Dan Peña - 50 Billion Dollar Man Dan Pena QLA - 11 Action Step Plan (Audio)

Key Takeaways

ladies and gentlemen welcome to the Quantum Leap Advantage Audio newsletter today I'm going to talk about something that's critically important and it is the 11-step plan that takes you from an idea the Inception of an idea to the actual execution or culmination of that idea now the first thing is you have to identify the idea now this may be a re ation it may be a dream that you've had it may be uh a concept to be to build a better Mouse strap it may be uh a number of things but it's something that you have decided that you're are going to build your exponential quantum leaf Quantum Leap action plan around now once you've identified the idea the second step is you have to investigate it for those of you that have heard me speak before you know that Constantine gratos the CEO of anas Shipping Lines and the right-hand man to Aristotle anasis for more than 60 years told me in the late 70s and again through the early 80s until he passed away that Mr Pena the more you investigate the less you'll have to invest and I'm here to tell you that the reason that step two and again step three of the 11 Step plan is investigation it's because the more you will investigate the less you'll have to invest over your financial lifetime I have been saved countless countless embarrassing situations uh by investigating in fact many of you that have heard me speak before know that I have a full-time private investigator on staff that goes through a very succinct due diligence process on anybody that I may contemplate might contemplate being in business with and all the principles of the organizations that I might U partner up with okay so Step One is identify the idea step two is investigate step three again is investigate now this investigation process as you'll see as we go through the rest of the 11 steps is an ongoing process the investigation process never really ends the investigation process is something that you will be fine-tuning it could very well be for many many years because things happen things happen in life to change situations um some of the things that we look at are the um if the businesses in real estate or Insurance there's various associations there's various licenses that you have to have to be in the real estate business to be in the insurance business to be in the Securities business to be in the mortgage business um and I go through and I have these uh various associations have information centers and with the Advent of the PC virtually in in minutes you can drum up or pull up on PC and download countless of thousands of bits of information about people that have licenses obviously doctors accountants dentists lawyers all are members of associations and they have licenses to practice the associate the various associations for those different professions have endless amounts of information that you can pull up there's the libraries there's uh the the public records there's the court systems both for criminal and and and civil so there's a lot of information you can you can uh get yourself uh involved with uh some of you may know we have a book that's part of our our library investigate before you invest that you can be helped immensely with by uh the purchase of that item now the fourth thing on the list is commitment to the idea I mean you're you get committed after you've gone to the investigation and you're fairly well convinced that it's all right to proceed at least at this juncture and there's no red flags you commit yourself to the idea what do I mean by that I mean you get obsessed you get crazy you get nuts you get psycho over it for those of you that saw the movie in Psycho some people have related that scene where um Anthony Perkins breaks through the shower curtain and starts stabbing the woman as how I get obsessed and I get crazy over these some of the projects I've been involved in the last 15 or 20 20 years I mean you you totally lose it you live it you breathe it you sleep it that's all you talk about to your significant other that's all you talk about to your business partners that's all you talk about to your employees if you've got employees that is your entire life you get absolutely Stark raving obsessed now why do you let's stop a second Dan why why would you act crazy about this why would you get obsessed well as I've said in other audio tapes and as I've said countless times in front of countless groups I've never ever ever seen a high performance person a mega successful person that wasn't enthusiastic and wasn't obsessed about what he was trying to sell what he was trying to deliver Visa a product or a service so unless you get obsessed I can assure you you are not going to convince anybody about anything the biggest not the biggest but one of the biggest failings I see of people that are trying to implement the Quantum Leap Advantage methodology is they're really not obsessed with it they really don't believe in it because if they did believe in it they'd be willing to take those risks they'd be willing to sign their name on uh the dotted line they'd be willing to stick that neck out of the turtle shell as you've heard me say a turtle only gets a head when it sticks its neck out and the reason they don't do it is they don't get obsessed you've also heard me say there's a lot there's a big difference between managing to win and managing not to lose and the reason that most people manage not to lose as opposed to managing to win is because they're not obsessed with it they are not living their life around it okay so now step number four is we get obsessed because we're committed to the idea now step number five is a preliminary decision and Ian by that I mean you and and to the extent that you have other decision makers you sit down remember you're obsessed you're fired up you bring in your people if you have any or you're bringing your spouse or you bring in whoever your is your close net group and you share this Obsession and they used to call me the Vince Lombardi of the energy business I used to be like new rockney at halftime i' pump him up like a show dog it used to be a religious experience I used to go nuts and I used that a lot of that craziness was transferred to my senior people now these are the these are your other senior people to the extent that people that are listening to this tape have many layers of management which will be the subject of another tape you shouldn't have many layers of management but we'll get into that another time but you should sh share this Obsession and you've got to share the idea that they have to live it totally this may be difficult for some if it is