Joe: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to On Boards, a deep dive at what drives business success. I’m Joe Ayoub and I’m here with my co-host Raza Shaikh. Twice a month, On Boards is the place to learn about one of the most critically important aspects of any company or organization – its board of directors or advisors, with a focus on the important issues that are facing boards, company leadership, and stakeholders.

Raza: Joe and I speak with a wide range of guests and talk about what makes a board successful or unsuccessful, what it means to be an effective board member and, how to make your board one of the most valuable assets of your organization.

Joe: Before we introduce our guests today, we want to thank the terrific law firm of Nutter McClennen & Fish who are again sponsoring our On Board Summit this year, taking place on October 22nd in their beautiful conference [00:01:00] center in the Boston Seaport. They’ve been incredible partners with us in every way. We appreciate all they have done to support this podcast.

Our guest today is Rick Williams. Rick has a breadth of experience as an executive and board director for technology companies, including medical technology, software and financial services.

Raza: He is a nationally published thought leader who provides CEO and board advisory services for middle market technology companies. He has been a board member, board chair, mentor, and coach to CEOs.

Joe: He is also the author of an eagerly anticipated new book entitled Create the Future. It is about how to make great decisions for your company and yourself, and will be published in September. And last, but not least, he is one of the rare guests back for a second episode. Rick was [00:02:00] our second guest on this podcast back in February of 2020, and we promised to have him back when his book was published.

We thought it would be in the fall of 2020, but all the better, four years later to have Rick back with us. The book is excellent. Raza and I have reviewed it and we’re looking forward to discussing the book and the book adventure with Rick today. Welcome back, Rick. Thank you for joining us again on On Boards.

Rick: Well, thank you, Joe, and thank you, Raza. It’s a pleasure to be here. I never imagined it would take this long to be on the program again, but things always take longer than they seem.

Joe: And writing a book is an adventure, so let’s start, talk a little about the journey from February 1st, 2020, which was when you appeared on our show, to today. As I said, you expected it at the time that it would might be published in the fall. I [00:03:00] know you’re a prolific writer, but I also know this is your first book, so a lot to learn when you’re publishing a first book. Talk a little bit about what you learned and how you picked your publisher and the amount of work that you’re doing and what you’re doing actually to bring it to people’s attention.

Rick: Well, Joe, I’m happy to do that. This has been such a convoluted and truly wonderful process. Yes, it took longer, but I don’t regret having taken the time to really get this right. If you don’t mind, I’m going to take 20 seconds and fill your audience in a little bit more about what the book is about.

You said it’s a leadership book to help you make better decisions for your company or yourself, and it’s really intended to help the middle market and smaller company leaders who don’t have access to a lot of outside paid consulting support, help them learn by team exercises in the book to fully engage [00:04:00] their board of directors, for example, their leadership team to be more creative about the options they have and then in the end, make better decisions for themselves and for their companies. That’s what the book’s about.

 I drew on my experience as a management consultant with Arthur D. Little, my experience founding and running a company, and then a lot of my board of director experience as to what really are the barriers that leaders and board, particularly where you may have an executive committee or a board that must make a very important decision, and what is the process that often they stumble on and have difficulty that I may have some help through the guidance about how do you go from really what is the opportunity through the real options you have all the way through to the process of finally in the end choosing what you’re actually going to do. That’s what this book is about.

The question you asked was, okay, what took so long, and, yes, I have [00:05:00] published internationally a lot of thought leadership articles. I think I’ve written lots of books, but they’re called reports that sit on somebody’s shelf, so Create The Future is the first book that you’ll be able to buy on Amazon and like Barnes & Noble and places like that, and when I got to the end of what I thought was a very terrific first draft of the book, what happened after that is I was very fortunate to get introduced to a terrific editor who helped me think about really how should the book as a whole stand together.

This draft that we were talking about when we got together had been reviewed by a committee of people like yourselves and give me feedback on it. I had gone over it to make sure the whole thing hung together.

But Meryl Meadows, who I worked with as an editor, really helped me hone it down to very concise language. I think it made the whole book hang together. I give an enormous amount of credit to Meryl for working with [00:06:00] me and bringing me the book that I have together today.

