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⚙️ How to get advice from the worlds best founders
+ what to do when plans fail
Rhys Jeffery
November 30th, 2023
How Jeff Bezos Helped Me Create A Strategic Plan
As the CEO of Rugby Bricks, I'm in charge of putting together our strategic plan for 2024, which, in its simplest form, is an agreement on what we will do next year.
The details of these plans are important and getting them right is tricky. They can sap what feels like an unreasonable amount of time and energy.
So this year, to lighten my mental planning load - I've enlisted the help of Jeff Bezos, by using my favourite tool, ChatGPT.
Every year, Jeff writes an annual letter to his shareholders. In these letters, he shares how he thinks strategically about building a business.
I’ve compiled all of these letters to create a ChatGPT Bezo's Bot that is serving as a sounding board for me as I write out our new strategic plan.
Here's how I did it:
You will need the premium version of ChatGPT.
1. Open ChatGPT.
2. Click "Explore"
3. Click "Create a GPT"
4. Click "Configure" - here is the prompting I used:
5. Under the "Knowledge" section, I added two PDFs:
Our Three Year Plan
+ Jeff Bezos's Annual Shareholder Letters
I then asked Jeff for advice.
It’s crazy to me that for just $14.99 a month, we can now ask some of the World’s best founders for advice.
Notes:
Bear in mind these bots aren't yet producing advice that is super specific.
You can see above, the bot could have better contextualised it’s answers based on our 3 year plan, instead of giving me generalised advice I can find in a blog post. This will come, but isn’t here yet.
So a buyer beware disclaimer: The usefulness of the outputs of these bots can only be determined by you and should not be accepted as truths.
Planning For Your Plan To Change
A related thought by Nassim Taleb.
What should you do when you undoubtedly need to deviate from your plan?
Each scenario has its quirks, but as a general rule, Nassim suggests you want to embody a property called being antifragile.
Explained below with this lightly edited excerpt from Blinkist:
Fragility is a relatively easy concept to understand; we know that fragile items need protection from volatile situations. Such as the white china I posted this week labelled handle with care. Yet, when we try to think of the opposite of fragility, we tend to think of robustness.
Things that are robust handle shocks well, or better said, they tend to maintain their original form - a well-engineered building surviving an earthquake comes to mind. But this is not the opposite of fragility.
The opposite of fragility (or things that suffer harm from volatility) is antifragility, which benefits from volatility. Instead of handle with care, these packages would be labelled "handle roughly".
Circling back to business planning and the inevitable failure of thus plan. Once a plan (through the medium that is your business) experiences volatility, you don't want to fight to maintain that plan (or you can, but likely at a significant cost with little upside); you want to look for ways to benefit from that volatility.
A good example of antifragility is the story of the Hydra from Greek mythology. The Hydra was a many-headed serpent that tormented the ancient world. Each time one of these heads was cut off in battle, two would grow back in its place. So every time the beast was harmed, it benefitted; the Hydra was, therefore, antifragile.
What does this look like in the real world?
At Compound Gym, FIFA forced us to leave our premises during the recent Women's Football World Cup: A decently detrimental exercise to go through. But instead of trying to fight back to our previous form to regain that lost revenue, memberships and goodwill. When we returned to our premises, we took the opportunity (with an empty gym) to refloor, paint and re-layout our gym, so we re-opened much stronger.
