In this zealous episode, Faris Aranki, Founder and CEO of Shiageto Consulting, shares how his passion for improving strategic effectiveness within all businesses and individuals led to the establishment of Shiageto Consulting.
You will discover:
– How to stress test the quality of your ideas
– The one reason the vast majority of strategic plans fall short
– Why the perfect strategy and all the right people still might fail to follow through
Episode Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello, hello and welcome welcome once again to the Secrets of the High Demand Coach podcast and I’m here with yet another high demand consultant and that is Faris Aranki. He’s not experienced firsthand in the fine differences between strategic success and failure, not Faris, his work to distill his knowledge of how to solve complex problems in a strict structured manner. Combined with his skill of engaging and effectively with others, and his ability to quickly determine the barriers to a strategy success. He spent 12 years working as a strategy consultant at some of the top global consulting firms and his work has spanned numerous companies from global behemoths to small startups, in numerous countries across a range of sectors, supporting them all to unlock strategic success. Well, Faris, I’m so excited to have you here. And before we get into how you help folks unlock strategy, because you have a really cool approach to this that I think is profound. Before we get that I’d love to hear before starting your company before kind of doing this full time, especially on your own. So tell us your story. What were you doing beforehand? And how that ultimately leads you to where you are today?
Faris Aranki
Yeah, sure. Sure. Bring it bring it to life, right. And I didn’t realize there was a time before I ran my company’s scope. But I’ll try and juggle the gray cells and bring it back. Hey, I look like you kind of mentioned, I’d be running company for four years. Before that I did have a life I was the strategy consultant for 12 years working at different firms, predominately focusing on the energy industry. And that’s because before being a strategy consultant, I worked in the energy space, I worked for a big global energy company in their strategy team. And long, long time before that, I started off as a high school teacher, Scott, so I used to teach high school math and economics. Yeah, I’ve had a, you know, had a lot of different twists and turns on the way. But you know, I’ve worked lived and worked around the world that had different careers. It’s all about taking each component from whatever you’ve done, and building on that, those foundations to the next thing you’re doing. And that’s why I love doing what I do.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s, that’s awesome. So if we fast forward, then to today, what would you say some of the most important work you’re doing with your clients?
Faris Aranki
Everything we do is the most important work. Let’s be clear, but what is it? You know, just listening to you read out my intro, which apologies I wrote, and sounds very clunky. Now I heard somebody else read that was, quite simply, what we do that is really important is bring emotional intelligence to strategy, right? Anyone can come up with a strategy. I know. Some are not. But that’s the easy part. You know, not to break it to people, that’s easy, but getting others to understand and buying geostrategy. That’s the difficult part. Because then otherwise, it’s just a piece of paper. Right? I have worked seen far too many companies have great ideas, great piece of paper, great strategies, they go no, without emotional intelligence without that ability. So that’s the greatest thing that we do for companies, and it can really revolutionize what they achieve.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, so first question with that is, why is that the case? Right? Why is it that we tend to be so underdeveloped on the EQ side of things?
Faris Aranki
Because many of us are, for one reason or another, a lot of it could be our brand, but it could also be our mindset, our task focused, right are like, I need to complete a, I need to achieve this. Great, right. It’s great to be focused on what you need to achieve. But if it involves other people, they don’t think, how do I get these others involved? You know, we’re wired to think I need to do this, whether you know it, whether I need to be a bulldozer or not. And you know, take a conversation between two people, I say, say yeah, I’m on this podcast and say I had a burning thing. I need to talk to you about a my book or something. I just come on, and I talked about the book, and I’m just like, and I’m just blunted Lee, you know, bulldozing at you. I’m not worried about are you receiving it? I’m just worried about broadcasting. And that’s that’s how we’re programmed in life to broadcast not to think about the receiving ad, but that’s a large part of it. Because if you pitch and nobody catches, then, hey, the game’s over.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah, that’s so true. So true. So what do you what do we do then? Right? Let’s say, we’ve been there, we’ve done that we’ve got the marks, we’ve had the strategy that has not worked and and we recognize, hey, like, this Ferris guy, he’s onto something, how do we improve our EQ?
Faris Aranki
So the good news is, everyone can improve their EQ, right? The cue is to turn around what you’re doing, instead of you talking at people ask them questions, right? Say you’re explaining something stop after 10 seconds, say, Hey, does that make sense? You know, what, you know, what? What did you just hear me say, What would you like to hear about? And now, that’s a really sort of, yeah, it’s sort of high level explanation, but that’s a that’s a great example. It’s taking the cues from around you learn to have more than you sort of omit right because there’s a lot of clues in life out there. But we Until you’re trained to look for them, you’re gonna be lacking in EQ.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. Now one of the challenges with that, and you face this in what may be the real world is that it takes time. Yeah. And so how do you cuz there is another side of that and extreme, and I’ve worked with some organizations that that’s all they do. They just talk to each other, and they want to feel good. And it’s all wonderful. You know, like, you can overdo this. Now, most of us are at no risk for overdoing it. But how do you find the right balance? How do you know when you’ve asked enough questions and when you haven’t?
