Go Big: Starting the Year With Focused Challenges

Okay, Dave, we're back from break. We're back from break? What are you talking about? We're not back from break.

Come on, we have to pre-record. We actually have a break coming up, so we have to pre-record this. Please, this is coming out of January. Can you just...

It's the middle of December. What? Just play along, please, for once. You are insane, Michelle.

How did this happen? I have to plan, Dave. This is like... How else are we going to get a podcast out?

Oh, great. Okay. Well, Michelle, how was your break? What did you do?

I was in Santa Fe. Let's really hope that trip doesn't get canceled. It was great. The snow was falling.

And yeah, I don't know this is going to work. The most amazing thing happened to me over break. Okay. What did you do?

I don't know. See, we're not actors. I'm Dave Pitnaya. And I'm Michelle Loretta-Mola.

And you're listening to The Jump Podcast, the conversation for future-focused leaders. Today, we're kicking off the year by talking about how great leaders set focus challenges, not just plans. And as always, we're going to end up with some headlines from the future. Are you ready, Dave?

Let's go. It's also us from the future. All right, Dave. So it's 2026.

We're starting the year, right? A lot of us are coming in, including us, right? Yes. No, that's true.

Including us, we're ending the year with our plans. We're going to come in and we're going to say, it's January. Yeah. Let's go.

Let's go, right? Let's go. And the question is, does everybody know what direction they need to be going in? Do they have that clarity?

and and you know as well as i do that most people have these giant decks that they made back in december but they they're not walking in with clarity of like here's where how we're going to hit the ground running and and what are the amazing things we need to get done by december, yeah i think i've heard everything like a classic one will be yeah yeah we have a plan here's my 50 page deck yeah right and there's nothing but if you ask them like no no what but what's the plan, they can't tell you.

Yeah, right. And this is the issue with it, which is that most large enterprises are very good at planning. They're very good at saying, okay, look, these are how we're going to allocate budget. These are the kind of activities we're going to have.

These are the kind of metrics we're going to have. It doesn't usually ladder down to like, these are just the three or four, you know, five big things that we're going to do that are going to be amazing this year. Okay, I love that, right? Because you said ladder down, and in some ways, I think ladder up is a better way.

And the reason I'm hinting at that is because I think we're talking about two different things, right? Is oftentimes organizations are thinking about their plan, right? And that's what they're coming in with. But is it giving them what they think they're going to get, which is the other thing, right, coming into the year?

And I think particularly right now in all the conversations is saying. Man, I need transformation. I need growth. I need big things.

Right. And I don't think there's a lot of confidence in that the plans are going to do that. Well, and look, a plan is, at least as most companies practice it, you know, plans are inherently a present focused activity. Right.

Because so much of it is based on, OK, here's what has happened in the past. Here's what's going on now. Yeah. Most people are doing that kind of like crazy zero based budgeting.

So they're just saying, OK, what is the differential between now and the future? It is kind of an assumption that the, you know, the world is going to behave itself. and that the future is going to look like an extension of what's already happened. And yet we have so much evidence over the last few years, from COVID to AI and everything else, so much evidence that says that the world is not behaving itself and it's not fitting to a plan.

And I think that some of the most successful future-focused leaders that we're working with, yes, they have plans, but more importantly, they have focused challenges. They have these kind of like things that these are the big things that we need to do. And we're not even sure that we're going to be able to do them, but we're going to sure as hell try. And it's a big thing to set those kind of focus challenges.

And it's hard to do. It's very hard to do, I think, very rare, right, in enterprises to see that we're seeing that, like, clear setting of focused challenges. And I think it's exactly what you said, right, is, like, planning is a tool, a literal season in most organizations, right? We've got dashboards we fill, right?

Templates. And months and months sometimes of activity, right, within organizations. But I do think the at least the folks that we're talking to, they are definitely recognizing, OK, there's too much ambiguity. These plans aren't enough.

But then it's like, OK, what else? And we don't actually know as clearly as we do with our planning how to set those focus challenges. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, you think about, you know, in my mind, what is the greatest focus challenge of the modern era?

And that is John F. Kennedy in 1963, right? Standing up at Rice University in September of that year and saying, you know, folks, I propose that before the decade is out, we put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth. That is such a clear challenge.

As hard as it gets, we're going to put a man on the moon like no one has ever done that before. The U.S. was certainly not the country that you would bet on to do it first.

I mean, think about it. The first satellite in space was the Soviets. The first, you know, dog in space. Right.

Was Laika from the Soviets. And then finally, yeah. Yeah. Yuri Gagarin.

It was the first man in space. And so we were down 0-3. Right. And the idea for.

