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Transcription of interview with Jack Bergstrand on December 2, 2013.
Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, Financial Planner & Investment Advisor
Jack Bergstrand is the CEO of Brand Velocity.
He is the author of a fascinating book called Reinvent Your Enterprise.
Douglas Goldstein, financial planner & investment advisor, interviewed Bergstrand on Arutz Sheva
Radio.
Douglas Goldstein: Tell us a little bit about your book.
Jack Bergstrand: The book itself is a compilation of a lot of Drucker material and about 200
others.
Largely, it is the thought in today’s global economy and in the information age that the
enterprise is the brand not so much your product or service or trademark.
Reinventing Your Enterprise is all about taking companies and major initiatives in the knowledge
age and getting them in what Peter Drucker often said in a way were knowledge work productivity
can be improved and so at the heart of reinvention is really knowledge work productivity and
at the heart of knowledge work productivity is Peter Drucker.
Douglas Goldstein: You were differentiating between the enterprise and the brand.
What do you mean?
You could use the example Coca Cola which is the famous brand in the world.
Jack Bergstrand: I think in the old days, the brand was somewhat distinct.
It was owned by marketing and it had a lot to do with your trademark and your image and
I think today that is no longer the case and for a long period of time brands probably
got hijacked by marketing as the expert, but in today’s world particularly with the social
media and the integration of supply chain, the interdependence between different companies
in order to deliver a product or service.
The enterprise itself is the brand and your image and your identity is really a function
of that.
So the way to improve your brand is not to necessarily improve your marketing, it’s
really to improve your company and to improve your people and your relationships which is
very much Drucker days as he was really the first to acknowledge that management was a
social science.
I think most of us did not know what he was talking about but it is becoming clear and
clearer.
Douglas Goldstein: You use the term enterprise.
Is that because you don’t want to specify a company and you try to be more broad than
that?
Jack Bergstrand: In most cases, it’s a company although it could be an organization of another
sort, a firm or a government or education or some other form of an organization, but
largely the enterprise is driven off of the linkage between the company itself and its
enterprises [sums] and its relationships and its strategy as a whole as opposed to just
the part.
Douglas Goldstein: Is this something that only applies to huge corporations or huge
enterprises like Coca Cola or would it applied to a small financial planning firm in Jerusalem?
Jack Bergstrand: It applies even more specifically the math and I think it applies to human beings.
When we distilled a lot of Peter’s work and the work of many others, we came down
to a realization that what we term envision-design-build-operate was at the heart of successful reinvention
initiatives.
It was also at the heart of successful organizations and it’s also at the heart of successful
people.
People who if you frame envision-design-build-operate just a little bit differently, you think about
it in terms of a series of questions, envision is all about where do we intend to go and
why and then that constraints design which is what are we there for and need to do and
when which further constraints build which is how do we best do those things which further
constraints the who which is who is going to be motivated to do this.
Without those constraints and the interdependent knowledge age, a lot of that things happen
but also bad things happen when people are not clear about where they intend to go and
why, what do therefore need to do and when, how to do those things and responsible for
what and we tend to have a lot of empty calories in our lives, largely because they don’t
follow that same process.
I think at the individual level, at a team level and an organizational level and even
the strategic level, the breakthrough of Reinvent Your Enterprise which I owe dramatically or
significantly to Peter Drucker is this notion of envision-design-build-operate as being
the one constant when everything else is moving.
Douglas Goldstein: One of the terms that you keep using is envision which I think is the
core of the basic philosophy and often it seems like the hardest thing to do.
How do you help people to do that?
Jack Bergstrand: More often than not, we have to force it and what we’ve come to find
out is that as individuals, we are all wired in a particular way and some of us are just
build people who we’re in the house and some people are design people who were in
the what.
Some of us are visionaries who are all about where and why and then there are the who people
who are the operators but the truth is it’s very easy to start with the what or how and
we see it all the time in massive enterprise projects, big software projects with the lot
of change of management and it is very predictable without some kind of the framework like this
that when you enter those projects a yearend, people are not clearing about where they intend
to go and why if they ever work.
On one hand, visionaries are critical in terms of laying out a destination but at the same
time they have to be grounded and the organization needs to be grounded and needs other three
aspects, otherwise, it’s a common characteristic of a visionary to change his or her mind all
the time and you really do need to connect the dots between where you intend to go and
why from a vision standpoint which is the proper way to start and then might lead to
what you need to do and when, how the best do those things, who is going to be responsible
for what and do it in a very integrated way.
Douglas Goldstein: Do you think that these principles that you talk about in reinvent
your enterprise apply even in family finance?
Jack Bergstrand: One of the things that we find in large initiatives and even small ones
is that we are wired in a different way.
The big opportunity here is that there needs to be a framework bigger than ourselves that
function in our company and so what we are able to do by introducing envision-design-build-operate
as a framework and then also as a practice is that the practical person might be more
like a builder, sees where they fit into the overall framework and the visionary sees where
they fit in the overall framework and the nice thing about each of these characteristics
is that they all bring with them advantages and at the same time, they bring with them
disadvantages and sometimes huge blind spots.
We found time and time again with introducing the framework and this as a way to think about
reinvention is that the visionary no longer feels compelled to take the practical person
and make them a visionary and vice versa but rather they see where they fit in the whole
and not only are those components all important, the sequence of those components is vitally
important.
Douglas Goldstein: How do you deal with people who perhaps are visionaries but they also
are very hands on?
Is there a way you can help people to focus on what they
are really good at or they seem just good with everything?
Jack Bergstrand: Some people are good at more things than others.
There’s no doubt about that.
I think the important thing in terms of somebody like that is that they have a different set
of problems.
So the nice thing about envision-design-build-operate is that whatever you are, you have a survey
called strategic profiling which identifies individuals and groups to the framework for
initiative like this and the more holistic you are, the more you have a good dose of
envision-design-build-operate, you have the problem of you get energy from everything
and so you’re much more likely to have sequence problem and as you dive in to one area and
then dive back into another area and not connect the dots in terms of where and why, moving
to what to the how and to the who.
If people are very singularly focused in an area, they don’t have that problem typically.
They have another problem and that is a blind spot of these other areas and so there are
people who are very focused on envision, design, build or operate.
There are also others that are more cross functional in nature and when you look at
their teams, they tend to be more holistic because there are people who are focused on
different areas and that’s what you see in teams that the teams have a very hard time
getting the order right where individuals often times are the very hard time filling
in the gaps.
Douglas Goldstein: How can people follow you and your work?
Jack Bergstrand: There are two ways.
One is to order Reinvent Your Enterprise and another way is I would recommend people take
the free version of Strategic Profiling because that’s a good way to see how as an individual
you relate to envision-design-build-operate.
It’s free at www.strategicprofiling.com.
It’s also on the Brand Velocity site and that’s a good way to stay connected or to
at least begin the conversation.
Douglas Goldstein, CFP®, is the director of Profile Investment Services and the host
of the Goldstein on Gelt radio show (Monday nights at 7:00 PM on www.israelnationalradio.com.
He is a licensed financial professional both in the U.S. and Israel.
Securities offered through Portfolio Resources Group, Inc., Member FINRA, SIPC, MSRB, NFA,
SIFMA.
Accounts carried by National Financial Services LLC.
Member NYSE/SIPC, a Fidelity Investments company.
His book Building Wealth in Israel is available in bookstores, on the web, or can be ordered
at: www.profile-financial.com (02) 624-2788 or (03) 524-0942.
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