difficult for some then they shouldn't probably be part of your closet group so you're sharing this obsession with your senior people you're living it totally I mean when you go to business lunches when you have business meetings when you travel on the planes that's all you talk about you don't talk about anything else you don't talk about a project that you're going to do three years from now 6 months from now or 10 weeks from now you only talk about that project people that have heard me speak before know that the super successful the mega successful the the Ros pero this world focused on the few not the many so you're only living living one project at a time totally that's not to say for people that have many divisions they won't have an obsession in division a an obsession in division B and an obsession in division E but most people that are listening to this tape don't fall into that category so you live it totally your people are obsessed just like you are now step number six is investigate again as I told you at the beginning of this tape the investigation's really an ongoing process it may last weeks it may last months it may even last years investigation never ends again the more you investigate the less you have to invest now at step number six as you continue to get the reports from the investigation that's ongoing you may see a red flag that red flag May preclude you from continuing oh but Dan I've invested time I've invested money it would be embarrassing for me to pull out now well I'm here to tell you that whether you've invested time you've invested money and whether it's going to be embarrassing to you has little or no effect it shouldn't have little it should have little or no effect on your decision because that's where you separate the men from the boys that's where you separate the professionals the mega successful from the people that aren't because they can pull out of a deal they can stop 20% or 30% or 40% into a transaction that's the difference they're disciplined so at step number six which is more investigation you may very well get the red flag that sends you scre sends you away from the transaction step number seven okay this is what I call the action plan or you and the decision makers are actually going to start to formulate your action plan now you further beyond the level of people that you've already brought into the full already started to get obsessed you bring in the next level and you further expand the obsession there was a time at Great Western resources during our five years of of of extraordinary exponential growth that everybody from the janitor from the chairman would be obsessed about a deal we allowed them to know when we were in the hunt for an acquisition we allowed them to know when we made offers we had meetings sharing those offers we had meetings when some of those offers were rejected we had meetings all the way down the line where people knew that we were going to be in a proxy fight we shared that Obsession and it was infectious we had people that worked hard long long hours into the night to help us allow those ideas that started in Step number one of this action plan come to fruition you walk your talk we're still on step number seven it's you and the other decision makers now you're expanding the obsession but you're walking your talk what do I mean by that well for example you never ever ever ever ever ever share a doubt now contrary to what you've heard in other seminars you tell your best friend you tell your spouse you tell your partners well it's a little shaky you want to share information you want to be Airy fairy Cardiff By the Sea I'm okay you're okay Cha Cha Cha that is all wrong and I'm going to give an example of how this was validated not that I needed the validation and stamped in like in concrete in my brain and if I ever had a doubt about sharing doubts this ended it we were in the midst of a fairly difficult acquisition and I'm getting ready to go on a long trip business and the vice chairman of the company who happened to be one of the other co-founders asked me he says dan how do you think things are going and I said um it's going to be an uphill battle it's going to be tough sledding I remember using the words tough sledding didn't say it was impossible didn't say we weren't going to get it done didn't didn't say anything else now I go away for three weeks ostensibly with my team of trained assassins business assassins working through the formula working through our methodology and I get back three weeks plus later and I walk into the office and it looked like I remember the day President Kennedy was shot November 22nd 1963 and that's what it looked like when I walk back into my offices you thought somebody had died you thought I had died and I come back and I couldn't understand it everybody looks depressed and everybody looks dejected and so I go into my office I bring some people in and I ask them what the hell happened and they said well uh you know the deal's collapsed well how did it collapse when I left it hadn't collapsed now how come nobody called me how come I I'm coming back like you know like I'm I'm landing from Mars and I'm I'm seeing what the hell happened and so I made it my business to talk to the senior people and for the next several weeks weeks while I was resurrecting the transaction I went back and I followed step by step where that information came from and as it turns out what I had told the vice chairman he had told his wife when he translated it to his wife he used some different words when his wife was at a health spa here in in Houston or there in Houston he she was there with a wife of another senior executive when the other wife of the senior executive asked well what how's the how's the transaction going she said the old man says it's probably not going to come to fruition the old man being me well I've never been in a woman's steam room but I'm informed that they wear little towels around them and there was a an employee a little girl was picking up towels that were on the ground and that girl was the daughter of one of our Pumpers a pumper is a field hand that works in the field um and she heard that so she went back to her father a lowlevel employ and said Dad the old man said I heard Mrs so and so tell Mrs so and so that the old man which is Mr Pena says that the deal has collapsed well now that information filtered from the very low levels of management of great russan resources to the upper levels now if you were working on the transaction and you heard that the chairman of the board of a public corporation said the deal had collapsed how hard would you work on it would you try to resurrect it when