It's hard to imagine that, you know, to put yourself in that context of how ambitious and that idea felt at the time. That's right. Exactly. And his whole point of saying, look, it's not just kind of getting out into space.

It's about going to someplace. He set like a finish line for a race. He's like, yeah, that's the finish line. This is where we're going.

With a timeline. With a timeline. Right. And that's really important, too.

which is he didn't say anything about how to do it. He's like, I don't know how to do it. I'm not a rocket scientist. I'm a president.

But moon, not Mars, not Venus, not a space station. Moon, right? And we're going to do it by 1970. And they're coming back.

And they're coming back. And you've got to bring them back safely, right? And so just that is such a clear, focused challenge. And there's so many, again, goals that have to then kind of get disaggregated out of that.

And so many, yes, plans about what you're going to do, what you're going to put in place in 1963, 64, 65 and on and all of the budgeting and all of that. Yeah, all the missions, right? All the missions. But like the big picture of like in the arena of space, what do you want to do?

Is something otherwise up until that point, we were just kind of reacting, you know, at least in the public imagination to whatever the Soviets had cooked up. And you never want to be in a place where your your challenges are being set by your competitors. Yeah. Okay.

So we're going to get into a lot of that because there's so much about that moonshot, right? That infamous moonshot that so many, I mean, we, so many companies have tried to talk about implement. We've heard it all the time, right? It's like, what are moonshots, right?

But often I think they're either poorly chosen, right? Like not right for the company, not as clear as we're talking about, you know, the first moonshot, the JFK's moonshot, right? The original moonshot was a very clear moonshot. It was very good, right?

It was very well chosen and expressed. But I think there's something else that you're getting at, right, is like what it unleashed for... For the U.S.

, for the team, right? Why focus challenges matter, right? Not just the focus, but when done well, it can, like, capture the imagination, rally a team, and unleash creativity, right? Like, he didn't know how.

Absolutely, right. And there was so much work that needed to be done, right? Now, to be fair, he wasn't coming in completely pie in the sky. But at the time in September 63, when he set that challenge, we had already done, you know, a couple of tours in space.

We had gotten an astronaut into space. Right. And then we had actually gotten into orbit. You know, John Glenn had circled the Earth.

Right. Even if we were reactive, we were doing stuff in the city. We had some credible evidence, right, that he wasn't, you know, completely, no pun intended, pie in the sky. Yeah.

I can't remember. But I think, you know, but there was this, you know, the kind of this rallying cry. I'm always amazed when, you know, people are like, oh, yeah, we faked the moon landing. I'm like, just think how many people you would have had to have had in that conspiracy.

I think officially, at the very least, the full count of everyone who worked on, you know, Mercury, Gemini and Apollo, it was like 450,000 people worked on that program. Yeah. Right. But it's like a significant slice of the U.

S. population contributed to it. And it's like, how would you possibly fake that? But to unleash that kind of creativity.

Yes, to get that many and to inspire that many, as we'll talk about, I think, that many missions and even go through failure. Like, that's what a great focus challenge can do is sustain an organization and point them in the right direction. In a way that is truly future focused. In a way that is truly future focused.

So, you know, you touched a little bit on, like, picking the right goal there, right, or picking the right challenge, right? It was like, well, he's not starting, you know, JFK didn't start from... You know, we have no space program and then we're going to put someone on the moon. Right.

And I think that's one of the places where organizations often drift when they're thinking about what goal to set will be like picking something that's just completely unrealistic either for yourself or the market. Right. Like the market doesn't even want it. Yeah.

Right. Yeah. And I was thinking of. You've written about the Tata example.

Yeah. You know, is this right for you? Yeah. Right?

Can you share a little bit more of that? Yeah, I mean, you know, like the Tata example is a beautiful one of that, you know, most folks have heard me talk about Ratan Tata before, without a doubt. You know, when people ask me, like, who's the most impressive CEO I've ever had the chance to work with? And without a doubt, it's Ratan.

You know, just an amusing, an amazing person. God rest his soul. He passed away not that long ago. I loved your profile on him when that happened.

Yeah, I mean, just an amazing leader. And he had this experience, and he talked about it many times, where he was, you know, he's the CEO of an Indian conglomerate. They own everything from Tata Motors, a car company, to Teth VT, to now they own, you know, Jaguar Land Rover, and all these things in between. Very successful.

Very successful. And he was driving down the road in India, and he saw a scooter in front of him. And like a lot of people in India, the scooter had a whole family riding on it. You know, like the dad is driving the scooter.

The mom is sitting behind him. There's a kid kind of like squeezed in between both of them, and the mom's holding a baby, like family of four on a scooter. Yeah. Right.

