Execution Quotes

“To understand execution, you have to keep three key points in mind: 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.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“Thus you have to rely on yourself to contain your own ego and recognize your inevitable blind spots. Be particularly cautious about losing your ability to listen. Not only do you need expertise from both within and outside the company to shore up your blind spots and weaknesses, but also a pipeline to people willing and able to bring you diverse views and bad news. Above all, you need to be able to recognize when you’re part of the problem.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“EXPAND PEOPLES’ CAPABILITIES. The fundamentals of this essential behavior don’t change. Even in tough times you can find ways to provide education and training as an investment in the company’s future. Even though promotions may be few and far between in this toxic environment, you can still find ways to stretch and test your people. It goes without saying that you need to do precise, accurate, and candid appraisals, but be sure you are looking for the qualities that matter amid the current turmoil: energy, courage, honesty, integrity, and perseverance. You need people who can roll with the punches, not people who are whiners and naysayers. You also need to rethink which people are more likely to rise to the top in the new environment as your organization’s strategy evolves.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“Of course, to properly reward the “doers” you must correctly define what a doer is. This is central to the idea of execution. Simply put, a doer is a person who gets things done. Doing is meeting goals. Some goals are legitimately short-term goals that yield short-term results and are properly compensated on a short-term basis. But other goals are long-term and by definition we will not know if we have achieved those goals for some time. Consequently the people striving to meet those goals should be compensated on a long-term basis, with some portion of that long- term compensation based on achieving critical milestones toward the goal. And there are some goals that are so long- term that compensation should only be awarded when a person retires and his or her contributions to meeting those extremely long-term goals can be assessed. Leaders must take responsibility for setting the right rewards for doers. This is particularly true of boards of directors, many of which made egregiously bad calls in rewarding poor performance by the CEOs of their companies. Linked together as these behaviors are, rewarding the doers must be based on the correct metrics. For too long companies—and this often involved boards of directors— set “shareholder value” as one of the goals to be measured and rewarded in compensation plans. But the directors and CEOs who set shareholder value as a goal missed an essential point. Increasing shareholder value is an outcome, not a goal. If you set the right strategy with the right goals and execute well to implement the strategy and achieve the goals—growth in earnings per share, good cash flow, improved market share, for example—then shareholder value is the result. Get everything else right and shareholder value will take care of itself. EXPAND”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“FOLLOW-THROUGH. Follow-through is a constant and sequential part of execution. It ensures that you have established closure in the dialogue about who will be responsible for what and the specific milestones for measurement. The failure to establish this closure leaves the people who execute a decision or strategy without a clear picture of their role. As events unfold rapidly amid much uncertainty, follow-through becomes a much more intense process. Milestones need to be placed closer together so there is less room for slippage, and information needs to flow faster and in more detail so that everyone knows how the strategy is evolving. Follow-through”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“Identifying goals requires a level of savvy and expertise to achieve the right balance. That, in turn, requires the realism and the knowledge of the business and the people that constitute the first two of our seven essential behaviors. Choosing the wrong goals can be disastrous. All too often the wrong goals are set because the leader isn’t realistic about the ability of the people to achieve them. Articulating the right goals is the first step. The people in the organization then have to execute and that means setting priorities and benchmarks.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“IDENTIFY CLEAR GOALS AND PRIORITIES.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“But knowing your people is not enough. They need to know you. It is absolutely critical during trying times that you as a leader are accessible, that you project a sense of confidence tempered by concern, that you share as much undistorted and unfiltered information as you can, and that you act decisively. Remember that people are constantly searching for indications about their leader’s ability to carry them through a raging storm and they will interpret or misinterpret the slightest signals, whether those signals are sent intentionally or mistakenly. INSIST”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“KNOW YOUR PEOPLE AND KNOW YOUR BUSINESS. In Execution we stress the need for domain knowledge, the kind of granular understanding of how the business makes money that goes beyond profit and loss statements.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“Operations To execute well there must be accountability, clear goals, accurate methods to measure performance, and the right rewards for people who perform. But now, more than ever before, leaders need to design flexible operating plans. In the past a company might make one or perhaps two profound changes in its operations each year.