Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

by Larry Bossidy

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

The company spent an enormous amount to install SAP, enterprise software that connects all parts of the company through a standard software platform, but the money was largely wasted because the company didn’t change work processes to take advantage of it.

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

As Dick Brown puts it, “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.”

Follow-through is the cornerstone of execution, and every leader who’s good at executing follows through religiously.

Never finish a meeting without clarifying what the follow-through will be, who will do it, when and how they will do it, what resources they will use, and how and when the next review will take place and with whom. And never launch an initiative unless you’re personally committed to it and prepared to see it through until it’s embedded in the DNA of an organization.

Strategic value is also added by initiatives to improve performance throughout the company, such as Six Sigma, digitization, and implementation of a good people process.

A good strategic plan has to be translatable into the operating plan. Not all in one year, but it has to have an action quotient to it.

The operating plan specifies how the various moving parts of the business will be synchronized to achieve the targets, deals with trade-offs that need to be made, and looks at contingencies for the things that can go wrong or offer unexpected opportunities.

the budget should be the financial expression of the operating plan and the underlying plans generated by the business’s components, rather than the other way around.

Most sizable businesses spend weeks or months preparing their budgets. This is unnecessary, and a great waste of time. You probably recognize that it can and should be done much faster. But would you believe you can prepare your budget in three days? We know a number of companies that do it. The starting point is a robust dialogue among all the relevant business leaders, who sit down together to understand the whole corporate picture, including all of the relationships among its parts. We call this the principle of simultaneity. Almost all budget or operating plan exercises are done sequentially, bottom up and top down: the goals and general assumptions come from the top, and the businesses generate the particulars. But sequential budgeting misses the power of simultaneous dialogue, which generates insights on the totality of the business and links its moving parts into a whole. The dialogue takes place in a three-day session that includes all of the business unit leader’s direct reports, line and staff. They’ve all previously been given the initial cut at the broad assumptions for the external environment, along with a set of competitor analyses and the financial and other targets for the year, quarter by quarter. The meeting focuses on the roughly twenty lines that, in just about any budget, account for 80 percent of the impact on the business outcomes. Among these, for example, are revenues by product mix, operating margins, marketing expenses, manufacturing costs, engi...

An operating plan addresses the critical issues in execution by building the budget on realities.