And it's raining and the scooter slips and recovers, but damn near kills everyone. And he's so shaken by seeing this happen right in front of him. He's like, there's got to be something that we can do about this. And in his arena, right?

In his realm, right? And he's like, I'm the CEO of a car company. And so he comes up with this challenge that we're going to build a one lakh rupee car. Now, a lakh is an Indian amount.

It's a measure. It's 100,000. So it's 100,000 rupees, which at the time is the equivalent of 2,000 U.S.

dollars. So we're going to build a car for 2,000 U.S. Dollars because he realized that most Indians can't afford a car.

That would be a good price point. That would be a good price point. And so he set this challenge is like, we're going to go build a one lakh rupee car and then devoted the next several years of his life and of his company's creativity to actually making that happen and bringing it to a reality. Yeah.

And OK. And from what I know of the story, right, like he did it. He did. He succeeded.

He succeeded, created this incredible car. I mean, in the innovation that it took to create a low cost car. Yeah. Right.

But it was a market failure. It was a complete failure. Right. And I remember talking to him about it.

And, you know, he such a like without a doubt with the humblest leaders I've ever worked with. And he's like, Dave, it was just right in front of me. I didn't see it. He's like, nobody wants a car that broadcasts to the world, hey, everyone, I'm poor.

There's a status thing, right? Huge status thing. I mean, like, you know, and, you know, again, it would be great if someone had, you know, pushed back. Then, you know, Indian companies are fairly hierarchical.

So it was like, yes, Mr. Tata, that's what we're going to go do. Yeah. Right?

So was it a clear challenge, one lakh rupee car? Absolutely. Was it the right challenge? Obviously not.

And he, you know, it's just, it's a beautiful example of like, I love his vision and I love his commitment, right, to doing that. But, you know, if you're a CEO, don't go off and try to set these challenges by yourself. Get help. There's smart people on your team.

Like, what are all those strategy folks for? Help them. Yeah. Like, draw upon the best talent in your company.

In your business, yeah. So I'm sure that Kennedy didn't just wake up that September morning and go, hey, moon. Yeah. Like he had help formulating that plan.

Exactly. OK, so there's there's a huge part of that. I was like, is it right for you? Right.

Like setting something that is right for you, both in, you know, stretches you, but achievable. And also, like, does the market want it? Right. Certain things like that.

Right. So we've got our great iconic example, but it's, you know, a political one. We've got a bad example. What comes to mind for you when you think of, like, great enterprise-focused challenge?

You know, the classic one for anyone who studied strategy in business school, and I think it still holds, is the story of Komatsu, right? And Komatsu is, you know, they make earth movers, bulldozers, right, and big construction equipment. A caterpillar-type company. A caterpillar-type company.

And when they were coming up in the 70s and 80s, Caterpillar was the dominant player globally, and Komatsu was the insurgent. And so they said as their focus challenge, and it sounds vague if you don't have the cultural context, but their focus challenge was encircle Caterpillar. Yes. When I first read this, you're right, vague, because I'd be like, oh, it just sounds like - Go after Caterpillar.

Yeah, go after Caterpillar, right? But, I mean, yes, I know there's a little bit more. Tell me about that one. Yeah, because that idea of Encircle comes from the game of Go, which is kind of like, let's call it East Asian chess.

Okay, yeah. But playing Go and... The move of encircling, if you think about it, it's like, you know, if you are the white pieces and I'm the black pieces and you have a white piece, and if I can put black pieces all around your white piece, I then turn that white piece to a black piece. Yeah, you're mine.

You're mine. I convert it, right? And I capture it. And that's what encircling is.

And so when Komatsu was saying encircle Caterpillar, what they were saying was that, no, we're going to go one by one to markets that Caterpillar is in now, but ignoring. And we're going to surround them and we're going to surround them from a supply chain point of view. We're going to surround them from a servicing point of view. We're going to surround them from, you know, just making sure that that territory is better supported than what Caterpillar can possibly do.

And we're going to flip that market and then we're going to go do it again. And then we're going to do it again. It's a very clear strategy, which is not we're just going to go head to head, you know, with Caterpillar. Yeah.

When I love it, like we talked just now, right? It's got the clear, like, strategic forethought, right? Of like that this is. You've done your homework.

You've done your homework, but it's ambitious. That's right. That's hard to do. Caterpillar was the dominant player at the time.

And we don't know how to do it necessarily. Right. But what I also love about it, and we're getting a little too of like how to express these things. But the idea of encircle, like you said, again, going back to that, turning these ideas like the space program was there before, but JFK's Moose Shot was a rallying cry, right?

A concept. And there's something about touching, knowing the culture and saying encircle Caterpillar, right? That just, you can see what that does to the organization. Yeah.

