For more than a decade, Alex Banayan has obsessively studied what success means. Thousands of hours of research, hundreds of biographies and most importantly, personally interviewing everyone from Warren Buffet to Lady Gaga for his bestselling business book on success, The Third Door. Along the way, Alex uncovered important guiding principles that can help inform successful, finance-led business planning.
Discover how Alex’s lessons on success can help impact your finance team in A New Mindset, a CPE-accredited, on-demand video at PlanToGrow.com, a digital learning platform for business leaders and finance and operations professionals.
“The opposite of success isn’t failure … it’s failing to try.” — Alex Banayan
Throughout his research and interviews, Alex learned that almost everyone he met approached success in much the same way—through persistence and resilience. What’s more, most of that approach can be applied directly to successful, finance-led planning at your organization, with notable examples, including:
- It’s the Process, Not the Plan: How his journey to interviewing the world’s most successful people was often as telling as the interviews themselves—in much the same way that a strategic plan itself isn’t as important as the planning process behind it.
- Planning is a Process of Persistence: Just as integrated planning and agile forecasting are iterative processes of continuous improvement, persistence was essential to Alex’s success to a point—and too much got him into a corner even Bill Gates couldn’t help him escape.
- The Value of Allies: In the same way that the most successful people recruit personal mentors, coaches and allies to have their back, the success of finance-led planning efforts often depends on having the right executive buy-in.
Watch Alex discuss how the fundamentals of success apply to some of the biggest challenges facing strategic finance teams today. Take a page from The Third Door to use explicit and implicit messages that encourage innovation, experimentation and—ultimately—a growth mindset throughout your organization.
Join Alex’s discussion for key takeaways, including:
- What the third door of Alex’s bestselling book means and how it applies to growth and success in the face of any business or market condition.
- The difference between explicit and implicit messages and how the latter defines you as an individual and team and your approaches to business planning.
- Why cherishing your mistakes is a necessary step towards personal and organizational growth, reinforcing the values of persistence and continuous improvement.
- The make-or-break value of having an influential ally in your corner, whether it’s a personal mentor or executive sponsor of your finance-led planning initiatives.
- Hear about Alex’s amusing, memorable and first-hand conversations on success with Steven Spielberg, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Quincy Jones, Jessica Alba and more.
Thought Leader Bio
Alex Banayan: Success Expert & Author, The Third Door
Alex Banayan, author of The Third Door, is America’s youngest bestselling business author and one of Forbes’ and Business Insider’s top “30 under 30” thought leaders. An expert in high performance and personal development, he is a frequent public speaker and contributor on CNBC, Businessweek, The Washington Post, MSNBC and Fox News.