 I then talked to a whole lot of people about who was a publisher that would be open to working with me on the book, and I had to learn about the publishing industry, how much has changed in the last 10 or 15 years, and anyway, I got proposals for a lot of different publishers to publish the book and ended up going with a publisher called Amplify that’s outside of Washington, DC who I chose because they’re kind of a medium-sized hybrid publisher that I felt was large enough to have the impact I wanted, but also small enough so that this book would be really important to them, and working all that out and getting through to the point of countless reviews and re-edits, and “Gee, is this sentence exactly what you want to say for every single sentence in the book”, has taken this long to get to where we are today.

Joe: Look, if you’re going to write a first book, you want it to [00:07:00] be good, and I think we appreciate the amount of time and effort you put into it.

One thing I learned from your press release is that you were named after Rick Blaine, Humphrey Bogart’s character in Casablanca, and I love the fact that it was in Casablanca that you came up with the name. Just talk about that little moment when you were sitting at a cafe, looking at the wheeling and dealing going on in the marketplace, how this title came to mind.

Rick: Well, it is an interesting story, and odd enough that I thought it was worth mentioning in the book. So, yes, my parents named me after Rick’s character in the movie Casablanca.

Joe: Wait a minute, is your name Richard or is it really just Rick?

Rick: My name is Richard Williams. Williams is Welsh. The Welsh seem to have a very limited imagination on the names of their sons so my father’s Richard Williams, his grandfather’s Richard Williams. You can see this going back. So, [00:08:00] I’m Richard Williams, but my parents’ nickname for me was Rick Williams. Rather than call me Dick, which was my father’s nickname, they called me Rick, which was Humphrey Bogart’s character in Casablanca.

Joe: Right.

Rick: I had been thinking for many months, “Gee, do I really have a book in me that would be interesting to the kind of business leadership audience that I’ve been writing for?”

I had taken almost three weeks to just get some traveling in and went to Barcelona and then over to Morocco and was thinking about this during the whole time that I was riding the camel in the desert and going through the Kasbah and learning about the wonderful history of North Africa and how it contributed to the development of science and mathematics and so this was sort of a background context for my thinking about, ” if I’m going to write a book, what will it be about?”

[00:09:00] One day I was sitting in a cafe in Casablanca up on a terrace on the roof of this cafe, and as I thought about it, I took the placemat on the table and turned it over and I wrote out the title of the book, Create The Future, and then I wrote under that some key ideas that I was having at that moment about what the book would be about, and that’s the start of this book.

Joe: Wow. Fantastic.

Raza: Rick, Create The Future is a book about the process of organizational decision making as you put it. What does that mean?

Rick: The book is really a guidebook. It’s a guidebook about what are the process steps for making important decisions. It’s not a “Oh, gee, if you’re doing this, you should do that.” That’s not what this book is about. This book outlines the five steps that we all either instinctively do or should be using when we have an important decision to make. [00:10:00] What really is the opportunity? What would success look like? What are the options? Be creative about the options we have. What are the execution barriers? And then finally making the decisions to choose the path forward.

It’s not about what you should do. It’s a leadership guidebook that you yourself or you with your leadership team can use, including whiteboard team exercises that you would use to go through each one of the five steps.

Now, it’s not intended that somebody is going to go through each one of these steps for everything they’re trying to do. It’s one of these things in which you have to decide. You may use one or two of them, or three of them, whatever, but the ones that are critical to the decisions you’re facing, the opportunity or the threat you’re facing.

We could talk about success, which sounds like it’s a simple idea, but the notion of what are we really trying to achieve here is one that often we don’t spend enough time on. I spent [00:11:00] quite a bit of time on how do you as a leadership team, and it might be a board of directors, for example, how do you actually go about deciding what you’re really going to do.

Often we as board members, for example, either don’t have time or haven’t fully thought through what are the values that we bring to the decisions we make, what is our risk preferences, and also what are the values and goals of other people on our board and how do they factor into this? If all we do is we say, “Okay, we got a decision on the table. We’re really rushed to make a decision,” they’re really not learning from each other and I place a lot of emphasis on the value of learning from each other, particularly when we’re in a board or committee situation.

Raza: So Rick, you’re saying, first of all, it’s not a book of answers that gives you answers already. It is a book about how to get to those answers and the process to do that, and you define that process in five steps. [00:12:00] Would you mind going through that five steps again? And which ones are kind of maybe not optional, but are less done? Is this an iterative process or it has to be done in that sequence? Very curious to kind of go through the five steps with you.

