Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

by Larry Bossidy

RESETTING EXECUTION FOR A TIME OF CRISIS

Examples are outdated? Focus on 7 essential behaviors

As an adviser to senior leaders of companies large and small, I often work with a client for ten or more consecutive years.

I have the opportunity to observe corporate dynamics over time and to participate directly in them. I first began to identify the problem of execution more than three decades ago, as I observed that strategic plans often did not work out in practice. As I facilitated meetings at the CEO and division levels, I watched and studied, and I saw that leaders placed too much emphasis on what some call high-level strategy, on intellectualizing and philosophizing, and not enough on implementation. People would agree on a project or initiative, and then nothing would come of it. My own nature is to follow through, so when this happened, I’d pick up the phone, call the person in charge, and ask, “What happened?” In time I saw a pattern and realized that execution was a major issue. Here is the fundamental problem: people think of execution as the tactical side of business, something leaders delegate while they focus on the perceived “bigger” issues. This idea is completely wrong. Execution is not just tactics—it is a discipline and a system. It has to be built into a company’s strategy, its goals, and its culture. And the leader of the organization must be deeply engaged in it. He cannot delegate its substance. 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.

We talk to many leaders who fall victim to the gap between promises they’ve made and results their organizations delivered. They frequently tell us they have a problem with accountability—people aren’t doing the things they’re supposed to do to implement a plan. They desperately want to make changes of some kind, but what do they need to change? They don’t know. So we see a great need for this book. Execution is not just something that does or doesn’t get done. Execution is a specific set of behaviors and techniques that companies need to master in order to have competitive advantage. It is a discipline of its own. In big companies and small ones, it is the critical discipline for success now.

Execution will help you, as a business leader, to choose a more robust strategy. In fact, you can’t craft a worthwhile strategy if you don’t at the same time make sure your organization has or can get what’s required to execute it, including the right resources and the right people.

If your business has to survive difficult times, if it has to make an important shift in response to change—and these days just about every business does—it’s far, far more likely to succeed if it’s executing well. Leading for execution is not rocket science. It’s very straightforward stuff. The main requirement is that you as a leader have to be deeply and passionately engaged in your organization and honest about its realities with others and yourself.

This is true whether you’re running a whole company or your first profit center. Any business leader, at any company or any level, needs to master the discipline of execution. This is the way you establish credibility as a leader.

Execution Is a Discipline 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 fundamental to strategy and has to shape it. No worthwhile strategy can be planned without taking into account the organization’s ability to execute it. If you’re talking about the smaller specifics of getting things done, call the process implementation, or sweating the details, or whatever you want to. But don’t confuse execution with 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. It also includes mechanisms for changing assumptions as the environment changes and upgrading the company’s capabilities to meet the challenges of an ambitious strategy.

Execution Is the Job of the Business Leader Lots of business leaders like to think that the top dog is exempt from the details of actually running things. It’s a pleasant way to view leadership: you stand on the mountaintop, thinking strategically and attempting to inspire your people with visions, while managers do the grunt work. This idea creates a lot of aspirations for leadership, naturally. Who wouldn’t want to have all the fun and glory while keeping their hands clean? Conversely, who wants to tell people at a cocktail party, “My goal is to be a manager,” in an era when the term has become almost pejorative? This way of thinking is a fallacy, one that creates immense damage.

It’s no different for a business leader. Only a leader can ask the tough questions that everyone needs to answer, then manage the process of debating the information and making the right trade-offs. And only the leader who’s intimately engaged in the business can know enough to have the comprehensive view and ask the tough incisive questions.

Only the leader can set the tone of the dialogue in the organization. Dialogue is the core of culture and the basic unit of work. How people talk to each other absolutely determines how well the organization will function. Is the dialogue stilted, politicized, fragmented, and butt-covering? Or is it candid and reality-based, raising the right questions, debating them, and finding realistic solutions? If it’s the former—as it is in all too many companies—reality will never come to the surface. If it is to be the latter, the leader has to be on the playing field with his management team, practicing it consistently and forcefully.

When things are running well, I spend 20 percent of my time on the people process. When I’m rebuilding an organization, it’s 40 percent. I’m not talking about doing formal interviews or selecting staff; I mean really getting to know people. When I go out to visit a plant, I’ll sit down for the first half hour with the manager. We’ll have a discussion about the capability of his people, looking at who is performing well and who needs help. I’ll go to a meeting of the whole staff and listen to what they have to say. Then I’ll sit down after the meeting and talk about my impressions of the people and write a letter confirming the agreements made at the meeting. And I’ll assess people’s performance not just at our formal reviews but two or three times a year. When we were putting these processes into place at AlliedSignal, one guy—a pretty good guy—said to me at a meeting, “You know, I’ve got to go through this people ritual again this year.” I said, “That’s the dumbest comment I’ve ever heard, because you tell the world how little you know about your job. If you really feel that way, you’ve got to do something else, because if you’re not going to get good at this, you can’t be successful.” I didn’t say it in front of everybody, but I thought to myself, That just tells me maybe I’ve got the wrong guy.

