­gies to take big steps ahead are 15 months — or more — ahead. But the work we have to do now is real­ly a 15-minute focus.

The Chal­lenge

• Do you spend enough time on 15 months and 15 years?
• And when you are look­ing at 15 min­utes, are you look­ing at the high­est val­ue strate­gies that will have the high­est impact today and 15 years from now?

Aside from the plea­sure of shar­ing new con­cepts, is see­ing how peo­ple, in many dif­fer­ent roles, tru­ly aspire to grow and improve. To me, there’s noth­ing more inspiring.