Your engagement survey, your leadership cohort, your retention plays — every single one of them would work just as well at your biggest competitor. Now, you've probably already suspected that, and you've never said it in the room where it could be heard. In the next half hour, you're going to find out what makes a talent plan yours alone, and why your generic HR catalog is costing you every quarter that it stays on your calendar.
Hey there, senior leader, and welcome to the Talent Sherpa Podcast. This is the podcast for HR executives who've realized the top chair isn't an HR job. It's a completely brand new identity. And we're going to help you move beyond operating as a support function and become the business-first people leader and the right hand that your CEO cannot run the company without. I'm your host, Jackson Lynch, and today I am joined by my co-host, a man named Scott Morris. He's a former CHRO with all the scar tissue to prove it. He's a man who once asked a leadership team to name their company's strategy and got four different answers, two of which were adjectives. And the founder of PropulsionAI. So, Scott, today we're going to go after something that might sting a little bit, because it's aimed at good work, not broken HR. Competent HR. In fact, that could be the problem. The plan that you could defend line by line in front of your CEO and your board, and it's still wrong. My claim is that most senior people plans are a catalog. And a catalog is not a strategy. A strategy is — and I learned this from you — the allocation of scarce resources under constraint. You cannot allocate against a constraint that you've never ever named.
Yeah, and Jackson, here's why this one is harder from the inside than it looks from the outside. Nobody builds a catalog of HR programs out of laziness. You build it because it's the most defensible answer available to a question nobody in the building has actually answered for you. I ran that catalog for a lot of years. I got promoted by running that catalog. The reinforcement is real, and it points the wrong way.
Oh, that's exactly right. And here's why we're talking about what we're going to show you today. Why your competent, well-run HR initiatives might be the activity wearing a strategy cloak. And how to find out which one of your four levers — cost, quality, speed, or flexibility — your business actually competes on, and why that lever alone should be the one shaping your talent strategy. And what it's costing you to spend your scarcest resource, which I think is your managers' attention, on work that's tied to none of them.
Hey Jackson, before we get going, let's do a quick shout out to our community. Brad in St. Louis, thank you so much for being a part of what we're doing here, for being a part of the community and for staying in it. And to everyone who's tuning in, whether you're joining us from Nicosia in Cyprus — and I hope I said that right — or from my adopted hometown of Buffalo, New York, we appreciate you being here a lot. Okay, Jackson, let's get into it.
I love having these with you. I never know, I get new things every time we talk about it. I didn't know you lived in Buffalo. When did you live in Buffalo?
Six, almost seven years, and it's — I can't even believe it, but it's going on like 15 years, 20 years ago.
Holy cow. Okay. Well, let me set you down someplace I think you've probably been, and we'll be again soon. And I'm not talking to you, Scott. I'm talking to the people listening here. Imagine it's fall planning season. Next year's people plan is sitting in a document, and it's legitimately good work. You've got an engagement survey in the first quarter, a leadership cohort in the second, maybe some sort of retention play on your critical roles. And you can defend literally every line of it. And here's the thing that you've noticed, and you hope no one else really did. You could hand that document to your counterpart at your closest competitor, and they could run it on Monday morning without changing a word of it.
Don't widen out on that. Stay in that room for one second. What's the person that's holding that document likely feeling?
They're feeling confident, and maybe even slightly hollow, though, at the same time. They know the work's good, right? We've all done this and we've built it, and they know that nothing in it is a choice, even though it feels very safe and normal. A strategy, in my view, is a choice about where scarce resources go and what you give up to send them there. A catalog of HR programs is a list of things that are all probably worth doing, but that's exactly why it's not a strategy. And the enterprise conversation has moved underneath of it. So Evanta and Gartner, they surveyed more than 750 CHROs in May of this year on their enterprise priority. Innovating for competitive advantage entered the enterprise top five for the first time, and it took the place of employee satisfaction and engagement. So hold that. Put that one next to your plan. Your peers are reporting that enterprise agenda is about differentiation, and the catalog is probably the least differentiated thing that you have in the entire building.
That is the outside view. And we said different from the inside than it is from the outside. What does it look like from inside of the HR function?
Yeah, our friends at Gartner, they ran a separate survey of 220 CHROs in the summer last year. 47% said that culture drives employee performance today. So let's look at the math. Less than half the people who own culture, or at least are the right hand of the CEO owning culture, believe it's currently moving performance. Less than half. That's honesty from people who can actually tell the difference between running something well and moving a number. So, Scott, let's — maybe as we kind of unpack this, can we use an example company to help people see where it actually breaks?
