Creating exponential results by playing the long game, with Dorie Clark (S11E10)

Dorie Clark
Lot of people really do make choices that that lead them to be pretty close to the edge, and I’m not comfortable with that. I think that with economic margin comes freedom. And that is extremely important for me because I don’t want to, be beholden to anybody. I don’t wanna, you know, be desperate at any point because, oh, God, it has to work out. You lose all ability to innovate when you have, oh, god. It has to work out because innovation is never definitionally guaranteed to work out.

Richard Medcalf
Welcome to the Impact Multiplier CEO podcast. I’m Richard Metcalfe, founder of Xquadrant, and my mission is to help the world’s top CEOs and entrepreneurs shift from incremental to exponential progress and create a huge positive impact on our world. Now that requires you to reinvent yourself and transform your business. So if you’re ready to play a bigger game than ever before, I invite you to join us and become an Impact Multiplier CEO. How can you play the long game for your leadership? What does it look like to create exponential success by taking a really strategic view, not just on the current time frame, but looking perhaps years into the future. Today, I’m speaking with Dorie Clark, who’s an expert on this. She’s written books about it, but most importantly, she’s lived it. You see, many years ago, Dori was a consultant, speaker, and a coach, doing pretty well, but not really making a mark that she wanted to make.

She made some strategic moves. She actually gave up 1 third of her business to invest it in strategic activity. And it was that that catapulted her to pretty much the pinnacle of the business thought leadership space. Her books have been WSJ Bestsellers. She’s been nominated the Thinkers 50 list of top management thinkers three times. She’s a contributor to Forbes, to, Harvard Business Review, to lots of different influential places. So she’s somebody who’s really catapulted herself and gone on this exponential journey of impact that we talk about. And in her book, The Long Game, which we discuss, she kind of goes through some of the key principles of thinking that help us to take that trajectory.

For Dori, it’s not over, she’s been playing The second long game, actually creating a broadway musical that she her intention is to get onto the stage in the next couple of years. This has been a 10 year project for her. So Dory is somebody who lives this stuff, and she speaks on it, and she writes very eloquently on it. So enjoy this conversation with Dori Clark. Hi, Dori, and welcome to the show.

Dorie Clark
Hey, Richard. So good to be here.

Richard Mecalf
So, I’m gonna start. So this is gonna be a really fun conversation. You’re somebody I’ve followed. I’ve read a lot of your books over the years. You know, your current book, The Long Game, is all about thinking strategically, which, you know, anyone who knows me knows that’s really close to my own heart. It’s a subject to my own book in some ways. And so I think enjoy this enjoy this conversation to actually explore how we kinda look at the long game and how we optimize for Multiplier impact over time. So this is going to be a fun one.

I’m going to start with I’ve kind of already kind of warmed up to this question possibly, but I still want you to tell the The, why don’t you like red peppers? Let’s just start there where it’s important.

Dorie Clark
I mean, mission critical here. Absolutely. Yes. I assume most of your audience has tried, red peppers. If they haven’t, I just wanna tell you they’re awful. They’re terrible. So I think they are bitter and I don’t really understand why, other people like them. So I, I don’t wanna judge other people’s choices.

I’m kind of a libertarian in the pepper department, but, if I were advising people, I would say, don’t do it.

Richard Medcalf
There we go. So, you know, you heard it here. This is controversy on the the Impact Multiplier CEO podcast. We’re really getting into it here. You thought the brussels sprouts wars were were were bad enough, but we’re getting to the The pepper wars. Okay. So luckily, my son is if my son was here, I’d bring him on. He’s a big fan of red pepper, so you 2 could have kinda slugged it out, the heavy hitters Oh, yeah. In this you know, probably cool debate.

Dorie Clark
Well, I’ll I’ll come back. We’ll we’ll have a cage match next time.

Richard Medcalf
There we go. That’d be good. That’d be a fun one. Okay. So, yeah, again, let’s let’s, slow it down. The Long Game. Right? It’s a book you’ve you’ve written. You’ve you’ve spoken about a lot of times.

I’ve heard you speak on it. It’s really fascinating. How to be a long term thinker in a short term world. And what I wanna focus on perhaps today is, like, let’s talk about your own journey because you’re somebody who, you know, is I don’t know how many followers you have on social media. It’s huge. You know, you’re a top voice here and there. You’re on this publication and that publication. You’re you’re in the The fifty list.