the very founder chairman president and chief executive officer said that the deal was dead no not likely so it became a self-fulfilling prophecy so virtually every single person in the company just let it drop down the toilet with a tidy ball man now when I say that if I needed any validation about never sharing a doubt that was it to this day as all good politicians all good senior man management and CEOs of public companies I don't share any doubts now the day before Mr Nixon resigned as president of the United States I believe it was 1974 on the Friday before the Monday everything was fine he wasn't resigning yet he resigned and he was given um clemency or whatever it's called by President Ford um when Donald Trump filed bankruptcy a few years ago he got off on the Friday before the Monday and said nothing was further from the truth everything couldn't be better when you see people that are running for president the presidency or the governorship or the US Congress the day before they resign they have no intention of resigning you see it time and time again they never share their doubts yet always in business you hear oh things are going lousy I'm not going to be able to make payroll things aren't going our way interest rates are against us all you hear is doubt and we wonder why the smaller companies the less sophisticated companies the companies that don't follow or and or believe not and or but and believe in the Quantum Leap methodology they share doubts did you ever hear Gates Dale jobs leoka one one of the great sales jobs of all time was LE coka getting up and telling Congress that he could turn around Chrysler there was no way he could turn around Chrysler zero is one of the one of the great BS lines of all time of all business in this Century you don't share doubts if you don't follow anything else in the quantum Le methodology you're going to be a lot better off and you're going to be a lot farther down the Continuum towards geometric growth if you don't share doubts and this is part of walking your talk you are visualizing positive occurrences you are always acting as if you have no limits to your abilities now step number eight you're putting together a critical path now who's going to put this critical path together you know it's your other decision makers now of course for those of you that are listening to this tape that don't have other decision makers and you have no other levels of management other than you you and you well then you're doing all these steps okay so number eight is a critical path if you have other decision makers they're putting it together if you don't it's you now what do I mean by a critical path now I don't mean it so much like in the MBA sense um I mean it more like a detailed observation of a timeline in other words on Monday or Tuesday or on February the 16th through the 20th or March the 5th through the March the 8th these things should be happening if they're not happening then and that affects certain other decision trees and so you've put together this timeline so you can see very accurately if you're on target it's one thing being one or two or three days off Target as opposed to six or eight or 10 or 12 months off Target and what I see when people put together these timelines they put them together all too generically and so it's very difficult to to notice that you really are off Target okay and the and and the the next thing that I see when people do put together a timeline or critical path is they forget that it has to be continually measured there's continual measurement you know when we we we we fire a rocket ship that goes to the moon or to Mars or wherever they're going nowadays 90% of the time it's off Target how do we get it back on Target and obviously there's been a critical path put together they didn't just fir the rocket uh that carried men to the Moon a number of years ago and and it get there willy-nilly it's continued a Readjustment what we do is when we have a plan we have a critical path or we have a business plan what we we write it down like it's in concrete like it's the Bible it's like the Ten Commandments we put it in a top drawer and then we never if we look at it we sure as heck then never change it all critical paths all business plans have to be continual continually measured and monitored the ninth step in our Quantum Leap action plan is the implementation of this plan up through step eight now what do I mean by that well first of all again if you have levels of management Beyond yourself then it's your other decision makers that are doing the implementation not you for those of you that started your company with just one employee you then it's you you and you again just as I did when I started Great Western Resources with $820 a least tax machine in a phone in a spare bedroom which ultimately became the nursery of my uh my oldest son okay so now how are we going to implement we're going to write this plan we're going to monitor it and but you're going to have the followup of the plan of the implementation again for those of you that have other than yourself and you're going to have the followup of at all the other levels not your you're not going to be following up you're not going to be calling you're not going to be saying oh Item B on page six line seven hasn't been done yet it's not you remember Quantum Leap methodology is all about macro thinking not micro thinking it's about concept selling not individual item selling so you're going to have other people following up and making sure that each and every aspect of the plan has been implemented now you're also going to have the followup at the other decision maker levels it's not going to be you they will follow up to make sure so you may have if your organization's large enough you may have two or three levels following up on the implementation from senior to Junior okay step number 10 is what I call the execution now what do I mean by that it kind of sounds that perhaps step number eight and N or kind of execution a form of execution no that's not really what I mean by execution I mean the other levels of decision makers that are both carrying out the critical path and the implementation are staying laser being focused but more importantly now these are the people that you're staying focused on to make sure that it happens you are not going down to middle management as some of the companies I'm involved in right now the founder will go down and tell a marketing guy that the bullet points and a marketing piece are no good well first of all he shouldn't be doing that number one number two if he has any comments he should be going to for example the vice president of marketing or