Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
The NDSU Extension weekly podcast In the Pod: Soybean Updates delivers timely insights and expert advice on soybean production.
You're listening to In The Pod, soybean updates, a weekly trek into the latest soybean information from NDSU Extension. Our guest this week is one of the featured speakers at the Northern Corn and Soybean Expo. Ken Gilliam, vice president of directions group, will focus on strategy. Ken, tell us about the upcoming event.
Ken Gilliam:This is the Northern Corn and Soybean Expo. They're looking to help farmers with their journey to increase productivity and profitability. It gets an annual event hosted by the North Dakota soy and corn associations or the checkoffs there.
Bruce Sundeen:What makes this topic of practical strategy and hard decisions so timely for farmers right now?
Ken Gilliam:It's important this time of year and probably more than most because now they actually have a little bit of time to pause, and that's often what we don't do with decisions when we're trying to actually make a decision. We make decisions every day, probably thousands of decisions every day, but rarely do we pause to think about how we decide. On top of that, you have a lot of uncertainty with the recent past, both with selling products, what's going on in the world. New products are flooding the market all the time. There's lots of new information that's out there, a flood of information that producers have to filter through to determine what they're gonna use and how they're gonna produce their product and what's the best path to profitability.
Ken Gilliam:You put all that stuff together, sometimes it just creates an analysis paralysis. It makes it hard to consider everything that's there. We're trying to provide some context and frameworks and tools to filter through some of that so they can see their own path forward and see themselves making better decisions in the future.
Bruce Sundeen:Strategy can sound like a big corporate word. How do you make strategy useful for the everyday farmer?
Ken Gilliam:Sometimes strategy itself is an overused word. It sounds like big corporate speak and can often cause confusion when two people are they think they're talking about strategy, but they're using two different internal definitions for it. For me, what we really try to do is simplify the language around what strategy is. That's just to be clear of what you're trying to do in the first place. But you have a simple three point. I want you to recognize what your key challenge is, what are your guiding principles around making decisions in your guiding policy, and then what's the set of coherent actions that help achieve your purpose within that guiding policy. That's the basic kernel of a good strategy. Put those three things together. And if you can apply them, it doesn't matter if you're applying them at the highest business level or even very low level aspects of a decision problem. That structure, it's very resilient to helping you make decisions.
Bruce Sundeen:Farmer of the future research done by the directions group is part of your talk. What are one or two standout insights that surprise you?
Ken Gilliam:Farmer of the future, as we describe who farmers are nationwide, number one, there's an incredible alignment in their central purpose and mission and how they view why they're farming in the first place. What's very interesting to me is farmers are not homogenous in how they make their decisions, how they gather facts, how they approach farming as a business, and that how we categorize them doesn't matter what size of the farm, what commodities they're growing, where they're located, or how old they are. They are much better categorized by their psychographics and how they want to make decisions.
Bruce Sundeen:Ken, after your talk, what would you like people to start doing differently in their planning or business conversations?
Ken Gilliam:I want participants to reflect on how they make decisions now and how they could do it better. And that begins with recognizing what really matters to the decision maker and applying that to the decisions that need to be made.
Bruce Sundeen:Give us one powerful shift you'd encourage farmers to make in decision making.
Ken Gilliam:I've dealt with a few farmers over the past five years that I've been doing this, and I hear strong opinions everywhere. And I would recommend that those individuals have their strong opinions but loosely held. Seek information that proves your theory wrong. Be willing to accept that you might be wrong and take in information and seek information that goes against what you think is true. Decision making is a skill. Grab a book and read about it and get better.
Bruce Sundeen:Thanks, Ken. Our guest has been Ken Gilliam, vice president of the directions group. You're listening to in the pod, soybean updates, a weekly trek into the latest soybean information from NDSU Extension supported by the North Dakota Soybean Council.