Ged: [00:00:00] Hello Milan. How are you today? I am great. Yourself? I’m good. I’m good. I’m looking forward to going through our next card. So we drew a card at random and what we pulled out was the 20 mile March by Jim Collins.
Milan: Yeah, it’s a great one actually. I came across it several times and. Most recently I reread grade by Choice. Yep. Which is where the, where the whole idea is introduced. And then we both saw Jim, either in person or on webinars, and he’s speaking about this a lot as Yeah. The relentless execution or as he, as he call it, discipline action to to get things done.
So that’s where this card came from. And, you know, I’ve used that principle so many times since.
Ged: I mean, I Great by choice, Jim Collins. Awesome book. Not as well known as good to Great. But there’s some incredible concepts in here and, and no doubt [00:01:00] some of those concepts will end up as, as other cards, as you come, come up with them.
The card talks about the, the 20 mile march, obviously. But the concept behind it is actually quite interesting. And, the concept as, as you mentioned, Milan is all about, you know, disciplined action. And the card, the, the, the concept talks about how you should commit to doing something and doing it consistently again and again and again and again.
So, if you wanna walk 20 miles. Then you walk 20 miles, you don’t walk five miles or zero miles because the weather’s bad, and you also don’t walk 40 or 50 miles because that’s taking it. Over the upper bound. So, so Jim’s message here is about consistency of action, you know, and it’s about discipline of action so that you set your target and then you execute on it day by day, week by week, month by month, to give you those consistent results.
But [00:02:00] Milan the question from me. What, what why did you create this as a card? What was the trigger for you to actually capture this as a concept?
Milan: A couple of things happened and obviously, you know, sergeant’s speaking about it and it was one of the big takeaways from his growth faculty presentation. But then I realized in the card is talking about it, I’ve been actually using similar principle. Mm-hmm. Telling people, you know, just do one a day. Right? Or, you know, find the 15 minutes here, but be consistent because you know, your financial advisor will tell you that, you know, consistency is a key because of the compounding effects.
And the same thing works in execution. The same thing works like, you know, if you read for. Disciplines of execution. Yeah. It’s talking about a similar thing, right? What is the one thing we can do this week? So then what is the one thing that we can [00:03:00] do, do next week? Very similar concept of really disciplined action that is leading you to consistent and predictable results and also predictable effort. You know, Jim is talking about the. Importance on sticking to the 20 mile march in good days and bad as you were talking about it, because both is that you still need a result on the on the bad day. But then you don’t want to overextend yourself or go beyond of what you are planning on the good day, because that might actually leave you in a more vulnerable position going after.
And you know, he’s using the trip to, or the expedition to the South Pole as, as an example. But you know, this happens in so many different places for occurring out cloud. You know, these cards themselves are my own two email March, right? Yeah. Committing to publishing two a week. Right. And it’s been going to the clock work, so hopefully, you know, we can stick with that.
Ged: Yeah. So, so the example that Jim [00:04:00] Collins gave around the, you know, the expedition to the North Pole, you know, he contrasts the approach by the two teams. Now, how, how, how would you summarize the different approaches of those two teams in, in that expedition to the North Pole?
Milan: Well, there were a lot of things.
First of all, it was a salt pole, but even though it was supposed to be an North Pole, but then it ended up being a salt pole. The other pole. The other pole, yeah. Yeah, yeah. We have two of them. But really the idea was, you know, we built our plan around making a predictable progress, and then we execute on it in a, in predictable and consistent way.
’cause when you think about it in that context, like. How do you space your storage depot? You know, how much time do you plan you are going to use? How many supplies you, you know, once you create this predictable plan and then stick to it, you know, things fit into each other, you’ll leave yourself less exposed to bed luck or anything else that can happen.
Right? [00:05:00] What the opponent, the date was exactly the opposite. You know, stay in the tent in the bad weather for several days and you know. Complain about the bad luck and then they would ex exert themselves on the good ones. But, you know, there was no rhyme and reason to it. Only push forward as the, as the, that apply.
Sorry. That allowed. And that’s the same principle, you know, everywhere else. Like if you want to write a book, the most important. Ingredients is the bud glue, right? You need to sit down and write. You have to create, you have to create that environment and that accountability mechanism yourself.
Otherwise, it’s never gonna happen.
Ged: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he, he used the example of, you know, as, as you alluded to, you know, one of the teams I think, you know, Scott was who was, you know, when the weather was bad, they just didn’t move anywhere. They just stayed in the tents. Whereas, whereas Edmondson, you know he, every single day they covered off the distance, regardless of whether it was good weather, bad weather, raining, [00:06:00] snowing or sunny, you know, they, every single day they covered the distance. And in, in grape by choice.. Jim Collins uses the, another example of Southwest Airlines, you know, when they were expanding, when they were first starting they didn’t actually leave Texas for years. They made sure that they had solidified the base and, you know, gradually, gradually, gradually they expanded. Even though they were many towns that were clamoring for Southwest to fly to their towns, their cities in other states. They held back and, and I think it was only after about eight years that they actually scheduled their first flights outside of Texas. First of all, they went to to New Orleans and then they started going further afield. But, but the thing that I actually hadn’t picked up at the first writing is, you know, if, if your march is 20 miles. Then that’s your lower bound. But there has to be an upper bound as well. So it’s not just about doing the [00:07:00] minimum, it’s about not doing more than the maximum. ’cause if you do more than the maximum, you may overexert yourself, you may overstretch yourself. And the, you know, the, the history is littered with the corpses of companies that tried to grow too fast, overexerted themselves. We ran too thin and eventually expired. So the, the lesson is not about the minimum, it’s also about the maximum. The upper bound is important too.
