#127—Rebecca Homkes: Mastering Change—The Survive, Reset, Thrive Framework

Rebecca Homkes, is a high-growth strategy expert and CEO and executive advisor. She is a Lecturer at London Business School, Faculty at Duke Corporate Executive Education, Advisor and Faculty at the Boston Consulting Group focused on AI and Digital Transformation and a former fellow at the London School of Economics Centre for Economic Performance.   

A global keynote speaker and recognized thought leader, she is also the global Faculty Director of the Active Learning Program with the Young Presidents Organization (YPO), leads several fintech accelerators, and serves on the boards of many high-growth companies.   

Rebecca's multifaceted roles give us a uniquely wide and deep perspective on how companies grow. Her work challenges us to realize that the mechanical, linear paradigm of strategy making that has dominated the field for the last 60-odd years cannot deliver sustained growth in volatility of today’s rapidly-changing world. She shares an alternative approach in her 2024 book Survive, Reset, Thrive: Leading Breakthrough Growth Strategy in Volatile Times.

In this conversation, we dive into some of her powerful techniques around arming your company with the right mindset for the right time, and building a company that can learn and adapt through change. 

In this podcast, Rebecca shares: 

• An insightful and concise overview of her "survive, reset, thrive" framework
• Why we should think of growth is loop not a line 
• How to embed continuous learning loops in which you test, gaining insights, implement and share, and the iterating for improvement 
• What uncertainty represents a great time to grow—and how to seize this opportunity 

_______________________________________________________________________________
Episode Timeline:
00:00—Highlight from today's episode
1:06—Introducing Rebecca + the topic of today’s episode
3:23—If you really know me, you know that...
4:32—What is your definition of strategy
05:10—The "survive, reset, thrive" framework
8:30—The learning loop vs. linear thinking
10:20—Parrel paths: strategy and executing
12:59— Beliefs and critical assumptions in strategy
17:28—Addressing AI uncertainty in strategy
19:23—Balancing waiting and acting in strategy 
20:48—Identify your learning loops
22:51—Learning velocity as a growth differentiator
24:41—The dynamics of survive, reset, and thrive modes
28:05—The three elements of thriving organizations
29:15—How can people follow you and continue learning from you?
_______________________________________________________________________________________
Additional Resources:
Personal website: www.rebeccahomkes.com
Link to book: Survive, Reset, Thrive
Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/rebecca-homkes/

Thank you to our guest. Thank you to our executive producer, Karina Reyes, our editor, Zach Ness, and the rest of the team. If you like what you heard, please follow, download, and subscribe. I'm your host, Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for listening.

Follow us at outthinkernetworks.com/podcast

Transcript

Kaihan Krippendorff: Rebecca, thank you so much for being here with us.
 
 I know that you live all over the world and you're traveling all over the world. Where are you joining us from today?
 
 Rebecca Homkes: Oh, thank you so much. It's my pleasure to be. I'm joining you from a very wet a very dreary London England today.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Oh gosh. Oh, gosh. Well, I know you also have a place here in Miami, so hopefully you'll get yes.
 
 Rebecca Homkes:  I'll be in Miami sun soon so we can straddle through. Yes.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Okay. Alright. We'll make it through. I'm gonna open up with the same 2 questions that I always ask, which is if you complete the sentence for me. If you really know me, you know that.
 
 Rebecca Homkes: If you really know me, you know that I am passionate about growth strategy and doing what I do. I fell into something that I got to do what I love, but I'm not saying that with anything else but the absolute truth. Everyone who knows me knows, I'm doing exactly that. As a side though, you also know I am very passionate about all sports, but especially performance sports, especially American football, which I have spent almost 20 years convincing my British colleagues and friends is the true sport to watch, and I'm also a big secret formula 1 fan. I was lucky enough to work with Mercedes Formula 1 for a couple years, and I fell into a deep passion for that as well.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: That is amazing. Yeah. My wife saw the Netflix series about Formula 1, and then she has fallen in love with it. And since it's come to Miami, we've been going ever since And, yeah, it's interesting. So, like, there's engineering, there's strategy, there's team, there's funding 
 
 Rebecca Homkes: There's corporate strategy involved in all sports as well besides the actual action that happens on the field. So there's super cool stuff to geek out into in all of these sports.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yes. Right. You can find a depending on your interest, you can find a different avenue. Great. Alright.
 