I mean, it's very concrete. It's very visual. And it is speaking to its audience, right? People who can understand that, right?

You know, what's funny is, like, I always imagine if, like, people at, you know, Caterpillar, like, somehow got a copy of the strategy deck and they just saw the words on it encircle Caterpillar, they literally would not know what that meant. Yes. Right? It only works.

Yeah. It only works for its intended recipient. Totally. Okay.

So we've talked about, you know, it being particularly, like, big, doable, but doable for you. I think the other part here, too, like we said, is knowing, I love you and I kind of have joked in the past of this idea of, like, where's the moon, right? Like, making sure that there's a clear direction, right? Like, there's, and here it's, like, encircle caterpillar.

It's a very clear, you know, what we're going to go get, right? And that reminds me of, I feel like one of my favorite example is Netflix's challenge back in like 2006. Oh, okay. What is this one?

They're a fascinating company. They're very interesting tactics. And you know that they're famous for their algorithm, right? Like being so personalized, the data that they have, the ability that they're able to do personalized, curated, just for their consumers, right?

Yeah, because they have so much content. And it's so easy to be overwhelming. You get the paradox of choice. People walk away unhappy.

And so the trick of the game is to serve up something that I would like and have it be different than what they're serving up to you. Exactly. Right. And they have a ton of data.

So rather than figure out exactly what the solution is, in 2006, they do something very similar to, if you know, XPRIZE, right, where they literally call out their own XPRIZE, right, their Netflix XPRIZE. And they say, specifically, they go and ask companies to improve the Netflix recommendation algorithm by 10%. And they had three years to do it. This was a challenge between 2006 and 2009.

They set this challenge internally? This was a call to arms for anyone who wanted to solve algorithms that companies competed for. Oh, wow. So internally or externally.

Like, hey, anybody who can improve our recommendation algorithm 10%. And you'll win a million dollars. Nice. That's beautiful.

That is exactly the XPRIZE. Now, they stole XPRIZE's moniker for that. Model, right? Yeah.

But effectively within an enterprise, I think, you know. Yeah. I think that's a beautiful example. You know, we need to get Anusha Ansari to talk about, you know, she's, folks know that she's the CEO of XPRIZE Foundation, and we need to get her to join us on this podcast for a little bit to talk about how does XPRIZE actually do that?

Because that is yes they they stole the notion or they learned from the notion of x-price but it it also sounds like they did it really well they studied it right did it work did it worked right so the company that won it is belcor's pragmatic chaos team but that's what they called it um but as we know like that's why i started is like this was there's this back in it's hard to remember It was 2006, 2009, right? So this is very early and really started, like, their algorithm and the development of that and being able to - this is before even having their own content and all the content you're talking about.

So having this long vision of where they wanted to go and knowing that they needed to figure out their algorithm. And this was out of Bellcore, huh? Which is the old AT&T Bell Labs, right? The classic, the people basically, you know, invented the, you know, like half of the technology that we use in modern times.

We're using that ecosystem, right? Of saying, like, let's just get those inventors to invent. Yeah, that's a beautiful example of that. It's super clear.

You've said what is the moon that you're looking for. You've said the improvement. By 10%. And the best example that it's effective is because somebody actually solved it, right?

Exactly. It actually worked. It actually worked. Yeah, exactly.

Okay, so we've got, again, all these things that we've talked about is like great focus challenges I think are - , Big, but, you know, but you can achieve them. They're doable for you. Yeah, I mean, achievable, but like, you know, hard to achieve, right? Hard to achieve, but not out of nowhere.

What was that crazy line that Kennedy used in his speech? He's like, we do these things not because they're easy, but because they're hard. I'm like, what the hell does that even mean, Jay? Exactly.

And the other thing, though, as we're talking about it a little bit, is this idea of inspiring solutions, right? Like, we're not saying how to do it. Right. Like, again, Netflix is like, you figure it out.

But here's what we're trying to do. Another great example of that for me is Amazon's, again, hard to imagine, but in 2005, before they knew how to do it, they came out and they said, we're going to do two day shipping, free two day shipping for all our members. Yeah, that is such a beautiful focused challenge because how do you actually pull off getting you something within two days for all of our members, not just the ones who are in metropolitan areas? Yeah, that was crazy.

Yeah, right. And I think throughout their history, Amazon has been incredibly good at setting very clear challenges for their teams to rally against. And that's a beautiful one, you know, get you stuff within two days, not just for some of our people, but for all of our people. Yeah.

It's a beautiful challenge. Very clear as to what you're trying to achieve. You may not, you know, solve it in one year. It might take you a little while, just like the Netflix example that you brought up.