You know, you’re somebody who has has really cut her own niche in the world of business thought leadership. And, you know, you’ve still got other projects and so forth. And I know, you know, beyond the world of business thought leadership as well. I know you’re writing Broadway productions as well in your spare time or even in your non spare time. So take us back. Like, what was the thinking at the start of that process? Like, did you consciously decide I want to, like, go big, go wide? Was it was it a happy accident? You know, was it a master plan? Take us back a few years where you were not a known entity. Absolutely. That you made.

Dorie Clark
Yeah. Thank you, Richard. Well, I think, you know, like a lot of people, certainly probably the majority of my choices were a little bit happenstance and, and then, you know, maybe they worked out in in the rear view mirror. Certainly one example of that is areas that I focused on, you know, sort of what are you known for? What’s your core IP? This is something that some people from the beginning really have a very clear idea of, you know, here’s here’s what I wanna say. I was a bit more of a generalist, and there were a lot of things I could talk about. There were a lot of things I was interested in talking about, but I had absolutely no idea what I should focus on, or even if I should focus. I mean, I guess intellectually, I had the idea like, okay, yes, you know, focusing is good. People can understand better what you do.

But I was extremely reluctant to do it. And so The for me was much more of an emergent property where I just put a lot of content out into the world and eventually was able to discern where there seems to be resonance, where people liked what I was saying. There seemed to be more traction. And so at least at that point, I was smart enough to say, okay, well, good. I’ll do more of the thing that people like. But, The that’s sort of an example of me, following the evidence, but not necessarily setting out a a strategic path. But there was a really critical decision that I made about a decade ago that, there was a strategic bet that I am proud of. And I feel like it’s kind of a useful example because Multiplier, one of the bedrocks of my philosophy is that when it comes to strategy, the crucial piece is actually the willingness, the emotional willingness to make a choice and to deal with the consequences of that, because there often are negative consequences that come from cutting off options.

And so in this particular case, I had built a good business. I hit you know, we’re talking around, maybe 2010, 2011. I had built a good, you know, 6 figure consulting business and I was happy at what I was doing, but I also realized that I was kind of at a plateau. I had been at a income plateau for several years. And frankly, I’d been at kind of an impact plateau because I I was getting referrals, I was getting enough business, but I was working with relatively small clients. And that made sense because I had started my business when I was in my twenties. I didn’t have a lot of high level connections. I had come out of working in politics and journalism, and so it just there wasn’t an easy path into lucrative corporate consulting contracts.

I just didn’t know those people. And so I realized that if I wanted to demonstrably move the needle on my business moving forward, I needed to meet different people quite literally, and I didn’t have a good pathway for it. So I made the strategic call that I would cut off probably the bottom third of my business, which meant that there would be a real reduction in my income. And I would reallocate the time to content creation, specifically to to blogging and to writing for high profile publications. And in doing that, I said, alright, this is my bet. I am going to raise my profile. I am going to get better known. I’m gonna get my ideas out The, and that will lead higher profile people and organizations to me.

That’s how I can grow my business. And I did that for, several years and eventually it did pay off. But it it took about 3 years for the hit to my income to be restored. And the good news is it was a good bet. I now have a much more robust business than I ever did beforehand. But, but, yeah, you have to have to make a call sometimes, which can be uncomfortable.

Richard Medcalf
What was it like when you’re in that trough, when you were like, I’m churning out these articles, nobody’s yet responding. I’m not getting the audience that perhaps I wanted to. Was there a real sense in which am I doing the right thing, or were you already seeing, well, at least my audience is growing quite quickly and and you felt confident?

Dorie Clark
I think there’s 2 things at play that could potentially be useful for for everybody. The first is where it really gets precarious is if you are making a bet that is, you know, I’ll call it a dangerous bet. So meaning you say, oh, I’m gonna cut off a third of my income, but you really need that income for your bills and things like that. I had deliberately made some upstream choices. You know, I, I had bought a condo and things like that, but, you know, I, I didn’t buy the fanciest condo, you know, I, Now I have some nice places, but, you know, when I when I first bought, I I did it in this, like, emerging neighborhood, like literally, quite literally, it was across the street from a heroin dealer. And so it’s a very nice apartment, but, you know, yeah, there were like drug busts and stuff. And so I had margin, You know, I made choices so that I would never be desperate for money because we, you know, we all make poor choices if you’re in a situation of desperation. So you have to have some margin to enable you to make the the the strategic choice.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. I mean, that reminds me of, you know, a business principle that, you know, we’d use often in especially back in the day in strategy consulting, but I still apply it into in our lives. It’s The same thing. It’s just like you’ve got financial risk and operational risk. Right? So if you’ve got a lot of debt, high financial risk, then actually you need to keep your operational risk pretty low because you’ve gotta pay the bank each month. Whereas if actually you’ve got low financial risk, as you said, you’ve got plenty of margin, then actually you can take more operational risks. You can you can have more volatility on the on the on the income side.

