#43 Reclaiming the Soul of Strategy: Building Customer-Centric Organizations with Bernard J. Jaworski

no but but here's the interesting here's an so i'm going to first talk about drucker and then i'm going to talk about an interview i have with mark randolph one of the co-ceos early stage with uh in netflix so drucker's view was any good leader balances short-term and long-term.

And what he made very explicit was the idea that if you're a senior leader in a company, 20% of your time, 20% of your time needs to be spent thinking carefully about the future, resourcing against the future, and actually putting your best people against the future.

20% of your time.

What that means, I mean, think about that.

Every Friday, I set aside not to compete in the next 12 to 24 months.

Every Friday, I get to sit down with my team and think about how are we going to compete three, four, five years in the future.

Now, I can imagine there's a lot of senior leaders saying, hey, Bernie, I get that conceptually, but you don't understand my life.

My life is dominated by short-term stuff.

And the answer there is time management.

Drucker's view is you've got to manage your time very carefully to set aside what he calls large chunks of time to kind of think about the future and the evolution of the future and where that might be going.

So the very first thing is you've got to you as a senior leader have to think about managing two time periods constantly.

That has to be a preoccupation.

Most senior leaders spend 99% of their time in the present and think about the next two years, the next quarter.

They don't spend enough time about the future.

And that's why companies disappear off the face of the earth.

Which now leads me to my Netflix story.

So Netflix makes the argument, and we have an article on this topic, that they've made eight major transformations since they started.

Eight major fundamental shifts.

So way back at the beginning of time, they were DVD sales.

Then they became DVD rental.

And then, you know, eventually streaming and everything else, right? So the question was, this seems counterintuitive that a firm could reinvent itself eight times.

And now they're a movie studio.

I mean, it's the craziest thing in the world, right? So how does that happen? Now put it in the context of Clayton Christian's work that says there's an innovator dilemma.

The innovator in the marketplace gets locked in and they can't migrate and therefore new entrants come in and beat those guys, right? But eight times, eight times Netflix has reinvented itself.

So I asked Mark Randolph, I said, Mark, I'm struggling with this idea because everything we know is suggesting that it's very difficult for incumbents to compete with new startups, new digital natives, however you want to frame it.