Rick: Okay. Well, the steps again are, first, define what the real opportunity or threat is. Often, we’re dealing with the symptoms rather than the real challenge that we’re facing. Make sure you’re answering the right question.

The first one is define the opportunity or the threat. The second one is success, what are we really trying to achieve when we take advantage of this opportunity or counter this threat. For instance, are we trying to save the company, or are we trying to get the company ready to sell, or is it just for the owners and the family of the company to continue revenues at some stable level rather than trying to achieve some great step forward in terms of [00:13:00] revenue that might be more risky, so that’s success.

Then the third step is being creative about the options you really have. Take the barriers down to thinking about what you might really do in response to this threat.

Four is evaluate the execution barriers, because in truth, value is not created by the ideas we come up with. Value is created through execution. Can we really execute? Yes, we can imagine things, but could we really execute on? Do we really understand the risks, and are we trying to do something that we have to be certain is successful, or are we taking a moon shot? Are we trying to do something that if it works, it’s great. It’s a big step forward. But if it doesn’t, we’re willing to accept failure for the value we get out of learning from that experience. And then finally, making a decision. Now, making a decision sounds simple, “Okay, well, we’ll do this or we’ll do that,” but it’s really not. It’s a very [00:14:00] complicated process.

Joe: I don’t think decision making is simple at all. I think you’re right. I think making a decision is one of the most difficult things that anyone does, especially in the context of a company or organization where there are a lot of stakeholders who are involved, so I wholeheartedly agree with that.

Rick: Yeah, absolutely. I use three variables as factors to be considered. First of all, among the options you’re considering, that I call the choices, how close do they come with achieving the goals you set? Secondly, where are they in the risk profile in terms of acceptable risk to you or unacceptable risk to you. And third, these options you’re considering, how do they express the values that you may have as a company owner or your board may have for, A, what the company is doing and, B, the values of its operations.

So, those goals, risks, and values are the way I [00:15:00] categorize the important variables to be developed in the team exercise that brings out what the board members’ views are about the options under consideration, how well they achieve the goals, what their risk profile is, and what are the values that their decisions would express.

Raza: I love how you describe this, that at each of these steps, there is a lot of value based from one-to-one interactions, one-to-many interactions, and learning from each other. Step number three where you’re brainstorming creative options is an example of where you would need the crowdsourcing of choices, options, and things that you could possibly do. Nothing’s off the table, and then do you recommend that this process be followed like step one first and then step two, or is it kind of not fuzzy, but kind of interchangeable?

Rick: Well, yes, I do think of it as a sequence. What I say in the book is that some of these exercises will be [00:16:00] more important than others given your particular circumstances. It may be that, as I mentioned, thinking about defining the problem might be the most important thing you need people’s help with, and then once you define the problem, may be pretty straightforward is to what you actually do about it.

Remember Einstein, whether he actually said this or not, if he had one hour to save the world from destruction, he’d spend 55 minutes defining the problem and five minutes solving the problem.

Joe: Well, that’s Einstein, he only needs five minutes. That’s not helpful to the rest of us.

Rick: Okay. We need a little more than five minutes, but yes, defining the problem is really the right place to start.

Raza: One other analogy that rings true for me is that, you must have heard this saying, a camel is a horse designed by a committee, and I think that applies to the decision making process of a group, and I think really figuring out that we need to design a horse is what are [00:17:00] we going after, what does success look like, is a pretty important exercise.

Joe: I got to say though, you may be underestimating how important camels are. I speak because I know people that rely on camels all the time, and I think they’re really built well for where they’re used, but I’m kidding, of course, but getting a group together and taking advantage of what they all have to offer is obviously enormously valuable, and I’ll just say when we talked recently, I asked you what the CTF, Create The Future process was, and one of the things you said was, a number of individuals with different perspectives are together. How do you make sure everyone in a group with diverse perspective listens to one another and collectively makes the best possible decision?

I thought that was a great thought about how to get the best out of the talent [00:18:00] in the room, and what we had asked was maybe you could give us a couple of examples of how it might work because I think if people could hear that, they might get a really good sense of how this might apply to their organization, their company, their situation.