Well, let's use a contract plastic injection molder. You know the one that I'm talking about, right? 1,400 people.
Why wouldn't people — that everyone knows a contract injection —
Between you and I, we know the ones, or the one that I'm talking about. They've got 1,400 people. They specialize in both medical and automotive. They quote 16 weeks from the signing of a purchase order to a validated part. And right now, they're running about 23 weeks. Last year, they lost two programs to a competitor who was quoting 14 weeks. So significantly faster than what they were even targeting, let alone how they were actually performing. Now, you go look at their wall — and I've stood on the plant floor and I've looked at this wall — three ISO certifications that are framed there, quality in the mission statement, quality in everything that the CEO is writing about in the town halls. Except when the schedule gets tight, they are shipping past validation 11 times out of 12. And that doesn't sound like quality to me. It's not, and that's the whole point. You put your finger on it. When capital became free, that money didn't go to metrology. Metrology is about measuring parts in manufacturing. It didn't go there, it went to another shift in the tool room. So all of the things that they're talking about say quality is the number one way that we differentiate. But when it comes down to the choices that they're making, the checkbook says something else. What's the real order?
Well, if I heard you right — and I was still stuck on your use of the word metrology, which — metrology. Metrology, which I'm sure you're going to share about us in triplicate later, because it's sublime. Anyway, I think the order — the solutions order that you're describing — is speed, cost, then quality, then flexibility. Flexibility is probably last on purpose because they deliberately narrowed to two resin families and gave up the ability to chase anything outside of them. That's, by the way, a real trade-off, which means that somebody in the building did make it a strategy. So unfortunately, the results never made it to the values wall. And that ultimately didn't make it over to the people plan.
Well, Jackson, one quick thing I think that we should be clear with every single person listening. They didn't make it a strategy. Because as you said at the top of the episode, strategy is about the allocation of resources under constraint. Nobody's allocating anything. They were promising something that felt good to them. And what do you think the people plan is around this?
Well, since we both know the company we're talking about, I know what it is: engagement, then leadership development, and then retention of critical roles. So all of those are really well run, and they're not bad.
They're just not pointed at the problem that they're trying to solve, which is 23 weeks. Not why we said at the beginning of the episode — competent HR is the one that gets in the way of strategic HR. So let's talk about the challenges that are holding most companies in place, because this isn't limited to this manufacturing company, right? This dynamic is prevalent in a lot of companies. And I think there are two beliefs here, and I know you do too, that keep that HR programs catalog alive. I have held on to both of them in the past, so this isn't looking outside for criticism. It's internal for you and me, I think, a lot of the time. You know, you've got to start with the one that sounds like professionalism, right? The belief is that the program is well designed and well run and well received, and that somehow it is contributing to the strategy of the company. Even if every proof point is real and participation is high and scores are good for the programs, and people tell you anecdotally how a leadership program changed the way that they lead, right? That's a part of what's holding you in place. And here's the mechanism underneath it. Human capital is close to the only function whose outputs get created by how people receive them rather than by what they're actually doing. Did they actually move the numbers? Finance doesn't ask whether the close at the end of the month felt meaningful or important. Operations doesn't survey the line for satisfaction with yield. So the delivery becomes a proxy for value, at least in HR. It's the only measure that's really available.
So I want to pause here, because I think that statement might be the most profound that we've had on the podcast in — I think this is what, episode 158? — that we are the only ones that don't have a specific number to place on value. Like everything we do is indirect. I've known it, I've never really thought about it. But maybe we're right and then everyone else is wrong. What would it look like if Finance asked whether the close felt meaningful? I think that's something that they're missing.
Let's look at a QBR, quarterly business review. The COO is walking through where the number came from and where it's stuck, pick a metric, right? And you realize that you have nothing to add sitting in the HR chair. You have nothing to add that is going to connect the people strategy to what that COO is talking about. You have a good deck about what you're doing. You have programs that are running. Like I said a second ago, you've got people that are feeling good about those programs, but you have no direct line into where the conversation is happening in that room, in that QBR. You know, the work is excellent and it was orthogonal, and nobody ever told you that because everyone liked the cohort. Nobody's thinking about the connection.
Yeah. Fair enough. And that's my third word I have to look up from you today. What's the second one you talked about?