Right. But it tells you what's important and what you should spend your time on. Yes. I think there's something else that maybe is unsaid in some of these that there's also something important.

Authentic about them right we said like can you achieve them are they achievable in that time frame that kind of stuff like they should stretch you but not a you know but are they also strategically important you know for you in the way that you know we're talking about you know, tata's you know one one like rupee car right yeah is it appropriate for amazon right like getting stuff to people in in two days is it like it's a very clear you know value you know to its customers Yes.

But there's also, I think, examples of, I think, what I'm getting at is more inauthenticity around, like, is this something your company can really wants to take on, right? Yeah, you actually mean it. So you actually mean it, right? Yeah.

So BP, I'm thinking famous like 2020, right? It's like, we're going to become a net zero company by 2050. BP. Oh, the petroleum company.

Yes. Right. So famously become a net zero company by 2050 or sooner. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, when an oil company says we're going to be a net zero company. But I've got to look two or three times just to make sure, like, do they actually mean it or not? Do they actually mean it?

And like you said, part of it, maybe this is you only see it over time. But with a lot of the ones that we said are good challenges is like you kind of know they're good because they worked. Yeah. Right.

And part of it is you see some of these, you know, either very vague or we don't mean them challenges that just never come to fruition. Yeah. And you have to mean it. I mean, I think that's part of what, you know, certainly the Tatas had and Amazon had is like they have a founder who's in place who is, you know, Jeff Bezos is just an incredibly relentless human being, right?

Like no two days. Even, you know, in the case of the Tata car, right? There was a point in time after like trying to do this and do this and failing multiple times that, you know, Ratan Tata's senior leadership team came to him and said, you car is still an order of magnitude cheaper than anything else. $4,000, that's still a super cheap car when every other car is $20,000.

And I remember he said to me, he's like, no, Dave, a promise is a promise. He's one of the most ethical leaders I've ever worked with. But that idea of a promise is a promise is for him how he just shows that he actually means it. And I remember when I think it was John Brown at the time was the CEO of BP, you know, but, you know, public company CEO, limited ability to kind of say a promise is a promise like Ratan Tata.

Right. When you have the board or something behind you. And you have all the controlling shares, right? Yeah.

Like him or Jeff Bezos. But, you know, do you actually mean it? And I do believe that, you know, Lord Brown at BP actually meant it. I just don't think anyone else.

The rest of it. Exactly. I just don't think they believe it. But I do think that's a consideration for what you're setting, right, is what's the environment you're going to put it out into.

There is no point in setting a focus challenge that no one on your leadership team, you know, is buying into. Yeah. Who cares about, right? You've got to take people with you on that.

Okay. So when we're talking about these individual focus challenges, right, we talked about, you know, again, ambitious, but, you know, not out of nowhere. You got to be clear, like, where's your moon, right? Like, make sure you've got a clear moon.

It's not about it inspires solutions, right? They're at the right horizon. Clear, but not constraining in that way that is like here's all the how. Right.

You know, something we haven't talked a lot about, but I do think some of the most effective ones are a little more like visual, like when we talked about encircle, right? Like there was something about that, obviously within the culture, right? But I think there's something great about that. Something I can see, right?

Like I can see going to the moon. I can see encircling a game piece. Yeah. Right.

And it just captures the imagination. And I love what you just said, you know, with Tata as well, right? With this idea that you are committed to it and it stays true over time. Like, this is not a shoot for the moon and land on the stars thing.

It's like, no, we are going to the moon. No, it's moon, exactly. It's like, we're going to the moon. And I think that brings sort of like the last thing I think we should talk about is that piece that because these are longer horizons, these are inherently future focused.

That this is where we have to, this is where plans come in, right? That this is where having multiple missions, having those plans about how am I going to, you know, mission one, right? This is the version we're going to try out now that gets us to the moon, but we're still going to the moon. Yeah, right.

I mean... We went to the moon, but we didn't go there with Mercury 1. We went there with Apollo 11. There was Mercury, then Gemini, then Apollo.

And each of those, going back and just reading about this, I was amazed. Do you know why it's called Gemini versus Mercury, like how they named those things? Is it fascinating? No.

Mercury because it was a one-seater, right? Okay. And Gemini was, okay, we're going to send up two guys. Two-seaters, a Gemini, right?

Okay. But, you know, but it just shows you it was kind of staging as to how to do that. And I think Gemini 1 was like a horrible, terrible accident where like all the astronauts were burned alive on the launch pad. And it's like, no, OK, that's horrible.

Right. That that's a tragedy. And we're going in the moon. So go start working on Gemini 2.

