Show notes
Hear what good leaders should really be thinking about Richard Medcalf describes himself as "what you get if you were to put a McKinsey consultant, a slightly unorthodox pastor and an entrepreneur into a blender." In this podcast, you'll hear from an amazing thinker who has tackled strategic challenges in companies all over the world. In his new book, Making Time for Strategy, Richard speaks about the difficulties he has encountered working with high-powered leaders. Far too often, they find themselves focused on the wrong things---from how to respond to emails to how to get tasks completed on time. Instead, Richard preaches that a leader's mindset should be focused on the future, where the organization is going, and how everyone in that organization needs to be aligned around a core strategy to get it there. Listen and learn! Watch and listen to our conversation here Richard outlines four important ways you can refocus your time and energy to get where you want to go and find pleasure in the journey of getting there (TIME): Tactics Influence Mindset Environment About Richard Medcalf Richard founded xquadrant in 2017 with the mission of helping elite leaders reinvent their success formula and multiply their impact on their purpose, their people and their profit. He is bi-national (English and French), lives near Paris, and is also a licensed lay minister in the Anglican Church. You can connect with him on LinkedIn, Twitter and the xquadrant website. Ready to be a better leader? We recommend these for great learning: Blog: How To Be A Highly Effective Leader During Turbulent Times: The Five Things You Need To Know Podcast: Sara Canaday—Can You See The Gaps That Are Holding You Back From Being A Great Leader? Podcast: Kris Baird—Yes, You Can Teach A Leader How To Lead Additional resources for you My two award-winning books: Rethink: Smashing The Myths of Women in Businessand On the Brink: A Fresh Lens to Take Your Business to New Heights Our website: Simon Associates Management Consultants Read the transcript of our podcast here Andi Simon: Welcome to On the Brink With Andi Simon. Hi, I'm Andi Simon. I'm your host and your guide. And my job is to help you get off the brink. I want you to see, feel and think in new ways, so that you can change. And if you come here and listen, you know that each time I bring you somebody new, it's because they've done something that really is transformative in some fashion. They're tackling a problem that my listeners, my audiences, my viewers are all tackling as well. And I'm so really honored today to have Richard Medcalf here from Paris. And it's a wonderful opportunity for us to share his new book, Making Time for Strategy, but also to share Richard. Let me give you a little bit of Richard's personality. He sends me an email, and he wants to be on my podcast. Why? "The first thing is because I'm a fan," he said. "I will thank you for the time and energy you invest in putting this out into the world." I have not had many of those emails, even though I have lots of emails from our listeners. But that was really a sweet opener. The second: he said he was sure that my audience, our audience, will find value in the topic, because many of our listeners will be running teams or businesses and hitting the ceiling of complexity, as daily operational demands suck all their time, leaving no space for strategic thinking. Now I'm a Blue Ocean Strategist. I work with lots and lots of companies who are seeking to create markets, not simply compete in them, which is Blue Ocean thinking. And they often get so tied up in making the plan, they forget they have to do something with it. And conversely, though, if they don't think about the plan, all their actions can take them nowhere, a very good point we're going to focus on. And Richard thinks I'm a good speaker, which we will see today, because I think he's a good speaker. He describes himself as what you get if you were to put a McKinsey consultant, a slightly unorthodox pastor, and an entrepreneur into a blender. So you have an idea of what we're going to talk about today. He's the founder of xquadrant, and a trusted adviser to exceptional CEOs and entrepreneurs and their leadership teams. I think you're going to enjoy him because he has advised all kinds of folks in all large and small companies. We're going to let you hear his story from his own perspective. It's much better than reading it. But he's binational. He's both English and French and lives near Paris, happily married and the proud father of two. He's also a licensed lay minister in the Anglican Church, and has an insatiable love for spicy food and the electric guitar. Is that enough for us to think of this mash up today? Richard Medcalf is joining me now. So happy to have you on today. Richard Medcalf: Yeah, thank you, Andi. Pleasure to be here. And thank you for the great intro. Andi Simon: Tell our listeners and our viewers who is Richard Medcalf, because your background is rich with experiences that have led you now into your own business. I liked what you discovered as you were wandering through. You have been very successful, whether