 So you are interested, I assume. I mean, obviously, you said in strategy, what is your definition of strategy?
 
 Rebecca Homkes: I think the coolest thing about the definition of strategy is the last couple of years, especially, we're having all these conversations about everything's changed, new normal, paradigm shift, everything's different. What's really cool is strategy hasn't changed. The definition of strategy remains value creation. Strategy was and will always be about delivering value creation. And the definition of value creations driving the biggest gap possible between your customer consumer willingness to pay and your total cost of delivering that value.
 
 So strategy connect strategy, value creation, value creation, moving those 2 critical needles apart.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Awesome. I love it. So if strategies about value creation, just if you don't mind just lay out the framework, I wouldn't say a student of. It's too complicated, but I have written about and I use the OODA loop, a lot, John Boyd’s OODA loop.
 
 I love the idea of the cycle, and I particularly I love the way that you've captured and and it is different than the Uddalope. So just, like, if you don't mind, just, like, describe your survive reset thrive framework and just 1 sentence each. What does what does each mean?
 
 Rebecca Homkes: Yeah. I would love to. Thanks so much. So survive reset thrive is you know, the best way to describe it is a pragmatic and proactive model of how to grow through any market condition. And you've gotta start with the premise that growth is a loop, not a line, which can sound a bit cliche, but unfortunately, most of our strategy planning tools are based on linear checklist or frameworks.
 
 You know, step 1, then step 2, then step 3. And that's not the dynamic and complex world we're living in. And so I'm encouraging strategy, you know, strategy experts, whether you're an internal CSO or you're running your own company to embrace this loop thinking. And everything in growth you're going through this loop of survive, there will be shots, which could be market shocks like a recession or a COVID or a surprise election. It could be an internal shock.
 
 Like, you lose a major investor or you lose a major customer. So you gotta stabilize the business. You reset because the situations change, so you gotta change, which means challenging all of your critical assumptions. Then you can go back to being a thriving organization again. But you are gonna be going through this 3 mode loop.
 
 There's no perfect timing to stay in each. There's no way you can stay in thrive forever, which is a classic question the entrepreneurs ask me. You're going through this loop. And I think the biggest challenge of a 3 part loop is no organization goes through it at the same pace. So you're gonna have different business units in different geographies at different stages, and that can make our role as the internal strategy consultant or head of strategy very difficult.
 
 Because we are, you know, responsible for doing these processes and plans to get everything in sync at the same time. But you're almost always gonna have some units who need survive time and some who need thrive and some who need reset. And I kind of liken it to having 2 or 3 kids as a parent. And they each need a different parenting style to thrive. And it's the same on this.
 
 And so we need to actually embrace a bit of agility in how we approach the strategy process as well to embrace where different units are across these 3 modes.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Fascinating. I mean, so many questions that come off of that. Actually, it reminds me a little bit. We have Mike Tushman on and, you know, his ambidextrous organizations that at the very top, you have to have that leadership that could go between the 2 modes. But it sounds like you're saying that and those modes, I guess, what I'm hearing is, those are dynamic.
 
 Like, different parts of the organization, or they don't just stick in 1 mode?
 
 Rebecca Homkes: They don't stick in 1 mode. And, unfortunately, a lot of our processes are about age of the organization or size. So you need process if you're up to 10000000 process b for 10 to a hundred, process 3 for a hundred to a billion. And there's a bit of truth to that, but the differences in in modes really falls apart pretty quickly after 10000000. And then there's very little difference too.
 
 So, you know, if I'm honest, having been doing this for a very long time. But no matter what size or age you are, you're going to go through this. And the biggest trap is doing the same thing every year and never doing that forced reset sometimes or rushing a survive phase when you probably need as a unit to stay in there for an extra 6 months, and we're forcing units in or out of things because of our corporate planning process sometimes.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: So I I'd love to get into if there's some very specific suggestions and ideas, you know, around managing the corporate strategy conversation, but I just wanna we'll pull 1 thing out for the readers that I really appreciate about reading and listening to your stuff. This loop versus the linear. Okay? So, like, a company is entering a new market, and they kind of have a playbook because they've done it before, and kind of the linear model would be execute the playbook. How is the loop metaphor?
 