Leading for execution is not about micromanaging, or being “hands-on,” or disempowering people. Rather, it’s about active involvement—doing the things leaders should be doing in the first place.

The leader who executes assembles an architecture of execution. He puts in place a culture and processes for executing, promoting people who get things done more quickly and giving them greater rewards. His personal involvement in that architecture is to assign the tasks and then follow up. This means making sure that people understand the priorities, which are based on his comprehensive understanding of the business, and asking incisive questions. The leader who executes often does not even have to tell people what to do; she asks questions so they can figure out what they need to do. In this way she coaches them, passing on her experience as a leader and educating them to think in ways they never thought before. Far from stifling people, this kind of leadership

Leaders of this ilk are powerful and influential presences because they are their businesses. They are intimately and intensely involved with their people and operations. They connect because they know the realities and talk about them. They’re knowledgeable about the details. They’re excited about what they’re doing. They’re passionate about getting results. This is not “inspiration” through exhortation or speechmaking. These leaders energize everyone by the example they set.

Execution has to be embedded in the reward systems and in the norms of behavior that everyone practices.

focusing on execution is not only an essential part of a business’s culture, it is the one sure way to create meaningful cultural change.

Leaders who execute look for deviations from desired managerial tolerances—the gap between the desired and actual outcome in everything from profit margins to the selection of people for promotion. Then they move to close the gap and raise the bar still higher across the whole organization.

Execution should begin with the senior leaders, but if you are not a senior leader, you can still practice it in your own organization. You build and demonstrate your own skills. The results will advance your career—and they may just persuade others in the business to do the same.

If execution is so important, why is it so neglected? To be sure, people in business aren’t totally oblivious to it. But what they’re mostly aware of is its absence. They know, deep down, that something is missing when decisions don’t get made or followed through and when commitments don’t get met.

They search and struggle for answers, benchmarking companies that are known to deliver on their commitments, looking for the answers in the organizational structure or processes or culture. But they rarely apprehend the underlying lesson, because execution hasn’t yet been recognized or taught as a discipline. They literally don’t know what they’re looking for.

Organizations don’t execute unless the right people, individually and collectively, focus on the right details at the right time.

Leadership without the discipline of execution is incomplete and ineffective. Without the ability to execute, all other attributes of leadership become hollow.

Joe,

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People familiar with the company say several executives told Mr. McGinn as long as a year ago that the company needed to drastically cut its financial projections because its newest products weren’t ready yet and sales of older ones were going to decline. “He absolutely rejected” the advice, says one person familiar with the discussion. “He said the market is growing and there’s absolutely no reason why we can’t grow. He was in total denial.” Indeed, in a recent interview, Mr. McGinn said that during Lucent’s spectacular rise to stardom in the years after its spinoff from AT&T, he never gave much thought to how or whether the company might fall from grace.

If capabilities enable you to plan, commit and deliver, how can you NOT develop your people? People ARE our capability

Starting at the highest levels, Brown created new ways to drive accountability and collaboration. In the monthly “performance call,” for example, he, his COO, and his CFO began hosting Monday-morning conference calls of the company’s roughly top 150 leaders. These calls are essentially an ongoing operating review, in which the company’s performance for the previous month and the year to date is compared with the commitments people have made. The calls provide early warning of problems and instill a sense of urgency. People who fall short have to explain why, and what they are going to do about it. In the early days, when Brown was building the new culture of execution, the calls also served to reinforce the new standards of accountability. “The point I tried to make is that when you sign up for what used to be a budget item, you are committing for your team and each other,” he says. “The rest are depending on you. It added a layer of weight and responsibility that was missing before.”

The calls have brought a new reality to discussions of EDS operations. The talk is straightforward, even blunt, designed to elicit truth and coach people in the behavior Brown expects of his managers.

“Intense candor,” Brown calls it, “a balance of optimism and motivation with realism. We bring out th...