Okay, so the first belief is really that if we're running good programs and they're well received, we're actually doing something for the business, right? That's the first belief holding us in place. The second one is that you already know your business strategy because you were in the room when it was presented to the executive team, by the executive team, for the executive team, whatever. You sat through that offsite, you read the deck that came out. You can recite back what was in that deck or in that town hall. But go read what you were handed, because it says — in this case, in the example of the contract manufacturer, or the plastic injection molder that we were talking about — you know, it says that the company competes on quality and speed and cost and being responsive to customers. Four different levers, all of them. And that's not a strategy, it's a list, right? A strategy is the one that you're going to protect if you had to give up the other three. Hard choices. And almost nobody writes that part down, because writing it down means telling somebody else that the lever that they think is important came in fourth. But that's the debate.
Yeah, and nothing worth having doesn't come with trade-offs. That's true in business, that's true in your personal life, that's true as you kind of think through the society that we're living in today. Like, everything has a trade-off. If you ever hear people that say there are no trade-offs, you are not in fact listening to an honest broker. And it's just as true, to your point, inside the business, right? And so — but you just took away where I thought I could get it. I thought I could look on the wall, I thought I could look in the strategy document. You're telling me that that's not where to look. So where do I look?
Well, and this is where I come back to the word that you always like to use: audit your last hundred decisions, right? And a lot of times we say that about culture, but it works the exact same here, because what you're looking for are the sacrifices. Look at the moments that the business was under pressure and something had to give. What was it? In the example of our injection molder, quality got traded out 11 times out of 12. And free capital went to throughput, not to measuring parts to make sure that they were of high quality. It went to throughput. The revealed order was — for our four — speed, cost, quality, and then flexibility. And it was legible to anybody who looked at it, to read the behavior of those trade-offs. And notice that both of these beliefs, right? The first one, that good competent programs are good enough that they are strategic, which they aren't. And the second one, which is that you understand the business strategy, right? Neither one of those is enough. But both of them run using the same force. There was no explicit trade-off anywhere. Nobody said, we're going to sacrifice this so that we can have that. But the sacrifices were made. Without a trade-off, there's really no lever — or think about strategy as leverage that moves you farther down the road, right? And there was no leverage for that. Without that lever, there's no constraint to point at. And with no constraint to point at, then the catalog of programs that you have is the most defensible thing that you can build, and running it well is the only kind of success that's available to you. And that's what we want to try and get people out of, Jackson. Those two beliefs, because they're holding us in place.
So just to reaffirm then, the better you run it, the more the loop confirms itself.
Because every year people are thanking you for it. And they're saying this is a great program. And it might be a great program. And neither you nor I are saying that people are running bad programs. What we're saying is that's not strategy and it's not strategic HR. Strategic HR is the deployment of a program that actually moves the numbers in some way that you can measure. The incentives create gravity that is hard to get out of. Thanks, and the people like the programs, right? That's what's holding you in place.
Yeah, and specifically, it's not just that it moves the number, but that you can draw the through line from that HR activity into the business line. So before we get into what we do, I want to take a minute and maybe try to name the thing that I think sits underneath of it. Because that loop that you just described, Scott, it has a root cause. And the root cause isn't, in fact, in my view, your function at all. So here's a loop. You're asked for next year's people plan. No lever has been named for you at all. So you build the plan that's recognizable to everyone who has to approve it. Because a recognizable plan gets approved, and something with some kooky strategic leverage assumptions in it, that's going to get questioned, and that's painful. I once had a boss — he was, I loved him to death, but there were meetings with him that were just painful, because he would question every input, not even the output. And you just try to — what do you do? You shape all of your original thinking into ones that aren't going to make you go through that gauntlet, because it's so just utterly painful. So you build it so it gets approved, and approval reads as validation, and you feel like, okay, this is good. Next year, same request comes in, you get the same answer. As I think The Who once said, meet the new boss, same as the old boss. So no one in that sequence, by the way, I think is doing anything wrong. The catalog is a correct, low-risk answer to a vague and imprecise question.
I've lived it. I know you've lived it. Maybe neither one of us recognized what was going on. Why is it so vague?
