what I'd like to do in about 45 minutes to an hour is to give you a sense of what strategy is what tools we use to develop strategy and then teach you how to apply these corporate level tools to our day-to-day lives through developing strategic thinking abilities so if you take this mini course by the end of it you'll very clearly learn what strategy is and its various levels such as corporate strategy business strategy and functional strategies you will no longer confuse it with tasks or goals then you will also learn about a strategy canvas
with value curves it's a tool that will help you see the bigger picture help you with positioning of your offerings and hence develop strategies to become unique right and while I'm teaching you these I'll run so many case studies to make it crystal clear for you so if you have seen my other videos in the past you know that I'd love to give examples I'd like to make it very very grounded then finally the second half of the video will be most useful part to you I think I believe because in reality you're probably not
the strategy manager or the CEO of a large multinational company right you're probably not Coca-Cola's chairman so what I did at the second half of the video to customize strategy development so it can be applicable to your day-to-day lives you know you will learn how to develop a strategic thinking that will apply to your work apply to your family life your school in simple terms your life you'll be a smarter person because you'll be more strategic in your thinking you'll have more success because you'll have the ability to identify more opportunities you'll fail less because
you'll be able to identify risks even before they become apparent and I'll try my best to do the impossible and cover everything under one hour and make it super easy to understand at the same time I'll try but let's see if I'll succeed [Music] What is strategy right it's a word that gets used a lot and often in a wrong context most people can face it with goals essentially strategy is a roadmap roadmap of how we are going to win where you are is your as this state and where you want to go is your
to be state how you're going to bridge this Gap is your strategy so if I was to teach strategy to my children right I'd say you want to reach the Finish Line first you may walk straight to the Finish Line at five kilometers per hour or you may extend your route take more time as you have to travel more distance but then on the way collect the speed boost and you know shoot through the the Finish Line at 25 kilometers per hour because of that speed boost see collecting that speed boost to win would be
your strategy now let's get back to the adults world see in business we have three main layers of strategy you know the the first layer is Corporate strategy then we have business strategy and then we have functional strategies let's start with Corpus Raj corporate strategy is choosing what businesses to be in and accordingly how to allocate the resources among those businesses for example let's dump things really really down and let's make it super easy first I have two million dollars I wish I had two Millennials but let's say in this example I have two million
dollars should I invested money into real estate and go buy a few houses and few properties and enjoy the rent or should I invest it all in stocks and enjoy the dividends or create a basket of multiple Revenue sources so in this example let's say I decided to take my two million dollars and go into real estate business that's my corporate strategy that's it that's what corporate strategy is obviously large companies with their big funds make bigger decisions right um should I invest further funds into my r d research and development and create a new
product in new industry should I go into music distribution industry or should I go into satellite manufacturing industry all all of these are corporate strategy um corporate level questions I don't know if I made a lot of a lot of stuff so um now I'm not covering here how to make that decision I mean should I go into real estate it's just asking the question right to answer that we need to use various strategy tools I'll cover one of them in about probably 10 minutes but what I'm doing right now is just going over the
definitions and then we'll also talk about so many examples and then I'm even going to run a case study for you but before we get there in simple terms corporate strategy equals to what businesses to be in that's it don't complicate it good let's move to business strategy now business strategy is achieving a competitive advantage in the chosen industry now what does that mean competitive Advantage for example remember the two million dollar we had million dollars we had and that is a corporate level strategy we decided to go into real estate right now my business
strategy is to buy only town houses in a specific location like specific Street where I know it will appreciate in value more than probably other streets let's call it Mayfair Mayfair Street or um yeah I mean to get that competitive advantage in this case maybe it's because you know that in five years there will be a big shopping mall nearby which will change the face of the entire neighborhood so that would be your business strategy if you were managing a big corporate then their decisions would be for example only manufacture electric cars for example right
so in this case your corporate strategy is to go into Auto industry right car manufacturing and then your business strategy is to invest in electric cars right make sense cool let's move on let's move on if I can speak now the third one is functional strategies and this is obviously all about functions right like marketing operations Finance now let's go back to the two million dollar example I have two million dollars I decided to go into real estate as my corporate strategy then I decided to buy town houses in Mayfair Street as a business strategy
