Falling in love with the future

Miquel Lladó

• Publisher: Plataforma
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9788418582325
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Insurance
• Index: Business

One of the top experts in business strategy, Miquel Lladó shares with us his professional experience in significant cant executive roles in big, multinational companies. In this book the reader will discover Miquel Lladó's work methodology, and, more importantly, the ideas that have contributed to him creating his own future and reaching high-ranking levels in business leadership. Rich in real-life cases, experienced first-hand by the author –a deep connoisseur of the ins and outs of management in big companies– Lladó offers a truly organic and understandable summary. It enables the reader to become immersed in concepts worth mastering to fully understand the needs of a company and to achieve successful strategy implementation, even in a context such as the current covid-19 pandemic crisis. Indeed, an inspiring text for those current and future leaders eager to play in the big leagues.

1. Making things happen

“Everyone is given two great gifts: your mind and your time. It is up to you to do what you please with both.”

Robert Kiyosaki

In the introduction, we talked about thinking and strategy. Thinking is the foundation, but in strategy all reflection has one objective: action. It is about making things happen, not about them happening to you.

Adam Smith (1723-1790), the 18th-century Scottish philosopher, stated in his theory of the Invisible Hand that markets are self-regulating, so you must be aware of everything happening around you to analyse how it affects you and try to react to what is happening in the best possible way.

Two centuries later, Alfred D. Chandler Jr. (1918-2007), an American economics historian and professor at prestigious Harvard Business School, developed the theory of the Visible Hand. This is the hand we all have to make decisions that mark the future of the organisations we lead and our own future.

We must assume that we have a lot to say and do, because we are the main characters in our lives. We are largely the cause of what happens to us. We are the owners of that Visible Hand with which we can make things happen, and not just happen to us. Life brings along surprises. It brings us news and events to which we have to adapt. However, given what happens to us, we will have to see what to do with it. The most important thing is how we react. That is our decision alone.

What lies ahead of us is a matter of attitude. I really like Benjamin Zander’s way of thinking. In his book The Art of Possibility, he talks about focusing on the possibilities we have rather than on the limitations. Each of us decides what to pay attention to. Focusing on possibilities or limitations will largely determine our future.

The latter leads me to the ideas of American investor Robert Kiyosaki, CEO and majority shareholder of CashFlow Technologies and author of the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad, who says: “Everyone is given two great gifts: your mind and your time. It is up to you to do what you please with both.”

Kiyosaki highlights the importance of our thoughts directed at what we are going to do in life and postulates that if you think positively, it is easier for positive things to happen to you. Regarding the time issue, he affirms that what you pay more attention to has a much greater chance of happening.

And time is limited. In fact, it is the resource we all have the same amount of. We all have twenty-four hours in a day. Not one more, not one less. So why are there people who achieve more or do more in the same amount of time? This is something I have asked myself many times. Time management as a fundamental element in life. Neither Bill Gates nor Warren Buffett nor Jeff Bezos, despite having made great fortunes, have been able to secure a twenty-five hour day. We have something in common with them: those twenty-four hours a day, a scarce and limited resource that makes us all the same. I am asking again: why, in the same amount of time, do some get more done than others? The answer is that they know how to optimise that time and wisely use it.

Therefore, it is essential to manage it in the best possible way.

I need to decide who I eat lunch with and who I don’t eat lunch with, what I think about and what I don’t think about, who is worth listening to and who isn’t, who I can learn from and who I can’t, what I should do with what I’ve learned and what I shouldn’t do, who I meet and who I don’t, what book I read and what book I stop reading, where I travel to and where I don’t travel to.

I am convinced of the strength of Benjamin Zander’s approach to possibilities and limitations. It entails managing our mind in the best possible way, without distracting us with superfluous, useless and redundant information. My mother always encouraged me to think positively and to believe in my possibilities. Even when I was very little, she made sure that the word “boredom” was not part of my vocabulary. She told me that the best toy was our mind and taught me the importance of being very comfortable with yourself.

When I was invited to share my experiences at IESE as bread company Bimbo’s CEO, long before I delivered sessions at the school, I was asked to share with students what I considered most useful to help them grow as individuals and as professionals.

With the desire to convey the best of my experience to enhance their growth, I reviewed my past: what had worked for me, what had not, what I learned and what I had gone through.

I could talk to them about integrity. About values. About responsibilities and obligations. About honesty. About commitment. What could be useful to a group of students eager to learn and who would probably influence hundreds, even thousands of people in many countries of the world a few years later?

I remember choosing to talk about managing their schedule and their time. I could have shared with them everything I have mentioned in the previous paragraph, as well as finance, marketing, team coordination, speed, innovation, bread, crustless bread, customers’ issues and many challenges I have experienced as a CEO. However, when deciding what could be most useful to them, I thought about their schedule and time management, which is what we talk about the least, but is a very powerful tool.

In my experience, after having had the opportunity of attending multiple sessions on finance, marketing, operations, sales and all the countless topics that are addressed in business schools, one of the courses that most helped me at a critical time in which all my many efforts were fading away, was one on time management conducted by Gustavo Piera. It was excellent. I always carry his teachings with me. The session was about managing those twenty-four hours we all have. It was about valuing time and our schedule. What does not fit in your schedule, in the time you have, does simply not happen or will not happen.

