Hello, I'm Ian Green, your MDRT President, and welcome to another of our leadership touchpoints.

Today, we're going to consider the strategic skills objective. The aim is to understand how to prepare strategies and ideas that address changing environments and to consider challenges that lie ahead.

MDRT leaders, like you, are strategic thinkers, providing direction and insights as to how the future may unfold and how they can add distinctive value to MDRT's success.

Our Strategic Plan is what we broadly intend to do to reach our long term goals. The plan creates a vision and direction for the whole organization. More than ever before, MDRT leaders like you are needed to ensure success over the long term.

So now it's time to ignite your strategic thinking skills. Strategic thinking helps you plan to become more efficient, to maximize your strengths and to find the most effective path towards achieving any objective.

Strategic skills can often be confused with tactics, goals, or even actions. Being strategic intentionally focuses on the overarching plan or set of goals. Whereas being tactical focuses on specific actions or steps to accomplish your strategy.

So awaken your strategic thinking. You are a strategic leader. Clarify your vision with everyone and everything you do. Gather and analyze information, examine any external or internal issues affecting your vision. Formulate a strategy, prioritize and identify alternative approaches to your plan.

Implement your strategy. Make sure everyone understands their roles and executes the plan. And evaluate and control, measure all progress and control all actions of your plan.

MDRT strategic leadership is uniquely crafted and placed around the globe. Please know your contributions add value to MDRT's long term success. Well today I've given you quite a lot of information and for even more, please watch the Bridging Cultural Gaps video by Alan Morrison, PhD, Professor of Global Management at the Thunderbird School of Global Management.

This video will give you a different perspective on how to lead in MDRT's global organization. So, until next time, goodbye for now.