I think it's because the question has no owner. So think about it this way: the CFO doesn't need it in words. They read the revealed order straight off the capital allocation every quarter without ever having to name which of those four levers they're using. The COO's living inside of it. They can tell you what's binding this month. No one ever asks them to rank the four abstractions. And the CEO, by the way, believes the strategy deck probably has already answered that, although you and I have both seen strategy decks that don't. But so the question that would make the talent work more legible sits in the middle of the table with no name on it. Which incidentally is good news. It's the opening that is available to you. So we've got the catalog, and we have two beliefs, and we have a question with no owner. There's probably a song written — "A Horse With No Name" is kind of going through my head right now, but just forgive me for that. Scott, what's the shift that changes how someone in that chair, as a result of knowing these things, kind of understands their own job better?
Let me go back to what you and I have done in multiple past episodes, and that is to just make the comment that the top HR job is not an HR job anymore. It's a business leadership job. And that's the shift that you're talking about, right? I think a lot of us, in the function of human resources, treat strategy as something that's going to get handed to us that we then have to translate. Somebody in some other room decides, we receive it, and then we turn it into programs. That's the entire self-concept of a support function. And I think it's why a lot of us feel downstream even when we're sitting in the same room. But if you look at what strategy is — and I'll come back to that definition that you and I share, that we keep using — it's the allocation of scarce resource under constraint. That's the whole definition. It's about the choices that you make. So you've got to ask the follow-up that nobody asks you: what is the scarcest resource in the company? It's not capital. Capital is expensive sometimes. It's acquirable. You can go out and get more capital. The scarcest resource, I think, is the attention of your managers. And you know, it — that's hard. There's a fixed quantity of it. It doesn't potentially scale, and you can't just go buy more of it in a quarter, right? You already control where it goes, because you are running programs that are laying claim to that management attention. So you're not downstream of the allocation decision. You've been making that every single year running the HR catalog. The catalog is what the allocation looks like when nobody names that constraint. And remember, when we say constraint — cost, quality, speed, flexibility, right?
Look, I think that reframes the failure quite nicely. But again, because I'm slow, let me just double-click on it. You were allocating the whole time. You were, however, not doing it intentionally. You were doing it blind.
You're doing it blind. And blind allocations still cost full price. Checks. And those managers, they spent the hours one way or the other.
So, by the way, this isn't just an HR issue. This is a business issue. So let me go back 20 years ago, when I was probably about 50 pounds lighter and better looking. I was working at Frito-Lay. I was the senior director of transformation strategy, one of five people at Frito that was trying to figure out the day-after-tomorrow type of activities. And so I was in charge of enterprise change management. What we were doing is we were seeing all these people come up with ideas, and then how do we make sure that they're executable? And I ended up doing an assessment and I looked at every single initiative, and I can't remember how many there were, but there were 50-ish initiatives. And I looked at what each initiative — what are the downstream impacts of who gets touched by them, and where are the important decision nodes as you went through that? What did we find out? We found out that if it was something to do with finance, it almost always touched a frontline sales lead. If it had something to do with operations, it also almost always had something to do with a frontline sales leader. If it had something to do with sales, it invariably had something to do with, you guessed it, the frontline sales leader. If it was something in marketing and, like, how displays would be put into grocery stores, it had something to do with the frontline sales leader. And at least at the time, that was the area where we thought had probably the lowest bandwidth and the least ability to absorb more. So what we found is, out of the 50-ish initiatives, 38 of them were going through the frontline sales leader. And the second most compressed area had no more than kind of a dozen and a half, under 20. So we could not — and for anyone who's ever led through change efforts, you know that if you have someone who can have capacity for five things and you give them six, the thing that fails isn't the six, it's all six. And so what we had to do is step back and say, my manager attention and their ability to execute the change is in fact the pinch point in my ability to execute all of these things. We have to step back and strategically sequence what will do the best for the overall organization. Like, that level of work as a business process is hard, but we have the ability as capable leaders to do it every single time. So, Scott, with that, walk me through, in your experience, what allocating with sight — I don't know if that's the right way to phrase it — what does that look like? Because I know I'm probably going to say there's a solutions order, and I want to see if you get it right.
There is a solutions order, right? What do you have to start with? I'm going to try and do an example here that kind of parallels what you just described from your own personal experience. What do you start with? You start with your understanding of how the business makes money, right? What are the things that are really important? Now, in the manufacturing example that we were talking about earlier, getting product out the door fast is how they were differentiating, right? So that's the start. That's the mechanics. Then you have to think about those four levers: cost, quality, speed, flexibility. You have to rank them in the order of what you're actually observing. When the business is making trade-off choices, what are they trading off? What are they holding on to? What gets sacrificed under pressure? Not what we say about it, but look at the actual decision-making processes. Then go to the very top lever. The specific thing standing between the business and that lever is a constraint. What is it? Figure that out. Then look for a metric. And ideally, you're going to want to pick a metric that one of your senior executive peers is already watching — your CFO, your COO, your head of sales. You want to find that metric because you need to decompose it. So you understand how the business makes money, you understand the rank order of the levers, you understand the constraint that's on your top lever, you found a metric against it. Now you're going to decompose that metric into its component parts.