right now the functional strategies would be for example for operations I decided to use a third-party uh real estate company to collect the rent to do the paperwork to deal with tenants and do the maintenance work everything in exchange for let's say 10 of the revenue right so that would be my operational strategy now let's talk about Finance strategy for example right because that's also one of the functional strategies among with marketing and brand management and whatever is applicable to you so my strategy is to pay everything in cash instead of loaning from the bank
by that way I run a relatively Less riskier business and I don't have to pay five percent interest to the bank who wants to pay that right nobody and um another functional strategy is acquisition strategy and in our example it's maybe to look for bank owned properties through each bank's own website and then participate in those auctions now that would be my acquisition strategy so all of these are functional strategies and this list can go on quite a bit now let me run a case study for you and it's going to be an actual one
um so before I concluded my management consulting career with PWC Consulting pricewaterhousecoopers I was thinking of setting up my own shop my own company and obviously I was evaluating various options and um and one of the so initially I I I decided that I didn't want to continue being a Management Consultant because of the lifestyle I mean at the age of 36 you know constant travels and living in hotels isn't really something enjoyable you want to prioritize your family and um you know different things come into play so because of that when I put up
my own company I didn't want to continue in Consulting um also various other reasons I didn't think I could compete against giants like PWC McKinsey and BCG I didn't think I could win many projects if any at all um and even if I win a major project I mean how would I deliver it without a big team right and then it would be the same stress and the same travels again so I decided that my corporate strategy can actually be in career management right I thought as someone who made it to the pretty much top
of the corporate food chain uh from extremely humble beginnings um I believed I had a lot to offer and share my path uh for others who want to have similar success in their careers so this was my corporate strategy then my business strategy was to develop a training program teaching people how to get jobs with multinational companies you know it's like an A to Z TurnKey solution right and I teach not only how to get interviews with all these big firms but also you know like all these strategies but also teach them how to pass
into use as well through the bonus modules um yeah the program is called Lig and my functional strategies were as follows let's start with marketing strategy so my marketing objective was to First establish my authority and credibility and saying that hey I was a former Management Consultant a manager with prbc come join my Lig program wouldn't work so people need to believe that you know what you're talking about that you're credible then only they consider joining a program you know people need to see value in advance so I wanted to do it through free content
free but invaluable so as a result I chose YouTube which allowed me to meet my two objectives one at tremendous amount of value to my viewers so I can establish The credibility and two have an opportunity to talk about my Lig program to those who are unemployed or underemployed so this channel the whole thing all my videos is part of my marketing strategy that's the only reason I have all these videos I don't have advertisements on my channel by that way I think everyone is happy I hope I hope right I mean I'm not shoving
ads on anyone's throats and I'm providing Great Value but for those who really suffer from lack of progress in their careers now they have the opportunity to do something about it you know it's a win-win and as per my pricing strategy which is another level of functional strategy um this was very interesting because I practically have no competition even if I do I don't know about them and I don't have to know about them it's almost like irrelevant so I wanted to have a price point as low as possible without people considering it a low
quality product right so I wanted everyone to benefit from it um but not so cheap that not so not so low in price so people think it's cheap and low quality now yeah I guess these are enough examples huh so I hope I was able to clearly explain what corporate strategy is what business strategy is and what functional strategy is and their various different strategies now let's talk about tools yeah tools are the fun Parts uh strategy development tools let's get to it [Music] the purpose of tools is to help us make decisions right and
find competitive advantages for example you're working on uh your corporate level strategy and you're thinking of a few industries that I can go into right which one is the correct one so what do you do this is what you do you take out your strategy toolbox right and choose a few tools you know you choose a few for analyzing the external environment right then you choose a few for analyzing the internal environment right these are all tools you know you take them out and put them to work as simple as that for example you can