it was Cisco or elsewhere, and who are you so that they can now understand why you're so focused on making time for strategy. Richard Medcalf: Yeah, thanks, Andi. Well, obviously strap yourself in if you've got a spare six hours, because talking about myself is my favorite topic. So here we go. I'll try to keep it brief. I better keep it brief. But so yeah, so I grew up in the UK. Started at Oxford University, went into strategy consulting, started at that point to move over to Paris. Five years later, I'm still here. I'm married to a French woman and have bilingual kids and everything else. So life doesn't always take you in ways that you expect. When I was at Bynum, in my strategy consulting company, I became the youngest ever partner. I'd been there about 10 years, and decided it was time to become a smaller fish in a bigger pond, rather than a big fish in a small pond. And Cisco was knocking at my door, and I thought it'd be interesting, you know, a huge tech company. Joining them, I did various roles. The last role was a small team set up by the CEO of Cisco and its chairman in order to kind of catalyze strategic relationships between Cisco and its key customers. I like to describe it as fulfilling rash commitments made by the chief exec when he was talking to big customers. And that was all great. And I enjoyed that. And it was quite prestigious in its own way and all the rest of it. But I got to a moment when I said, you know, Richard, what do you want as a legacy? What do you want to tell your great grandchildren in the future when you're 90 and they're on your knee, and they're asking you about your professional life, what you did in your job? And I realized that although I really enjoy and I still enjoy creating financial results for my clients, and back in the day, I was doing that a lot. I realized I didn't want to just talk about how I helped AT or whoever it was, increase the EBITDA margin by 1%. So I started to think, well, what do I really want? What are the real stories that I want to tell, you know, of my life and my professional life? And that's when I started to really deep dive into, what makes me different? What's my biggest gift? What's my passion, all that kind of stuff. And I started to realize that I went to work at this intersection of leadership, strategy and purpose, or to put it another way, helping people, great leaders. I suppose the way I now describe it, or they didn't describe it that way at the time, was, I want to help great leaders reinvent themselves to achieve breakthrough goals that change the world. So there's a few things in there, that personal transformation, and it's about making a positive impact in the world. So up to now, I've given you all the external facts that allowed me to build this business and my new business. You know, I work with amazing leaders, CEOs of billion dollar companies, some of the founders of scaleups, tech unicorns. One of my clients is an Olympic medalist and is now building a billion dollar business. Another of my clients was nominated as Entrepreneur of the Year by Ernst and Young. These are amazing people. But they're already impressive, but they're looking to connect their impact or make it make a big difference. But let me take you back to my childhood. With me, my sister was born mentally handicapped, very seriously mentally handicapped. She passed away just a couple of months ago. And she made a huge impact on me. She was an amazing character, very determined, very joyful. But we had very different paths. You know, like she stayed at home, she needed 24 hour care, a whole care team. She couldn't be left alone. Basically, she was so needy. Andi Simon: Yes, but it sounds like it had a big impact on who you were. Richard Medcalf: And yeah, I've realized that recently. Yeah, I realized that recently. I mean, I had this high flying career, went to Oxford. I went to a high tier strategy consulting company. I went to Cisco. I started my business. I move countries, all this stuff. And she didn't do any of that. And so I have this real sense that when we have the gifts, the talents, the resources, the opportunities, we kind of owe it to the world to make it a better place and to make an impact. And yet I see so often, we end up in our comfort zone, scared of doing things because we're a bit worried about what we might lose if we were to dare to do something different. Even when we're playing a big game, we can be busy, but in our comfort zone. So impact is a huge word for me because of that impact. Andi Simon: It's interesting, I read an article this morning about purpose. And don't worry about purpose unless you have an impact. Purpose-driven companies don't necessarily do anything, they just have a purpose, and actually I worked with one about a month ago. But your point about having impact is important for our listeners, because you are coming to that epiphany, that aha moment, where more of the same of what you're doing, even if it's financially lucrative, or even if it's for good companies, isn't personally purposeful. And that becomes a real interesting driver for you of what your calling is