Accurate Foresight For Modern Leaders

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Today we are going back to the foundation, what it actually means to think like an accurate creative leader in a world where the ground keeps shifting under every business.
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Jay's going to walk us through why experience alone can quietly become a trap, why most executives don't even know what they don't know, and what really, what real business icons got dangerously wrong by trusting the wrong things.
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Jay, let's start at the top.
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What does it actually mean to be an accurate creative thinker as a leader today?
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Well, I think that you have to basically uh isolate uh categories of your thought process.
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A lot of people have hindsight, which is a historic reference.
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They have insight, which is what they are responding to in the moment.
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And then if they are lucky, they have foresight, which is trying to understand the future.
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And you can't do that intuitively.
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You've got to really look at dynamics that are forging it.
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And most people don't do that.
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They sort of today, because there's so much dynamism and volatility, you can look at it two ways dynamism or volatility, the people are clinging, you know, by their fingernails desperately to old mechanisms that are constantly diminishing in their performance.
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And I think a lot of people are afraid, I don't know if I'm gonna answer the question or take on a tangent, to really understand that you're gonna, you know, the the only thing that's always true is change is gonna happen whether you like it or not.
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Change is gonna happen whether you make it your ally or your enemy, change is gonna happen uh whether you capitalize on it or you let it whipsaw you.
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And if you have those two options, why don't you choose the former?
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I mean, the the you know, the the the positives.
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So I believe that the first thing you have to do is uh and I just did a really interesting keynote at Tony Robbins, and it was designed to talk about the things that are no longer true and the things that are that are immutably true.
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And a lot of the things that are immutably true, people have not really concentrated on, and a lot of the things that are no longer true is they're desperately holding on to.
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Now, you're gonna ask me what they all are, and I have such a list on my deck that it's gonna be hard to respond, but let me tell you what's always true.
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Being preeminent, being seen above the maddening crowd, knowing what relevancy means to your audience, gaining attention, you know, really and truly understanding what their motivations, their interests, their fears are is always going to be true.
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Believe it or not, as impressive as AI is, there's a lot of research that says there's a ton of people that do not like really dealing with it.
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Yeah.
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So it's understanding the differing audiences that you deal with.
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And there's just a multitude of things like that, but but uh in a changing world, first thing you have to do is cultivate world-class foresight.
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That foresight can't just be looking at what your industry is telling you, because even if it's accurate, then you're gonna have no advantage over your competition because they're all gonna be doing whatever they think the industry is telling them that you know that they should be doing, whether it's AI, AI agenics, or whether it's you know, it's selling more direct or whatever it is, and it's just gonna be an incremental game.
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What you have to do is study all the other factors that are happening in the world.
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And again, I don't do it at the extent I would like, but I think you should study geopolitics.
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I think you should study all kinds of other industries, related and not related.
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I think you should you should uh pick the mind of consultants.
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Uh, I have a concept that I really like.
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When I have a client and we're thinking about hiring an expert, I will find five or six experts and I will have my client pay them for a couple hours just to pick their mind and see what their sense of the future or currency is before they choose who they're going to work on or work on because they want to see if they're all aligned or whether they're disparately different, and they want to be able to evaluate the relevancy of those different worldviews.
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But since you're one person, I don't care how bright you are, you need you need a not just an advisory base, but you need a let me see what I would call it, you need a knowledge trust that gives you as close of a prediction as possible.
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And and and it's I mean, being accurate is very difficult, so you have to also be willing to hedge your bet somewhat.
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Because you can't tell.
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I mean, just because you know, when you ask people about AI, they they always say that the jury's out because it's changing with such rapidity.
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Yeah.
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It's fascinating.
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If you said, okay, what's the AI I should be using?
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Well, in the beginning it was Chat GPT, then it was Claude.
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Now it's Chat Pra which one of them, and it's just back and forth.
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And what do you use it for?
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And and it's it's just very interesting world.
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And I think that the first thing to do is stop being wetted to tradition looking at trend lines.
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I don't think a lot of but you you look at your numbers, but what are the numbers telling you?
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If sales are down, so I always say people are people are trying to solve the symptoms, not the problem.
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So if sales are down, you could say, well, uh, you know, there's too much competition.
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Maybe you could say that uh people are racing to the bottom, maybe, or you could say that you are not in alignment with what the market is responding to.
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And and if you ask different questions, because a lot of people, you know, yeah, I can say, okay, you got to sell more, but that's not really going to produce an outcome if your sales approach or your sales message or your sales mechanism or your sales distribution channel is not where the market has moved to, is it?
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That's right.
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You know, if I had a reasonable-sized company today, I would have a researcher full-time.