the director of marketing not the poor guy that's writing the bullet points so to the extent that they're you're focused you're focused not on the actual person that's doing the work you're focused on the people that he reports up through now another part of execution is leading from the front what do I mean by Leading from the front well I've used a number of analogies over the years but part of which is never ever second guessing your employees people have heard me say that uh part of um the conventional wisdom is that you know we're not supposed to make mistakes and you've heard me say time and time again that Mr Gates the founder of Microsoft actually pays bonuses for making mistakes if he's paying bonuses for making mistakes and why does he do that he pays large dollar bonuses for making mistakes because he wants people to stretch he wants people to get outside the box he wants people to as they say uh push the uh um the the size of the envelope uh you want people to think that there are no rules Vis A what they're doing so if that's the case then you can't expect or you can't tolerate people within your organization that will second guess and say John if you had done this this would have happened you've heard me say that I when I am making a suggestion to somebody that I work with I say next time implicit and next time is there's going to be a next time if there's going to be next time it's because you're not going to fire his butt or her butt for making a mistake there are organizations that I've walked into in recent years that realize that they have what I call a zero zero tolerance system and we're not talking about manufacturing tolerance we're talking about zero tolerance to mistakes if somebody makes a mistake they get their head lopped off you can't expect people to grow and you certainly can't expect your organizations to grow geometrically if you do not follow the idea that you can never second guess anybody that's part of your organization and more importantly than second guess somebody that's part of your organization is you can never ever ever second guess yourself I see more entrepreneurs more founders of more organizations that live by The Credo what if iida I'd have done this what if i'a been there what if i' have gone to that bank what if I Hada made this manufacturing change what if what if what if I may be in I may be wrong but I'm never in doubt youve heard me say that and virtually all the high performing people that I'm aware of and all the high performing people that I've had the pleasure to be exposed to and sit in meetings with and hear on the Das at various times in my business career never second guess themselves they never suffer under the syndrome of if Ida it's extremely important because the IFA syndrome can spread Beyond The Boardroom it can spread down to the very most menial task being done in your organization now we've gone through 10 steps the 11th step is constant re-evaluation of the first 10 I've already said what's wrong in my judgment with most business plans most critical past and the like are that they're written you think they're the Ten Commandments that came down from the mount and they're put in the top drawer of your desk and nobody's ever looked at them again nobody's ever refined them nobody's ever redefined what the objective was nobody has ever continued to measure them in objective manner the entire processes that we've just gone through from number one idea identifying the idea through number 10 the execution has to be re constantly re-evaluated one of the reason the great resting resources was the fastest growing natural resource company in the United States for five years in a row is the very reason that I'm involved in eight or nine rapidly growing companies today is we continue to re-evaluate where we started from where we are and where we're going our vision has changed our mission statement is General we want to dominate our industry and almost everything that I'm involved in in fact everything I'm involved in we want to dominate from that things have changed some of you realize that I'm in the textile business and the vision that we had in the textile business fire resistance end of the textile business has Chang changed as our process has changed we have become more proficient in certain areas of textile fire resistance wear and less proficient in others as the industry has grown in other areas where we thought we could be dominant we are now dominant or potentially dominant in other areas it's a constantly changing regimen now let me just review our 11-step idea to execution plan one identify the idea two investigate always investigate three investigate s more when you think you've investigated it all you've probably only half done four commitment to that idea you are committed to that idea you get obsessed you get nuts you get crazy five preliminary decision that's you and others you share your obsession with your other top decision makers and you live it totally six investigate again at as I said the investigation process never ends you are to you are always investigating so at this juncture after your preliminary decision by you and uh your your second level of managers you're continuing to investigate number seven I call it the action plan that's means you and the other decision makers further expand the your obsession throughout the organization that's you and the other decision makers and next you walk your talk and I walk your talk I mean never ever ever ever share any doubts with the project the project is Alive and Well on the Friday and it may be in bankruptcy on the Monday at 8:00 a.m. number eight critical path again that this critical path that's put together is put together by the other decision makers not you and that's more or less a decision uh detailed observation of a timeline and remember it's ually measured it's not something static life isn't static either as business number nine your implementation the implementation is by the other decision makers and you f have all the followup at all the other levels to the extent that you have other levels and you have followup by these decision makers number 10 the execution that's laser Beast beam focused execution from you to the other decision makers and you lead from the front and by lead from the front again I say you never second guess your people and you're sure as hell never second guess yourself and number 11 is a constant reevaluation of 1 through 10 if you follow these 11 steps you will one enhance the probability of geometric and exponential growth dramatically and especially the investigation phases of this 11 steps the more you investigate the less you'll have to invest