 What what's the loop metaphort tell you to do differently.
 
 Rebecca Homkes: Well, there's, you know, the survivors at Thrive loop, but kind of the critical underlying loop, I'm gonna have a loop within a loop here. So brace yourself, is those learning loops. Right? Is learning loops are these repetitive, critical, cyclical processes of growth. So more simply, as we're doing anything in growth, you're going through a loop of execute insight in bet.
 
 Like, you execute something in the market. You get an insight you embed it in the organization, but the next time you execute, you should do it better. And so if I'm opening a new market, I'm launching a new product, I'm onboarding a new supplier, I'm actually going through this learning loop of execute insight and bet. And if we fall too much in the this is the checklist, this is what we do. Here's what actually accidentally happens.
 
 I'm heads down to new insights or new learning because I'm trying to stick to the plan or follow the process. And look, we need to stick to class and processes. We have for governance aspects, but it misses that insight. And here's a second thing I've changed. Execute is the first step.
 
 The traditional strategy process is analyze analyze, analyze, make decision, you know, approve decision, sit on decision, approve decision a second time, and then finally start executing. And we need to embrace this x you to get the learning, get the insight, embed the insight, and do it better again next time, is our world is changing at a pace. Right? That that old linear cycle of making decisions is going to be competitive disadvantage.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Right. Yeah. No. Again, each time you speak, you're popping a whole bunch of things, I'm kind of thinking of that yeah. You have that learning loop, the UDA loop.
 
 You have the the agile loop. But talk to us about this need to have parallel paths because you're what you're what I hear you saying, I'm gonna be correct or wrong, is it's it's not a question of we plan, and then we switch to execution. We're doing both. We're doing 1 for the other. So
 
 Rebecca Homkes: You are. Yeah. You are. And a little bit of that, you know, there's a couple different places where that comes in. But, you know, business schools traditionally have separated strategy and execution, and then they separate leadership and culture too.
 
 Like, these are really things that live separately in organizations. And strategy and execution live together. You know, any cliche about which one's more important than the other is a waste of our time. Right? They only live accidentally when they live together.
 
 Right? So the strategy you are achieving is the strategy you are executing. And let me put it simply. I'm wondering if we should stop calling them a strategic plans are the strategic planning process. I'm reframing it.
 
 I'm dropping the word plan. Let me tell you why. Because there's something about the word plan that frames our brain. Everything in this must get done. Right?
 
 This is what we must do. And as soon as we call the strategic plan, we are now focused on getting plan done. And I want people heads up, not heads down, and acknowledging the plan as a hypothesis. It's hopefully a great hypothesis based on all the learnings we had at the time of development but these hypotheses are gonna get proven and just proven as we're executing. And I need a system in the organization that's going to be willing to adjust it and update it as we learn.
 
 And what you're doing in this parallel path thing to make it more specific for the listeners. Is you made this set of beliefs, right, as you've developed the strategy. Now you're executing the strategy, but the ultimate parallel path is I'm testing my beliefs in the market while I am executing my strategy. And as my beliefs get affirmed or proven, I am actually incrementally resourcing and doubling down on that priority. Right?
 
 And as my beliefs get on proven or disproven or have the critical pathway off, I might pause or stop that priority. In these micro shifts that organizations make, that's the true power of agility. Now we over romanticize these big strategic pivots. You know, company was doing x, and now they're doing y. You know, empirically, those are few, and empirically, a lot of them don't work.
 
 Right? The true power of agility is these micro shifts and adjustment. As external eyes, we often can't see. That's the parallel path thing. I'm executing while I'm testing.
 
 I'm bringing learnings in. I'm adjusting. I'm pausing. I'm doubling down. I'm adding.
 