Yeah, that's the exact solutions order. So can you maybe help us ground that a little bit with a quick example of what this might look like?
Let me stay with the manufacturer, right? So one of the things — when I worked in manufacturing, one of the things that my CFO was watching very carefully was called ROIC, or return on invested capital. Right? CFO is paying attention to that. CFO is in the CEO's ear about that particular metric. Is it up? Is it down? If we take ROIC and we break it down, then we're thinking — and I won't do, I'm not going to do all of the components here, Jackson — but one of the components is conversion cost per unit, which is your labor cost plus your machine cost divided by how many parts you're actually pulling off each line per hour. And if you go one layer below that, you have what's the count of the parts that are coming off per hour, right? So we're decomposing that metric from the big one that's being watched in the financials to something that we can touch that is closer to, in this case, the factory floor.
And then once you decompose the big metric, you need to start looking for where the workforce actually attaches to that metric.
Exactly right. And in the example that I gave, coming down from return on invested capital, we get down to how many parts per hour are coming off the line. And that's the one where I think we can probably be attaching.
Okay, so the head of HR, the HR executive, they need to be asking: what related to the workforce is going to control how many parts are coming off the line every hour, and what would impact performance one way or the other? So the way I look at it is, I think you have a list of things to look at. I look at decision rights, I look at where handoffs are, I look at clear outcomes, places where authority and accountability don't match, which creates drag, places where a key role is filled with subpar talent for that role, you know, key capabilities that you need but no one really has at the standard that they need to have. Like, that list can really go on and on and on.
And you notice, like, we're going to get — as HR leaders, we might get to the point where we're doing a training program around something. But if we start with what we just did in this example, we're attaching whatever program we create to something that's actually driving a number upstream.
Yeah, that's not the same thing as, I'm going to create a leadership development program because I have poor leaders. Like, that's program, guys. What we just described is, I need a capability to be able to drive this constraint that will unlock this business performance. Okay. And then you measure yourself not on, like, entertainment value or participation rates. You actually measure your success and failure whether or not the business metric moved. And that's, by the way, how we connect talent solutions to operations.
And the same way we decompose the metric, we should be able to watch the change in the metric going back up. Change in parts per hour, change in conversion cost, change in return on invested capital, et cetera. And you know what, Jackson? And I know this has been your personal experience like it's been mine. Sometimes when you run this business logic — first of all, we haven't talked about anything HR here, right? We're talking about business leadership, and that's the role of the head of HR. But sometimes when you run this, you find that the constraints aren't yours to solve, right? Sometimes they aren't people problems. I think we as heads of HR, we think it always has to be a people problem. No, it's a business leadership problem. We're engaging our peers at the executive level in a different way. We should still be able to identify the constraints. We should still be able to have the conversation. It's just we're not always on the hook to solve the problem. Some of them we are, some we aren't. Leaders I know who operate this really, really well run this in an open loop. It's not an annual planning process. They're constantly in the CFO's office. They're constantly talking about the financials, because they're running this same loop backwards and forwards again and again.
So I'm going to push back a little bit on that. And this might come across a little spicy, but I actually think almost every business problem is a people problem. And when I say people problem, I mean the architecture around it, not necessarily the talent that's in a particular role. So what do I mean by that? At its core, if you have a strategy problem or if you have an execution problem, you probably have a talent-related problem. And it's almost always going to be the architecture. So I don't want to have our listener leave with — you know, sometimes you can just throw up your hands. I know that's not quite the way you were framing it, right? But look at decision rights, look at the clarity of outcomes. Look — if you go through that long list of places to look that I shared with you, and it's not on that list, okay, maybe it's one of the few ones that's not. But don't give up too early and say that's not a people problem to solve. Having the wrong person in the seat that's making the decisions around, you know, the handoffs that are necessary — like, that's important. Decision drag, because you say I want Jimmy to be accountable for it, and I want Susie to make the decisions, and they're not connected. Like that, in my view, is a talent problem. So thanks for listening to my mini TED talk on that. Let me though maybe put two things right next to each other and let people do what they want with it. Your CFO, when they're talking about the business, they do this very naturally. But you, on the other hand, are defending programs rather than relaxing constraints, and you're sometimes measuring participation rates rather than the actual business measure, using what we've talked about earlier in the show, which is about "so that." I'm doing this, so that this happens. Your CFO can tell you this company's revealed strategy in about four minutes just from looking at capital allocation alone. They, by the way, never talk about the word lever. Can you? For most of us, unless it becomes really intentional, it's disconnected. So, Scott, do you think I'm wrong here?