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And it'd be here, it could be offshore.
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And he or she's job would be to keep me apprised and to spill everything that was relevant about shifts that were going on and affecting any kind of industry, any kind of uh psychology, any kind of economic implication.
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And I would have the AI program to tell me what would the most logical first and second and third order implication be to my business or my industry.
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I wouldn't wait to react.
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I would always be proactive because reaction, by the time you have to react, your cash flow sucks, your market position sucks, you know, you're you have to catch up is a very costly game to play.
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Yeah, but proaction is probably the the the least expensive, but the most uh the most infrequently and rare thing that people really do.
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Yeah, yep, yeah.
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You've talked about the framework of spotting uh or for spotting blind spots.
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Walk us through that.
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How does someone actually know what they don't know?
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Well, that's very interesting.
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So it used to be that you had to bring a lot of experts in, but if you really wanted to, you could take your business as a starting point.
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Let's uh let's take your business, okay?
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Uh I own a platform that reaches entrepreneurs, and I reach them a certain number of ways.
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Here's our reach.
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And I offer shows a certain number of ways.
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Here's what they are.
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And I have a Salesforce of X, and here's what they do.
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And we source our clients in these forms.
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Here's what they are.
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And our value prop is here's what it is.
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And we monetize it by the following different uh services and products, and here's what they are.
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Our closest competition is this and this and this and this.
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Here are the departments.
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Tell me, tell me what I'm not seeing.
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And if you just did that, which nobody does, don't you think it would uncover some stuff?
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There's no question.
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And we do do that.
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This is a starting point.
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Then you can say, tell me what other companies in related to.
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And you're talking about programming your chat or your AI.
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Yeah, and I would not do one.
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I would do all, I would ask it of everyone, and then I would put it together and get the non-duplicated insights.
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And you could have, I mean, I have a full-time person that just does research on all the AIs for me.
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And I start with one, I and I, and I think I told you in private conversation, maybe I told you in one of our shows, the key to getting the best outcome is telling it what the what the usage is going to be, not what the function is.
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Instead of saying, I want you to research all these things, you've got to say, I want to uncover all the gaps in my business that are costing me profit, competitive superiority, relevancy, you know, whatever.
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I want to do it by questioning all the different interrelated activities I do and the both the process and the strategic thinking behind it or the flaws in it.
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I want to tell you all the things I do, and I want you to look at them with the most painstaking eye of uncovering where I may be weak that I don't know about, and I need you to tell me anything else you need to help you even have more insight.
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Well, if you I'm just giving you a knee-jerk response, but I think if you did that and you ask it of every one of them, and then when you got your results in, you said, okay, I've got three different answers, and you saw that 80% were the same, but 20% were different, then you put it together and say, give me the most non-duplicated complete assessment, value rank it on the most significant things I have to look at first, second, third, and fourth.
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This is before you bring a consultant in.
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And your consultant's at the tip of your fingers right there on your keyboard.
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And most people wouldn't, they wouldn't think to do that.
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Yeah, that's right.
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But I mean, the one thing the people vulnerability is a strength.
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It is not a weakness.
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You should always be asking what's wrong with my picture.
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Yes, agreed.
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And you should be very happy to uncover it.
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I'm trying to think of I'm trying to think there's one company that it's a big company and they they excel because they solve their problems quicker than anybody else.
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And they want to know their problem.
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And everyone on the on on in the factory is empowered to identify problems and never be penalized.
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Because the sooner they fix it, the sooner they're going to perform better.
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And they understand the interrelated uh dynamic of all these gaps being replaced.
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But the statistical probability of anybody, unless they're a huge corporation with all kinds of sophisticated expertise, having flaws, gaps, underperformance, dysfunctionality in their in their operating system, their revenue system, their any system is 100%.
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Yeah.
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So I would want to know what's wrong with my picture as often as I could gauge it, and I wouldn't just want it to say, here's the 10 things that are wrong.
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I'd then want to say, okay, if these are wrong, which one is the most, which is the highest yielding or the most dangerous to fix?
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How would I best fix it?
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What would step one, two, three, four, five?
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I mean, yeah, you can call in an expert, but you could also use, and I wouldn't just say, okay, my favorite is ChatGTP, so I'm not going to even consider asking Claude.
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I mean, why wouldn't you if you could hire three consultants that would cost you$100,000 or$200,000 a piece and you could get their combined logic, is that something you wouldn't want to do?
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That's right.
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And Jay, wouldn't you agree that today's consultants are probably used, they're probably going to Chat GPT or Claude and the others and saying, okay, I just took on a client and this is the issue, and and it could do it in seconds, at least give that consultant, you know, a basis, right?
