1. Key Questions to Ask Yourself

• Do you really want this?
• What will it cost you?
• Are you truly willing to pay that price?
• When will you start?

2. THINK LONG, THINK SHORT

Long-Term Thinking: Set the Vision

“You overestimate what you can do in 1 year and underestimate what you can do in 10.”

Choose a goal you love, because the middle will get hard. Only passion can carry you through. Don’t rush greatness. Amazon took decades.

Adopt a long view. The Japanese often think in 250-year cycles. That requires patience, discipline, and trust in compounding effort. Begin planting seeds today. Have a clear destination—or you’ll never get there.

Key Habits:

• Set clear, ambitious goals.
• Track your progress.
• Stick to the plan—even when it’s hard.

Short-Term Thinking: Build Momentum

Start with a short sprint. Deliver small, complete features that give value and showcase your capability.

Keep it:

• Simple
• On time
• Polite and professional
• Focused on shared interest

Avoid overwhelming clients or yourself. Be transparent about your systems and processes. Let your work ethic shine in small, digestible ways.

---

3. STRATEGY ISN’T JUST A PLAN — IT’S A SYSTEM

“Too often, strategy is mistaken for a roadmap or a list of goals. But real strategy is more than a plan.”

True strategy is an operating system — not just a destination, but a way of navigating everything that gets you there. It requires internal cohesion, where every decision, capability, and process reinforces your core approach to winning.

🔄 The 5 Interlocking Questions of Real Strategy:

1. Where will we play?
   Which markets, segments, customers, or geographies will we focus on?

2. What does winning look like?
   Are we aiming for market share, margins, customer retention, or impact?

3. How will we win?
   What’s our unique value proposition and differentiation?

4. What capabilities must be world-class?
   Do we need unmatched technology, talent, supply chain, or innovation?

5. What systems must support it?
   Think incentives, resource allocation, performance metrics, and decision-making processes.

When these questions align, strategy becomes more than a slide deck. It becomes a shared lens for action, and day-to-day operations begin to reflect long-term intent.

3.5 Set Your Goals

Write them down. Clarity builds commitment.

New Goal (Passion)	Why You Want This	End Date
Control LDL Numbers	Prevent heart disease	11/01/2019

Next: Break Down Each Goal

Vision Category	Specific Goal	Deadline	Training & Knowledge	3 Key Relationships	Next 7 Steps	Status
Health	Control LDL from 60 to 30	11/01/2019	Classes, Books, Podcasts, YouTube	James Doe1, Jane Doe2, James Doe3	[List]	Working on it
Money						Not Started
Personal Growth						Planning

---

4. 5 Best Practices for Strategy & Execution

1. Planning is Priority #1

• Set goals 50% higher than what feels “realistic”—this forces growth.
• Daily planning saves you an hour each day.
• Adopt Agile principles: plan, act, review—every day.

“The one with better information, better plan, and greater skill—wins.”
— Harvey Mackay

When is it enough to start?
When you:

• Have multiple viewpoints
• Close the scope with a decision-making framework (e.g. Force Field Analysis)
• Know the cost of missing data
• Have a deadline to decide
• Trust your gut and commit fully

Risk Planning Checklist:

• Time to failover?
• Backout plan?
• Historical success with similar changes?
• Stakeholder approval?
• What’s at stake?
• What’s changing (tech, process, people)?
• What’s the worst-case impact?

---

2. Let Strategy Degenerate Into Action

“Plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” —Dwight Eisenhower

• Break down goals into milestones
• Assign tasks
• Collaborate and align the team

Repeat the loop: Plan → Act → Reflect → Adjust

---

3. Inspect What You Expect

Clear communication, accountability, and constant refinement are key.

With each iteration, review:

• Purpose
• Milestones
• Actions
• Team alignment

---

4. Respond to Change

Change is inevitable. Prepare for it.

• Build backup plans
• Prove your assumptions with data
• Move fast, but never reckless
• Practice to eliminate delays

---

5. Measure Progress

Track daily progress across 8 business areas:

• Marketing
• Innovation
• Physical Resources
• Financial Resources
• Human Resources
• Productivity
• Profitability
• Social Responsibility

---

5. Planning Tools & Concepts

Natural Planning Method

1. Why? (Purpose)
2. What? (Clear vision of success)
3. How? (Brainstorm options)
4. What next? (Break down components)
5. When and in what order? (Prioritize)

Farming Analogy

Prepare the soil → plant → water → weed → wait.
Same with goals: plan, invest, nurture, repeat.