When I was a Key Accounts Manager for Frito-Lay in Spain, our most important customers were in Madrid and our company’s headquarters were in Barcelona. Every week I used to take the air shuttle and spend two or three days in Madrid to visit clients and negotiate conditions and promotions. During one of those weeks in which I did not even have time for my personal issues, I remember speaking to my brother Jaime on the phone and telling him that I didn’t have enough time in the day, that I was upside down, that events were somehow overtaking me and that I was behind things more than I was ahead. Jaime told me: “Miquel, this is about managing time.” And he suggested me taking a time management course taught by Gustavo Piera: two intense days to learn to manage my schedule, to become the master of my time.

The first concept I learned was that you don’t have to manage your work. You must manage your time.

My life changed. In two days, I went from being late for everything to enjoying every hour of the day. Learning marketing, finance, operations and sales had given me knowledge and a basis for my professional development. Learning to manage my schedule gave me the keys to make things happen. It’s not just about knowing. It’s about doing. And once again, you can only make things happen if they are on your schedule. If they are not on your schedule, they do not happen and you stop controlling your life. In fact, you leave your life in others’ hands. Control your Destiny or Someone Else Will, the book that Tichy and Sherman wrote about Jack Welch, is aligned with this.

The concept of managing your time, not your work, is that when you retire, you will still have work to do, but you will no longer have time. If what you propose to do does not fit on your schedule, then it will not happen. We are often busy with work that does not fit on our schedule and it runs your day.

As an example of managing time instead of work, Figure 1 shows my annual schedule when I was the CEO at Bimbo. I wrote what I wanted to happen. That is one way to control your schedule before your schedule controls you.

Before the start of the year, before the end of December. Landscape view. Vertically, the months of the year. Horizontally, the days of the month. Mark weekends, holidays and vacations. There are approximately two hundred and twenty-five days of the year to do your work. I mark in the calendar all events imposed by the company, such as reporting and strategic meetings, with the corresponding travel time. Thus, it is important to report to executives who do not constantly change scheduled meetings. In my seven years of experience reporting to Bimbo’s Headquarters in the United States, no meeting scheduled by its parent company, The Earthgrains Company, was ever changed. Its perfect organisation made it the most successful bakery company in the world. Its excellent internal discipline was reflected in its success in the market. From there, I had to put the events that depended on me in my schedule. In order to make them happen, I specified them on that annual schedule, to ensure that they had happened by the end of the year: road trips, strategic sessions, monthly meetings with my team of vice presidents, quarterly meetings with directors, biannual meetings with top managers, meetings with key customers and suppliers, visits to sales depots and factories and meetings with each department. And I left openings for unforeseen events, always making sure that no scheduled activity was changed.

I still think that an annual schedule is key to making things happen and that nothing important can be left undone. Urgent issues are resolved in the spaces assigned for unforeseen events.

The second concept I learned, another powerful lesson, was about the matrix to organise and separate what is important from what is urgent (see Figure 2). Stephen R. Covey (1932-2012), a writer, lecturer, and professor of Business Administration at Brigham Young University and Utah State University, includes this in his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. The trick lies in dedicating time to what is important and not only to what is urgent.

If you are in Important-Urgent mode, you are stressed, which means that the company is also stressed. If there are important and urgent issues, they are obviously resolved, but we must try not to be at that point for too long. Otherwise, we will hardly manage to move beyond our daily duties.

If you are in a Not Important-Not Urgent mode, don’t do it. You have to learn to say no without offending anyone. And this is another key skill in life: learning how to say no, because we don’t have time for everything.

If you are in the Not Important-Urgent mode, you must know how to delegate and find out whom that urgent thing is important for, since it is not important for you.

You should try to spend as much time as possible in the Important-Non-Urgent mode: it offers you the best future.

Stephen R. Covey says that “what is important is rarely urgent, and what is urgent is rarely important”. The third concept that I learned is that of time thieves: people or topics that distract you from important or urgent things you must do and which you must detect early so that you can avoid them.

Being sensitive to those three concepts has always helped me a lot. Thank you, Gustavo Piera, for what you taught me.

There is also a fourth concept to add that comes from my personal experience: making things happen requires energy. You must have lots of energy to drag others along. It is not as necessary for others to drag you along.

Always aware of the importance of energy, I have tried to rest and eat properly. People can boost others’ energy or they can drain it away. Find your sources of energy. Of course, the environment you are in is going to add or drench your energy. The same can be said about who you work with and who you associate with. There are people who fill you up and others who leave you empty. There are projects that fill you and others that leave you empty. I have always tried to relate to leaders and to professional environments that energise me. We do not walk alone, we walk with others. People who go for solutions and not just for problems, people who see more opportunities than threats. And this is a choice. This brings us back to the Visible Hand. It is about taking care of our mind and maximising what w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Introduction. Thinking versus teaching
• 1. Making things happen
• 2. What is winning?
• 3. Falling in love with the future
• 4. What is strategy?
• 5. Strategy on a page
• 6. Implementing the strategy
• 7. One thousand days to make a difference
• 8. The endless story
• Colophon