Beat Grandma (The ’Tells’)

What do card games with Grandma and corporate strategy have in common? They're both high-stakes games of deception and decoding how the other player thinks. Beneath the surface lies a battle of wits, where every move is calculated to win. But how do you decipher the moves of your competitors and partners? Join me to learn how to outsmart Grandma and apply the same techniques to your corporate strategy. By decoding the DNA of decision-making, you'll gain a strategic advantage and pave the way for success in your leadership journey.

Put yourself into position to play a winning hand?

Key takeaways:

• Decoding Decision-Making: Just like reading Grandma's moves in a card game, understanding the conscious and unconscious decisions of competitors and partners is crucial in corporate strategy. By deciphering these patterns, leaders can anticipate future moves and gain a strategic advantage.
• Uncovering Subconscious Biases: It’s important to recognize not only the overt decisions but also the hidden biases and blind spots that influence behavior. Identifying these subconscious patterns allows leaders to make more informed decisions and navigate complex business environments with confidence.
• Enhancing Accuracy and Competitive Advantage: Improving the accuracy of decoding decision-making processes is essential for success in a competitive landscape. Through methods to enhance accuracy and minimize guesswork, leaders can better position themselves to capitalize on opportunities and navigate challenges effectively. Doing so is how a CEO plays at the highest levels of ’the game’.

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Original Music by Billy Goodrum

Transcript

I had two grandmas growing up. And they were mean. 

Like most grandmas, they were sweet. Most of the time. But when we played cards after Thanksgiving Dinner, or Christmas, or whatever it might be, you realized that down deep in their soul, they were mean. They wanted to win the game, and they didn't care what it took to get there. They would deceive, they would joust. They would get inside your head and play games. They would toughen you up.  What you realized is that there was no limits to what they would do to win that game. They would get ‘knife in a barfight’-type of mean. 

For survival, us kids had to figure out what was going on. How were they making their decisions? You discover things that they were doing consciously, but also more importantly, what they would do unconsciously. What were their patterns? What were their biases? What were their blind spots? What were the things that they didn't even know they were doing, but we could see from the outside looking in. These were their ‘tells’. 

We do something very similar in the corporate world where there are things that we can study about a competitor’s balance sheet or P&L or sales or who they're developing the partnerships with. These tell us a lot about how they're behaving and what their strategy is. 

To go to the next level, however, you want to decode how they make their decisions. What do they do from a conscious perspective in their decision making? That tells us a significant amount. Even more importantly, and the echelon even higher, is to be able to discover what they do with their decisionmaking that they're not even aware of. These are their patterns and blind spots, and tell us what cards are coming next, that they don't even know that they'll be playing. This is really powerful. 

This podcast is about creating “a-ha’s” – inspiration for your own leadership, how you make decisions, how you think about the problems before you. So in this exercise, think about the person that's sitting on the other side of the table from you right now. Someone that you want to buy, somebody to sell, somebody who could be an important partner to your strategy going forward. Decode what it is that they are doing consciously, but even more importantly, unconsciously. 

Your accuracy will be off to begin with. There's a lot of presumption and assumptions that we make, there is guesswork that goes into it, but there are methods to improve that accuracy. And improving that accuracy as the stakes get higher and higher becomes essential to gaining that advantage in the competitive pursuit. 

The bottom line is this: Beat Grandma. Decode her decision-making. Discover what it is that she's doing, and what is it that she's not even aware of? Discover ‘the tells’. 

That's all for now. I'll talk to you soon.