572 :: How 15 Minutes a Day Can Help You Make Faster, More Strategic Decisions

[upbeat music] Well, hello there, friend.

Welcome back to the Construction Leadership Podcast, where we explore practical mental models to help construction leaders build businesses that are hard to compete with.

They have better leadership, stronger teams, clear strategy, and they generate higher profits.

I am your host, Bradley Hartman.

[upbeat music] So I recently finished the book American Icon.

It was Bryce Hoffman's book about Alan Mulally and turning around Ford Motor Company.

It was episode 569, where I did a breakdown of some of the scenes that really impacted me the most.

I love the book so much, in fact, that I reached out to Bryce on LinkedIn and just said, "Hey man, this is a great piece of work.

[laughs] Super impressed, and thank you." I learned a lot from it that I was able to apply to more than one of my clients.

And when I discovered Bryce used to host a podcast, so I started listening to those as well, and while scrolling through old episodes, I stumbled across a conversation between Bryce Hoffman and Rich Horwath.

Now, Rich taught strategy in my MBA program, and he continues to be a wonderful mentor and coach and friend to me today.

He is, I believe, I am biased, the best strategic thinker on the planet.

And this clip from the conversation you're about to hear between Bryce Hoffman and Rich Horwath is a question I believe everyone needs to consider, which is what are you doing to improve your strategic fitness? Now, as I get older, my metabolism is making it, uh, increasingly clear that if I want to maintain the figure that I had in my youth, I'm gonna have to work harder just to maintain the status quo.

So I find myself allocating more time each day and each week to get off my ass and go exercise.

I gotta make time for it, and I understand that there's gonna be some negative ramifications to how I look and what I'm able to do if I don't make time for it.

And if you are [laughs] aging like me, maybe this resonates.

If not, well, good for you.

Congratulations.

But here's the question.

What about our fitness as leaders? How often do we actually practice or exercise strategic thinking? How often do we extract ourselves from the daily grind of reacting to things that pop up, to solving problems and diving into emails, and all the other things that don't really help drive ourselves and our organizations forward? Because naturally, if strategic thinking is a skill, and it is, we can practice it.

And if we don't practice it and the people around us don't practice it, we shouldn't be surprised when we're not very good at it.

And this is exactly what Bryce Hoffman and Rich Horwath are talking about in this clip about strategic fitness, what it looks like, and why you should think more about it and engage in it.

Let's hear a word from our sponsor and dive in.