 And that's what we need to embrace in the process as well. Which is why I think strategic planning isn't framing us to do what we need to do for our organizations.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: So I don't know if you have an answer to this, but I'm kind of thinking that there are probably you probably have some kind of schema of types of beliefs. I think that there are some types of beliefs that are, like, cultural beliefs. We you know, this is the customer's all. Right? There's beliefs that we don't know.
 
 I think, like, read them a graph and discovery driven planning. Our strategy depends on the customer adoption rate, but we don't know if this can be 5 percent or 50 percent. So let's look that. There are beliefs that you kind of, like, you're betting on, but you might be wrong, and then there are things that you just you know, that you're really getting on. Do you have, like, a kind of a help people, like, think about it?
 
 Rebecca Homkes: Yeah. Absolutely. So first of all, beliefs are not religious dogmas. Right? Is, you know, you start with your beliefs from the macro trends.
 
 And that's, you know, what stuff going on? Macro, industry, economic, social, you know, specific to you. There's also what I call value chain trends. So what are your critical beliefs based on how you think your best at r and d, your supply chain, your culture, your leadership? And then you've we set them.
 
 You know, you call it the trends, but most strategies have a bunch, you know, call out the trends, have pages and pages of the trends, but more critical in the strategy is not the trend. It's your belief, like your stance. So think the trend is what you can see, what your belief is your stance of how that's gonna move going forward. And then you've got some critical assumptions. And the best way to simplify it is what has to be true for this to be a great idea.
 
 So I start with the beliefs, then you kinda work through the strategy. But then before you really move forward into x education. You've got your belief, but you also have your set of critical assumptions.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: 1 example of a what has speech would just help us do? Yeah.
 
 Rebecca Homkes: You know, let's take kind of the ESG agenda. Right? So if you're progressing with anything around carbon reduction, I'm working with a great pool company trying to take carbon capture out of concrete, They've got some critical assumptions about how quickly governments move, like, what governments are willing to subsidize, you know, how much customers actually care versus say that they care. And we've captured those, you know, assumptions based again by their political aspects by the customer aspects, by the consumer aspects. And, you know, there's many, but you can really capture in probably 6 or 7 core assumptions, and now I'm testing those.
 
 And I'm testing those. And as long as they're roughly right, but, you know, maybe not tracking, I'm still going. As they start accelerating, I start accelerating. And you can just go back to the question what has to be true for this to be a great idea. Those are your most critical assumptions, and that's where you start parallel pathing in that testing process.
 
 And here's how you practically, though, let me add 1 thing, is you need to add a tracker to your strategy. You've got your strategy tracker, but you need to make a belief tracker. So your belief tracker is based on the critical beliefs that are baked into our assumptions baked into our strategy. You're tracking those beliefs separately, not related, but separately. And here's the fun thing.
 
 You want your belief tracker to be off track sometimes. Because if I look if I look at a team's belief tracker and it's all green, My instant assumption is not this team is a genius and they predict the world wonderfully. My instant assumption is I bet we weren't clear enough on our beliefs to get any feedback on whether or not they're proving or not. So a bit of orange and a bit of gray is actually good because that means we were clear enough. I can actually test this in the market.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Alright. I'm just making kind of a little mental lip pee peeve here. We had Amy Edmonson on, you know, psychological safety, and she looked at, you know, nursing teams that actually had more reds. Is that related to what you're describing?
 
 Rebecca Homkes: It's related to the notion of embracing the learning loop, you know, what she calls the learning moment, and she does a great job of defining different types of learning that you're supposed to be doing. Right? It's an excellent book for those who haven't read yet. I'm assuming all of your listeners have. And so that's gonna bracing a notion that going back to what we said, our strategy's hypothesis.
 
 Right? And we're going to be testing these hypothesis, and it's okay to pause or change some of the things along the way as these hypothesis have proven or disproven. Which means we will need to resource testing, not just resource executing for results, and that's another shift that we wanna make if we really wanna embrace this path with a threat.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Gotcha. So it's kind of, like, being honest with ourselves that we don't know or we we're learning things that are inconsistent with what we believed.
 
 Rebecca Homkes: Exactly. And those and those ways to do it well. Right? The immature way to do it, let's take AI. And I'm hearing this a lot over the last couple of months is, you know, to make a belief, like, AI is gonna be a really big deal, but we can't predict gonna happen, so we need to watch it.
 