do Porter's five forces and Industry value curves for analyzing the external environment and you can do maybe resources and capabilities along with mckinsey7s to analyze the internal capabilities right just the tools check them out and then start putting them into work we're going to do that soon so um just like in real life right I mean you want to screw something on the wall correct I mean you open your toolbox and you pick up a tool you pick up a screwdriver right and you start doing it you don't pick up voltmeter it's the same with
us we have probably about um 20 or 30 major tools and Frameworks and depending on your challenge you pick various tools and then Implement them that's it very simple stuff the difficult part is the difficult part of being a Management Consultant or strategist isn't knowing the tools it's the easy part learning them I mean it's just going to take you maybe a few months probably less easy stuff the difficult part is to have a strategic thinking ability but that's for the second half of the video now a quick disclaimer I'm not going to cover every
single framework and tools available to us all right it would take a 20 hour video I'm also not going to cover the most popular ones by mbas like Porter's five forces and the value chains or McKinsey 7s and I'm not going to do that simply because they're not relevant to you I mean they're not they're relevant to Warren Buffett and Consultants to Warren Buffett it's funny really like you search for strategy tools online or in MBA you know you're taught all of these tools like Porter's Concepts you know various other popular ones and and the
funny thing is no strategist or a Management Consultant can actually use any of these tools they're just not practical um okay now because it's YouTube I just need to take one minute of your time to explain this a bit more otherwise some MBA student is going to be pissed and say what do you mean portions five force is not relevant he's the greatest there is yes he is yeah he really is I actually met him multiple times he's amazing but let me explain what are five forces poorest five forces five forces make you analyze five
areas of developing a strategy right I mean these are like um the the bargaining power of spiers and then threats of new entrance um to the market threat of substitutes bargaining power of of of of buyers and Industry rivalry in case you don't understand what he means by substitutes um it's basically a plane ride it's a substitute to bus ride right they both serve in the same purpose but their unique selling points are different so back to the point about five forces do you know how much it costs to actually get analysis on each of
these five blocks and we're talking about millions of dollars here to properly gather data and run analysis it's a major work you need industry-wide data points they are expensive you know you need then you need surveys you need interviews with subject matter experts hundreds you need to purchase data run analysis run confidence studies you know test so many hypotheses it's a major work it's a very expensive work so in reality what happens is that you know them you're aware of the five forces you know it's nice and all but you never use it to make
decisions it's just one of those inputs you're aware of but not necessarily in a deliverable form okay I mean seriously which client is going to pay you five million dollars just to get an idea on fireforce not many maybe only very large corporates so in case you got excited and started writing a comment there it is that's my view now let's move on this tool this tool that I'm going to share with you that I'm going to teach you um helps us see the overall picture and create positioning strategies it's called value curves or some
also call it um strategy strategy canvas or four actions framework we call it I call it value curves and it's awesome you'll love it and I'll talk about it in Great details I'll also run a case study for you multiple case studies so you can see how it works in real life all right so here's our strategy cameras let me take it out while the seat on your screen as well right so the x-axis is the offering level and y-axis is the key competing factors right so key competing factors obviously varies from industry to Industry
right but in our case I'm now taking hospitality industry hotels as an example and what would be the key competing factors for hotels this is your step one right here so in general we would have what architecture we would have Lounge appeal room size technology access right like internet Wi-Fi we would have room amenities silence bait quality and price right now the next thing we need to do is to attach the value curves to this canvas it's about to get more exciting so now you can do it on an industry level or at a particular
competitor level now let's do it with industry in this example okay so after having spoken with with industry experts and having conducted surveys and you know let's say we're able to draw the industry value curves now we know how the industry stands our competitive stand in terms of each competing Factor okay now your step three is that you need to know who your is his estate and translate it into a value curve as this means your present situation basically how do you perform in those key competing factors right this is where customer service play a
key role you need to run customer surveys and find out where in that canvas your value curves are say you're like this right so far so good now you know the industry value curves now you also know where you stand like this so this lets us see the overall picture and help us identify you know the trade-offs it's beautiful canvas very very helpful you know but here is where things get very interesting having a high score for example here with silence right it doesn't necessarily mean that's what we want or need life is all about