---

6. Achievement Action Plan

Steps:

1. Define outcome + deadline.
2. What does it mean to you?
3. Identify 3–5 major components.
4. Break each into steps + sub-deadlines.
5. Allocate weekly time.

Use a Critical Path Chart to:

• Map the strategy
• Identify dependencies
• Anticipate bottlenecks

Apply the Pareto Principle:
Focus on the 20% of tasks that drive 80% of results.

---

7. The 7×7 Goal Planning System

“Dreams are just dreams. Goals are dreams with a plan and a deadline.”

1. List 7 priorities to achieve the goal
2. Break each into 7 action steps
3. Schedule only 6 key tasks per day
4. Create a buffer for the unexpected
5. Stay proactive, not reactive
6. Never wing calls—plan and summarize
7. Engage your community intentionally

---

Bonus: Theory of Constraints – Drum, Buffer, Rope

• Drum: Your system’s biggest bottleneck
• Buffer: Protection to avoid pressure on the bottleneck
• Rope: Communication system to manage flow

---

Do you want this?
What will this cost?
Are you willing to pay the price?
When are you ready to start paying?

THINK LONG, THINK SHORT

Long Term Objectives

You overestimate what you can do in 1 year and underestimate what you can do in 10 years. Pick something you love because you will give up when you hit the miserable middle. Only love can take you through the long middle. Do not pressure yourself thinking about getting it all done in 1 year. Amazon.com gave itself a much longer runway to become the juggernaut it is today 20 years later.

How long is a long-range goal? Japanese say 250 years. To do that, you need patience. Plant your seeds today so you can reap the crop tomorrow. Plan for a lousy fortune while the fortune is good. If you do not have a destination, you will never get there: set goals, plan to achieve those goals, track your time, and ensure your plan gets executed.

Short Term Objectives

Your first sprint must be on time. Pick a short sprint, a small and slim end-to-end feature set, make a plan, and keep it fun. Let clients see your infrastructure, team, and work ethic. Provide bite-size nuggets, and avoid moving too quickly to overwhelm the client. Do not bear your soul, show common interest, and be polite.

It would be best if you had written down your goals by now. Here is an example template you can use to get started.

New goal(Passion)	Why you want this?	End Date
Control LDL Numbers	Prevent heart disease	11/1/2019

Our next step is to take each goal and develop a strategy for each and then execute the plan.

Vision Category	Goals (specific outcome)	Deadline	Training Knowledge	3 Helpful Relationships	Next 7steps	Status
Health	Control LDL Numbers from 60 to 30	11/1/2019	Find concrete paid and free Classes, Books, Blogs, Podcasts, YouTube	Supportive James Doe1,  Jane Doe2,  James Doe3		Working on It
Money						Not Started
Personal Growth						Planning

5 Best Practices for Strategy and Execution

1. PLANNING IS THE MOST IMPORTANT

When setting goals, aim 50% higher than expected, as you need to stretch yourself, and you will always fall short. That is proper planning.

Plan every day; it saves you an hour in daily execution. You can do it for an hour daily, or you need to take a day off once per week to do this. The agile methodology involves much more planning because you are planning daily.

WHO WINS? THE ONE WITH BETTER INFO, BETTER PLAN, AND GREATER SKILL – HARVEY MACKAY

HOW MUCH INFORMATION IS THE RIGHT AMOUNT TO GET STARTED?

The right information to make a good enough decision can be done using the following

1. Get many points of view.
2. Use the “force field analysis” framework to close the scope of what the important drivers are and the direction to head
3. gauge the impact and importance of the missing data on the outcome,
4. avoid data recency bias,
5. Make plans that have a backout strategy,
6. timebox a date by which you need to arrive at a decision,
7. Listen to your gut,
8. Allow disagreement but expect full commitment by all accountable parties after the decision.

How much time you devote to planning should depend on the risk you can assume. The higher the risk, the more planning is necessary.

7 questions when assessing risk:

1. How long to failover?
2. Is there a backout plan?
3. Have similar changes been made before, and were they successful?
4. Does the client approve of the changes?
5. How critical is it that changes are made?
6. What is changing? (technology, process, or management)
7. What is the worst case if this goes south? # of clients/configurable items impacted, are the clients external, internal, or both?

2. LET STRATEGIC PLANS DEGENERATE INTO ACTIONS

Plans are useless, but planning is indispensible – Dwight Eisenhower

Identify activities for each milestone goal; this will constitute your project plan.  Collaborate with the team to have a shared, unified, action-oriented understanding.