 We didn't do anything in our strategy by saying that. So saying that and then not putting in a strategy and doing nothing differently, we're not doing anything. But making some pretty core beliefs about how quickly it's gonna move on a macro level, an industry level, productivity level and then testing those along the way, now you're kind of embracing some of this mentality.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Gotcha. So let's just dig a little bit more into that because I love how the way how you approach this idea of trends and how we relate to trends. And the idea of, like, trying to predict where AI will be in 3 months is and what it will do
 
 Rebecca Homkes: It's a fool's errand. It's a fool's errand. Right. Yeah.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: So what do we do? Do we just wait to see what other people will do and then we act or but then we're too late? How do we Yeah.
 
 Rebecca Homkes: This is, of course, it's 1 of those that 2 word. It depends answer. Right? But here's first what I like to do. Is making a belief about AI is, frankly, a waste of time.
 
 Right? You're saying nothing. So I asked teams to break it down into 4 types, your macro view of AI. I'll come back to what that is. The industry, internal needle up, if I go back to strategy, so increasing customer willingness to pay, internal needle down.
 
 So you've got 4 beliefs you've gotta make. Think about macro. Here, it's a good example, is the movement from search to ask. As we move it from searching in Google to ask in GPT, if you're a b to c business and, frankly, some b to b businesses, that might affect your customer acquisition. If you're a brand based business, this really changes things for you.
 
 Right? But I think of some of my great brands, like, let's take AWD 40 that blue and yellow can't. Right now, if you and I go to Google or YouTube and put in fix a squeaky door, it's gonna return millions of videos of people fixing squeaky doors with a blue and yellow can. But if you go to your GPT of choice, I won't we won't name many names here. Right?
 
 And put in how do I fix this squeaky door? It's entitled to use a lubricant. Right? And that's 1 company. So that's a macro industry.
 
 It changes ability to enter, ability to exit account, consolidation, fragmentation. Then, of course, need a lot need a doubt. So make a belief on all of those, then you can start testing them. You're not trying to predict the future. You're taking a stance, so you can start moving.
 
 Sometimes our bigger companies are gonna move to actively shape if you've got a critical belief that has to be true, go into a shaping stance. Often, we're just in learning stance. And, yes, of course, is sometimes appropriately to be in an active waiting stance.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: So what do you do with leadership? Or what does a chief strategy officer, chief innovation officer do when leadership says, let's just wait and think through the decision more. Let's see what's happening. Are we making the right decision? You know, we're not in execution.
 
 What how do you react to that?
 
 Rebecca Homkes: There are times when purposely waiting is the right response. And my challenge is if you're in a waiting stance, right, you should be waiting because you are very purposely watching for 1 or 2 beliefs to be proven. If we're not even clear enough to know what our beliefs are, right, we need to do work there before we go into that. I find it very difficult to ever argue we shouldn't be utilizing the learning stance, but I call acting to learn. So I'm taking purposeful action in the market not to get results today, but to get the insights I need for results tomorrow.
 
 Right? And so if you think about, at its simplest in strategy, we can wait or we can act. And we can wait because we're analyzing, we can wait because we're watching, or we can be wait purposely wanted to move in number 2, or we can act the results, the classic strategy 1. We can act to shape or we can act to learn. And if your corporate strategy process is using 2 of those 6 stances, you know, way to analyze accurate results, you are leaving all of these options on the table that other people in the market are using.
 
 So waiting is okay if it's very purposeful, but I want you using some of those acting stances too. If it's premature to act for results, you should be acting to learn.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: I think that people can kind of get their heads around this taking action in order to learn in that space of, like, human centered design, new product design, but I love that you talk about applying that across, like, the entire other areas of this model.
 
 Rebecca Homkes: Yeah. And there's 1 ask, of course, you know, just articulate your beliefs, testing your beliefs, but more fundamental and you can do it pre and post setting your top priorities, but let's talk post. Those would be easier for listeners to grasp on to. Once you've got your top priorities, I go through each of them and say, where am I critical learning loops? So within each of the top priorities, where are the 2 or 3 loops that we need to accelerate our learning?
 