Faris Aranki
Well, that doesn’t mean you’ll know. But it’s where you start off from right? I often talk about these three types of meetings, let’s say whatever you’re trying to achieve, right? There’s the closed meeting, which is, I turn up and I tell you what I’ve already prepared. And I’m I don’t care about your opinion, I’m not here to get your opinion. And those are great, right? If you need to deliver a set of instructions to someone. Then there’s the other side of that the other end of the spectrum is the open meeting where you literally start with a blank piece of paper. So what do you think a, this is a topic? What do you think? Right? Again, like you lay you touch one that will take a long time? Okay, yeah, you’ll get completely fine. But there is a third type of meeting, which I call the half open meet, where I’m going to turn up having done 90% of the work, I’m going to have stuff and I’m going to ask you not an open question like, where would you start on this? What do you think of this model, have I prepared, I am totally open for you to restructuring it or changing bits of it. But I’m not open up everything, right? That’s a great technique to use, because then you can timebox it, then it’s not like gonna take forever, but the other person feels involved in right.
Scott Ritzheimer
And that’s hard. Because there’s some risk to that with either of the other two, you’re not really putting anything on the table for anyone to reject. If it’s already signed in and settled, like you’re closed meeting, you’re getting your way one way or the other. If it’s the Open Meeting, you know, you can kind of hide behind everyone else’s ideas, I think what makes it so challenging? Is the personal risk involved in bringing something that could be rejected? How do you how do you handle that? Because what you don’t want to do is walk into a meeting, ask them questions, and then start to feel threatened and shut the thing down? How do you keep that at bay?
Faris Aranki
Yeah, and you’re absolutely right, you’re going to pick and choose from those three kinds of meetings, depending on the strength of relationship and what you need to achieve. Okay. So you got to be conscious of that. And, and you’ve got to use a lot of it is your self awareness and self management? Right? If you know, you’re a very defensive person, like be, how have techniques to overcome that. Right. So I’ve worked with, I worked with a lot of leaders. And I, you know, I’ll use the example of one guy, very dominant leader, his natural position he didn’t realize was anytime somebody said something about one of his ideas, he would go on the attack. Right? Because if they were saying something positive, actually, and he didn’t realize it about him. So I videoed the meeting, I played it back to him. And when he saw it, he was like, Man, I do do that. Right. Okay. So that’s first step, self awareness. Then he was like, then he turned to me two weeks later, because it took him time to process it. What do I do first? How do I change this behavior? Because I’ve been offering this way. 30 years, right. And nobody’s had the balls in my team to tell me and I said, it’s okay. Right. I said, we’re going to try some techniques. Right? First technique, you’re going to be the last to speak in a meeting from now on, instead of being the first, right. Second technique, you’re physically going to sit on your hands. Right? It’s going to be a reminder not to say anything. All right. Once you’ve graduated from that, we’ll put a risk play, we’ll put an elastic band on your wrist, right? So you’ve conflicted every time you think you’re going to do this, right? So it’s, it’s about changing those habits or behaviors. But the first step is you got to be aware dust, and you’ve got to have someone close to you to give you that feedback. And that’s a lot often that’s what I did we do with senior leaders is spot the behaviors, not be afraid to call them out because I’m not a risk. If I tell a leader, he’s crap, right? He’s he could improve because my job isn’t on the line. Yeah, he might not hire me again. But that’s I can step beyond the psychological safety and the boundaries of teams that they might be in jeopardy. That’s why his team never told him if that he is.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, there’s so much in there. One is that challenge function, right, a healthy team, I think the result of this EQ that you’re talking about is a good challenge function. It’s the psychological safety that your team has to say no. And I would say for a lot of leaders, they feel successful when everyone’s just like, yes, we’re all moving together. But I would say a better indicator of success. And I’d love to hear your thoughts on this is that you’re regularly getting pushback from your team, right? You’re you’re regularly getting not not like recalcitrance it but people who are challenging your ideas. Would you agree?