I think that gets to something that I think is so important. I keep going back to this, like, rallying cry, right? Like, why is this so important to choose the right one and also express it in the right way? Yeah.

And I think there's... It's so hard, right? I mean, it's... It's hard, yeah.

You know, if you are an enterprise leader in a large organization, along the way, you went to training and you got advice and feedback from your boss on, like, how to be, you know, how to set good, you know, strategic plans, you know. Which is an oxymoron. Really, it's not a strategy. It's a plan.

You learn how to figure out what your AOP is going to be. And there's certainty in that, right? Inherently in that, it trains us to be certain. That's right.

But most companies do absolutely no development work or no training in helping their leaders get good at setting focused challenges. Yeah. Right? And so then suddenly you were the head of a business unit or, God forbid, the CEO.

And, you know, you and I have seen this where people start turning to their PR team. Yeah. We need a focus job. We need a motto or mantra.

Yeah, right. Exactly. And that's when you get something super vague. I mean, you must have...

You've seen these all the time, like organizations who have just come up with something that sounds snappy but means absolutely nothing, right? Oh, yeah. You see that in all of the work that we do. I mean, my favorite, too, is like you think something like WeWork in 2017.

WeWork. You're right. I mean, easy to make fun of now, but WeWork, they elevate the world's consciousness. That was their - OK, I mean, yeah.

There's so much wrong with that, but I'm just like, what? What? But, okay, but that is, I mean, I could, let me give them a benefit of the doubt for it. That sounds like a purpose statement, like a broader why of why we exist, right?

We exist to elevate the world's consciousness. As a challenge, it's not good, though. Now, look, it might have just been hippie bullshit, you know, that was like wrapping up, you know, like renting desks and chairs. We can criticize it as a purpose statement, but as a challenge, it's not a great challenge.

As a challenge, it's totally useless. Yeah, totally useless, right? Because there's no moon. Like, what is the destination we're going for?

But it also, I think, and again, going back to that authenticity, but I go back, I'm coming back to that rallying cry, right? And the reason why it's so important to set these focus challenges and having that longer time horizon during this time, I think goes back to that, if it's Gemini 1, right, and the multiple missions, is that right now... There is, I think, I mean, there's probably never been certainty, but we are awake to the lack of certainty, right, that we can't predict the past.

A lot of us are waking up to that. Yeah. Right? And so I think this idea of setting a good challenge that is worthy of you and your team and focuses them is just, that's why this is critical.

Yeah. And Michelle, you don't have to have the answer. Exactly. You just have to get everybody focused on the right question.

And you don't even need to come up with a question yourself. You can get help. You can get help from, yes, your PR team, but your strategy team and looking at what's already going on inside your company that's really good and do the hard work. Go through all of the messiness.

And you don't even necessarily need to have just one, you know, focus challenge for your whole company. You can't have 50. You can have three or four. These are the big things.

Maybe if you're a small team, it's like one, you know. But if it's the enterprise, it's, you know, three to five for all of you, right? Yeah. Okay.

So you're right. If you're a startup, one focus challenge, right? But if you're a business of any scale, like a couple of billion dollars, call it like four or five focus challenges. And if you're like a giant multi-business conglomerate, then each business might have its own focus challenges.

But it should be a small enough set that is written concretely enough and succinctly enough that when I ask you what are the big things you're trying to get done, You don't need to start hunting for a PowerPoint slide to tell me what it is. You should just be able to rattle them off. Yes. Okay, but it's January.

Am I too late? Laurie, like, kind of, I mean, you said, like, the homework and all of that. Like, what should I do now? No, I mean, go through all of your, you know, your big planning deck from last year, right?

And it might just be already in there, right? You just need to pull it out. More likely than not it's in there but it's written as like 20 words and you need to rewrite it as three right and get it down to something succinct yeah, And it might not be on the page anywhere in there, even as 20 words, but there's like a basic intent, you know, like, get your PowerPoint deck and then zoom back from and go, wait, what is the big thing I'm trying to do that all of these crazy goals and objectives, you know, are driving at?

What's that bigger thing? Yeah. And just start talking about that, what that bigger thing is. I think you could do that with your team.

It's like right now in January, get them together three hours and just do that. Right. I mean, like, spend an hour yourself. Yes.

Just try to do it first. Well, ask everyone to think about it before. But I think it's doable to, you know, something is better than nothing. And translating those to clear focus, Sean, just can be a real unlock.

I totally agree, right? And, you know, there's some, you know, I'm an IBM fan. Boy, my dad worked for IBM. My uncle worked for IBM.