Dorie Clark
Yes. Perfect. Yeah. That’s that’s exactly right. That’s a a super helpful framework. So I think that’s that’s one principle that was, in play there. The other one was, you know, I’m I’m a big fan in general of ensuring that you can find wins along the way. Because, you know, the ultimate payoff and this is one of the the key challenges that I talk about in my book, The Long Game.

If you’re setting a fairly substantial meaningful goal, it it may well be multiple years, I mean, sometimes even decades, before it comes to fruition. And try as you might, there’s often very, very few things you can do to speed that up. You just have to deal with it. It’s gonna take a long time. And so in order to keep yourself motivated and feeling okay about that process in the interim, you need to identify the wins that you can celebrate. And so in my case, the good news was even though the ultimate metric that I wanted, which was, you know, unsolicited inbound inquiries, you know, like sort of high level opportunities coming to me, that takes a while. That’s, that’s not gonna come with your first article or something like that. But in the interim, I was spending a lot of time doing interviews at the time I wrote for Forbes, and I, I would interview authors in the space who had come out with books or things like The.

And for me, that was very exciting because there was an opportunity to connect with new colleagues and expand my network. And so I figured, you know what, whether or not this actually yields a piece of business, it’s certainly going to be a good thing for me in whatever way to have a better network in my field. And so it’s at least achieving that goal, and that was helpful along the way. Mhmm.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. I mean, that that building relationships is really building assets. Right? I mean, I don’t wanna translate relationships into transactions. Right? They’re they’re much more than transactions. Right? But every relationship is an asset. Every, every article you put out in the web, you know, it’s it’s The idea of for me, strategy is often about invest it’s investing in future success. Right? It’s building assets that are gonna pay off Yes. Rather than when we use our time and we’re just doing something that’s here today and gone tomorrow.

Like, you know, you work with The client, you do it, you get the check, whatever, and you move on. Like, you might have anything to show for that above the money, whereas you build a relationship, you you create some intellectual property. These are the things, I guess, that have stacked up for you.

Dorie Clark
Yeah. Absolutely. That’s that’s right on.

Richard Medcalf
Okay. So I think great distinction, first of all. You’ve got this emergent property. It’s like, yeah, sometimes we like to say there’s a 5 step game plan from the start. The reality is normally we are responding to what comes our way, right, and what opportunities we’ve managed to create, and we we navigate that path. So you definitely started off like that. You did make this choice, which is quite bold, right, to take a third of your clients and to say, I’m repurposing that into an investment. Do you think that The specific investment if you’re doing it now like, you talked about blogging.

Obviously, there was a period where blogging was perhaps The different place than it is now. Do you feel that there was, like, a coalition, a convergence of events that made that that was the right time in the right place to be doing that kind of content creation, or do you think it’s you still do the same now if you were starting?

Dorie Clark
Yeah. It’s a it’s a good question. I mean, I to a certain extent, I would do something similar. I mean, the particulars would probably change. Part of it for me was, and I think this is a useful question for everyone, is sort of what is your unique competitive advantage? And in my case, I had worked previously as a journalist, and so writing was something that I actually felt like I I could do faster and easier than other people because of the training that I had had. And so I thought, okay, well, that’s, you know, that’s useful. So writing would probably be it. Different places have different advantages.

At the time, Forbes was just getting started with their contributor network, and so it was a much less crowded space, and so it was much easier to get very high, page views and exposure. So I think it was probably a better opportunity The than it is now where there’s, you know, thousands of contributors, and they have this, you know, they’ve they’ve subsequently introduced the kind of pay to play, you know, quote, unquote councils, the coaches council, and then this and that, which just clogs the pipeline. So I I probably wouldn’t literally do that, but some form of writing I probably would because, you know, there’s there’s a lot of ways to do it. I don’t think that writing is the only one. I deliberately use very agnostic terms. I created something that I call the The recognize expert formula, which I I teach in a program that I run. And the basic idea, you know, for for people who are thoughtful professionals that are looking to get recognized for their expertise, there’s 3 key components. There is your network, of course.