trade-offs right let's talk about this now step four step four is to apply our four actions framework to this canvas and four actions framework is very simple terms it tells us which of these competing factors we want to eliminate reduce raise or create new ones if you want to now let's let's reorganize this canvas and let's look at the trade-offs and take maximum benefit from them okay let's say I own a hotel and um where my frequent visitors are Backpackers okay then I'd have to draw a value curve to suit their primary needs and save
funds from those areas where they don't care about make sense for example I need to eliminate luxury architecture and Lounge a pale right reduce the price and the room size if I need to but I need to raise the quality of the bed hygiene and silence they're Backpackers they walk all day long so at the end of the day all they want is to go take a nice shower you know check their emails and have a good night's sleep so they can continue the next day right so with the money I save from not having
a luxury exterior architecture or luxury Lounge I can invest in high quality beds and high-speed internet makes sense right now let's say I own a hotel in a business center then my value curves will change again so they will need to reflect the new conditions I need to eliminate or reduce the Leisure activity such as not all of them are like the outdoor pool for example or if I have water park they don't need it you know but I have to raise the lounge appeal the room amenities access to technology and as a result the
price then I need to create a bar or a luxury restaurant this is how you create a competitive advantage and it applies to all Industries without an exception it's a canvas that makes you see the bigger picture and helps you identify areas of strategic advantage let's say you have a direct competitor direct competitor Hotel just next to you in the same street now your value curves compete it's like a game at this stage you're both competing for the same target audience but one of you will need to create a competitive advantage let's say it's one
of those areas where people don't make reservations in advance you know they just show up so obviously you will need to put more emphasis on your architecture right and your Lounge appeal I'll share with you something interesting remember this to win you don't have to win in each competing Factor you can't just be you can just be good in all of these but have a landslide win in only one of these factors and that may just be enough to become a market leader right let me give you more examples from different Industries let's take Automotive
what is the best car company in the world who is the best car in the world can you answer this question you can't right you can't answer that question without saying it depends right it depends on what it depends on the segment are you talking about the performance the luxury reliability safety what are you talking about exactly that's what segment segmentation is all about that's what corporate strategy and competitive um Edge is all about you're competing but you're competing to be unique you don't want to ever compete on the cost it's a zero-sum game you
want to be competing to have a unique offering in your particular segment you want to be the best at that particular offering and just be good in others now um let me give you an example let's take this which car company this white line is it has okay or medium luxury right it has okay reliability but very good in price and performance can you think of its name it's Subaru right relatively a low cost but a high performance car how about this uh let me give you another example I'll put it over here so let's
say it's high luxury right uh High reliability high price but low performance for Rolls-Royce right another one let's say medium luxury medium reliability very very high performance crazy performance and a very high price Ferrari right another one high luxury medium reliability high performance and high price Aston Martin so you see where I'm getting it although it's first glance it looks like they're all car companies competing against each other they're only competing to be unique now Lamborghini was um of course a while ago now Lamborghini is competing against Ferrari and it was not doing very good
right it was on the verge of bankruptcy and Volkswagen bought it so again now they're trying to be unique and create different segments for themselves but it's not working so well um so far so the key takeaway is you don't have to be the best in everything you do to win you just have to be unique in your own little segment and that'll probably be enough now this concludes the first half of strategy development the exciting part is about to start we're now going to talk about a lot more important aspects right it's just it's
just I can't speak I got so excited is this is the Strategic thinking right it's really what counts the most I suggest you take a break now and I suggest I also take a break um let's get some fresh air and come back when you're ready because you really really don't want to miss this second part it's going to be life-changing for you thank you we talked a lot about the strategy what it is what it's not and one of the tools available to us so they're all nice and sweet but you're probably not managing
a large corporate or a company you know you may just want to know how to develop strategies for your own career how to get jobs how to get that promotion right how to win that race if you're a sportsman and that you need a certain level of thinking that will open all the doors now what I will share with you over the next maybe 20 30 40 minutes will absolutely accelerate your progress it won't be a magic formula magic doesn't exist but it will help a lot so to make the best uh use of these