My first job out of, you know, as an intern was with IBM. You know, you and I have talked about the fact that they were working on supercomputers for a long time, but they had a focus challenge that was really all about like, no, no, we're going to make a computer that's powerful enough to beat a chess grandmaster. You remember this whole thing of Deep Blue versus Garry Kasparov? Yeah, the world's best human chess player, right?

Yeah, there you go, right? We're going to beat Garry Kasparov at chess. Like super clear, right? Right.

And how are we going to do that? What is the techniques we're going to use? You know, like what is the kind of machine learning that we need to build for that? Who knows?

But the challenge was super clear and they actually achieved it, right? Yes. When you have that level of clarity, all of the priorities that you have in your organization come into relief. It becomes super clear what you're focusing on and why.

Favorite time of the day, Headlines from the Future. All right. This is the time when you tell us about all sorts of amazing things that are happening in 2035 or 2030, but actually it's happening today. Although today is now January, and I'm pretending it's January.

It's all very confusing. This whole podcast is such a time warp. Okay. Headline from the future in the actual future.

In the actual future. All right. So this one I think is important. Headline number one, right because it tells us a lot about where we're going guess what oxford's word for 2025, was that's not a headline that's a question okay okay fine but i'm posing it as a question yeah okay i play a lot oxford's word for 20 do you remember last year's well such a shit show no what was last year's what was 20 okay last year we talked about it last year and it was brain raw brain that was great right that's the good one it's it's everything that's wrong with, It was a good indicator of, I think, all the AI slop and stuff that we're getting now, you know.

Okay, so this year's, though, rage bait. And rage bait is Oxford's. OK. All right.

OK. I don't know that that is unique to 2025. I feel like people have been using that, you know, for a long time. So people have used it for a while.

But the reason they're calling it out, and this is why I thought it was important as a headline for the future, is because two important things. One is that the use of the term has tripled in the last year. Oh, really? OK.

And so the biggest thing that is pointing out is just the Internet's business model used to be a lot about curiosity. That was the hook, right? Like that was just about curiosity. And now it is now a very well-established thing that we are doing, which is a strategy of rage baiting.

So saying as companies and as organizations, the thing that will lead to clicks is anger. So it's a specific strategy. So like that is the Internet strategy right now. I'm trying to think about, you know, in terms of as a headline for the future, what does this mean?

You know, there is one option, which is that we as a culture will just live in constant rage and just constant anger with each other. That's systematized. That's systematized. But I worry that that too quickly spills over into, you know, we saw the number of assassinations of public figures on both the right and the left that are happening.

There was that Gallup study, you know, year before last that said that 42 percent of Americans believe that we're going to have a revolution or a civil war in the United States sometime in the next 10 years. Terrifying. Right. But I wonder if that is just the natural progression of it or...

My hope is that we actually just get exhausted with it and we just stop and we just turn it off. The idea here that we are waking up, and maybe that's a good thing, right? We're waking up to the strategy that is fueling that, right? That is now part of like the business model for the internet.

Yeah, you know, this is true. Like, you know, another internet word is doom scrolling, right? And I love that we named it because it means like we can therefore notice that we're doing it. The first step is naming.

Yeah, name it, notice it, and then stop doing it, right? And it's like, okay, I'm just doom scrolling, right? And so then I say, no, these people are just rage baiting, right? And then we're more aware.

That's right. Nate Garvis, who's a brilliant thought leader on this stuff, wrote about this now, we're talking about like 15 years ago, that it was the rise of the entertainment industry. Entertainment, like that. The entertainment industry.

And I mean, he was just prescient at that point. And most of us are unhappier from it, but, you know, some of us make a lot of money from it. All right. Headline number two.

Phone before 12 becomes a red flag for teen health. Phone before 12 becomes a red flag for TV. Oh, before 12 years old. Okay, got it.

So we've now put an official age, right? So new studies. So we've heard, right, like there's been early studies on, okay, maybe phones aren't great for us, right? Smartphones.

And now there started to be some studies on like the younger population. But now it's been fascinating. This is now among doctors. And so it's becoming more of like a public health thing in a regular practice where they're saying, We are now doing studies where we should not give kids before 12 phones.

Yeah. There is a serious correlation with particularly anxiety and obesity. And obesity. And obesity.

I mean, GLP ones might change that. I don't know. We might want to be conscious. But I think the biggest thing here, though, was interesting is like, yeah, they're saying 12.

But even then, they warned that, you know, even delaying it. Right. So even if they were given phones when they were 12, that also had a negative impact by the time they were 13. So they're saying like 12 because, you know, put an age on it.

But if we really think about it, it just seems to be like any time you get it, it starts decreasing your mental health. Yeah. I mean, this is where, you know, smoking, sugar, social media. Right.