 It could be onboarding a new supplier. If it could be kind of sustainability scoping for suppliers, it could be opening a new market. It could be rolling out a new internal IT system, like an ERP launch or something along those lines. It could be, you know, 1 of my critical HR metrics days to value creation. So you identify what these kind of few ones are map out, hey.
 
 Here is the 6 or 7 steps, right, that we have right now. And what your goal is to say, hey. In this loop, you know, let's take onboarding a new supplier. There's 10 steps right now. How can I, you know, makes it go eliminate the friction and go faster through them, and then those learnings will embed and evolve into my next stage of the priority?
 
 So simple, identify your learning load. So it's critical, repeatable activities for growth. I'm gonna define it again. So I'm a big repeater. Your learning looping, those critical, repeatable activities for growth.
 
 Those are what your goal always is. And, you know, sometimes I think corporate strategy processes, they stop at the top priorities and then move to tracking. And it's a huge miss because you've got all of those insights from the discussions, from the vetting, from the scenario planning, and you just chunk everything into a tracker and start executing. It's like, why aren't we doing a better job of linking the insights from the discussion into the execution besides just tracking the priorities and learning loops is a great place to do that.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Fascinating. Yeah. And I and I heard you say something before, but kind of the distinction between learning and teaching. And I kind of what I'm hearing is sort of a maybe talk to us about that because there is this, you know, view. Hey.
 
 We we've come up with our plan, and we repeat our plan, our processes, you know, operating manuals and things. So what what's the difference between learning and what many companies do?
 
 Rebecca Homkes: Let's give the big punch line. Okay? The number 1 differentiator being a Thrive company without question, not even close is learning velocity. Organizations that learn faster, grow faster, it is that simple. But learning is hard.
 
 Because being a learning organization is not being a teaching organization. Almost all companies pride themselves on learning because they have an LMS system. They have a team dedicated to it. They send people to fabulous business schools as, of course, they should keep going. Right?
 
 As all of your guests for the test. But that's great, but that's incomplete. Right? That's being a teaching organization. Being a learning organization is, here's our priorities.
 
 And within them, here's a 3 learning loop we need to close. We're acknowledging our strategies to set up hypothesis. We're going to test and involve as we're executing we are preparing our board and stakeholders, right, that we have a set of hypothesis, hey. 1 of these priorities might not be there next year. Let me show you the first reset of our 3 year strategy because we are going to be more agile than others in the market.
 
 And it's a capability. Like, growth is a capability, and it is a choice you have to make whether or not you want to build that capability in your organization. And, frankly, I don't wanna call it laziness because people think they're doing the right thing. But, hey, we just need to go on to execution mode right now. When I hear that from an organization, I know growth is about to fall off the table.
 
 Right? Because as soon as you go into that mode and you think you need to can stop building a capability of growth and learning, things are gonna start slowing down really fast.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Gotcha. As you say, there are very few organizations that actually can gross for, you know, over time. Somehow, cities can keep growing and growing, growing, and countries.
 
 Rebecca Homkes: They are. They are. But what the cities that you probably looked to had recent Right? Look at all of those cities. How many New York has gone through surviving resets many times.
 
 San Francisco, of course, is going through 1 right now. You know, are Miami. Right? How many times is going? We think about Miami in the eighties and nineties.
 
 We're very different in both of those decades than Miami in the early 20 20. So cities, yes, because cities always have this structure that they can get back to thrive easier than organizations. Right? Because they have these populations who are rooting for them, which is a little bit different sometimes than shareholders in a public market.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Interesting. It tells a little bit more because, you know, also what I love about what you what you say is, like, it's not just about being triggered, seeing an internal external shift change, and then be bringing react quickly to that. It's more about that you're you're not in 1 of these states at all time at any given time. You're more kind of across all. Just bring that to life first.
 
 Yeah.
 
 Rebecca Homkes: So we think about there's 3 modes in the loop. There's a survive mode, right, where you're stabilizing your organization from an internal and external shop. There's a reset of change mode, and there's a thrive mode. Now the thing about survive is no 1 wants to talk about it. No 1 wants to be there.
 