and why it's so important that you choose where you go, and you do it in a very intentional fashion, so that you have your own legacy and can answer to those kids and grandkids. You know why I've done what I've done in this life? Because it has made other lives better. So tell us from your company perspective, as well as from the book. You know, my segue is, how are you doing that? Richard Medcalf: How am I making that impact? Well, I think concretely, what I do, we're one-on-one with high-end leaders, CEOs or founders, entrepreneurs, sometimes C-suite leaders with their teams. I have a couple of programs that I run with perhaps more junior leaders. And I'm always helping them think about how they don't need to challenge my thinking. Where do I need to shift who I'm being as a leader in order to achieve things which right now are outside my zone as a reference? And, you know, what is that? What's really important? I think it's the fundamental question of what's really important in terms of what I want to accomplish, what's really important in terms of where I put my attention and my focus? What's really important in terms of where I build my skills? I think I described myself as being strategically lazy. I've always been a strategist. So my life, you know, it's why I got to the top, first at Oxford University, because I just knew where to put the focus, and what was important, what wasn't so important when I was studying. And I think it's strategic laziness. I just want to get a big result by focusing my efforts on the key areas. So I think I bring that to all these different parts of leadership, from ambition to goal setting to habit formation to dealing with people. That's kind of, I guess, the fundamental part. But what I find is that in all those conversations, whenever I sat down with a new leader, and we were looking at how you're going to multiply your impact, how you're going to, really just in the exponential, how you're going to break through, the first conversation we would always have, and he was like, "Yeah, I'd love to do that Richard. But right now, to be honest, I'm just so overloaded. I've got so much on my plate. You know, where do I go? Where do I go from here? And how do I even make time for all this exciting stuff?" I know, it's possible for me because that really was the seed of the book that I've now written. Andi Simon: But it's an interesting reflection. I am an anthropologist, and you're an observer. And as you're talking, I'm thinking about you meeting with your clients and listening to their stories, because we're story creators. And the story was a catalyst to change your own story in your mind. And I often preach that because telling stories isn't incidental, it doesn't stay outside of the other person. And as you're talking and sharing your story, our listeners' stories are also changing. But what's important is, as you're coaching your clients and they're sharing their sense of pain, success has now turned into, "I no longer have a vision, I no longer can see where we're going. I'm not even quite sure how it's all aligned with a strategy." You had an epiphany, a moment, which said, Wow, there's something here beyond simply helping them personally transform it that could be instrumental for them to get back to being the big leaders who are supposed to be visionaries. And they're not supposed to be worried about managing the tactical details. They're supposed to be leading people into some particular direction. So once you had this epiphany, then the book came out of it. Richard Medcalf: The first thing I want to just clarify is, for me, strategy is really a shorthand for strategic activity. So as a top leader, we might lead literally focusing on corporate strategy. But no matter where we are in the organization, we always need to focus on what is the most strategic, what's going to move the needle, what's going to have the biggest leverage. And that's really, when I talk about strategy, I mean that. So for somebody, that literally is: "I need to think about the vision and strategy for my company." But then I need to just step back and think about how am I going to maximize the impact for my business unit, or my department or my team or myself? So, yes, I think the book came out not necessarily immediately, but I started to go, "I've got stories here." I realized that a lot of people think that what they need is a time management book, a productivity tip that you think about how to maximize, filter their emails better or something. What I realized was that no, the breakthorughs my clients had were in these deep conversations. They weren't just in the area of tactics, which can be important, but it's not everything. So with the book, I wanted to really bring, if you like a transformation perspective, to this question of how do I free myself up for this? So because I realized that was what my clients were dealing with, they knew that theory about, you know, working on the important things, even if they're not urgent, and this kind of stuff, t…
Full show notes at the publisher 
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
Stay Connected