There is social proof, meaning, you know, what is your sort of easily perceived external, metrics of credibility. And then, there’s content creation. And I’m I’m very specific. It’s content. It’s not necessarily writing or or what have you. It just means that you need to find a vehicle to publicly share your ideas because you can’t be recognized for your expertise if people don’t know what your ideas are. But, you know, whether you’re better at speaking and so you give talks or you have a podcast or something like that, that’s great. If you’re a video kind of person, awesome.

There’s a lot of ways that you can do it, but writing is still certainly a viable option among among the universe of options.

Richard Medcalf
Perfect. So let’s zoom forward a few years. So, obviously, now, you know, you have somebody who’s written a whole bunch of very successful books. You’re a sought after speaker and and everything else. What’s the long game you’re now playing at this

Dorie Clark
point? Yeah. So for me, I’ll give you one example. I mean, I think for all of us, we have different, you know, different areas of long game, whether it’s our personal life or our professional life or, sometimes avocationally. In my case, one example or one case study that I actually talk about, in my book, The Long Game, is, I started in 2016 writing musical theater. I had never done it before. And I decided, that I would create a 10 year goal for myself, sort of the epitome of a long, long range strategic thinking. I was going to create a 10 year goal where I my ambition was to write a show that made it to Broadway. And, it’s an ambitious goal, but the truth is you can actually do a lot in 10 years, much more than people imagine.

And so as we’re recording this, I am now on year 8 of this. You know, it’s it’s not entirely clear to me whether I will have a show on Broadway in 2 years. That would be amazing. But I can tell you that the act of pursuing that I literally started out from a place of not knowing at all how to write musical theater. I have now learned how to do it. I’ve completed a fairly prestigious training program for it. I’ve written 2 complete musicals and I’m working on a 3rd. And The of my shows has had, both as, you know, an actors’ equity stage reading in New York and is actually having its first university level production in a couple of months.

So it it’s moving forward and advancing into a very real thing that came out of a place where I had no experience whatsoever. So a lot is possible in 10 years.

Richard Medcalf
What was the driver for that particular project?

Dorie Clark
So in early, 2016 I mean, I actually go back, even a little bit further. In 2015, I I went a little bit nuts with, with work and with travel for work. I released a book that year. That one was called Stand Out, and I did 70 4 talks that year. So I was giving, you know, basically a talk and a half per week, many of them, travel based. So I was I was just constantly gone, constantly on the move, and, also constantly sick. And at a certain point, toward the end of the year, I was just like, oh, this is so ridiculous. You know, I’m traveling all the time.

I feel miserable. I’m putatively living in New York City, but I’m actually, you know, traveling all the time. And so I decided that I would embark upon a campaign of what I called The uniquely New York activity per week. And so I Rivendell that of myself that I would start to, you know, basically appreciate the city more that I was living in

Richard Medcalf
Right.

Dorie Clark
By making specific choices. So, like, watching a movie on Netflix does not count. You can do that anywhere. But going to a Broadway show, for instance, would be a uniquely New York activity. So I made an effort to start to go to some more shows. And I went to 1 with a friend, Fun Home, which was a a Tony winner that year, and it was just so great and and powerful and impactful. I literally just woke up the next morning and I was like, I need to do that. I need to learn how to write musicals.

And so I I’ve just kinda taken taken the ball and run with it ever since.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. That’s fantastic. So have you found The so, again, that’s something which presumably has taken time from you, right, that could have been on more close range Rivendell earning, you know, work. You know, say forthright takes a long time to master this this this art, I assume. So, again, did you have any inner kind of qualms? Like, you know, am I gonna you know, am I taking away from my, like, my core business, my my my growth The? Or did you feel I’m just kind of curious about the inner decisions because probably many people have gone, oh, that’d be cool to do that, but you’ve actually gone and done it. So I’m just wondering, were there any barriers that you felt you had to overcome internally in order to actually make it happen?

Dorie Clark
Yeah. I mean, I I think I think it’s an important question. I I’ve actually been okay with it in the sense that, again, one of the one of the themes that I, talk about in The Long Game is something that that has kind of gotten neglected by its, original advocates, which is the, the 20% time concept The, Google, you know, very famously propounded in in its earliest days of spending up to 20% of your time on these kind of speculative long range activities. Most Googlers these days are not doing that anymore. They’re they’ve kind of succumbed like everybody else to just being busy and doing the thing that’s in front of them. But I do think it’s an incredibly valuable thing to do because, you know, we know the world is changing fast. We don’t know in what direction. We can have theories, but, like, you know, in the end, who knows? And so having something outside of our core activities that we are spending time on can be very powerful.

