The Transformation Challenge: The Six Steps of Planning and Execution Welcome to our podcast listeners wherever you might be in the world today, this is Steve Shallenberger your host. And have you ever had a big problem in your life, a challenge or a tremendous potential opportunity and not really sure how to tackle it? How to start? How do you develop it? How do I solve this problem? And sometimes the problems are highly emotional or discouraging. You're just not sure what direction to turn. Have you ever been immobilized by a problem so big that you just couldn't get going on it? Well, today we're going to talk about a tremendous process, it's an invitation really to each one of us of how to take our bad where it exists and make it better. And how to take your good and make it better. And how do we take our better and make our best and there is a process, it's a challenge really to each one of us. We call it the Transformation Challenge, and it is an invitation to each one of us to take these types of situations and transform them into something that is good, better and best. And how do we get the best results? This is the Transformation Challenge. When they come down the pike at us, whether it's a threat, or an opportunity, or a problem that we say we will take it on we because of our leadership, because of our commitment to get things to a better place, we will transform this. And so, let's go, game on. This is the idea, it's almost a response. So, we'll talk about a skill that you can use over and over and over again, that you can be courageous that you can have confidence, and be excited to tackle things. Wouldn't that be wonderful? And not only that, you can teach the transformation challenge to every member of your team. I'd like to give the background to the transformation challenge, The Six Steps of Planning and Execution. That's really the subtitle. About 30 years ago, I was working with an outstanding organization that has had a company named Buffalo Rock, one of the top Pepsi distributors in the world. They've been in business like for over 125 years and really great at what they do. I'll never forget as we're having the chance to work together that Jim, one of the very... he was the Executive VP of the company was sharing with me about a book that he read and he said, "This is the best book that I've ever read on planning and execution." And something happened to me that day that I said, "Hold it, this is a big part of what highly successful leaders do, the best of the best." And so, what is it? This is a learned skill and that if we can learn this skill, it helps us to get to a better place. So, I started researching and studying every bit of literature that I could find. Books, magazines, Harvard Business Review, the Stanford work that they had done and really from the best business schools in the world on planning and execution. How do we solve problems? And after all that time, I started developing some ideas. It had to be simple, it had to be something that anybody could really learn to apply from a child to a seasoned executive of a billion-dollar company. Could we really do that? Could that exist? Well, in the meantime, as many of you know, we've had a couple of sons who have been F16 pilots among other things. Another one has been an engineer and a lawyer, another got his master's in accountancy and so on. So, these you know, it's really been fun to watch them be thinkers about these kinds of things. Well Rob, as he is getting ready to get out of the United States Air Force, and we have decided to work together in a leadership training firm, he brought to bear as we talked about these Six Steps of Plan and Execution, this transformation challenge. He brought with him all of his experience in the Air Force world who are experts in planning and execution. Their ultimate success depends on being really the best in planning and execution and carrying out a mission. And so, what we did as we pulled these two w