Faris Aranki
Oh, completely right. I have you. I don’t know. Scott, have you ever had the pleasure of working over in Ireland? No, no, right? The Irish is some of the friendliest people you’ll ever meet. Maybe you met some Irish people over the years. And I once did a corporate strategy piece with an Irish client. And my team was super happy because every meeting we go into, we’d show them stuff. We work on the strategy. They’d say, This is amazing. This is the best work we’ve ever you’ve ever seen. And my team was super happy. They’re like the client is really happy. And I said, No, no, no, no, this is a bad client. Right? Because they’re not giving us a Any challenge whatsoever. So we, you know, we could literally put terrible stuff in front of them, but because they’re so friendly, they’ll say, Yeah, this is great. I said, Guys, we have to up not up our game and challenge ourselves. We’re gonna bring in someone who is tough on us. Yeah. So I put in a set for a partner to just join the meetings to be that sort of like not this isn’t good enough, right? Because we needed that constructive challenge. And you see it in your own life, right? When you get in your comfort zone, you ease off, you don’t perform produce your perfect work. Now, in some areas of life, that’s absolutely fine. But when you want to deliver high excellence, you need that challenge. And again, that’s a key part of psychological safety.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah. That’s so good. So one of the things that we’ve talked a lot about EQ. And I think that’s right, because it’s one of the hardest ones. But the thing that really stood out to me on your website, and as I was reading a lot of your materials was this kind of balanced approach that you take this three prong approach of what I think you call the IQ EQ, FQ is that right?
Faris Aranki
That’s absolutely right. Right to be strategically successful, you need those three elements. So let’s just let’s just run, we talked a lot about the EQ, the ability to take others on the chin, the IQ is the quality of your ideas. Right? And it’s not, it’s not like the classic sort of, you know, get get lab tested for our kids. How good are your ideas? They can always be better, right? Have you actually tested them? Have you stressed tested them? Have you? Have you involved more people’s views? So if not, that’s where we help companies. But often companies have really good IQ, they have great ideas, great, great technical people, the missing bit and bit that some of your listeners might never have heard of, was the focus question. So this is something we we we, you know, a bit of research, I was amazed, obviously, people talk about focus, but a maze that hadn’t been formulated, we actually trademarked the focus question, which says, Look, you can have a great idea, others can be bought into it. But if you as a company are not focused enough, you’re gonna deliver, right? And that could mean prioritization. But it could also mean, look at the barriers that stop strategy from coming, it being made, like you haven’t given your team the tools to do what you’ve asked them to do. Right? The classic one, for example, that I often talk about is, imagine a broken printer in an office, right? You gotta have that’s fine. That’s fine, right? But what’s happening is each time somebody goes to that they lose half an hour of their day, they lose. And that’s that, you know, that’s, that’s like, yeah, 8% of their working day, right. And you’re telling them that you need them to be really super productive and focus on launching this new product, whatever. Right? So fgu, they’re saying, just get a new printer, right, identify that as this barrier to focus, eliminate. Right? And that happens all the way through from, is it clear what people should be working on? Are there barriers in the way to even the individual what distracts me from my work, right? We all know, our phones distract us. But are we conscious that, hey, if I’m hungry, I’m not going to be producing my best work, I’m going to my mind is going to be over there. Like what should I have for lunch? Right? So how can you eliminate those to be at the top of your FQ?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah, that’s so good. So when, you know, one of the things that we always kind of look for we know it’s never true, we were always looking for it. Is this kind of simple, one size fits all answer, right? If it’s, if it’s not this and, and, and sometimes, as coaches, we can kind of feed into that with our specialty, right? It’s like, for example, if we had stopped it at EQ, right? It’s all it’s all about EQ. And so, yeah, there’s, there’s this like, slippery slope of like, yeah, you can go way down that rabbit hole, but it’s not enough if you don’t balance it out. But on the flip side, when there’s three different things that could go wrong, how do you know which one it is?
Faris Aranki
It The answer is it. It could be anything, right? Here’s the here’s the here’s the honest truth, right? All three of these things will probably bring you some success or improvement. So here’s my tip, right? Pick the one that you’re most likely to actually stick to and do, right? Because if if if Option A is gonna give you a 5%, uplift, and Option B, a 10%, and Option C or 20%, but you know, you’re gonna find option C really hard to deliver and you’re gonna, you’re gonna bail out halfway through, just pick option A, may get that 5% in the bank, then we can come back to BNC. Don’t try and do them all at once. That’s what I see a lot of that’s where the focus comes in. Right? Yeah, I see a lot of people go right. We’ll do all these things. Whoa, whoa, whoa, buddy, right. Human beings cannot do too much at the same time and do them well. So yeah, that’s that’s the honest, there are no bad choices. The bad choice is doing nothing of the three.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah. It’s so true. Or not making the choice at all right? Trying to make every single all that there. Yeah. And it’s that it’s that again, that’s kind of that difficult middle space that I love the advice like go your take that path of least resistance and then build on it, right. Don’t just stop there, but build on it.