The talk isn’t always about numbers. At one of the first meetings, Brown recalls, “one of the executives made the statement that he was worried about growing anxiety and unrest in his organization, worried about rapid and dramatic change. His people were asking, ‘Are we moving too fast, are we on the threshold of being reckless? Maybe we should slow down, take it easy, reflect a bit.’” Brown turned the issue around—not incidentally, creating a forceful coaching lesson. “I jumped all over that. ‘This is a test of leadership,’ I said. ‘I would like anybody on this call who is really worried about where we are going and worried about the fact that we will probably fail, tell me so right now. Don’t be afraid to say you are. If you think we’re making a big mistake and heading for the reef, speak up now.’ “No one did. So I said, ‘If you’re not worried, where’s the worry coming from? I’m not worried, and you’re not worried. Here’s where it is: some of you say one thing, and your body language says another. You show me an organization that’s wringing its hands, listening to rumors, anxious about the future, and I will show you leadership that behaves the same way. People imitate their leaders. If your organization is worried, you’ve got a problem, because you said you’re not.’ “And I put it right back on that. ‘Here’s your test of leadership; now calm your organization, give them information; strike right at the heart of their worries. I can’t believe that their worry is fact-base...

The discipline of execution is based on a set of building blocks that every leader must use to design, install, and operate effectively the three core processes rigorously and consistently. Chapters 3 to 5 distill our observations about these building blocks: the essential behaviors of the leader, an operational definition of the framework for cultural change, and getting the right people in the right jobs.

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.

Leaders have to live their businesses. In companies that don’t execute, the leaders are usually out of touch with the day-to-day realities. They’re getting lots of information delivered to them, but it’s filtered—presented by direct reports with their own perceptions, limitations, and agendas, or gathered by staff people with their own perspectives. The leaders aren’t where the action is. They aren’t engaged with the business, so they don’t know their organizations comprehensively, and their people don’t really know them.

Suppose a leader goes to a plant or business headquarters and speaks to the people there. He is sociable and courteous. He shows superficial interest in his subordinates’ kids—how well they’re doing in school, how they like the community, and so on. Or he chats about the World Series, the Super Bowl, or the local basketball team. He may ask some shallow questions about the business, such as “What’s your level of revenue?” This leader is not engaged in his business. When the visit is over, some of the managers may feel a sense of relief, because everything seemed to go so well and pleasantly. But the managers who are any good will be disappointed. They’ll ask themselves, What was the point? They had prepared for tough questions—good people like to be quizzed, because they know more about the business than the leader. They’ll feel frustrated and drained of energy. They didn’t get a chance to make a good impression on the leader—and the leader certainly didn’t make a good impression on them. And of course, the leader hasn’t learned anything. The next time he makes prognostications about the company, the press or the securities analysts may be awed, but the people in the business will know better. They’ll ask each other, “How on earth could he say those things so confidently when he doesn’t have a clue about what’s happening down here?”

The point is that when you probe, you learn things and your people learn things. Everybody gains from the dialogue. And you dignify the leadership at the plant level by allowing them to expound on the business.

As a leader, you have to show up. You’ve got to conduct business reviews. You can’t be detached and removed and absent. When you go to an operation and you run a review of the business, the people may not like what you tell them, but they will say, “At least he cares enough about my business to come and review it with us today. He stayed there for four hours. He quizzed the hell out of us.” Good people want that. It’s a way of raising their dignity. It’s a way of expressing appreciation and a reward for their extensive preparation. It’s also a way to foster honest dialogue, the kind that can sometimes leave people feeling bruised if they take it personally. But the dialogue should not be mean-spirited. Let’s assume you have a heated debate with somebody. You disagree with what he’s doing, but then you both resolve it one way or another. You can write the man a note and say, “Great discussion yesterday about the growth plan for your group. Appreciate your setting forth your views and your candor and insistence that we confront reality.” You’re not going home mad, and you don’t want him going home mad. You’re trying to promote the ability to intellectually debate important points. It doesn’t matter who wins or loses. The fact that the debate happened and a resolution occurred is good in itself.

But you need to show up with an open mind and a positive demeanor. Be informal, and have a sense of humor. A business review should take the form of a Socratic dialogue, not an interrogation.

Realism is the heart of execution, but many organizations are full of people who are trying to avoid or shade reality. Why? It makes life uncomfortable.

Embracing realism means always taking a realistic view of your company and comparing it with other companies. You’re always keeping an eye on what’s happening in companies around the world, and you’re measuring your own progress, not internally, but externally. You don’t just ask, “Have I made progress from last year to this year?” You ask, “How am I doing vis-à-vis other companies? Have they made a lot more progress?” That’s the realistic way to look at your station. It’s shocking to see how many people don’t want to confront issues realistically. They’re not comfortable doing it. 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.

Leaders who execute focus on a very few clear priorities that everyone can grasp. Why just a few? First, anybody who thinks through the logic of a business will see that focusing on three or four priorities will produce the best results from the resources at hand. Second, people in contemporary organizations need a small number of clear priorities to execute well. In an old-fashioned hierarchical company, this wasn’t so much of a problem—people generally knew what to do, because the orders came down through the chain of command. But when decision making is decentralized or

highly fragmented, as in a matrix organization, people at many levels have to make endless trade-offs. There’s competition for resources, and ambiguity over decision rights and working relationships. Without carefully thought-out and clear priorities, people can get bogged down in warfare over who gets what and why.

