Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

by Larry Bossidy

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.

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.

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.

Without what we call emotional fortitude, you can’t be honest with yourself, deal honestly with business and organizational realities, or give people forthright assessments. You can’t tolerate the diversity of viewpoints, mental architectures, and personal backgrounds that organizations need in their members in order to avoid becoming ingrown. If you can’t do these things, you can’t execute.

A solid, long-term leader has an ethical frame of reference that gives her the power and energy to carry out even the most difficult assignment. She never wavers from what she thinks is right. This characteristic is beyond honesty or beyond integrity, beyond treating people with dignity. It’s a business leadership ethic.

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.

HUMILITY: The more you can contain your ego, the more realistic you are about your problems. You learn how to listen and admit that you don’t know all the answers. You exhibit the attitude that you can learn from anyone at any time. Your pride doesn’t get in the way of gathering the information you need to achieve the best results. It doesn’t keep you from sharing the credit that needs to be shared. Humility allows you to acknowledge your mistakes. Making mistakes is inevitable, but good leaders both admit and learn from them and over time create a decision-making process based on experience.

The behavior of a business’s leaders is, ultimately, the behavior of the organization. As such, it’s the foundation of the culture.

cultural change gets real when your aim is execution.

First you tell people clearly what results you’re looking for. Then you discuss how to get those results, as a key element of the coaching process. Then you reward people for producing the results. If they come up short, you provide additional coaching, withdraw rewards, give them other jobs, or let them go. When you do these things, you create a culture of getting things done.

This is a good definition what a performance review sets out to accomplish

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.

People who are setting out to change a culture often talk first about changing the set of values. That’s the wrong focus.

Values—fundamental principles and standards, such as integrity or respect for the customer or in GE’s case boundarylessness—may need to be re...

The beliefs that influence specific behaviors are more likely to need changing.

People change them only when new evidence shows them persuasively that they’re false.

Behaviors are beliefs turned into action. Behaviors deliver the results. They’re where the rubber meets the road. When we talk about behavior, we are talking less about individual behavior than about norms of behavior: the accepted, expected ways groups of people behave in the corporate setting—the “rules of engagement,” as some people call them. The norms are about how people work together. As such, they are critical to a company’s ability to create a competitive advantage.

The foundation of changing behavior is linking rewards to performance and making the linkages transparent.

If a company rewards and promotes people for execution, its culture will change.

“In the first year, a person came to me and said, ‘Your system doesn’t work. Last year I was rated really well. This year I did the same work and achieved the same level of performance, but I was rated really low.’ I said, ‘Well, let me give you an answer. It’s one of two things or both. Number one, chances are you weren’t as good as you thought you were last year. Number two, if you were that good and you did the same job this year, you’re rated lower because you didn’t get any better, and everyone else did. You’ve got to realize, EDS is improving, and everybody’s got to improve the job they do, and if you’re staying the same, you’re falling behind.’”

Whatever approach you use to determine rewards, the goal is the same: the compensation system has to have the right yields. You should reward not just strong achievements on numbers but also the desirable behaviors that people actually adopt.

We don’t expect people to know everything, but we do expect people to get the best answers they can get, and they get them by working with other people. Practicing such constructive debates over time builds confidence in people to tackle unfamiliar issues as they arise.

Robust dialogue starts when people go in with open minds. They’re not trapped by preconceptions or armed with a private agenda. They want to hear new information and choose the best alternatives, so they listen to all sides of the debate and make their own contributions.

harmony—sought by many leaders who wish to offend no one—can be the enemy of truth. It can squelch critical thinking and drive decision making underground. 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.” Candor helps wipe out the silent lies and pocket vetoes, and it prevents the stalled initiatives and rework that drain energy.

I asked the CEO and the vice chairman what the three nonnegotiable criteria for the job were. After some discussion, they named the following: be extremely good in selecting the right mix of promotion, advertising, and merchandising; have a proven sense of what advertising is effective and how best to place this advertising in TV, radio, and print; have the ability to execute the marketing program in the right timing and sequence so that it is coordinated with the launch of new products; and be able to select the right people to rebuild the marketing department.

They don’t ask the most important question: How good is this person at getting things done? In our experience, there’s very little correlation between those who talk a good game and those who get things done come hell or high water. Too often the second kind are given short shrift. But if you want to build a company that has excellent discipline of execution, you have to select the doer.

I talk a good game, but MY execution is off. How do I learn to execute?

Too many leaders think they can create energy by giving pep talks, or painting an uplifting picture of where the business can be in a few years if everybody just does their best. The leaders whose visions come true build and sustain their people’s momentum. They bring it down to earth, focusing on short-term accomplishments—the adrenaline-pumping goals that get scored on the way to winning the game.

Getting things done through others is a fundamental leadership skill. Indeed, if you can’t do it, you’re not leading.