tools in our careers we need to develop a new level of thinking and this new level of thinking which you'll learn soon requires immense amount of mental horsepower I don't know horsepower I'm talking about just pure mental torque and you need that mental torque the mental power to be active all the time I'll also teach you how but step by step have you ever taken an IQ test with Mensa or any similar organization or even an online IQ test doesn't matter you probably have at some point in your life right see your IQ score is
you know from those tests it's similar to your car's maximum horsepower score you know like the most car engines the get the the gasoline or diesel ones they generate their maximum power at really really high RPMs you know RPM meaning revolutions per minute so in simple terms you get maximum power from your car's engine when your car's engine is screaming right and vibrating the whole car is vibrating and that's not how you drive your car in your day-to-day life right you don't go to shopping or to your office in the morning with making your engine
screen just so you can have power available to you all the time you don't right and if you do it in that way then one it'll be very uncomfortable and two you'll run out of gas very quickly and say what you do is you just Gear Up put the transmission on the next gear right so what you do is you sacrifice power for comfort and economy now continuing with the same analogy your brain works very similarly you only get Peak Powers when you absolutely need it other than those times that you need it your brain
just gears up and sacrifices power over comfort and economy in this case economy represents saving glucose or alternatively ketones so just like how you save gas in your car by not driving at extremely high RPMs all the time you save glucose and sometimes ketones in your brain by not pushing it so hard so far so good great okay now if you enter some sort of a test right then your focus gets activated you commend your subconscious to fully engage in the activity at hand and use your maximum IQ but once the test is over you
go back to only using 10 to 20 of your mental capacity and spend the rest of your day like that you're you're not even aware of this it it just happens automatically now listen to this carefully to be an insanely successful person in everything you do you need to use your brain at near maximum capacity all the time not once in a while at high RPMs like I gave an example no you need a brain that outputs its maximum power all the time not just once a day for five minutes or once a week for
20 minutes or once a month for one hour now I'm going to teach you how but I want to go in a logical sequence now in the past there was a good reason for your brain to evolve to work this way your brain consumes the highest energy highest calories in your body it weighs about 1.4 kilos right kilograms and you know it's what equals to about two percent of your total body weight probably where it's interesting it demands 20 of your resting metabolic rate that's huge that's a huge amount of energy consumption and that's just
to keep things in order right so in the past like millions of years ago like from 3.2 million years ago from the time of Infamous Lucy um from that time until only about 10 000 years ago which is when we transitioned from hunter-gatherers to farming the food supply was limited all these millions of years right and as a result your brain learned to adapt and cut down on energy usage until it was absolutely needed so now when you push the brain a bit too much unless you're trained and and used it uh it gives your
temporary mental exhaustion or mental fatigue you leave an important exam or test and you feel this right the mental exhaustion you know like after meetings you feel that sometimes this is the evolution speaking it's telling you hey you're using it a bit too much you know I don't like it take it easy it's just not used to it it doesn't like it you know it didn't evolve to work that way but we live in different times now don't we I mean we have no shortage of food supply not anymore we can we can buy calories
now therefore we need to push and train our brains to start using 100 of its capacity all the time what is limiting me it's not glucose or ketones why am I saying this I'm saying this so you understand that you already have the same Hardware used by Einstein and Isaac Newton you're as genius as they are you're just limited by the software not the hardware you all have the same Hardware but I'm going to talk about how part very soon um but before I do it I want to give a few more examples okay we're
like you know a must you know I'll put a thing we're like a moth a moth guides Itself by light sources and in the past the only light sources at night were the moon uh the planets and the stars and their guidance strategy was that if you can keep those lights sources at constant angle right you'd be able to go in a straight line and because those light sources like stars are so far away you'd be able to go straight but now things changed when small local sources of light came to being like candles or
light bulbs then the strategy of keeping light at a certain angle resulted in them circling around the candle and then possibly spiraling into their death that's why you see so many insects like moth and spiraling around your light bulb in your garden at night that's the reason that's how they are guiding themselves so the evolutionary strategy they adopted that made them survive that are no longer making them survive and this um not evolving and adapting fast enough is the reason so many species go extinct you don't have to look far away for animals going extinct