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. You’ve got to have these few, clearly realistic goals and priorities, wh...

Along with having clear goals, you should strive for simplicity in general. 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.

Clear, simple goals don’t mean much if nobody takes them seriously. The failure to follow through is widespread in business, and a major cause of poor execution. How many meetings have you attended where people left without firm conclusions about who would do what and when? Everybody may have agreed the idea was good, but since nobody was named accountable for results, it doesn’t get done. Other things come up that seem more important, or people decide it wasn’t such a good idea after all. (Maybe they even felt that way during the meeting, but didn’t speak up.) For example, a high-tech company was hit hard by the recession of 2001, suffering a 20 percent decline in revenue. The CEO was reviewing the revised operating plan for one of his most important divisions. He congratulated the division president on how well he and his people had reduced its cost structure, but noted that the business would still fall short of its target for return on investment. And he offered a possible solution. He’d recently learned about the importance of velocity, and suggested that the division could make real gains by working with its suppliers to increase inventory turnover. “What do you think you can do?” he asked the purchasing manager. The manager replied that with some engineering help, he thought he could make substantial improvements. “I’d need twenty engineers,” the manager added. The CEO turned to the engineering vice president and asked him if he would assign the engineers to the tas...

Hook

Clear, simple goals don’t mean much if nobody takes them seriously. The failure to follow through is widespread in business, and a major cause of poor execution. How many meetings have you attended where people left without firm conclusions about who would do what and when? Everybody may have agreed the idea was good, but since nobody was named accountable for results, it doesn’t get done. Other things come up that seem more important, or people decide it wasn’t such a good idea after all. (Maybe they even felt that way during the meeting, but didn’t speak up.) For example, a high-tech company was hit hard by the recession of 2001, suffering a 20 percent decline in revenue. The CEO was reviewing the revised operating plan for one of his most important divisions. He congratulated the division president on how well he and his people had reduced its cost structure, but noted that the business would still fall short of its target for return on investment. And he offered a possible solution. He’d recently learned about the importance of velocity, and suggested that the division could make real gains by working with its suppliers to increase inventory turnover. “What do you think you can do?” he asked the purchasing manager. The manager replied that with some engineering help, he thought he could make substantial improvements. “I’d need twenty engineers,” the manager added. The CEO turned to the engineering vice president and asked him if he would assign the engineers to the tas...

Action, Follow Through

When I see companies that don’t execute, the chances are that they don’t measure, don’t reward, and don’t promote people who know how to get things done. Salary increases in terms of percentage are too close between the top performers and those who are not. There’s not enough differentiation in bonus, or in stock options, or in stock grants. Leaders need the confidence to explain to a direct report why he got a lower than expected reward.

A good leader ensures that the organization makes these distinctions and that they become a way of life, down throughout the organization. Otherwise people think they’re involved in socialism. That isn’t what you want when you strive for a culture of execution. You have to make it clear to everybody that rewards and respect are based on performance.

As a leader, you’ve acquired a lot of knowledge and experience—even wisdom—along the way. One of the most important parts of your job is passing it on to the next generation of leaders. This is how you expand the capabilities of everyone else in your organization, individually and collectively. It’s how you will get results today and leave a legacy that you can take pride in when you move on. Coaching is the single most important part of expanding others’ capabilities. You’ve surely heard the saying, “Give a man a fish, and you’ll feed him for a day; teach a man how to fish, and you’ll feed him for a lifetime.” That’s coaching. It’s the difference between giving orders and teaching people how to get things done. Good leaders regard every encounter as an opportunity to coach. RAM: The most effective way to coach is to observe a person in action and then provide specific useful feedback. The feedback should point out examples of behavior and performance that are good or that need to be changed. When the leader discusses business and organizational issues in a group setting, everybody learns. Wrestling with challenging issues collectively, exploring pros and cons and alternatives, and deciding which ones make sense increases people’s capabilities both individually and collectively—if it’s done with honesty and trust. The skill of the coach is the art of questioning. Asking incisive questions forces people to think, to discover, to search.

Education is an important part of expanding people’s capabilities—if it’s handled right. Many companies are almost promiscuous about it, offering cornucopias of generic courses in management or leadership and putting far too many people into them. In one company I know every bonus-eligible manager went through the executive development program. It was an absolute waste of time for 50 percent of them. You need to make judgments about which people have the potential to get something useful out of a course and what specific things you’re trying to use education to accomplish, in order to expand the capabilities of the organization.