Execution: It's All About Getting It Done!
Part 5 -- What Is Execution, Where Does It Start, Where Does It End
by Janice Giannini
As a trusted business consultant and advisor, Janice has been helping clients achieve their stretch goals and create a new normal since 2005. She engages with senior executives and teams, particularly in complex businesses where misalignment is blocking their desired success, to develop and execute practical business strategies and plans. Clients have found her especially helpful when they recognize they must integrate an eagle’s eye and worm’s eye view in order to identify and remove obstacles. Janice has consistently taken on those challenges that others chose to run from. This typically involves those challenging times when failure is not an option and integrating business, technology and people changes must be accomplished simultaneously. As a result, many of her clients are complex organizations who won't settle for anything less than developing widespread professional competence.
In Part 5 we focus on creating a tight enough linkage between execution and strategy to form an iterative cycle. This linkage creates a self sustaining operational way of doing business that keeps the team focused and ready for the next challenges.
This is a process requiring constant attention and improvement. Determining the result needed, measure the actions taken and achieved, evaluate the results, determine the real cause of the problems ( versus symptoms) and up the anty to make it better. While the names may have changed over time, this is a sound way to take results to the next level.
The basic process of understand the results needed, developing the plan, measure the achievements and re-pathing when necessary applies to:
- product or service industry,
- internal organizations
- organizations that interact directly revenue generating customers
- new business generation
Taking performance to the next level over time requires that both external and internal forces come together. When this doesn't happen, the inevitable question is "Is it execution or is it strategy"? I claim it is both. It was both because execution and strategy need to be tightly coupled to reinforce each other to make the whole stronger. Going back to the basics to understand, some questions to help guide :
- What's different today about the markets served?
- What is likely to be different tomorrow?
- How will these changes influence products and services needed?
- Is there still a market for current products and services?
- How do current services need to be adapted?
- What trends are taking place in the industry, what new products and services are being created as a result?
- What trends are taking place in my customers industry,
- What impact is technology creating?
- Is the customer base changing?
- Where am I going, where are my competitors going
- Why am I going there, why are my competitors going ….
- Where is my customer base going, do I care, what am I doing about it
- Am I producing what my customers want or am I trying to sell what I have
A disciplined execution model, then starts to confirm or confront the strategic plan. The implementation of an iterative cycle will align the business from strategy through to results. The desired state is steady on course so every little ripple doesn't create an emergent strategy, flexible and agile enough to alter course when needed, confident and open minded to see what's really there, and finally clear accountability . One last thought to share. Accountability is not a dirty word. As with any human experience we tend to look for the negative. The definition of accountability is clear responsibility so people and teams know what they need to do and when they need help. It is a positive experience for the majority of the time. As George Bernard Shaw said "The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want and if they can't find them, make them".
Our five focal points of discussion, when taken together as a package form the basis for taking any organization or individual's results to the next level. A rigorous approach to this can enable any organization to execute flawlessly and "Get It Done!"
- Addressing the What, Why, How, When, and Who of effective execution
- Properly defining the execution and emotional mindsets needed,
- Thinking through the plans and metrics required to succeed,
- Handling the process challenges and inevitable stumbles along the way, and
- Creating a tight enough linkage between execution and strategy to form an iterative cycle.