you know like leopards or Darwin's Fox from Chile or you know Etc it's happening all around you none of us including Homo sapiens are fast enough to evolve the only reason we survive and thrive and they go extinct is because as species we're not faced with a challenge that is bigger than our capabilities to solve them there isn't a smarter smarter being than us at the moment right and the only challenge we're up for is the one that comes from other Homo sapiens that's why we never needed to challenge our mental capacity that much because
we already won with what we had why consume more calories why put more effort unless we really need to we already won now if you're wondering why I'm sharing this with you all right just be patient I'm going to tie everything together beautifully everything will make sense soon so the point is your Peak IQ means nothing in terms of Hardware you are as smart as Isaac Newton or Einstein or Nikola Tesla you have the same Hardware the difference is in the software they learned to adapt and exude incredible amount of brain power throughout their work
throughout their days think of Isaac Newton do you think he'd be able to develop principia if you only had 10 minutes IQ Peaks a day or Einstein I mean he released like four major Publications in 1905 that changed the future of humanity right I mean he first his first publication uh told us how to measure the size of molecules in liquid the second thought is how to determine their movement and the third publication was like how light comes in packets called photons and the fourth one was obviously the special relativity All In One Ear do
you think he achieved everything in five minute Peaks the key takeaway is keep that light turned on at 80 Watts throughout the day and you never need 100 Watts once a week you'll be smarter than all the Geniuses got it Dennis okay fine I get it yeah how do you do it then I'm sold I get it Evolution we need to adapt keep the light on at 80 watts how do you do it now let's move on to the second part second part of the second part you don't need a secret pill you don't need
surgery you don't need anything that you don't already have you already have the hardware for it we talked about it you just need to update the software a bit you need to command it command it yeah right Dennis I don't think it'll just listen to me it will it will if you know the secret ingredient right the secret sauce it will have to listen to you it cannot reject you and the secret ingredient is questions what questions yep questions currency to buy everything currency to buy my boat my house my car my career whatever you
desire in life is question marks currency to lead a very successful life is all question marks that's all you need that's all you need to get it started questions or commands you give to your brain for it to get to work and stop preserving energy critical thinking at its core is nothing but an ability to ask questions without even being aware of it if I made sense at all there it's it's the state of the state of mind that your brain is constantly looking for an opportunity to ask questions and you had disability before you
needed disability before badly do you know when can we think of one when you were a child growing up your brain needed to work a lot harder than it does now as your environment constantly changed right your body changed your mental capacity grew your height your weight so many unknown inputs so it needed to stay active a lot more frequently than it is now so okay what do I do then I'm not a kid anymore yes you are not your first level of action is to put conscious effort to ask questions like consciously right just
ask questions about so many things why did I do this report you don't have to voice it out just think of it why did I go there how do I change my career how do I need to get that promotion initially these questions won't come up naturally you have to look you're gonna look funny to ask these questions you're going to feel funny but after a week or a month you'll notice something very strange you'll notice that your brain now continues to continues the effort Without You consciously asking you know what I mean it it
starts asking questions subconsciously now you won't need to sit down and ask questions anymore because your brain automated that activity those questions will start to pop out of nowhere that's how you win it's questions so you need to ask the right questions but how do you know which questions are the right questions how do you get to the right questions by asking a lot of stupid questions but within a scope I know I'm a bit at a high level now but just be patient because we'll get to the examples in a moment and how how
to ask questions and the whole thing in life you're almost always one smart question away from completely transforming your life for better your only one right question away from being super rich wealthy insanely peaceful and happy just one question but you won't know what that question is until you start asking a whole bunch of nonsensical ones look at Ikea you know one of the companies that truly mastered the outer strategy right the positioning segmentation and value chains and value curves do you think Ikea's founder ingvar sat down with management Consultants like me and ran competitive