No, I think you're right here, and you used a really key word there: intentional. And that's what we're really trying to help every single person listening grab onto. If you're intentional about the way that you are reading the business, you are going to ultimately drive greater enterprise value, because you're going to connect your HR programs to moving the numbers that your peers are talking about, in the same way that you should be talking about them.
So this is where we get to the climb, everybody. It's the playbook for the week. It's where we get really practical. And we're going to talk about three things that you can do this week. But before the first one, as Scott always says — I've asked our CEO which lever to compete on, and he said all four. So I built four different talent strategies, and now I have four things that people are ignoring. Okay, not literally better for that. Okay, play one. You've got to build the revealed order yourself and create a frame of reference for yourself. And you can do this without asking anyone's permission. You don't have to open up the strategy deck, although understanding the difference might be helpful. But here's what I do: just pick three moments in the last year, 18 months, when the business was under real pressure and something had to give. Like a schedule crunch, a bad quarter, a customer escalation, something that's not going well. And then for each one of them, just write down what got protected and what got traded. And you know, that page is going to be the first understanding of the way your business is actually managing trade-offs, which is a necessary step to understanding how to build your talent strategy against it. Scott, what do you got for number two?
So, play two. Take that one page that Jackson just described, take it to your COO, or take it to your CFO, and take it as a question, not a finding. This is how I think we're actually competing in the market right now. This is what I'm seeing us do versus what we're saying, maybe. Am I wrong about this? Where am I right about this? That's a calibration. And it matters that you go that way, right? Because a finding invites defense, it's a different kind of conversation. A question invites a working session — that's exactly what you want with your COO or your CFO. It's aligning around how the business is really differentiating, what the strategy is for the business.
And then that leads to play three. Take whatever kind of macro metric you've aligned on, and then keep diving deeper into it. Figure out what must be true from a talent standpoint for this to execute the way we intend. And where you have a disconnect, now you've understood where you have a talent constraint on your business metric. That's your bingo point. And that's where you start thinking about, what is it that I can do — or maybe undo — to make a meaningful impact on that constraint. And then measure your success in how that operates by thinking about "so that." I'm doing this, so that this happens. You should be able to relax that constraint and you see it on the business plan. And when that happens, you're changing the conversations that you're in from that moment forward.
So, Jackson, we've been talking about this for, I don't know, the last 30 minutes. Let's stop here and hand this straight out to our audience.
Yeah. So there's one thing I'd like you to carry out of this episode. You cannot allocate what you don't understand. Until you can name the lever your business is really competing on, your best work is probably going to be nothing more than a well-educated guess. And the way you get through that is by understanding the metric and the solutions order, so that you can then manage your talent work against those very things. And by the way, sometimes you might find that those aren't what you want to be executing on. Like, now all of a sudden you've entered a conversation that no one else is starting, and it might be the most important thing for your business as well. Like, there's no downside for this, as long as you don't go into it kind of loaded for bear and say, I can't believe you guys aren't doing this right. So, anyway, let me close the loops that we opened at the beginning here. We promised you three things at the top. Why your competent, well-run initiatives might be activity wearing strategy's clothes. We talked about how to find which one of the four levers — cost, quality, speed, or flexibility — that your business is actually competing on, and why that lever should be the one shaping your talent strategy. And we talked about what it's costing you to spend your scarcest resource, which is your managers' attention, on the work tied to none of that.
Yeah, and that's the whole job, Jackson. Stop operating as a support function and become the person your CEO can't run the company without.
And one last thing. If something we talked about today resonates with you, let's just take 30 minutes on the phone. You tell me what's happening, I will help you find the architecture underneath all of it and help you figure out what to do next. The calendar link, by the way, is in the show notes, or you can reach out to me at mytalentsherpa.com. And that's the summit for today. And I want to say thank you for climbing with us. Until next time, keep raising the bar. Keep asking which lever you're actually competing on. And keep on climbing.