Iterate as many times as you can end-to-end to foster a learning and conditioning process. Learning takes time: planning, acting, and reviewing are essential for effective learning. Plan, then act, then reshape your plan, then act again.

3. WHAT YOU INSPECT DETERMINES WHAT YOU CAN EXPECT

Inspection is clear communication on a relevant plan, accountability, measuring, and moving forward inch by inch. It is important to see the cross-impacts and communicate as you make changes.

Each iteration can complete each task faster and better than before when there is a review of the following: purpose, objectives, milestones, actions, plans, and collaboration.

4. RESPOND TO CHANGE

Be prepared for change and adapt to it. Do not avoid change so you can stick to the plan. Prove the math and have a backup plan. The biggest complaint about professionals is that they are too slow. Practice to prevent this and have a plan when things go wrong.

5. MEASURE PROGRESS

Measuring and monitoring results daily, a detailed marketing plan with specific growth expectations, and setting appropriate goals. Put growth thinking in every area of the business. There is not ONE objective but many objectives. In business, we measure 8 key areas:

1. Marketing,
2. Innovation,
3. Physical resources,
4. Financial resources,
5. HR,
6. Productivity,
7. Profitability,
8. Social.

Project Management Terminology

Natural Planning Method: Why? Then drive that project over core values. Next is a clear vision of the outcome, tasting what success tastes like (what?), brainstorming the many options, then components or milestones, sequence, and priority to get done

Unnatural planning usually starts with crises until a consultant comes in and asks, why are we doing this, and then it starts at the top with natural planning methods.

The process: If this were farming, it would involve preparing the soil, selecting the right seeds, planting, and being faithful in watering, weeding, and cultivation, letting God and nature do the rest. Similarly, we must plan, invest with excellence, demonstrate consistency, pay attention, and show empathy and appreciation.

A Strategic Action plan outlines the steps to move from a C+ to a B+; it is the action taken after the post-implementation review is complete, guiding improvement.

Strategy isn’t just a plan — it’s a system.

Too often, strategy is mistaken for a roadmap or a list of goals. But real strategy is more than a plan. It’s about internal cohesion — where every choice, capability, and process supports a clear, intentional way to win.

A proper strategy answers five interlocking questions:

1. Where will we play?
   (Markets, segments, customers, geographies)

2. What does winning look like?
   (Market share, margins, customer loyalty, outcomes)

3. How will we win?
   (Our unique value proposition and differentiators)

4. What capabilities must be world-class?
   (Technology, talent, supply chain, innovation)

5. What systems must support it?
   (Incentives, decision-making, resource allocation)

When these parts align, strategy becomes more than words on a slide — it becomes a shared lens for action.

💬 How aligned is your strategy with how your organization actually operates day to day?

5 steps of the achievement action plan:

1. What precisely is to be accomplished, and what is the deadline?
2. What does it mean to me?
3. 3-5 significant components of accomplishment?
4. Are there exact steps and deadlines for each component?
5. Weekly time investment? Achieve?

The Critical Path Chart lays out the strategic map, determines the dependencies, and estimates the segment’s force. It involves precise planning, which is incredibly early in a project.

Pareto tasks: not all tasks have the same impact on the outcome. Ideally, you want to do the least tasks you need to accomplish to achieve the objective. The objective setting is to put that check on your mirror and ensure you can cash it. Are you doing the things you need to do to cash it?

7×7 program for making a Plan for a Goal. Dreams are just dreams; goals are dreams with a plan and a deadline. Write them down to give them the substance you need to force them to carry them out. Pick the first 7 things to get it done, then 7 actions on those 7 things.

make lists, allocate time per task, never book more than 6 tasks or 6 hours, create a daily plan, buffer against ad-hoc tasks, reactive vs. proactive, i.e., planned vs. unplanned tasks, buffer against unplanned

Priority setting: Take stock of the inventory of work so you do not get overbooked, then schedule stuff for later, do not let ad-hoc work pop up and take over planned work

never wing a telephone call, summarize a plan for any call. Listen a lot, but ensure that, when leaving meetings, everyone has explicit action plans,

you must plan on how to engage the community

The Theory of Constraints operates a system called Drum, Buffer, Rope (DBR). The drum is the system’s constraint; the Buffer plans for the main constraint set, and Rope communicates how to open the gate for the constraint.

Project Management Frameworks

• SEI – Capability Maturity Model (CMM)
• ISO 9000
• DMAIIC – Six Sigma
• PMI -Work Breakdown Structure (WBS)
• Lean
• The Theory of Constraints
• Agile

Stephen Choo Quan

Thanks for reading and Sharing ❤