Once I embrace an initiative, I make sure it’s put into effect. If I let it wane after six months, wasting money and people’s time, that’s going to reduce my effectiveness in making future initiatives. People will think, “We’ll give this three months, and ol’ Larry will be off on something else,” and their body language will show that they’re skeptical. So I make a point of emphasizing that I’m committed and that we’re going to do this. We may do it with or without everybody’s support, but we’re going to do it. Then people get the message quickly that this is not an experiment.

The basic goal of any strategy is simple enough: to win the customer’s preference and create a sustainable competitive advantage, while leaving sufficient money on the table for shareholders.

How do I express this summation in my strategic plan?

a good strategic planning process also requires the utmost attention to the hows of executing the strategy. A robust strategy is not a compilation of numbers or what amounts to an astrological forecast when companies extrapolate numbers year by year for the next ten years. Its substance and detail must come from the minds of the people who are closest to the action and who understand their markets, their resources, and their strengths and weaknesses.

If a strategy does not address the hows, it is a candidate for failure.

The substance of any strategy is summed up by its building blocks: the half-dozen or fewer key concepts and actions that define it. Pinpointing the building blocks forces leaders to be clear as they debate and discuss the strategy. It helps them judge whether the strategy is good or bad and why. It provides a basis for exploring alternatives if needed.

If you can’t describe your strategy in twenty minutes, simply and in plain language, you haven’t got a plan.

Every business operates within a shifting political, social, and macroeconomic context, and the strategic plan must explicitly state the external assumptions that management is making.

The division manager of a large industrial company recently proposed a growth strategy requiring a $300 million capital investment. The strategy would adapt an existing technology to a new product that would be sold to a new set of customers. The plan he proposed was elegant in the way it answered the usual strategy questions with data about the competition, the industry, and the external environment. The CEO listened patiently for twenty minutes, an unusually long period of time for him. However, he couldn’t wait any longer to ask the following questions. First, who buys this product? The division manager answered that it was the purchasing managers of customer companies. The CEO said, “Really? Let me rephrase the question. Who specifies that this product should be purchased?” The division manager answered that it was obviously the engineers. The CEO’s final question, delivered in a stern tone, was, “How many engineers did you talk to?” The dead silence meant that the project was rejected.

Milestones bring reality to a strategic plan. If the business doesn’t meet milestones as it executes the plan, leaders have to reconsider whether they’ve got the right strategy after all.

A good strategic plan is adaptable. Once-a-year planning can be dangerous, especially in short-cycle businesses where markets won’t wait on your planning schedule. Periodic interim reviews can help you to understand what’s happening and what turns in the road are going to be necessary.

Balancing the short run with the long run is thus a critical part of a strategic plan. Most plans don’t address what a company has to do between the time the plan is drawn up and the time it is supposed to yield peak results. A plan that doesn’t deal with the near-term issues of costs, productivity, and people makes getting from here to there unacceptably risky—and often impossible.

Every strategy must lay out clearly the specifics of the anatomy of the business, how it will make money now and in the future. That means understanding the following foundations, the mix of which is unique for every business: the drivers of cash, margin, velocity, revenue growth, market share, and competitive advantage.

a strategic plan contains ideas that are specific and clear. It is not a numbers exercise. Numbers are obviously needed, but those that are detailed line by line and are mechanically extrapolated over five years offer little in the way of insight. The numbers you need are those that add to the robustness of the ideas in the strategic plan.

While you generally want to avoid the rearview mirror—focusing too much on last year’s strategic plan—you should spend some time discussing how well it was executed. How close did you come to achieving its goals?

Is the plan plausible and realistic? Is it internally consistent? Does it match the critical issues and the assumptions? Are people committed to it?

Is this idea consistent with the realities of the marketplace? Does it mesh with our organization’s capabilities? Are we pursuing more ideas than we can handle? Will the idea make money?

The strategy process defines where a business wants to go, and the people process defines who’s going to get it there. The operating plan provides the path for those people. It breaks long-term output into short-term targets. Meeting those here-and-now targets forces decisions to be made and integrated across the organization, both initially and in response to changes in business conditions. It puts reality behind the numbers. The operating plan is not budgeting for “We did better than last year.” Such budgeting looks into the rearview mirror to set its goals; an operating plan looks forward to the hows.

First, the process doesn’t provide for robust dialogue on the plan’s assumptions.

Second, the budget is built around the results that top management wants, but it doesn’t discuss or specify the action programs that will make those outcomes a reality.

Third, the process doesn’t provide coaching opportunities for people to learn the totality of the business, or develop the social architectu...

These operating plans are typically based on a budget that has been previously prepared. This is backward: the budget should be the financial expression of the operating plan and the underlying plans generated by th...

An operating plan addresses the critical issues in execution by building the budget on realities. What do the capital markets expect, and what are your assumptions about the business environment? If it’s sunshine, how do you take advantage of the opportunities better than your competitors? If it’s rain, what actions do you need to perform to ride out the storm better than them?