In 2010, my colleagues and I at the Drucker Institute had the great fortune of receiving an afternoon of consulting from A.G. Lafley, who had just retired as the CEO of consumer products giant Procter & Gamble.

What I remember most about that day was the way that Lafley listened for less than half an hour about the state of the organization before winnowing our strategic choices to a handful of viable options—the very same list that our team had spent a good chunk of the year putting together.

“My god, how did you do that?” I asked Lafley, genuinely dumbfounded. “You figured all of that out in a matter of minutes. It took us months.”