Episode 670 - Yes, and...

In this week's episode, Phil shares his observations from two recent 2025 planning sessions. Alternating between observer and participant roles, he witnessed two distinct approaches to business leadership: one session flourished with a "Yes, and..." mentality that encouraged collaboration and innovation, while the other remained stuck in a "No, but..." mindset that prioritized rigid focus over change. Phil connects this to Ilya Strebulaev's "The Venture Mindset," highlighting how successful leaders create engaging cultures balanced between focused execution and shared purpose. As we look toward 2025, Phil challenges us to consider our own leadership approach: Will you choose to simply manage with a "No, but..." attitude, or will you lead with a "Yes, and..." mindset? The choice is yours.

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Ilya Strebulaev’s book The Venture Mindset

Transcript

Top performers in every field surround themselves with those who inspire them, who seek to build them up, and who push them to reach beyond their current limits. I'm Phil Buchanan, Executive Chairman of Cannon Financial Institute. I designed Monday Morning Mojo to provide you with a weekly spark, a push, and motivational insight to live your best life.

Thanks for joining. Good Monday morning. It is Phil here with episode 670 of Monday Morning Mojo. Our technology has been giving us a bit of fits here recently. I want to give a huge shout out to Danny Brunner. He's responsible obviously for editing and mixing, uh, the podcast that we do here at Cannon Financial Institute, but he has done a fantastic job in [00:01:00] elevating our game and making our technology integrate in beautiful ways.

It is neat. To see things come together. So thank you, Danny. All right. I've been involved in quite a few 2025 planning meetings with both clients and internal colleagues here at Cannon over the recent few days. Now in some of these sessions, I've been facilitating the dialogue while in others, I've been an active participant or in a couple, a passive observer.

Now, all three of these roles, facilitator, active participant, passive observer, each affords a different opportunity for me to learn and, and to grow. Yet in the past two sessions as a private observer, I took away a rather unique understanding of the cultural differences between the two groups. Now, one of the groups, we'll call them group A.

is a very innovative and [00:02:00] very high energy group. They have introduced several new concepts or ideas or services in recent years. Many of these have been successful, but actually a fair number of them have not been successful, and they've, they've stopped offering or stopped providing that service. Their Top line revenue and bottom line profitability have grown faster than their peer group over that period of time.

Now the other group, we'll call them group B, they haven't significantly changed their focus in recent years. They are, they are myopic. And their focus, their organization is hyper focused on ensuring quality and efficiency in what they do. Any new products, any new services that they introduce must pass a very comprehensive and strict evaluation process.

Now, this business's top lines and bottom lines have been stable, but relatively flat for several years. Although, from a margin standpoint, they [00:03:00] do very, very well. Now, the information I just shared came out in the planning sessions that I attended, but in hindsight, had I just Listen to the language that the groups used.

Well, that would have really told me their respective stories without ever needing to look at the financials, the growth oriented business group. A. has what I consider to be a yes first mentality. The second group has a no first mentality. Group A is predisposed to try new ideas unless someone can demonstrate a valid reason not to proceed.

Group B is predisposed to turn down new ideas unless everyone can be persuaded the new idea is solid. Group A responds to new ideas with words like [00:04:00] yes and dot, dot, dot. The second group responds with no, but perhaps. Now, Ilya Strebulaev is a professor at the Sanford Graduate School of Business. He has done extensive research and extensive writing in the area of venture capital.

He has a book out That is entitled The Venture Mindset. And in that book, he highlights the world of venture capital as they seek to find and fund businesses that will be wildly successful. And a large part of that success will come from how the leaders of those companies operate and the culture they foster.

Yes, those companies must stay focused, but they must be willing to innovate, test, fail, fix. The and still remain focused. Now, anybody that has studied the [00:05:00] venture capital world knows that statistically venture capitalists fund a lot of initial projects, but only a select few turn out to be truly viable and truly life changing.

But in order to be successful in the venture capital business and in order to be thriving as an ongoing company, you really do need a yes and mindset. Leading a successful business requires taking risk. Placing your time, treasure, and talents on ideas and concepts may not yet be totally proven, but that Really have tremendous upside, real engagement, and I mean, mental, intellectual, emotional, etc.

Real engagement comes when we believe that we are involved in things that are bigger and greater than [00:06:00] ourselves. So I want to challenge you something. As you get ready to attack 2025, I want you to evaluate whether you'll seek to maintain or seek to elevate. Will your culture be cultivated based upon a no but mindset or a yes and mindset?

Will you lead or will you just manage? Choose wisely, my friends. Monday Morning Mojo is a production of Cannon Financial Institute. Executive producer of Monday Morning Mojo is Sarah Jones. Managing producer of Monday Morning Mojo is McCall Chamberlain. Editing and mixing is done by Danny Brunner. Until next time, I'm Phil Buchanan reminding you to be a force for good.

Have a great week and thanks for being part of the Mojo community.