Milan: Yeah. The, the discipline works both ways.
Right. Pushing you forward when you don’t want to, and holding you back when you feel like you should go faster because there is a, you know, there is a plan and there is a reason why the, where that limit exists.
Ged: Do, do you have any examples of companies that have now maybe suffered because they didn’t follow the concept of the 20 mile march?
Milan: You put me on the spot. Nothing comes to mind immediately, but you know, when you look at, when you look [00:08:00] at the. Comparison companies and great by, there are many examples there. I can can pull one of them. But again, the, the, the typical, the typical mistake would be moving too much, exerting yourself too much without sufficient reserves because you didn’t plan for a push like that.
Yeah. And I’m sure that we can come up with a whole bunch of examples. Anything comes to your mind.
Ged: Yeah. So there, there was an example that I was thinking of when I put the question and, and sorry for putting you on the spot but the example I was thinking of was there was a, a very, very well known donut company that first opened, I think it was in, this is an Australian example, then they first opened in Melbourne and then they went to Sydney. And. Then it appeared that, that they seemed to be opening a new shop in a new suburb or a new town, you know, pretty much every week, you know, and the, the [00:09:00] donuts were amazing. I mean, I’m, I haven’t got a sweet tooth, but their donuts were actually, no, they were pretty incredible. But they just grew too fast.
They, they didn’t. They didn’t hold themselves back to the upper bound and they grew too fast and they overextended themselves. And as you can imagine, the, the end of the story is, is familiar. They, they, they ran outta cash ’cause they were growing themselves, broke the investment in the new stores, basically used up all their cash and they, they, they didn’t have enough working capital to actually fund operations. So in a, they, they may have had a lower bound, but they didn’t adhere to an upper bound.
Milan: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. No, that sounds like a good example. And then, you know, in, in a hospital business, there are so many other you know, our friend Damien would tell us about how far away to stay from the type of business.
Right. But, but. There are so many other effects that you need to be prepared. You need to be conservative, you need to [00:10:00] be ready to make mistakes, right? Open in the wrong neighborhood because you missed something, right? Mm-hmm. And you might have to close again, right? And you know, having a great donuts at.
Some scale does not necessarily mean that you have the skill and the ability to create such a great donut on a, you know, 10 XA hundred x scale. So going to in some kind of plant manner and having the thresholds or if you know okay, until particular point, we can only add one store a month until we figure out how to do that, then we can maybe double the base.
Mm-hmm. But having the trigger points of where you can start it going faster, so you can go. Safer. Safer because inevitably something’s going to happen. Jim is talking about it as well, right?
Ged: Yeah.
Milan: You don’t know what’s going to happen and when, but something is going to happen for sure. And how prepared you are for that, be it a good thing or bad. That’s, you know, a whole chapter in, in Grade by [00:11:00] choices in the concept of luck, right? And the 20 mile March goes to that is basically how it makes you resilient to any changes of the environment that might affect your your business and your future one way or the other. Yeah, yeah,
Ged: I’ve, I’ve got the book open here on the 20 mile March chapter, and I’m just gonna read some of the, you know, the there’s a section here about the elements of a good 20 mile march.
So, a good 20 mile March uses performance markers that delineates a lower bound of acceptable achievement. So that’s the, the low water mark. You know, if 20 miles is your minimum, 20 miles every single day. A good 20 mile march has self-imposed constraints that create an upper bound. Again, the, the high watermark that we talked about a good 20 mile march is tailored to the enterprise.
So in my donor example, not opening too many stores and violating. The upper bound that maybe they didn’t actually set. A good 20 mile march lies largely [00:12:00] within your control. Now that’s a good one, isn’t it? ’cause if you can’t control the bounds either up or lower, then well, you know, you’ve got no way of actually affecting the outcome.
And this is, this is the one I really like. A good 20 mile march has a Goldilocks timeframe, not too short and not too long. But just Right. And I think that’s the thing that a lot of companies probably struggle to articulate. You know, what is that Goldilocks timeframe? And the final one is a good 20 mile march is designed and self-imposed by the enterprise, not imposed externally.
So you have to come up with your own boundaries, your own 20 mile march for it to really work for you.
Milan: And you know, the same thing applies personally, right? We are looking at it because we’re coaches from the business point of view, but. You know, a lot of people have their own march. You know, it can be the every, day walk with your dog, no matter what, rain or [00:13:00] shine. You will you know, obviously if anybody has any kind of fitness routine, you know, how, how important this is in creative world, you know. Being relentless and disciplined about creating the space for yourself to be able to to work those muscles, right. Whatever, you know, whatever that is.
You can find examples everywhere, and once it’s followed, you also see the results compounding very, very quickly. Yeah.
Ged: Yeah. And it doesn’t have to be every day. I mean, I know people who know they, they commit to going to the gym four times a week, five times a week. But they’re not gonna beat themselves up if they don’t go on a Sunday morning.
As long as they hit there four or five times a week. It’s about consistency. It’s setting your, your constraints, your boundaries, and then being consistent in actually bringing them to life.
Milan: And that is the timeframe, right? Sometimes it’s, something needs to happen every month. Sometimes it’s, something needs to happen every [00:14:00] day.
Sometimes it’s something needs to happen every hour. I cannot come up with an example, but I’m sure there will be one. You know things that are absolutely essential, but they have their own timeframe and you design your own. That is the key. That is the key here. Not something that you read somewhere, right?
Your own your own goal broken into small pieces that you can predictably fill and plan for, and then created the conditions of successful expedition. To go back to the original analogy,
Ged: So the 20 mile March one of Jim Collins, lesser known concepts, but a very powerful concept, all the same.
Excellent.
