“In July of 1982, I found myself in real trouble,” Dan Sullivan recounts the story. “I’d been asked to present writing and artwork for a project I was creating for the federal government in Ottawa. But on the day of the presentation, I had nothing ready to show the cabinet minister.
“I walked down the hall to the meeting where the cabinet minister and four or five members of his team were waiting for me. And I told them that instead of talking about the project, I wondered if I could tell them about an idea I had.
“I addressed the fact that there was an enormous amount of complexity in what the cabinet minister did, and I asked him, ‘What are some of the things you want to have accomplished while you’re here? What would make you feel great about all of the work you’ve done?’
“I wrote down his answers and then asked, ‘If we were going to prioritize these, what would that look like?’ And we arranged the list of accomplishments in order of priority.
“I explained that the next steps were to identify all the obstacles that were currently in the way of those goals and then to work through each one until it was transformed into a strategy for achieving them.
“The minister said this was a fascinating process I had taken him through and asked what I called it. I drew a circle around the goals, obstacles, and strategies and decided then and there to call it ‘The Strategy Circle.’ He said he wished I’d been there on his first day in office.”
“I realized as I left that meeting that my whole life, including all the projects and experiments I’d done in the marketplace, had just clicked. I now had a structure that could work for anything.
“The great thing about the structure was that it required no homework on my part. I could simply set up The Strategy Circle, and I would never get trapped like I’d gotten trapped in that presentation situation.
“It wasn’t just that I had solved the problem of that particular incident—it seemed that a door to the future had opened for me, and I now had a simple way of approaching the rest of my life.
“The cabinet minister had mentioned that day after, we’d made the list of priorities, that it was easy to get lost in complications and complexity. The Strategy Circle was a way to cut through all of that, and I saw that it could work for anyone in any situation.
“The Strategy Circle was the first thinking tool we patented. At Strategic Coach, we take our intellectual property and protecting that IP very seriously. Although this list needs to be updated on a weekly basis, to date, we’ve filed 2,000+ copyrights, 200+ trademarks, 42 issued patents, and 65 patents pending.
“Some people ask why. My answer is simple. It’s because intellectual property is the most valuable type of property.”
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(Excerpt from: You Are an IP Company. Get the book here and start protecting your IP - https://lnkd.in/g8yavKAN)
Dan Sullivan
Strategic Coach