I mean, sometimes it’s, you know, maybe more directly income generating, but at a minimum, it’s about, you know, giving you new knowledge, new experiences, new connections, new perspectives that you wouldn’t have. And so I don’t really ever feel bad about allocating 20% of my time to long term strategic bets like that. You know, also, again, I do think that financial necessity is an important consideration. And so it has always been an important value for me to have a lot of liquid cash and, to, you know, keep keep expenses as low as possible. I mean, you know, you don’t want to sacrifice to the point that you’re not enjoying your life, but I I think that there are a lot of people that, you know, I look at them and I see I see the house or I see the car or I see the vacations and I think, wow, I wouldn’t do that. And I actually am pretty sure I make a lot more money than you. And it’s it’s interesting. I mean, you know, it’s a different choice and it’s cool.

Everybody’s doing their thing. But, a lot of people really do make choices that that lead them to be pretty close to the edge, and I’m not comfortable with that. I think that with economic margin comes freedom, And that is extremely important for me because I don’t want to, be beholden to anybody. I don’t wanna, you know, be desperate at any point because, oh, God, it has to work out. You lose all ability to innovate when you have, oh, god. It has to work out because innovation is never definitionally guaranteed to work out.

Richard Medcalf
I hope you’re enjoying this conversation. This is just a quick interlude to introduce you to 2 transformative programs that we run. The first is Rivendell, my exclusive group of top CEOs who are committed to transforming themselves, their businesses, and the world. It’s an incredible peer group and a deep coaching experience that will push you to new heights no matter how successful you’ve already been. The second is Impact Accelerator, a coaching program for executives who are ready to make a big leap forward in their own leadership. It’s regularly described as life changing and no other program provides such personal strategic clarity, a measurable shift in stakeholder perceptions, and a world class leadership development environment. Find out about both of these programs at xquadrant.com/services. Now back to the conversation.

Yes. Yeah. Beautiful. Yeah. It’s perfectly put. My speaking of myself, yeah, for me, you know, impact and contribution is a key value, but underpinning it, which are, like, essential components for me are creativity and, and fun, in fact. But Yes. Yeah.

So because I know that, like, I can’t if it’s contribution, but I wasn’t I was just grinding it out. It’s not I’m not gonna be able to sustain that. So, actually, to have something that’s sustainable for me, it has to it has to have that fun and creativity, which as you said, requires a little bit of requires The margin. Right? Because creative projects, you don’t quite know. Are they gonna work out? Right? Whereas you say if you have to and I’ve got people who are very successful compatriots of mine, you know, in communities that I’m part of who are very successful coaching businesses, but they’re, like, booked out from 9 till 6 or whatever with x coaching calls, you know, with x hours between them. And I’ve always divided my business so that I have margin to create. And it’s but it’s a very yeah. It’s a different choice.

Right? And I suspect as well that, the lifestyle is so important. I I’m on to work with a client. He was well, he wasn’t actually a client. He was like somebody who’s in my network. I coached him a few times. I think he had, like, a 9 figure personal worth, I mean, in the 100 of 1,000,000. And he said to me I always remember it. He said, Richard, the next 5 years are gonna be turgid.

It’s such a word, but, oh, he’s CEO so awful and, like, just so dull. And he’s The excited to backpedal. You know, I can’t complain, you know, build handcuffs. And I was like, you know, like why you’ve got this amazing business. I said, oh, well, you know, I I, you know, I can’t do this. I can’t do that. If I let somebody else do it, who knows? And it was a prison of his own making. It really was.

Dorie Clark
Absolutely. Wow. That’s that’s powerful. So, Richard, tell me more about your long game. How how are you thinking about I mean, you know, this is your world too, man. How are you thinking about,

Richard Medcalf
the putting the table in the world.

Dorie Clark
Playing The the long game in your own life?

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. Well, I think so my over yeah. My overall mission is anybody who’s listened to the podcast, you know, multiple times would probably know or read my stuff is, yeah, I’m definitely on a mission to help the world’s top business leaders be forces for good at unprecedented scale. That’s what I love. That’s the game I love to play. And so that is, if you like, my long game. And the reason and how that’s impacted me, for example, is I’d like to say I’m a recovering high achiever. So there was a time when, like, every quarter was like, well, if my business is not exponentially growing every single quarter, then am I a Ford? You know, like and who am I to possibly advise anybody on anything? Right? But I realized actually The is not my game.