 But the first stage of survive is acknowledging you're in survive, which always sounds like a bad paraphrase, you know, if Michael had reference, but you gotta do that. Right? But you know what the cola survive is proactive survive. Right? You're always setting the organization up to survive, and here's what most organizations do.
 
 We swing. When markets are frothy, interest rates are low, cash is flowing, we're spending, we're hiring, we're growing, we're building capability, and then when interest rates change, right, when cash stops flowing, when things feel tough, when our customer cancels a contract, we stop everything, we do layoffs, brief, brief hiring, and think of it as this swinging. Right? Which means we're actually not building capability in either. We're never really a great growth company.
 
 We're never actually really great at handling downturns. So these thrive organizations have built steady state survive, which means I run lean but not too lean. I've got the right fixed variable cost ratio. I've got a strong balance sheet, but I'm not under investing in the priorities. I've got key moats around my customers that I'm never taking for granted.
 
 I prioritize engagement knowing that it's strategic for my employees to be engaged, and then when shocks hit, they react less. That's 1 aspect for the power move. The other is I've been thinking about this a lot with AI over the last kind of 9 to 12 months, is sometimes you need to reset without survive, and this is a harder reset. Right? Because you can be in thrive mode as some companies are in some industries.
 
 And AI has actually changed the dynamics of industry competition quite quickly. They need to go on to a forced reset and change some things in their strategy, what they're prioritizing and where they're spending, but they don't have that disappointing factor of going through a survived stage. Those are the hardest resets, then, you know, the ones where the market says stop or don't stop. Like, when we got a COVID or a recession or, like, you know, we lose a major customer, we know we've gotta survive. And we pride ourselves in being in crisis mode.
 
 But there are some companies and industries that have to go into this forced reset, and we'll see whether or not they're able to.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Mhmm. Yep. Yep. Oh, gosh. We're reaching the top of our time with you.
 
 I've got 15 questions, so I will just wanna hear about the 3 c's. I wanna hear about the 6 questions in the story. I wanna hear all this, but let me just ask you the question that you being a pinsky person, you probably know I'm gonna ask is what didn't I ask, is the 1 question that I could have asked that I that you didn't get to answer.
 
 Rebecca Homkes: You know, let let's just go to the recipe of Thrive and then the role that people can do to help organizations. Right? So let's simplify Thrive because we didn't spend a lot of time there. Is the recipe for Thrive is quite simple, you need 3 things.
 
 And I'm gonna say then we're gonna say, Rebecca, that's too simple. Let's say I am. Okay? You've got a strong balance sheet that you brought through from a survive phase. You have strategic insights from the reset phase, and then you execute with agility and learning.
 
 And 2 out of 3 is not good enough. You need all 3 at all times. Strong balance sheet, strategic insights, and execute with agility and learning. And here's how a corporate strategy director can help. We have lost the insights and strategy.
 
 This template based strategy we are defaulting into is losing the insights. Sometimes I can't force the insights into the same framework every other business unit uses. We've gotta bring the insights back into strategy and then embrace this executing with agility and learning, which means going back to, I'm gonna learn faster to grow faster and build that capability.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Love it. Okay. Again, we could've we could spend an hour unpacking that. But instead, we will ask people to definitely find your book, survive, reset, thrive. There's also great content that you have online.
 
 And thank you for doing that for us. Where else should people go to connect with you?
 
 Rebecca Homkes: Yeah. The best way to connect to me is go to survive, reset thrive dot com, and you will find lots of videos, some tutorials, and going through the 3 modes, lots of art that I've written an event published and direct links to buy the book. You can also, of course, connect with me on LinkedIn. You'll get to see the constant flow of everything that's coming out. But, yeah, just survive reset drive dot com.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Well, thank you. I really think this book has 10 books in it. I love the way that you're able to simplify complex things and make it really actionable in memorable ways and really provide that kind of bridge from the big, big, big idea and actually something tangible that we could do. So thank you so much. For doing that and for taking some time to unpack it with us here.
 
 Rebecca Homkes: It was my pleasure. We could've gone for hours, so we'll have to next time.
 
 Kaihan Krippendorff: Yes. I know. Yes. Thank you.