Rick: Yeah, really good question. First of all, there’s never a guarantee that anybody’s going to listen to each other, and often we don’t do enough listening, but I think the contribution this book makes is to encourage leaders, and it could be the CEO, it could be a board chair, it could be the board as a whole, to recognize that, yes, the value of this board is that it has different points of view in the board, it has different experiences, and each of those is a valuable contribution to the conversation, whatever it is.

If you don’t mind, I’ll tell a quick story which [00:19:00] has nothing to do with boards of directors. As you know, I do a lot of sailboat racing and I bought a new sailboat a few years ago and called all my friends together to help me come up with a name for the new boat, and I had said, “I wanted to experience new adventures on the new boat.” I’ll make this really quick. A woman came up to me at this party we were having who knew nothing about sailing, and she listened to my story and she said, “You know, I think you should name the boat Voyager which was the name of the spacecraft that had been launched into space to explore the outer rims of our solar system.”

As soon as I heard that name from the person who knew nothing about sailing, I knew that that was the right name for my sailboat, and that is not from an expert, it’s from somebody who was just being creative about their own experiences, and that’s exactly what applies in a boardroom, that what I’m encouraging people through this book is to [00:20:00] say, “You know, we want to get on the table what people are really thinking about. We want to understand. We want people to talk about what do they ideally want to accomplish by the decision they’re going to make. What assumptions are they making about what other people are going to do and how this is going to work out,” et cetera, all the way through the steps that are in the book. I won’t get into all the details here.

But I use an example of a company based in Atlanta that’s primarily selling products to the African-American community in the Southeast US, and the CEO of that company believes that the company has developed very, very strong marketing and sales operations and build on those products and customers, but there’s no reason why that can’t be expanded to selling, for example, to the Hispanic community or to the markets in the Southwest US. The problem is that on the board are representatives of the original founders’ [00:21:00] family, representatives of investors who want to keep the company focused on the markets and customers where it is, but others who say, “Gee, we have an opportunity here. We have an investment in this company. We want to see it grow.”

So, what you have on the board are people with different points of view about where the company should go, values that they want to see expressed through what the company is doing, and taking that board through the process of, A, what are we really trying to achieve with this company, B and therefore what would success look like, what are the options we really have, and then I will put in execution barriers, absolutely, but then how do we decide what we’re really going to do.

So, this process makes sure that everybody on the board participates in the conversation, their point of view is heard, and they hear each other talk about it. They hear each other say what they really are trying to accomplish, and then, yes, they’ll do test votes, and [00:22:00] they may do some ranking of the options that they’re considering, but in the end, the board will make a decision, and the people who participate in this will say, “You know, I may not fully agree with where we’re going to go, but at least my voice was heard, and I now understand what other people are trying to do and where they’re coming from.” That is enormously valuable to a board or any organization that as a group is trying to make really important decisions.

Joe: I think if you have the people in the room, whoever they may be, board or otherwise, at the end of the process, feeling like their voice has been heard, their ideas have been heard, and at least considered, that alone is success. Because otherwise, what do you have them there for? I mean, whether it’s a board or anything else, no one wants to sit on a board and think a couple of people are making all the decisions, and there’s no point in having a board if you’re not going to get the best out of everyone, so that’s fantastic.

How does an effective board make decisions generally? What is [00:23:00] it that makes a high-performing board high performing? Is that how you thought about the process that you laid out in the book, for Creating The Future?

Rick: Yes, absolutely. I’ve also thought about this from the point of view of the board itself, from the point of view of the chairman of the board in trying to bring value forward that’s in the board among the board members, and also from the point of view of the company leadership, like the CEO, for example. There’s always a tension between the CEO and that board. Because I completely agree with what I think Raza said earlier that the board can be a value accelerator, but it’s only if its value is brought forth into the important decision making.

The book actually deals with this by considering both the board itself as an entity that’s managing itself, but also if you are the CEO who may be controlled by the board, but also relying on the board [00:24:00] for ultimate decision making, and how does that relationship work.

Raza: Rick, as part of the book, I believe you’re planning to also release a workbook, that is a set of exercises for those steps. Is that right?

Rick: Yes.

Joe: Is it a companion to the book? Is it separate? If you don’t buy the workbook, is the book still work on its own or how would you describe it?

Rick: First of all, thank you for asking. So, the workbook will not be out for a while yet. It’s from my point of view. Again, one of these things that’s written, but I know there’s going to be a process of actually getting out. So, the workbook is more of an elaboration of the team exercises that are in the book.