Obviously, I want my business to grow and it, you know, it’s growing. But actually, my long game is am I moving forward on making the biggest impact I have and the thing that really lights me up and and is exciting. And so that kind of place of how can I be the person today that is actually already the number one go to adviser for really successful business leaders who wanna be forces for good? Because it’s a now and a not yet. So, you know, am I, you know, am I absolutely the number one coaching the most senior for no? Right? And, yeah, I can also point to clients who The yeah. Well, these are some of the world’s top leaders. They’re running extraordinary businesses, although extraordinary you know, they’re they’re in the top 1% or 1% of the 1% or whatever. Right? They’re already there. So it’s important not to forget what’s already been achieved Yes.

But also to start to think, at least in my sense, it’s like, well, what would that person be doing? Or, you know, if I’m being that person today, how would I show up in in this in this conversation? In tomorrow morning when I get out of bed, you know, what would that person be doing? Would they be fiddling on their website? Would The, you know, who they be calling up? Who would they how would they be showing up in conversations? And so I suppose that’s kind of, my overall mission. And then I think the kind of the, the other part, and perhaps this is a way of bringing it back to you as well, is I’ve been thinking recently on the on that way of how to maintain creativity and fun and innovation on that journey and experiment because there’s all sorts of things to try. And what’s come to my mind is, you know, you can see me. I’ve got my Freddie Mercury poster behind me. So I love rock music. I’m a guitarist. And I’m thinking, if I was a rock band, what would I do? Because I believe in reinvention. All the best pop stars reinvent themselves.

Dorie Clark
Yes.

Richard Medcalf
And so they would release an album. They would tour that album. They would release another album. They would tour that album. They would reinvent themselves and have another star and release another album. They’ve always got the other stuff in their back catalog. They can always bring it out on the on in the concert and play the greatest hits, but they they can also play the new stuff.

Dorie Clark
Yes. Did you see the Bee Gees documentary?

Richard Medcalf
I’ve not seen that one yet. I’ve been going through there’s so many documentaries right now, especially on Netflix, about all these pop stars and, you know, we’ve been going through them beautifully, but we haven’t got to that one yet.

Dorie Clark
Yeah. The the the new Bee Gees The is is actually really excellent. And part of the reason I liked it is it’s got a good strategic lesson embedded in it because The Bee Gees, first of all, they reinvented selves. I didn’t even realize this, that pre disco, they were actually already popular. Maybe you knew this. They were like in the sixties, they were The were kind of like a like a rock band. And it was like, Oh, okay. I didn’t even know that.

But then they, you know, gotten stratospheric in the seventies when they went into disco. And then as soon as there was the disco backlash, they became pariahs and nobody wanted anything to do with the Bee Gees. You know, they were not successful. They couldn’t sell albums. They couldn’t get arrested practically. And so for about a decade, they pivoted to songwriting. And, they were masterful songwriters and they ended up, you know, and I didn’t realize this either, writing songs for almost all of the most popular artists of the eighties, just in the background because they’re like, you know what? This is not our time. This is, you know, this is not when the world wants to see our faces.

Okay, fine. Here. Here, Barbara Streisand. Here, other famous people, you sing our songs. And they did a great job and made a ton of money doing it.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. Yeah. It’s really, yeah, fascinating. So yeah. So so that’s what I’ve been thinking about is and I I feel it in my business as well. You know, the time when I was, like, the strategy guy, and I’ve really moved much more into more transformational work. I grew strategic, but I’m also had to be more magnetic, and and things evolve. And so I’m thinking, what’s my next book gonna be? And and how, you know, how’s my next album or whatever.

So Yeah. With that metaphor, I’m wondering about you because, you know, you’ve as you said, you’ve done a whole range of things, right, from stand out all the way through to, you know, the current The. And and each one has had quite a different theme. So do you see like, how do you move from one to the other?

Dorie Clark
Yeah. For my books, I I do I do feel like there’s been a little bit of a of an arc, I guess you could say. I mean, you can certainly read the books separately, you know, grab grab the ones that, feel most of interest and they’re, you know, complete and freestanding. But broadly speaking, I mean, Reinventing You, I’ll do The the show and tell. Reinventing You is the first one. And it’s basically about how do you position yourself, you know, how do you reinvent yourself into the place that you wanna The, the company you wanna be, the field you wanna be? How do you position yourself so that you are where you want in the professional ecosystem? Stand out is then answering the next question, which is, okay, you’re The. How do you get recognized? How do you become known as one of the best at whatever it is that you are doing?

Richard Medcalf
Yeah.