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The same thing they're going to do for the business owner.
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Touche.
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And then if you really wanted to hire a consultant, then you would say, okay, here you've given me the lay of the land, you've given me the priority, you've told me what has to be done.
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I need somebody with more expertise in that area.
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Who would I go to?
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Where would I find them?
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Who are the best ones?
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What would I need to say?
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I mean, you got that at your fingertips.
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That's right.
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That's right.
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And most people don't do it.
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They don't do it.
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You know, uh, you know, uh, what is it?
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Uh, you know, just uh forward ahead, you know, damn the torpedoes, etc., etc.
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And and it makes no sense today, does it?
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It makes zero sense, especially when you got it right there as close as your keyboard.
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The answers are right there.
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Yeah.
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Without a doubt.
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Excuse me, my housekeeper needs to get uh get a credit card so she can go spend some money.
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Yeah, I mean, and again, I'm not saying relegate everything to AI.
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I'm saying use AI for its ability to keep you a prize 24-7 and make that a an uh a standard operating procedure at regular intervals, and the intervals today should be much shorter than they used to be because change is so dynamic.
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Right.
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What AI can do also is to keep uh an eye on your competition at any particular moment and and within real time to say, hey, uh not sure if you're aware of it or not, but last night, you know, this was launched on on the internet or of your competition on their website or what have you, or this email went out, or that that email went out, or that that correspondent, or maybe it was something they found in your competition's social media, some big announcement that you are not aware of.
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I mean, that that could be vitally important to the bottom line of your business, right?
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Well, yes.
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What fascinates me is that you can now, and I'm not good at it, but I have friends that are master of you can create agents that are 24-7 just monitoring everything, and they can another agent, they can decipher, and then in the morning it says, here's something new that's happening in your world that you're not aware of, or here's what's happening in the parallel universe, and here's the translated application you should be thinking about.
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And you have that ability, you know, we we did a it was fascinating.
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We did uh this keynote, and I had a slide that uh a set of slides that talked about all the ways you could use it that no one thinks about.
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And again, when you have that capability, people go, oh, technology is intimidating, yes.
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But but intelligence mining and advanced intelligence and um and uh superior advantage intelligence is something that everybody in any competitive field should want worse than anything because that's going to give you breakthroughs, that's gonna give you the ability to see things your competitor doesn't, to act and react uh faster.
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It just, I mean, I don't understand why more people wouldn't do that.
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It's it's absolutely crazy.
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And it's fascinating.
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It's fun.
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The more it understands you, and I keep saying it, the more it understands the action that you want the research to take.
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Yeah.
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If you're just saying, I want to know these things, it's one thing.
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If you say the reason I want to know it is that I need to always be apprised ahead of everybody else of what's going on within my industry, outside my industry, outside my industry that can be applied directly or indirectly.
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I need to know what it is, where it is, every and I need to know a distillation.
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And you tell it what you're trying to accomplish, scarily and eerily, it can do that.
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That's right.
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That's right.
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And it's$20 or 200.
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And in a real researcher, it would cost you, you know, at least probably three, four, five thousand.
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Oh, for sure.
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Yeah.
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And wouldn't be that efficient.
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That's right.
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And if you've got to go to an a uh a live consultant, well, now you're in the six-figure number, right?
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Yeah, but this all goes back to your question about you know how to be on top of however you ask it.
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And I think it requires you to commit to it first of all.
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Yeah.
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You have to acknowledge that unless and until you commit to be proactive in foresight, and that your foresight is not linear just in your industry, but you're going to expand your your uh your your uh funnel to take in every category that could directly impact positively or negative what you're doing.
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And you're gonna constantly be questioning not just what you're doing working based on um on old beliefs, but on what's changing today, because maybe your system is working well, but it's delivering a product in in uh 20 weeks when the market is getting it from somebody else in four weeks.
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Yeah.
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And there's nothing wrong with your system except it's not delivering it the way the market wants to consume it.
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That's right.
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You shouldn't do that.
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That's right.
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Because again, what what most people get hooked on trying to solve the symptom, not the cause.
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Yeah.
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And when you look at the cause, I mean at very least you understand what is ailing you.
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At very best, you know how to correct it.
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But if you're not asking that question and looking at causality or whatever the word is, then you basically you're you're you're relegating yourself to being basically subordinate to the people that are.
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Yeah, yeah, that's a very good point.
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Very good point.
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Jay Abraham on the strategic edge.
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This is why we have so many people watching each week.
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We appreciate all of this phenomenal uh content, information uh accurate and creative thinking.
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Thank you so much.
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Thank you so much.
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Thanks for watching Strategic Edge with Jay Abraham, exclusively on ASBN.