strategy analysis right not at all no he didn't have money to hire Consultants at the time he just asked a lot of questions and eventually he just got to the right question so here's what's going to happen you know over time as you repeat these steps your brain automates this activity it lets you do it without even thinking about it now in your Consciousness you have space for about three things you can do about three things at any given time you can speak to a friend in person while texting to another friend while watching a
movie at the same time all of these things require conscious effort but here's the interesting part you can do almost infinites infinite amount of things that your brain learned to automate earlier meaning while you're doing all those three conscious things you can also ride a bicycle you can also eat and walk and drink the point is as long as you don't need tools such as your hands your your body parts you can run almost infinite amount of background tasks the tasks that are automated that's your goal ask so many questions all the time that your
brain learns to automate the task of asking questions and if you can get there I'm sorry when you get there your brain will perform at very very high power levels all the time you'll perform similar to how Einstein did or how Isaac Newton did okay Dennis what does it have to do with strategic thinking I'm confused everything everything strategic thinking is creating your positioning in life in at work at home it's answers answers are the outcomes of questions questions are not natural to us it requires uh thinking thinking is uncomfortable using your brain is uncomfortable
we don't like thinking why don't we like it because it uses so much energy what's wrong with it because that's how we evolved right so why do we evolve that way because the food supply was limited ah got it now so how do we break it we break it by automating the question asking process because we can only do one of three things right the questions need to pop up in our minds without putting conscious effort and in order to get there we need to First consciously ask questions teach the brain to automate it this
is the exact road map you need to follow you'll know when that transition happens because you'll realize you're now getting so many um questions popping up all of a sudden right now when that happens you may choose to answer them or ignore them but the important thing is having those questions coming to surface so your brain did its job it automated the question asking process and the best part is it won't go away you can still ride a bike even even if you don't ride it for decades right once it's automated it's not going away
you'll get there you'll see your your brain will become a constant question asking machine now why is that important here's an interesting thing for you and listen to this carefully pre-internet your your ability to analyze your environment was limited by both your ability to ask questions and find answers you couldn't get the answers uh you needed to move on to the next question so not only you couldn't ask questions uh but yeah but also you couldn't find the answers it was just a negative feedback loop right now you can find the answers but still limited
with questions and what good is having an ability to find answers if you don't know the questions that's what we're trying to solve right now I'll continue with some examples of how strategic thinking can apply to a career but if you need to I suggest you give another break get some fresh air and come back later when you're on top of your focus now okay let me give you some examples of strategic thinking at work not necessarily for top corporates but even mom and pop shops right or for your own small Department here's an interesting
story for you one day we were traveling around southern Europe and we were in a very very popular tourist destination in a very crowded street it's one of those areas where you know shop names were not even mentioned they said they're sick their sign boards say things like Italian t-shirt you know and then cell phone brands you know Nokia Blackberry or whatever uh it was a it was many years ago so I I'm sure you've been to those places anyway we just needed a lighter so we entered one of those shops and probably around 4pm
with an intention to buy a simple lighter that's it just a lighter and we left the place at 5 PM with bags full of stuff we didn't need we bought spices we bought shoes and sandals and bags and backpacks and necklace and computer cables and a lot of them were like either extremely low quality or fake as we came to understand in the evening so the guy duped us he mastered the art of human psychology I was so mad at him but I was also so impressed you know he he almost hypnotized us you know
he gave us subliminal suggestions and they worked we were almost in a Trans State and we didn't even buy a lighter he was able to sell us all these fake and low quality goods and now you may ask how is this relevant to the topic well the guy apparently asked a few very smart questions to himself didn't he is branding important for my business right no is customer retention important for me no you never see the same tourist twice they come and go is quality important for me no quality of the product will not be
very obvious at the time of the purchase it just needs to look good okay then what do I have to do screw the customer that's it as unethical as it is he found a strategy that made him the most money by asking just a few questions the guy didn't hire a Management Consultant like me right just ask um it is similar like how Ikea's founder we talked about this inkvar also didn't right and when you come to think of it all these strategy tools we have the poorest five forces past blue ocean value chains value