These are things that are. It's very much becoming. People make money from, you know, but you should pay attention to. And look, if you are a tobacco company, you had decades to see this coming and you should have figured out some alternate business models as to what to do.

If you're a food company and if you look and you have a giant carb factory, then even without the rise of Ozempic, you needed to see that, like, you needed to get off that sugar wagon. Yeah, exactly. And you have ample time to start to shift because consumer tastes are changing. Cereal's been declining for a while.

Yes, exactly. But if you are a technology company, right, and your core business model is based on keeping 12-year-olds bolted to their phone, right, and I'm talking about you, Snapchat, right? You have ample time and warning from headlines like this that you've got to figure out a different plan for going forward because the world is shifting and people's perception is shifting about what these things mean in our lives. Okay.

Headline number three, cloning moves from luxury pets to conservation tool. Cloning moves from luxury pets. But this is like, doesn't like Tom Brady have like a, like his dog is like a clone of his, of his last dog or something. Oh, yeah.

And he's actually only the latest, but this is why this has come up a little bit. But so he has, his dog has been cloned, but also apparently Paris Hilton and Barbra Streisand's like on her second clone dog. So, you know, like this is a thing. But that's why this is interesting because, you know, now obviously, apparently this is a, you know, to get your dog or cat cloned.

This is a $50,000 thing, right? So it's a real business that exists, but clearly niche. But do you remember Colossal Biosciences? Colossal Biosciences.

I do not. They've come up in a little bit, some of our future headlines, because they're the people trying to bring back extinct species. They're playing around with those kinds of cloning. This is the Jurassic Park startup.

These are the Jurassic Park folks, right? Okay. Colossal Biosciences. So they've bought the company that does the cloning for dogs and cats.

And they're also trying to do one of the biggest focus areas, which I think is interesting, is about now they're trying to do about diversifying the genetic pool for animals that are likely to have issues or go extinct because they have a really small genetic pool. Make up, right? Okay, so like there's some rhinoceros who is still alive, but there's only 2,000 of them, and they're worried that they're going to just become all inbred. So let's...

Yeah, so actually the black-footed ferrets, there's only about 10,000. Ah, the black-footed ferrets. The black-footed ferrets. How could you forget about them?

Yeah, how many of those does Tom Brady know? There's about 10,000 in the population, and they only come, though, from like seven founders, they call them right so they're cloning old frozen ferrets to add diversity back into the the pool oh okay they're also doing this with i'm not even going to try to pronounce the name but a certain type of horse chowalski's horse or something you know okay so the the idea here is you know really are we we're cloning which is cool for you know your your emotional needs with your dog, but also cloning for actually saving a species, um, you know, from its own genetic makeup, let's say, or lack of diversity.

Obviously, that is not, you know, a fix for habitat loss and other kinds of threats, but an interesting thing. I think this is really cool. You know, a number of years back, I was on a board with the San Diego Zoo. And they, I mean, one of the most interesting, sophisticated zoos on planet Earth.

And one of the things they have is what they call the frozen zoo. And the frozen zoo is basically, they were basically saving the DNA of all of these animals, right? Well, maybe they contributed to the Cholotovsky horses is from old zoo tissue. So maybe they came from San Diego.

Right. And so, yeah, we're kind of, when clones first started, you know, showing up, what were the potential or capability for this? You know, and we're going back to like, I think the late 90s. We're like, oh, this is creepy.

This is weird. And it is creepy. And it is weird, especially. But somewhere along the way, we found a path into technology exceptions, and it's through things like pets or endangered species.

Yeah, finding the use cases, right? Yeah, as much as like, you know, cloning grandma, you know, which is a whole other thing. Let grandma go. All right.

Yeah, very cool. I look forward to seeing just like where we have to keep a close eye. What are they? Colossal biosciences?

Colossal biosciences, yeah. Yeah, they're both amazing and potentially terrifying. We got to learn more about them as we go forward on this. We'll keep an eye.

All right. All fascinating headlines, but we got to go. We'll see you next time. Thanks so much for spending time with us.

Remember, the conversation doesn't end here. Every Saturday, you can hear from Dave in your inbox with his future focus letters for clients and friends. And you can always connect with us on LinkedIn and jumpassociates.com.

You know the deal, like, share, subscribe, etc. For more thought-provoking content and advice like, where's the moon? Where is the moon? Your hosts are Dave Pitnayek and Michelle Loretta Mola.

This episode was produced by Debbie Marone. Artwork was created by Sierra O'Kerry and music was composed by Avi. The Jump Podcast is brought to you by Jump Associates, the strategy firm for future-focused leaders. Stay focused on the future because it will be here before you know it.

Like January after December. Like January after December.