Dorie Clark
The 3rd book that I wrote is called Entrepreneurial You and it kind of answered the next, what I think of at least The the next logical question, which is okay, you’ve gotten lots of positive recognition that don’t pay the bills. How do you get wealthy doing it? What are the strategies that you can use on both the front end and the back end to be able to monetize your expertise? And then finally, we have The long game, which is, thinking, to a certain extent, you could say about about legacy, but it’s about, you know, what’s what’s it for? What’s the thrust? What do you want your life to look like overall?

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. Nice. So I wanna I wanna know what’s the other one. Is it, like, after you’re dead, the next one, it was, like, beyond the grave. Right?

Dorie Clark
It’s called it’s called reincarnating you, Richard, because it’s gonna be a very, very big seller.

Richard Medcalf
There you go. Yeah. And so, again, was that by design or was it more The it evolved your own journey as you were going through those stages?

Dorie Clark
It was really just answering answering the questions that were on my mind. So I you know, they always say, right, write the books that you would want to read. And so I tried to, to really live that out. I also, I mean, very deliberately, as, you know, as part of strategy, saw out of these books as essentially a really good way that I could interview smart people that I wanted to talk to and ask them exceptionally nosy questions. So especially, you know, for writing Entrepreneurial You, for instance, you know, if you’re writing a book about how to make money, then it becomes not rude to be like, So how much did you earn from that? And, you know, what what Impact was The structure there? You know, and, and that was very helpful. I mean, I’m a big fan of transparency. And, so being able to learn information for myself and then share that with other people, I think was quite valuable. I mean, I share that with other people, I think, was was quite valuable.

I mean, I I I want to democratize information as much as we can.

Richard Medcalf
So based on all of that and this whole arc, you know, of everything you’ve looked at, let’s let’s think about people who might be listening in right now, which, let’s say, you know, they’re already a very senior business leader. They might be own a company, might be a CEO, they might be in the The suite. So they’ve already, like, had a lot of success, you know, in in Eastern traditional terms. They might be probably pretty overloaded and they’ve got a lot on their plate because of a lot of responsibilities. What are the questions that you think they might need to be asking themselves for them to get to the next level? Like, what what comes to your mind as to the or, like, you know, what what might be their blind spots be?

Dorie Clark
Yes. Well, I I think that you’re touching on something important, which is what I realized in researching the long game was, I mean, kind of for me in some ways the most interesting thing about strategy is that unlike almost everything else in business, pretty much everyone agrees that strategic thinking is a good thing. There’s not like a lot of debate about The, but the problem is that so many people pay lip service and they say, CEO yes, it’s a wonderful thing, and then they don’t do it. And I wanted to understand, you know, what is, what what’s getting in our way here. Right? I mean, you are too. Right? Making making time for strategy. And and by time, we mean sometimes literally making time for it, but also as, of course, you know, it’s, you know, emotional space, you know, all the all the barriers, all the things that get in our way with regard to it. And so, to a certain extent, though, the the first step really is logistical.

It’s just clearing clearing out the calendar, clearing out the dross and the dreck that is, impeding us. And so I think that sometimes it’s, you know, really diving in and asking questions about, you know, it Rivendell what verticals we wanna be looking at, but it could be anything from what is the single biggest driver of our revenues. I mean, just really simple questions like that, but that often get buried or overlooked somehow. I mean, we often tend to disproportionately pay, a lot of time and attention to the problem areas instead of focusing on like, okay, well, what’s what’s going well and how can we do more of that? There’s kind of some basic questions The. But also it’s kind of higher level questions about ourselves, right? I mean, a really good question to ask over time is what kind of person do I wanna be? And what does that look like? Because if we are clear about the values or if we’re clear about what we want our lives to look like, then it becomes a lot easier to reverse engineer that. And oftentimes, the correct next action almost answers itself.

Richard Medcalf
Mhmm. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a great great, thing. I think every time I speak with my own coach, obviously, I I live my you know, I practice what I preach, and pretty much, like, everything always comes back to who you’re being in The situation. Right? It’s a brilliant filter. And often we often have choices as well defined between what’s The sensible thing to do and then what’s the brave thing to do. And actually, the brave thing to do is normally actually the thing you you need to do.

Dorie Clark
Yes. Yes. Amen.

Richard Medcalf
Well, this is, yeah, really fascinating. Dori, I think, perhaps to wrap up this conversation, what does multiplying your impact look like for you? So as you look forward, what would what would that look like for you to have that over the next few years to go, wow, I can’t believe I was here in 2024 and now, woah, I can’t believe where I’ve where I’ve moved to next and The impact I’ve had.