The book has 25 or so leadership team exercise. It could be board or director exercises, and there are enough details so that at least in a rough way, you could just use them by themselves, but I thought there was a need to have a more detailed workbook [00:25:00] that more systematically presents team exercises.

The team exercises take you through the goal of the exercise, the specific steps and then the work products that come out of the exercises. One example would be the team exercise where you’re being creative about what are the options you really have for responding to the opportunity or threat that you see before you, and I talk about wear a Hawaiian shirts or do something unusual to be in a creative moment.

But what I also do is in the team exercise, I say don’t start by saying give me a solution to what we should be doing here. What I say is start the exercise by imagining different paths that you could take that potentially could reach the goal. So, for example, if you were saying, what we want to do is raise revenues over the next three to four years. What are different categories of possible solutions for raising revenues?

Raza: increased [00:26:00]

Rick: raise prices. Exactly, raise prices. You could get more customers, more market share. You could go buy another company that’s doing the same thing. I mean, come up with categories of possible solutions rather than think about solutions. Once you’ve come up with a categories of possible solutions, then go through the process with each category. What are different things we could do within each category? It’s giving you a structure about how to be creative in that moment.

I make a big point that usually you don’t need more creative people in the room. What you need in the room is permission to be creative. That’s more important than getting another so-called creative person in the room. Also, don’t say to people, “I only want really good ideas here so we can put them on the whiteboard and get this settled fast.” Don’t say that. Say, “I want ideas on the whiteboard that conceivably could contribute to this. All ideas are good ideas.”

That’s the mantra, all ideas are good. Get lots of ideas up. [00:27:00] Once you have lots of creative ideas on the whiteboard, then you can go back through them. You’ll see connections and suggestions for other ideas you never thought about before. Once you get lots of ideas on the whiteboard, then you can wean them down to either categories of good ideas, an idea that inspires a line of thinking you never would have thought about, stuff that’s completely impractical and you’re not going to do, and maybe some things that are good ideas that you could work on separately, they really aren’t going to solve this problem. All of that whittled down into a half a dozen or so ideas that are worth pursuing in more detail.

Joe: It sounds to me like whoever’s leading this exercise, whoever that is, that role is quite important, whether it’s the owner, the CEO, the board chair, whoever it may be.

Raza: They need to have read the book.

Rick: I make a big deal of saying you really shouldn’t be the facilitator, and I give examples of that. Whoever’s the [00:28:00] CEO or board chair should not be the facilitator. You’d have somebody else, maybe an outside person who come in and be a facilitator for the day, or maybe somebody on the staff who’s good at doing that.

If I’m the CEO or board chair, I don’t want to be at the board trying to make sure I understand what everybody’s saying and write it down. I want to be experiencing this process and drawing my own thoughts from it and understanding the creativity and the value that’s coming out. I don’t want to be at a whiteboard trying to be the facilitator, and I recommend that you not do that.

Joe: Okay, that makes sense.

Raza: Rick, when is the book actually getting released and where can folks find it?

Joe: Actually, let me ask a different question. When can you get it on Amazon?

Rick: Okay. Well, technically, you can go on Amazon today and order it, but Amazon will not be sending them out and delivering them until like [00:29:00] mid-September.

Raza: We’ll include a link for our audience.

Joe: Yeah, we’ll include a link to your website and to Amazon’s site for this, so that they can buy it early and often, as James Michael Curley used to say.

Rick, it’s been great speaking with you again. I’m so glad you’re back. I’m so glad the book is almost out, but I would say it’s about to be in everyone’s hands, and I’m really looking forward to hearing the reaction from folks that we know when they get a chance to read it. So, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s great to have you back.

Rick: Well, thank you. It’s a pleasure, and I always enjoy these conversation with you and your audience.

Joe: Thanks so much. And thank you all for listening to On Boards with our very special guest, Rick Williams.

Raza: Please visit our website at OnBoardsPodcast.com. That’s [00:30:00] OnBoardsPodcast.com. We’d love to hear your comments, suggestions, and feedback. And if you’re not already a subscriber, please be sure to subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts and remember to leave us a five-star review.

Joe: Please stay safe and take care of yourselves, your families, and your communities as best you can, and we hope you’ll tune in for the next episode of On Boards. Thanks.