"Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done" by Larry Bossidy & Ram Charan

• Most often today the difference between a company and its competitor is the ability to execute. If your competitors are executing better than you are, they’re beating you in the here and now, and the financial markets won’t wait to see if your elaborate strategy plays out.
• Execution is the great unaddressed issue in the business world today Its absence is the single biggest obstacle to success and the cause of most of the disappointments that are mistakenly attributed to other causes.
• 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.
• 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.
• Any company that sells direct has certain advantages: control over pricing, no retail markups, and a sales force dedicated to its own products.
• Build to order improves inventory turnover, which increases asset velocity, one of the most underappreciated components of making money. Velocity is the ratio of sales dollars to net assets deployed in the business, which in the most common definition includes plant and equipment, inventories, and accounts receivable minus accounts payable. Higher velocity improves productivity and reduces working capital.
• 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.
• Execution is a systematic process of rigorously discussing hows and whats, questioning, tenaciously following through, and ensuring accountability.
• In its most fundamental sense, execution is a systematic way of exposing reality and acting on it.
• 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, politicizes, fragmented, and buttcovering? Or is it candid and reality-based, raising the right questions, debating them, and finding realistic solutions?
• Good judgments come from practice and experience.
• 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.
• The common view of intellectual challenge is only half true. What most people miss today is that intellectual challenge also includes the rigorous and tenacious work of developing and proving the ideas.
• The intellectual challenge of execution is in getting to the heart of an issue through persistent and constructive probing.
• There are seven essential behaviors that form the first building block of execution:
• 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.
• Good people like to be quizzed, because they know more about the business than the leader.
• The point is that when you probe, you learn things and your people learn things. Everybody gains from the dialogue.
• If a manager is having trouble, you don’t want to threaten to fire him--you want to help him with his problem.
• Realism is the heart of execution, but many organizations are full of people who are trying to avoid or shade reality.
• How do you make realism a priority? You start by being realistic yourself. Then you make sure realism is the goal of all dialogues in the organization.
• Leaders who execute focus on a very few clear priorities that everyone can grasp.
• 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.
• 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.
• If you want people to produce specific results, you reward them accordingly.
• You have to make it clear to everybody that rewards and respect are based on performance.
• Coaching is the single most important part of expanding other’s capabilities.
• Good leaders regard every encounter as an opportunity to coach.
• 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 god or that need to be changed.
• The skill of the coach is the art of questioning. Asking incisive questions forces people to think, to discover, to search.
• The same principles apply to coaching an individual privately. 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.
• Keep in mind that 80 percent of learning takes place outside the classroom.
• Emotional fortitude comes from self-discovery and self-mastery. It is the foundation of pole skills. Good leaders learn their specific personal strengths and weaknesses, especially in dealing with other people, then build on the strengths and correct the weaknesses.
• Only authenticity builds trust, because sooner or later people spot the fakers.
• Know thyself--it’s advice as old as the hills, and it’s the core of authenticity.
• Self-awareness gives you the capacity to learn from your mistakes as well as your successes. It enables you to keep growing.
• Self-mastery is the key to true self-confidence.
• Making mistakes is inevitable, but good leaders both admit and learn from them and over time create a decision making process based on experience.
• Internally competitive behavior is destructive.
• Behaviors are beliefs turned into action. Behaviors deliver the results.
• The foundation of changing behavior is linking rewards to performance and making the linkages transparent.
• Leaders must give honest feedback to their people, especially those who end up in the bottom rankings.
• You cannot have an execution culture without robust dialogue--one that brings reality to the surface through openness, candor, and informality.
• Leaders get the behavior they exhibit and tolerate.
• If you look at any business that’s consistently successful, you’ll find that its leaders focus intensely and relentlessly on people selection.
• Decisiveness is the ability to make difficult decisions swiftly and well, and act on them.
• Getting things done through others is a fundamental leadership skill.
• Traditional interviews aren’t useful for spotting the qualities of leaders who execute.
• If pole can’t speak forthrightly in evaluating others, then the evaluation is worthless--to the organization, and to the person who needs the feedback.
• If you sit down with your boss and your boss hasn’t said something to you about your weaknesses, go back! Because otherwise you’re not going to learn anything.
• A business unit strategy should be less than fifty pages long and should be easy to understand.
• If you can’t describe your strategy in twenty minutes, simply and in plain language, you haven’t got a plan.
• People tend to look at their businesses from the inside out--that is, they get so focused on making and selling their products that they lose awareness of the needs and buying behaviors of their customers.
• An astonishing number of strategies fail because leaders don’t make a realistic assessment of whether the organization can execute the plan.
• Every strategy must lay out clearly the specifics of the anatomy of the business, how it will make money now and in the future.
• You cannot set realistic goals until you’ve debated the assumptions behind them.
• As a leader, you question all the way down the line whether people have thought through all the ingredients in the plan. You need to be able to identify any assumptions that might be troublesome, in case they don’t spot them.
• The heart of the working of a business is how the three processes of people, strategy, and operations link together. Leaders need to master the individual process and the way they work together as a whole.