Orion: Susan, let me start with a question for you and for everyone listening. When was the last time you opened your calendar and scheduled a meeting with… yourself, just to think?

Susan: That’s a fantastic and slightly uncomfortable question. In the tech world, my calendar is a battlefield of back-to-back meetings. The idea of blocking time for something as abstract as 'thinking' feels like a luxury, almost an indulgence. You're usually thinking on the fly, between Slack messages.

Orion: Exactly. And that's why a story from John C. Maxwell's book, How Successful People Think, stopped me in my tracks. He talks about Dan Cathy, the president of the billion-dollar company Chick-fil-A. Despite a crazy schedule, Cathy has a dedicated "thinking schedule." He blocks out half a day every two weeks, one full day every month, and two or three full days every year, just to think. No meetings, no calls. Just thinking.

Susan: Wow. That’s not indulgence, that’s discipline. It reframes thinking from a passive activity that happens in the shower to a core business process. It’s like R&D for your own mind. I love that.

Orion: It’s the central idea of the book: good thinking isn't a gift, it's a skill. And like any skill, it requires deliberate practice. That's what we're going to deconstruct today. We want to move from just being busy to being effective, by choosing the right way to think. Today we'll dive deep into this from two perspectives. First, we'll explore the crucial difference between seeing the whole map and plotting the course—that's Big-Picture versus Strategic thinking.

Susan: A distinction that I think is lost on a lot of leaders.

Orion: I agree. Then, we'll discuss how to harness your team's collective brainpower without losing sight of the one goal that truly matters—the dynamic between Shared and Bottom-Line thinking. Ready to dive in?

Susan: Let's do it. I’m ready to craft my mind.

Orion: Alright. So let's start with that first duality, which I think is critical for any leader: the difference between Big-Picture and Strategic thinking. They sound similar, but Maxwell argues they are fundamentally different tools.

Susan: And using the wrong one for the situation can be disastrous. You can have a brilliant strategy for the wrong war.

Orion: Precisely. Let's define them with two stories. Big-Picture Thinking is about gaining perspective. Maxwell tells this great story about attending the Senior Bowl, a major college football event. He ends up having dinner with two legendary NFL head coaches, Dave Wannstedt and Butch Davis. Now, Maxwell is a leadership expert, but he's not a football coach. So what does he do? He spends the entire dinner asking questions and just listening. He’s not trying to solve a specific problem; he's trying to understand their entire world—how they build teams, how they foster chemistry, how they think about winning. He’s absorbing their system to broaden his own perspective. That’s Big-Picture Thinking.

Susan: It’s about intellectual curiosity. It's stepping outside your own domain to see how other complex systems work, so you can find patterns that apply back to your own world. It’s not about finding an immediate answer, but about enriching the soil from which future answers will grow.

Orion: Exactly. Now, contrast that with Strategic Thinking. This is not about broad perspective; it's about a targeted plan to solve a specific problem. The classic example Maxwell uses is from the 1930s with Maxwell House Coffee. They had a very specific problem: their sales plummeted during Passover because coffee beans were considered a legume by many Jewish families, making them not Kosher for the holiday.

Susan: A very specific, high-stakes business problem.

Orion: A very specific problem. So, a marketing man named Joseph Jacobs came in with a brilliant, two-part strategy. Step one: he advised them to get a rabbi to certify their coffee as a berry, not a bean, making it officially Kosher for Passover. Step two, and this is the genius part: he told them to create and give away free Haggadas—the prayer books used at the Seder meal—with every can of coffee.

Susan: Oh, that’s brilliant. They didn't just solve the problem; they integrated their brand into the very fabric of the customer's tradition. They became part of the solution, part of the ritual itself.

Orion: And it worked spectacularly. For over 70 years, they’ve distributed millions of these Haggadas. It was a precise, customized plan to achieve a specific outcome. That’s Strategic Thinking. So, Susan, as a Head of Growth, you live at the intersection of these two. How do you balance the need for that wide, NFL-coach-level perspective with the need for that targeted, Maxwell-House-level plan?

Susan: It’s the constant toggle switch for a leader. The Big-Picture thinking happens quarterly and annually. That’s when we’re looking at the whole market. What are our competitors doing? What new technologies are emerging? What are the macro shifts in user behavior? That’s our 'dinner with the NFL coaches.' We’re just absorbing, trying to see the whole board.

Orion: And the strategic thinking?

Susan: That’s a Monday morning meeting. That's when we say, "Okay, based on our big-picture understanding that users are overwhelmed with notifications, our strategy for this month is to design a single A/B test on our onboarding flow to reduce user churn by 5%. We will test a 'less is more' approach." The big picture informs the 'why,' but the strategy defines the 'what' and 'how' with ruthless clarity. One is expansive, the other is focused.