Faris Aranki
Yeah, exactly. Right. And it’s amazing what you can achieve that sort of 1% Difference compounded, and I see lots of charts about it, but it makes a hell of a difference. And that’s why we do what we do bring more irrational intelligence. It might not from outside seems, seems super sexy to to fix a conversation in a boardroom. But that and the the sort of the impact and the sort of the, you know, the splash it creates it is a mask.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, it’s so true. Alright, so here’s a question I like to ask everyone that comes on this. What is the biggest secret that you wish this was not a secret at all? What’s that one thing you wish everybody listening knew?
Faris Aranki
Do you know, I’m going to link it to what we were just talking about all the key knowledge that you need a regular, you’re just not using it. Right? Like, most of us forget stuff we learn right? Human beings will forget 70% of what they learned the day before, right? Unless you use it. So the biggest secret that I wish I’d known as it when I was younger tickling my student days was used the goddamn knowledge that you picked up, right? Apply immediately, even if it’s something small. Right? So all this stuff are going to help companies make people go Yeah, I knew there was like, okay, all right. So having a gym membership or never going, you know, going to the gym is good, right? Start using the gym membership. Start using the knowledge. That’s the biggest secret. Don’t Don’t you have to go and learn a new thing. Just use what you’ve already learned.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah, it’s so true. So true. All right. So it’s one thing to kind of give advice from the side, the other one to jump in all together. So why don’t you for a moment, take off your consultant hat put on your CEO hat, you’re leading your own business as well talk to us about the next stage of growth and what challenges you’ll have to overcome to get there?
Faris Aranki
Yeah, so this hat feels heavier. Right. But hey, you know, as a recap, I started my company four years ago, which was six months before COVID. So the first year was terrible, right. And I still carry the scars, but also that built a lot of strength. So since then, it’s grown. Well, we’ve grown quickly, you know, we’ve got a nice team, we got good clients. So what’s the future hold the future holds continuing that growth, right? And that’s going to bring some challenges, because the next step is that I’m still the sole founder, right, is maybe bringing on some, you know, a co founder to share some of the burden and the worries and and go from it. You know, in some ways, it’s the next evolution, you need to having a bigger team having more complexity. And I look forward to that. Right. i One of the things I love about the business as much as rollercoasters is it keeps my mind occupied as much as I’m advising people am applying those techniques to my company. And it doesn’t always work. Right. And that helps us, you know, and I can be honest with clients, when I go and say, hey, look, I’m doing what you’re doing. Right. And I know how difficult it is. So I look forward to that next stage of growth. I look forward to bringing on a co founder. And yeah, we continue to expand, right, we’ve got some interesting conversations in the US at the moment. So we might do in 2024 actually have a US operation. So there’s lots that excites me, but also scares me Sheffield read as well, because a but if you’re not, if you’re not on that fine line, then I don’t think you’re growing in life. So yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s what my CEO hat has.
Scott Ritzheimer
Fantastic. Fantastic. I love it. And I love that you use the word evolution. Because there’s there’s actually a book that I’ve just put out been promoting recently called the founders evolution. And it is this, this, this constantly changing their stage after stage. And I love that you picked right up on that. So before we let you go, there’s one more question and that is, how can folks find out more about you and get in touch with you?
Faris Aranki
Yeah, absolutely right. And I always direct into one of two things. So my company is called Shiageto. Now, for those who don’t know, don’t speak Japanese. Shiageto is the Japanese word for sharpening stone because we effectively help sharpen other companies and individuals. So look for Shiageto. And, Scott, I’m sure you’re that you’ll put that link because some people don’t know how to spell it. And I’ll say that. But the other place is LinkedIn, I spent, you know, probably a bit too long on LinkedIn, I love it. For good or for bad. If there’s only one Faris Aranki on LinkedIn. So come and find me. I share my daily journey. So if you want to know what it’s like being a startup founder and tips on bringing more EQ into the business world, come and look me up there and we’ll carry on the conversation.
Scott Ritzheimer
That’s fantastic. Faris, thank you so much for coming on. Definitely check out the show notes. For those of you listening. We’ll put both of those links in there. And he’s right both his website and LinkedIn are just chock full of valuable information. You don’t want to miss it. So first again, thank you so much for everyone listening your time and attention you know, mean the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did and I cannot wait to see you next time. Take care.
Contact Faris Aranki
Faris Aranki has experienced first-hand the fine differences between strategic success and failure. Faris has worked to distil his knowledge of how to solve complex problems in a structured manner combined with his skill on engaging effectively with others and his ability to quickly determine the barriers to a strategy’s success. One of his career highlights include 12 years working as a strategy consultant at AT Kearney, EY, Baringa and FTI Consulting. His work has spanned numerous companies (from global behemoths to small start-ups), in numerous countries, across a range of sectors, supporting them all to unlock strategic success.
Want to learn more about Frais Aranki’s work at Shiageto Consulting? Check out his website at https://www.shiageto.com/ or connect with him on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/farisaranki/
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