". . .strategy is actually very straightforward. You pick a general direction and implement like hell.” – Jack Welch

I have a friend with seemingly boundless energy. It's infectious. One holiday season I introduced him to another high energy friend and by the end of the evening it was decided we were going to run a marathon.
At the time I could barely jog around the park without stopping (3 miles) but it seemed like a fun adventure. We trained, we chafed, and we all finished no worse for the wear. When I told people about my experience running a marathon the typical response was, you ran a marathon?
I wasn't offended. I don't look like a marathoner. I wasn't known for running, and I may have been a little bored at the time.
The lesson I took from running the marathon lied in the training. To go from relatively stagnant to maintaining 4 straight hours of activity takes planning. We started with the end date, marathon day, and worked back to where we were today. The first week required 30 minutes of run/walking three times. Three months later we were running 10 miles in 110 minutes. Three months after that we ran 18 miles, the longest training run before tapering down to marathon day. The day of, we joined 30,000 like-minded souls and ran through the streets of Chicago for four-plus hours.
It started with the vision, we set the goal, we calibrated the goal to where we were at the moment, then we worked back from the goal to make a plan, like "the week before the marathon, we'll need to rest a bit, the week before that, we'll need to taper for the rest week, the week before that we'll need to run 18-20 miles. . ." and so on. All the way back to week one, starting the day after the holiday party. Trying to run/walk for thirty minutes, three times.
I tell this story a lot this time of year. It helps orient clients for strategy and planning sessions. (strategy is its own session, planning is another) Agree on the vision, set a target, compare it to today, agree on the value of the difference, then step back from the target planning the next year/quarter/month/week. Finally, leave in copious wiggle room for when conditions change.
It's a process, not an event.
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