Orion: And you need both. You can't have a great strategy without understanding the big picture, and a big picture without a strategy is just a dream.

Susan: Exactly. It’s the difference between being an architect and a builder. You need to be both, and know when to wear which hat.

Orion: That idea of a specific target, that 5% churn reduction, is the perfect bridge to our second theme. Because once you have that target, you need your team to help you hit it. This is the dance between Shared and Bottom-Line thinking.

Susan: Ah, the great tension of modern leadership. How do you foster creativity and collaboration without descending into chaos? How do you let a thousand flowers bloom, but make sure they're all growing in the right garden?

Orion: You've nailed it. Maxwell defines Shared Thinking as more than just brainstorming. It’s about intentionally gathering the right people—people with different skills, maturity, and perspectives—to build an idea together. The core belief is that "none of us is as smart as all of us."

Susan: But we've all been in those "shared thinking" meetings that go nowhere. A collection of opinions isn't the same as collective intelligence.

Orion: And that's where the counterweight comes in: Bottom-Line Thinking. This is about identifying the single most important outcome and never, ever losing sight of it. The most powerful story in the book on this is about Frances Hesselbein. In 1976, she took over the Girl Scouts of America. The organization was a mess—declining membership, outdated activities, and the Boy Scouts were about to start admitting girls.

Susan: A total crisis. A turnaround situation.

Orion: A complete turnaround. So what did Hesselbein do? She didn't start by tweaking programs or redesigning uniforms. She started by asking three simple, bottom-line questions: What is our business? Who is our customer? And what does the customer consider value?

Susan: Cutting right through the noise.

Orion: She cut through everything and came up with one, single, powerful bottom line. She said, "We are here for one reason: to help a girl reach her highest potential." That was it. That was the bottom line. It wasn't about selling cookies or earning badges. Those were just activities. The bottom line was the mission. And once that was clear, every decision—from management training to creating bilingual materials to outreach in low-income communities—flowed directly from that single, clarifying purpose.

Susan: That is so powerful. Because in the for-profit world, especially in tech, the 'bottom line' is often seen as just a number—Monthly Active Users, revenue, customer acquisition cost. But what Hesselbein did was define a mission-driven bottom line, a qualitative goal that then drove the quantitative results, like tripling minority participation.

Orion: So let me ask you, how do you translate that into your world? How do you foster that creative, shared thinking where your team can come up with wild ideas, while still holding them accountable to a hard metric, a number on a dashboard?

Susan: We use a framework that mirrors this perfectly, called OKRs—Objectives and Key Results. The 'Objective' is our Hesselbein-style, mission-driven bottom line. It's qualitative, inspirational. For example, "Create the most beloved and seamless user onboarding experience in our industry." It's big, it's exciting. That's where the shared thinking comes in. The team can brainstorm a hundred ways to achieve that.

Orion: And the Key Results?

Susan: The Key Results are the non-negotiable, numerical bottom lines. "Reduce onboarding drop-off by 15%." "Increase user activation rate to 70%." "Achieve a Net Promoter Score of 50 from new users." The Objective gives the team the 'why' and the freedom to create. The Key Results provide the 'what' and the accountability. It allows for both shared creativity and ruthless focus. It’s how you let the flowers bloom while making sure the garden produces a harvest.

Orion: That's a brilliant, practical application. You're essentially creating a structure where the team's creative energy is aimed directly at the one thing that matters.

Orion: So, as we wrap up, it feels like we've landed on two powerful dualities for any leader. First, the need to toggle between the 30,000-foot view and the ground-level plan—Big-Picture versus Strategic thinking.

Susan: The architect and the builder.

Orion: And second, the need to foster collective creativity while maintaining a laser-focus on the ultimate goal—the dance between Shared and Bottom-Line thinking.

Susan: The garden and the harvest. I think the overarching lesson here is that thinking isn't a monolithic activity. It's a toolkit. The best leaders don't just think harder; they consciously choose the right mental tool for the specific job at hand.

Orion: Which brings us back to where we started. If thinking is a deliberate act, a skill to be honed, what's the one thing someone listening can do right now to start?

Susan: I think it has to be the Dan Cathy "thinking schedule." Don't just wait for an idea to strike you. Don't hope for a moment of clarity between meetings.

Orion: Be intentional.

Susan: Be intentional. Open your calendar right now, find a 30-minute slot in the next week, and block it out. Title it "Thinking Time." It might be the most productive meeting you have all week. It’s a small, simple action that signals a profound shift in how you approach your work and your life. It's the first step to truly crafting your mind.

Orion: I couldn't agree more. A perfect, actionable takeaway. Susan, this has been incredibly insightful. Thank you.

Susan: Thank you, Orion. It was a pleasure.