Execution seems to be a persistent problem that plagues many leaders. My constant frustration with this led me to re-read Gary Harpst, Six Disciplines of Execution this month. Harpst provides some helpful charts and a detailed strategic process for execution that’s worth the price of the book alone.
Here are a few of my highlights from the book (sorry, doesn’t include the cool charts!)
- Leaders who build organizations with the ability to balance strong strategy with strong execution over long periods of time achieve enduring excellence.
- Walmart is not great at execution because they are big, they’re big because they’re great at executing their strategy.
- Concentrate on solving the problem that makes all other problems soluble.
- It’s better to have a grade B strategy and grade A execution than the other way around.
- We usually know what to do. It’s just that we don’t always do it.
- “Vision without execution is a hallucination” Thomas Edison
- There are three major barriers to execution: insufficient expertise, prohibitive economics and simple human nature.
- Creeping misalignment occurs everyday, often in very small ways, as the organization changes.
- “Changing people’s behavior: It’s the most important challenge for businesses trying to compete in a turbulent world. The central issue is never strategy, structure, culture or systems. The core of the matter is always about changing the behavior of people.” John Kotter
- When people don’t understand each other, nothing gets accomplished. But when communication is clear, there’s little that can’t be achieved.
- We discovered that the foundation of a complete program balancing strategy and execution is having a well defined, repeatable methodology.
- The purpose of methodology is to accelerate the learning of proven best practices for building any business.
- Repeatability is critical to learning.
- The earlier you catch an error, the less costly it is to fix it.
- “The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule but to schedule your priorities” Stephen Covey
- An organization that’s not growing is much easier to manage than one that is growing.
Thanks for publishing your views, Mac! (The full name of the book is “Six Disciplines Execution Revolution) – you can get it from Amazon – or from here: http://bit.ly/gsXDjT
Oh man, that’s great stuff!