Dorie Clark
Yeah. Well, one of one of the things, Richard, that, I think we probably have in common is I’m also very interested in, in finding ways to help others surface and share their best ideas. I mean, thinking back to when I started my business, which was now, 18 years ago, it was it was so hard and so frustrating. I felt like I kept having to like reinvent the wheel because getting your message heard in this noisy world was very challenging. And even if you’re good, even if you know you’re good, even if, like, maybe the tiny circle of people around you know you’re good, it’s very hard to expand beyond that. And so I spent a lot of time studying in reverse engineering, and this is, you know, a lot of what drives my books, really reverse engineering this question of, all right, well, how how do you get your ideas noticed and heard? How do you become a recognized expert? And so subsequently, a lot of my attention, 8 years ago, I started an an online course in community called Recognize Expert. And it’s really been very satisfying for me because the goal of that is just to help other people figure out how to get out there, how, you know, how to take all all their ideas and their knowledge and, and help other people with it. And so, I mean, just as a couple of, like, fun facts, I mean, I haven’t even tallied it in about a year, but as of last year, 68 people in the recognized expert community had gone on to become, Harvard Business Review contributors.

Like, I love that. I mean, that’s a marvelous metric of people really finding a way to, at scale, impact other people. Just in the last couple of months, I mean, you know, we were talking earlier about meeting at Thinkers 50. So they just announced the crop of the this year’s Thinkers 50 radar thinkers, which are the people that are sort of on the watch list of, like, you know, these people are like rising stars. There are 30 people per year that they identify. And this year, 5 of them were members of the recognized expert community. And so it’s it’s very cool for me to, to see a lot of people that, you know, hopefully in some way I’ve been able to help encourage who are making a dent in terms of having their ideas do some good in the world.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. And so as you continue to do that and scale your impact, like, what’s one reinvention that might weigh you? Like, how might you need to shift who you’re being to kinda go to your next level?

Dorie Clark
Yeah. Well, you know, I think, as you’re pointing to, there’s there’s kind of the large and small ways to answer that. I mean, broadly speaking, of course I am, as I’m coming up on this 10 years, I am intending to make a push and to try to get my show or shows that I have written, seen by as many people as possible, hopefully, finding a way to the Broadway stage or some equivalent thereof. So I’m gonna continue to work on that and allocate time toward that. Additionally, I would say for all of us, an important thing to do is just, you know, regulate to make these sort of audits of how we’re spending our time, what we’re doing. I mean, I’m a big fan of, creating constraints. And so when I think about having more time to focus on high impact things Again, you know, we can’t do it if our days are chockablock with meetings. And so back in 2020, I started blocking off Fridays and not having meetings on Fridays.

And now I’ve done the same thing for Mondays as well. So the middle of the week is a little bit busier, you know, we’re of course speaking in the middle of the week, but having a couple of days where you have more freedom and flexibility to either be doing deep work activities or having networking meetings or things like that. That’s some of the really high value stuff that often gets lost in the hurly burly of business life.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you. Well, Dorey, hey. It’s been a real pleasure talking with you. It’s been a lot of fun. You’ve got some great, points from, you know, from insights to from the Bee Gees, the, you know, Broadway, Red Peppers.

But we’ve been talking about as well, like, the, yeah, like, the crucial part of strategy, making a choice and the balance between the moves that you make and the kind of randomness and the emergence of the journey. And then I think, you know, great points around finding your unique advantage, right, in this. And, yeah, and perhaps creating 20% time or if it’s not 20% to start with, at least something, 2% time to start with, and to actually start to explore little seedlings that might have a big payoff in the future.

Dorie Clark
Amen to that, Richard. I I think that’s wonderful. This has been such a great conversation. I’ll just mention for for folks who wanna go even deeper, I have a free resource, The Long Game Strategic Thinking Self Assessment, and folks can download that for free at doryclark.com/thelonggame. The, Richard, thanks so much for having me on. This has been fantastic.

Richard Medcalf
Yeah. Perfect. Thanks, Dobby. I’ll put all that into the show notes as well so people can directly click through to that assessment, which is a a good one. So thanks so much, and, speak soon.

Dorie Clark
Thanks.

Richard Medcalf
Well, that’s a wrap. If you received value from this conversation, please do leave us a review on your favorite podcast platform. We deeply appreciate it. And if you’d like to check out the show notes from this episode, head to expodrent.com/podcast where you’ll find all the details. Now finally, when you’re in top leadership, who supports and challenges you at a deep level to help you multiply your impact. Discover more about the different ways we can support you at xquadrant.com.