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“Competition for the best leaders will be intense. One way to ensure that you have the right people in the right jobs in this rapidly shifting environment is by writing job descriptions for the kind of people you need in each job as it will exist tomorrow, then match those descriptions against the talents and abilities of the peole holding those jobs today. If you don’t have the right leaders for the environment, then it is incumbent to move quickly and make the necessary changes. You must also begin now to cultivate the leaders of the future, testing and evaluating people for their ability to execute in the face of new challenges and circumstances. Operations”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“Many people strategize themselves into the wrong businesses.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“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.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“There’s a saying we recently heard: We don’t think ourselves into a new way of acting, we act ourselves into a new way of thinking.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“An environment of fast growth can cover a multitude of sins, but an era of slow growth will magnify every shortcoming of every person in the business, especially the leaders.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“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.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“Without execution, the breakthrough thinking breaks down, learning adds no value, people don’t meet their stretch goals, and the revolution stops dead in its tracks. What you get is change for the worse, because failure drains the energy from your organization. Repeated failure destroys it.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“The gap between promises and results is widespread and clear. 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.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“Much has been written about Jack Welch’s style of management—especially his toughness and bluntness, which some people call ruthlessness. We would argue that the core of his management legacy is that he forced realism into all of GE’s management processes, making it a model of an execution culture.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“While understanding reality is crucial, equally important is communicating it to your people.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“IDENTIFY CLEAR GOALS AND PRIORITIES. The ability to identify clear goals and priorities is being tested as the world resets. In 2008, for example, the primary goal for many companies became safety and managing for cash. But within that goal was the related one of managing for risk and a shift from previous years in the balance between the short-term and the long-term. Identifying goals requires a level of savvy and expertise to achieve the right balance. That, in turn, requires the realism and the knowledge of the business and the people that constitute the first two of our seven essential behaviors. Choosing the wrong goals can be disastrous. All too often the wrong goals are set because the leader isn’t realistic about the ability of the people to achieve them. Articulating the right goals is the first step. The people in the organization then have to execute and that means setting priorities and benchmarks. It isn’t enough to say “we need to generate $10 billion in cash.” You have to know what parts of the business will generate how much cash, how they will do it (by better managing inventories and receivables, for example), who is accountable, and how to follow through to be sure everyone is doing what they are supposed to be doing.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“It is imperative, too, that every strategy takes into account an analysis and understanding of the global financial and economic environment marked by slower growth, increased competition, altered consumer behavior, and more government intervention.”
― Ram Charan, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“Execution is what gives you an edge in detecting new realities in the external environment as well as risks that are being introduced, perhaps inadvertantly, to your own operations.”
― Ram Charan, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“But inflation or deflation can be forecast to some extent. The real risks are those that lie hidden beneath the veneer of “business as usual.”
― Ram Charan, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“There will be a new regulatory environment and each government will carry it out in different ways, some as partners to business, others as adversaries.”
― Ram Charan, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“everyone will be fighting harder and smarter to win market share. Each company will be searching for a new advantage, in the form of products, technologies, management, locations, prices, among many other variables.”
― Ram Charan, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“the company that executes well will have the confidence, speed, and resources to move fast as new opportunities emerge. It will also have credibility as a partner, supplier, and investment of choice, compounding its advantage as it positions itself for growth.”
― Ram Charan, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“Growth will be slower. The vast consumer market that is America may no longer be the principal global economic driver it has been, and countries intent on creating jobs for their people will be much slower to import our goods.”
― Ram Charan, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“Execution, when first published in 2002, was based on our observation that the discipline of getting things done was what differentiated companies that succeeded from those that just muddled through or failed.”
― Ram Charan, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“Execution not only ensures efficient use of resources in a credit and cash-starved world, but also provides the feedback loop needed for the business to adjust to changes—big or small—in the external world.”
― Ram Charan, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done