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Category Archive: Execution

The Secret To Sustainable Results

Posted by on May 18, 2016

The concept of the flywheel was used by Jim Collins in his best selling leadership book Good to Great. The major point of the illustration is that significant change occurs when you do the right things repeatedly over time and eventually you will have a breakthrough that results in significant success.

We all would love to have the quick fix strategy work instead, we want instant culture change. For every company that moved from Good to Great there was no single defining action, no grand programs, no celebrity leader and no one killer innovation that produced the results.

“Good to great comes about by a cumulative process—step by step, action by action, decision by decision, turn by turn of the flywheel—that adds up to sustained and spectacular results.”

A great example that really makes the point is used is from the legendary coaching career of John Wooden at UCLA. Most basketball fans know that he won ten NCAA Championships in twelve years and at one point had a sixty-one-game winning streak.

What most of us do not know is that for fifteen years coach Wooden worked in relative obscurity at UCLA before he ever won his first national title. During that time he was building the foundation for the program of great recruiting, player discipline and refining his style of playing the full court press style of defense.

The real character question for leaders today is how many are willing to pay the price of not demanding short term success at the expense of long term sustainability for the organization? It may keep you off the front page of the business section of your local paper but in this economic environment that can be a very good thing.

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Leaders Effectiveness In Strategy Or Execution

Posted by on January 22, 2016

There are clearly two extremes in the leadership world today. Some leaders are incredibly creative and can translate that into a workable strategy. Others are wildly successful in getting the ball over the goal line and meeting expectations. This HBR post reveals some harsh reality about leaders that needs to be understood:

“In a 2013 survey of nearly 700 executives across a variety of industries, our firm asked respondents to rate the effectiveness of the top leaders of their companies. How many excelled at strategy? How many excelled at execution? The results are shown in the chart below.”

Learning How To Follow Up

Posted by on March 12, 2014

I am great at starting things and not so good at finishing them. When working in a team environment I can easily delegate but rarely build in feedback loops to ensure the project will be successful. Brad Lomenick gives us some very practical tools to resolve this problem:

“As all of us know, when dealing with other people, other organizations, and other teams, many times the project or initiative bogs down because “you haven’t heard back from him” or “she never emailed me to confirm” or “I’m still waiting on them to send over a fax” or “I called and left a message, but don’t want to bother them again.”

This is a very big deal for every leader. Read More …

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Busyness

Posted by on November 1, 2010

I always receive the highest evaluation scores when I speek on the subject of how to set personal priorities for own life. The major point of my presentation is that we are all overscheduled because of the wireless connected culture we live in today and we must find a way to say no to many of the things that are robbing us of the priorities we care about the most.

I use a time matrix diagram devleoped by Stephen Covey that divides all of our daily lives into four quadrants that are based on the two variables of urgency and importance. Everything that is urgent demands some action immediately and the things that are important may not.

If something is urgent and important then it should be done. It could be a doctor’s appointment personally or a major project at work that is due this week. Hopefully for most of us at least the majority of our day should be spent in this category.

The next area is all the things that are urgent but not important. The blackberry is screaming for attention, the inbox is full and there are meetings on the schedule. The problem here is that we have assumed that because something is urgent it must be important.

Another very unproductive area includes the things that are not urgent but they are not important either. The danger here is that when we get home in the evening we want to run away and hide with hours of meaningless T.V. or surfing the net.

The single most important category is the things that are not urgent but very important. This is where family, friends, faith and all of our important relationships reside. Most of the time our family and our friends will not demand our immediate attention but if we neglect them long enough they will move into the urgent category and we will all suffer the consequences.

The only way to find time for the things that really matter is to stop doing so many of the things that really don’t.

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Four Generations Of Time Management

Posted by on July 29, 2009

Stephen Covey pioneered this type of thinking several years ago but it is certainly worth repeating based on the incredible pressures we are all under in the area of time management. In a day when it is impossible to do everything that comes our way we must find ways to prioritize the important things and the discipline to say no to everything else.

The first wave or generation of time management could be characterized by simply taking notes and making checklists to try to keep track of all the things we needed to do. To some degree we still use this today but in a much more effective way.

The second generation started to use calendars and appointment books. The big improvement here was in planning ahead and making sure we had an idea of what we wanted to accomplish over a longer period of time. We all still use calendars today and they help us not only in planning but in daily execution as well.

The third generation brought into play the whole concept of prioritization into the process where we try on a daily, weekly, monthly or annual basis to identify those things that are most important and do them first and move the lesser items to the bottom of list. We started setting goals and incorporating those goals into our time planning which place a priority on efficiency.

The emerging fourth generation that recognizes that time management is a misnomer because the ultimate challenge is not to manage time as much as it is to manage ourselves. This whole concept recognizes that just because we can do things faster today they might not be the right things to do and that you cannot a week in advance know everything that should be on the top of your list.

The fourth generation mindset is that I will value relationships over results and I will always be open in the flow of my life to change direction on any given day when a greater priority comes into my life. The use of time is based on core values and is not driven by efficiency but effectiveness.