curves they all serve one purpose and that is the facilitation of question asking process right it keeps you within the scope I mean if you already have that natural ability to ask questions you wouldn't even need any of these Frameworks because these questions come out naturally right and this isn't only applicable to profitability or the companies every single aspect of your life it is applicable to sports School career getting your promotion everything it applies to everything let me give you another example if you watched my previous videos you would know that I'm a champion sailor
I mean I don't make money from it I'm a Management Consultant but it is something I do since the age of six now let's apply a similar level of thinking to sailing right and what questions led me to become a very successful European Champion sailor so to be the first I need to cross the Finnish land first right okay now let's ask some questions question one do I need to be the fastest in all points of sailing I mean do I need to be the fastest in each leg like upwind and reach uh or downwind
right not really okay which point of sailing then makes the biggest difference well when we go upwind you know like with angles towards the wind um we cannot surf so the maximum speed for all of us is limited by hydrodynamics let's say it's three nuts for Optimist which is when I race when I was a kid so but when we go reach or downwind we can surf the waves and that makes us reach greater speeds up to 15 knots so if I can train hard enough to just be the best sailor in reach and downwind
then I will make the biggest difference this was a question I asked myself when I was seven years old and I figured that it was going to be my strategy and in all my 30 years of sailing I just stopped by this strategy we started racing upwind out of maybe 100 plus Racers I'm usually in top 10 or top 20 but never top five but then we turn to reach I make up the top five and then when we go to downwind I am usually in top three or first now this level of thinking is
exactly what corporate strategy teaches you doesn't it we talked about this before you don't have to be the best in everything you do remember the example what's the best car company in the world now okay you can say you know and then as I'm not managing a small business you know nor am I a sailor or a sportsman I'm just a mid-level employee fair enough let's cover more areas then let's say you are uh what can be let's say you're a sales manager right you're upwind maybe your B2B sales your reach is your repeat customers
and your downwind is your joint venture Partnerships right now sit down and draw the importance of each of these legs and figure out which ones you need to be good and which ones you need to be the best right and that's how you get that promotion you want to have your MBA at Harvard Business School good no problem your upwind leg is your GPA from your bachelor's degree your reach is your work experience and your downwind leg is your references right in simple terms this applies to any industry profession any person is very similar to
the value curves we did earlier right isn't it let's take it to let's take it to extremes you're a girl you want to have a boyfriend right okay your upwind is your looks your reach is your social uh status your downwind leg is your character make sense now you don't have to have the well we're going to talk about limitations so let's talk about trade-offs and limitations one of the reasons I was never be the uh I was never the best in upwind was because I was very small compared to the others at that age
they were bigger than me and in upwind we hike so physically I wasn't as strong or as big as they were and there was nothing I could do about it physically they matured faster than I did it's a limitation for example in your case you may never be the you may never be the best looking girl or a guy in the world maybe you will you will never look as pretty as Jennifer Connelly and that's fine because if you can have a really good character and perhaps a strong social status then that's good enough for
you to have your dream partner make sense or in sales maybe you are really really bad at B2B sales right but if you can be great at JV Partnerships maybe that's all it takes for your employer to give you that promotion in essence that's what strategy is all about you're competing while you're competing to be unique and the only way you can win is by finding the right answers the only way you can find the answers is if you can ask the right questions making sense the only way you can get those questions when you
need them is if you train your brain to automate that activity so questions come to surface all the time without you using one of the three slots that are available okay um thanks for being with me for the past one hour this video is done thanks for your time and if you benefit from this video please feel free to share in Twitter and Linkedin and if you're share in LinkedIn uh please send me an invitation as well I'd love to connect with you um and finally if you're not happy with your current career if you're
unemployed or underemployed I strongly suggest you check out my Lig program just take a look and see if it is right for you that's where I share with you some of the advanced and unknown strategies to lend yourself interviews and jobs with multinational companies now Lig is not a magic formula magic doesn't exist but it quadruples your chances and significantly shortens your job hunt process and oh I also have an interesting promise so if you take action and Implement what you learn at Lig and still don't get results within 30 days I will personally work
with you to make sure you get to where you deserve now that's that's quite valuable um very well once again thank you and see you next month
