Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

by Larry Bossidy

Can the business execute the strategy?

Are the short term and long te...

What are the i...

What are the critic...

How will the business ...

Assessment of the External Environment?

political, social, and macroeconomic context,

AT&T’s assessment of its external environment failed to anticipate that regulators

and that the capital market boom in dot-coms,

The general environment is the same for...

What differentiates the successful ones are their insights, perceptions, and abilities to detect patterns of change and relate them to their landscap...

People tend to look at their businesses from the inside out—that

issue is simply understanding the specific people who make the purchasing decisions and their buying behavior.

This requires taking a significantly different approach to the customer.

It experienced no growth because reimbursement policies were discouraging hospitals from buying new equipment.

overcame the first obstacle

acquiring a company specializing

lower-tech eq...

overcame the second

entrepreneurial gamble

original growth initiative shifted a steadily increasing portion of GE Medical’s revenues into high-margin services with higher levels of cash flow.

One tool that’s useful in defining growth opportunities is market segment mapping.

A simple map of Cross’s market segments identifies three different consumers.

Who Is the Competition?

while Staples, Office Depot, and OfficeMax were competing with one another, they failed to see the inroads that Wal-Mart was making into the discount office supplies market.

$5 billion company.

five dollars a share

three-...

One key division was responsible for the company’s failure to meet its earnings forecast.

His strategy was to gain market share by cutting prices.

adding capacity

consumed a lot...

has thin profit ...

He calculated that his increased...

cutting prices would lower costs s...

“I did not ask him what the competitors’ reaction would be,”

Prices for the entire industry went down.

The CEO replaced the division head, and the new man he brought in gradually rolled the prices back up, initiated productivity programs, and reduced costs. The competitors followed the price increases, and by the end of the next year the CEO had made his $5 a share.

Sometimes people have the opposite problem—th...

small player in the software industry. Its product was excellent—it’s

enable appliances to connect with one another and the Internet—but

lea...

they were so terrified of...

What they didn’t understand was that Microsoft actually had a lousy record of execution in their area.

They knew how to execute.

The company went ahead and is now succeeding. To execute still better, it is also changing its organizational structure and changing key people in both sales and design.

Can the Business Execute the Strategy?

leaders don’t make a realistic assessment

This was one of the problems at Xerox, Lucent, and AT&T.

top two layers