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Follow Up Or Fail

Posted by on July 21, 2009

I cannot tell you how many people I have worked with over the years that are great at getting something started but totally ineffective in finishing the task with excellence. They get very excited in the creative planning stages of something but when it gets down to execution they lose interest and allow performance to deteriorate.

Keith Ferrazzi in his great book Never Eat Alone says that good follow up alone elevates you above 95% of your peers in every area of your life. In his opinion it is the absolute key to success in any field.

In the area of networking he makes sure that he makes contact with any new person he meets within twelve to twenty-four hours after they have initially met. He says why go to all the trouble of meeting new people if you’re not going to work on making them a part of your life?

This same discipline applies to phone conversations and meetings where commitments have been make for some future action. It is extremely important to get all assignments down in writing and distribution made for all involved giving what is expected, who is responsible and when the project should be completed.

Many times great decisions have been made only to see the idea or project fail not because of poor initial planning but simply not paying attention to all the details involved in implementation. Creativity alone can produce a lot of excitement but follow up alone is what produces sustainable excellence.

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The Building Blocks Of A Strategy

Posted by on July 6, 2009

One of the best books I have read on developing a strategic plan and all that is involved in the execution of that plan was written by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan called Execution. It is a must read for any organization that uses teams to accomplish planning and execution.

A strategy is the key steps or methodology that you are going to use to accomplish your goals or mission. Many times the goal seems to be clear and necessary but the breakdown occurs at the point of determining how we are going to accomplish what we want to do.

In this book he lists several critical questions that should be answered during the development of your strategy to ensure a high probability of success:

1. How good are the assumptions upon which the plan hinges?

2. What are the pluses and minuses of the alternatives?

3. Do you have the organizational capability to execute the plan?

4. Are the short term and long term balanced?

5. What are the important milestones for executing the plan?

6. Can you adapt the plan to rapid changes in your environment?

The two most important questions are do you have the organizational capability to execute the plan? Just because it is the right thing to do may not mean we have the right people in place and this is the right time for implementation. If we add something major to our process without additional manpower it must be assumed that something else needs to go.

The last question is even more important in the culture we live in today. Just because something looks great as a strategy today and even works for awhile does not mean that it will be viable in the next twelve months. This means that nothing must become so sacred that it cannot be changed if necessary when a better plan is discovered.

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The Power Of Momentum

Posted by on June 15, 2009

There are very few things more difficult to deal with in your personal or professional life than a loss of momentum. It can be brought on by some major tragedy or a series of small compromises over a very long period of time.

Eventually we get to a place where we start worrying about things outside our control and that drains us of what little emotional energy we have left. Also because we are so focused on the negative we stop doing the things we should and can do and that brings even more despair.

The only way to break this cycle is to start doing what you can do and build some small daily wins into your life. This principle works with individuals as well as organizations.

With every small win comes movement and that generates confidence that things are finally headed in the right direction. When we regain our confidence then we attempt even more things that product even bigger wins and the power of the momentum begins to put the wind back in our sails.

It is very ironic that when we get to the places of greatest difficulty in our lives it is the very smallest of things that can break the downward cycle. We are desperately searching for the big answer that is going to solve all our problems when the solution was right in front of us all the time.

The good news is that the power of momentum works in a positive way to an even greater degree than it does toward the negative. When you repeatedly do what you can do daily the positive flow of your life moves you beyond all the negative issues that may still be there but now they are in the proper perspective.

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Big Hairy Audacious Goals

Posted by on June 9, 2009

There has always been a delicate balance in goal setting between what can be done and what could be done. Goals should be realistic and achievable but they also must be courageous and challenging. Safe is not good enough anymore and we must be willing to take risks that stretch us outside our comfort zone to achieve greatness.

I absolutely love this quote that is extremely timely in our current environment, “Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much no suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory, nor defeat.” Theodore Roosevelt, 1899

When President Kennedy said in the early 60’s we are going to land a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of this decade the overwhelmingly majority of people thought he had lost his mind, and yet we did it.

The world has changed dramatically in the last decade. The power of technology and the globalization of all the world economies are driving change in unprecedented ways that no one could have imagined either just a few years ago. When this recession is over we are never going back to the ways things used to be.

What goals are you setting for yourself and your organization that are commensurate for the challenges that lie ahead in the 21^st century? They must be big hairy and audacious if they are going to lead to outstanding performance.

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The Five Practices Of Leadership

Posted by on June 2, 2009

I am constantly reading new materials on leadership and occasionally I review great books from the past. One of the all time classics is The Leadership Challenge by James Kouzes and Barry Posner.

This very exhaustive book centers around these five simple but very powerful practices:

Model The Way-Find your voice by clarifying your personal values and set the example by aligning actions with shared values.

Inspire a Shard Vision-Envision the future by imagining exciting and ennobling possibilities and enlist others in a common vision by appealing to shared aspirations.

Challenge The Process-Search for opportunities by seeking innovative ways to change, grow, and improve and experiment and take risks by constantly generating small wins and learning from mistakes.

Enable Others to Act-Foster collaboration by promoting cooperative goals and building trust. Strengthen others by sharing power and discretion.

Encourage The Heart-Recognize contributions by showing appreciation for individual excellence and celebrate the values and victories by creating a spirit of community.

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