Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

by Larry Bossidy

Most often today the difference between a company and its competitor is the ability to execute.

Many business leaders spend vast amounts of time learning and promulgating the latest management techniques. But their failure to understand and practice execution negates the value of almost all they learn and preach. Such leaders are building houses without foundations.

Leaders in an execution culture design strategies that are more road maps than rigid paths enshrined in fat planning books. That way they can respond quickly when the unexpected happens. Their strategies are designed to be executed.

The gap nobody knows is the gap between what a company’s leaders want to achieve and the ability of their organization to achieve it.

Execution is a discipline, and integral to strategy. Execution is the major job of the business leader. Execution must be a core element of an organization’s culture.

People think of execution as the tactical side of business. That’s the first big mistake. Tactics are central to execution, but execution is not tactics.

Execution is a systematic process of rigorously discussing hows and whats, questioning, tenaciously following through, and ensuring accountability.

It includes making assumptions about the business environment, assessing the organization’s capabilities, linking strategy to operations and the people who are going to implement the strategy, synchronizing those people and their various disciplines, and linking rewards to outcomes.

In its most fundamental sense, execution is a systematic way of exposing reality and acting on it.

The leader has to be engaged personally and deeply in the business. Execution requires a comprehensive understanding of a business, its people, and its environment.

The leader must be in charge of getting things done by running the three core processes—picking other leaders, setting the strategic direction, and conducting operations. These actions are the substance of execution, and leaders cannot delegate them regardless of the size of the organization.

Even at the end of his career, Jack wasn’t presiding. He was leading by being actively involved.

One way to get a handle on execution is to think of it as akin to the Six Sigma processes for continual improvement.

Do great CEOs and Nobel Prize winners achieve their glory through execution? Well, yes, in fact, and therein lies the grand fallacy.

There are different kinds of intellectual challenges. Conceiving a grand idea or broad picture is usually intuitive. Shaping the broad picture into a set of executable actions is analytical, and it’s a huge intellectual, emotional, and creative challenge.

Especially when a business is making major changes, the right people have to be in the critical jobs, and the core processes must be strong enough to ensure that resistance is dissolved and plans get executed. Both of these building blocks were missing.

Brown expects of his managers. “Intense candor,” Brown calls it, “a balance of optimism and motivation with realism. We bring out the positive and the negative.”

Know your people and your business. Insist on realism. Set clear goals and priorities. Follow through. Reward the doers. Expand people’s capabilities. Know yourself.

They had prepared for tough questions—good people like to be quizzed, because they know more about the business than the leader.

If nobody asks me questions, I know this is not an open community.

You’ve got to bring in some other people once in a while to get fresh thoughts, or you’re always basically washing yourself in the same dishwasher. In other words, you’ve listened to all of the ideas of the people in the place, and you miss out on the fresh perspective of newcomers.

So you keep working on the personal connection every way you can. And then when he calls you up one day and says, “I’ve got another offer to go to another company,” you know him; he knows you. And you say, “Well, Sam, why do you want to do that? You’re doing well here. You’ve got a good future,” and so on. Most times you can keep them. Absent that personal connection, you’re just a name.

A business review should take the form of a Socratic dialogue, not an interrogation.

All you’ve got to prove is that you care for the people who are working for you.

When I took over at AlliedSignal, for example, I got two different pictures from our people and our customers. While our people were saying that we were delivering an order-fill rate of 98 percent, our customers thought we were at 60 percent. The irony was, instead of trying to address the customer’s complaints, we seemed to think we had to show that we were right and they were wrong.

A leader who says “I’ve got ten priorities” doesn’t know what he’s talking about—he doesn’t know himself what the most important things are.

One thing you’ll notice about leaders who execute is that they speak simply and directly. They talk plainly and forthrightly about what’s on their minds. They know how to simplify things so that others can understand them, evaluate them, and act on them, so that what they say becomes common sense.

You have to make it clear to everybody that rewards and respect are based on performance.

The skill of the coach is the art of questioning. Asking incisive questions forces people to think, to discover, to search.

The same principles apply to coaching an individual privately. Whatever your style—whether it’s gentle or blunt—your aim is to ask the questions that bring out the realities and give people the help they need to correct problems.

Putting the right people in the right jobs requires emotional fortitude. Failure to deal with underperformers is an extremely common problem in corporations, and it’s usually the result of the leader’s emotional blockages.

Moreover, without emotional fortitude, you will have a hard time hiring the best people to work for you. Because if you are lucky, these people will be better than you are; they will bring new ideas and energy to your operation. A manager who is emotionally weak will avoid such people out of fear that they will undercut his power. His tendency will be to protect his fragile authority. He will surround himself with people he can count on to be loyal and exclude those who will challenge him with new thinking. Eventually, such emotional weakness will destroy both the leader and the organization.

No one does the leader’s job flawlessly, believe me. You’ve got to make mistakes and learn from them.

We don’t think ourselves into a new way of acting, we act ourselves into a new way of thinking.

Stripped to its essentials, an organization’s culture is the sum of its shared values, beliefs, and norms of behavior.

Behaviors are beliefs turned into action. Behaviors deliver the results. They’re where the rubber meets the road.

Far too many companies do a poor job of linking rewards to performance.

harmony—sought by many leaders who wish to offend no one—can be the enemy of truth.

When harmony prevails, here’s how things often get settled: after the key players leave the session, they quietly veto decisions they didn’t like but didn’t debate on the spot. A good motto to observe is “Truth over harmony.”

Informality is critical to candor. It was one of Jack Welch’s bywords. Formality suppresses dialogue; informality encourages it.

At a meeting in a formal, hierarchical setting, a powerful player can get away with killing a good idea. But informality encourages people to test their thinking, to experiment, and to cross-check. It enables them to take risks among colleagues, bosses, and subordinates. Informality gets the truth out.

Dialogue alters the psychology of a group. It can either expand a group’s capacity or shrink it. It can be energizing or energy-draining. It can create self-confidence and optimism, or it can produce pessimism. It can create unity, or it can create bitter factions.

the key is that people act their way to thinking because they’re driven for results. If you reward for performance, the interest in performance will be sufficiently deep to sponsor a dialogue.

If instead you say, “Okay, let’s talk about that. Let’s listen to everybody and then make our choice,” you’ll get much better responses.

“The culture of a company is the behavior of its leaders. Leaders get the behavior they exhibit and tolerate. You change the culture of a company by changing the behavior of its leaders. You measure the change in culture by measuring the change in the personal behavior of its leaders and the performance of the business.”

Success in executing a cultural change depends first and foremost on having the right people.

Executive development needs to be a core competency. At GE 85 percent of the executives are promoted from within—that’s how good the company is at developing leaders.

And it got so good because Jack Welch—and now his successor, Jeff Immelt—made leadership development a top priority and demanded that all of his executives do the same.

I couldn’t interview everybody, but I knew that the standard I set would be followed in the rest of the organization: you hire a talented person, and they will hire a talented person.

To consistently improve its leadership gene pool, every business needs a discipline that is embedded in the people process, with candid dialogues about the matches between people and jobs, and follow-through that ensures people take the appropriate actions.