4 Disciplines Of Execution Quotes

If you’re not keeping score, you’re just practicing.

As legendary Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt put it, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.

there will always be more good ideas than you and your teams have the capacity to execute.

You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, unapologetically—to say no to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger ‘yes’ burning inside.

In summary, procrastination may arise from problems in each of the nine executive functions—(1) inhibition, (2) self-monitoring, (3) planning and organization, (4) activity shifting, (5) task initiation, (6) task monitoring, (7) emotional control, (8) working memory, and (9) general orderliness.

you might find it hard to let go of a lot of good goals until you start serving a greater goal.

once you’ve decided what to do, your biggest challenge is in getting people to execute it at the level of excellence you need.

you ignore the urgent, it can kill you today. It’s also true, however, that if you ignore the important, it can kill you tomorrow.

The 4 Disciplines of Execution,

In our culture of multitasking, according to Professor Clifford Nass of Stanford University, “The neural circuits devoted to scanning, skimming, and multitasking are expanding and strengthening, while those used for reading and thinking deeply, with sustained concentration, are weakening or eroding.”5

only one employee in seven could name even one of their organization’s most important goals.

Basically, the more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish. This is a stark, inescapable principle that we all live with.

Habitual multitaskers may be sacrificing performance on the primary task. They are suckers for irrelevancy.

People who try to push many goals at once usually wind up doing a mediocre job on all of them. You can ignore the principle of focus, but it won’t ignore you.

These executives are quoted in an article called “Sleep Is the New Status Symbol for Successful Entrepreneurs.”4 Nancy Jeffrey of the Wall Street Journal writes: “It’s official. Sleep, that rare commodity in stressed-out America, is the new status symbol.

In fact, in our initial surveys we learned that only one employee in seven could name even one of their organization’s most important goals. That’s right—15 percent could not name even one of the top three goals their leaders had identified. The other 85 percent named what they thought was the goal, but it often didn’t remotely resemble what their leaders had said.

Your wildly important goal will come from one of two categories: either from within the whirlwind or from outside it.

Without involvement, you cannot create the high levels of commitment that execution requires.

Implementing Discipline 1 enables an organization to quickly turn a broad strategy into clearly defined WIGs at every level.

Rule #3: Senior leaders can veto, but not dictate.

The highest levels of execution are never reached when the strategy is devised solely by the top leaders of the organization

Discipline 1 requires you to translate your strategy from concepts to targets,

This is a summary of the negotiated sale approach: 1. Package the company. Identify and describe the company’s strengths clearly and accurately, both in the descriptive memorandum and in phone calls, e-mails, and meetings. 2. Identify and contact all the potential buyers. Employ discipline and creativity in pursuing more than just the likely buyers. 3. Execute a disciplined process for following up and moving the buyers forward. 4. Negotiate by understanding the strategic implications of the acquisition for each buyer. 5. Endeavor to get multiple offers at the same point in time. Take the highest offer. Package

We believe the principles of execution have always been focus, leverage, engagement, and accountability. Are

Most people fall in the middle between the models and the resisters. They represent your greatest potential leverage for improving performance.

Whenever you see a man on top of a mountain, you can be sure he didn’t fall there.

If you ignore the urgent, it can kill you today. It’s also true, however, that if you ignore the important, it can kill you tomorrow

A good lead measure has two basic characteristics: It’s predictive of achieving the goal and it can be influenced by the team members.

the highest level of performance always comes from people who are emotionally engaged and the highest level of engagement comes from knowing the score—that is, if people know whether they are winning or losing. It’s that simple.

the more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.

Discipline 1: Focus on the wildly important requires you to go against your basic wiring as a leader and focus on less so that your team can achieve more.

Lead measures are quite different in that they are the measures of the most high-impact things your team must do to reach the goal. In essence, they measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures,

Según declaran los autores de The 4 Disciplines of Execution, «cuanto más queremos abarcar, menos logramos hacer».

the three reasons for disengagement as anonymity, irrelevance, and immeasurement.

WIG sessions provide an opportunity to celebrate progress, reenlist the energies of the team, and reengage everyone.

Results drive engagement. This is particularly true when the team can see the direct impact their actions have on the results.

The problem is not the absence of data; the problem is too much of it, and little sense of what data is most important.

Visibility drives accountability.

The snapshots represent the characteristics and practices of successful companies at a specific point in time, not those of struggling ones; or of executives who perform better than others at the time of the snapshot. Explicitly or implicitly, they then assert that if you want to perform as well as the best-performing ones, you should copy what the best companies and the best executives do. My colleagues and I have eschewed the profession

once you’ve decided what to do, your biggest challenge is in getting people to execute

If it requires people to do something different, you are driving a behavioral-change strategy and it’s not going to be easy.

What Six Sigma and Lean are to manufacturing, The 4 Disciplines of Execution is to executing your strategy.

The goals you’ve set for moving forward are important, but when urgency and importance clash, urgency will win every time.

Only 51 percent could say that they were passionate about the team’s goal,

A staggering 81 percent of the people surveyed said they were not held accountable for regular progress

If you ignore the urgent, it can kill you today. It’s also true, however, that if you ignore the important, it can kill you tomorrow.

if you and your team operate solely from within the whirlwind, you won’t progress—all your energy is spent just trying to stay upright in the wind.

The challenge is executing your most important goals in the midst of the urgent!

The first discipline is to focus your finest effort on the one or two goals that will make all the difference,

Execution starts with focus.

The inability of leaders to focus is a problem of epidemic proportions.

Focusing on the wildly important means narrowing the number of goals you are attempting to accomplish

W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement, taught that any time the majority of the people behave a particular way the majority of the time, the people are not the problem.

any time the majority of the people behave a particular way the majority of the time, the people are not the problem.

If every other area of our operation remained at its current level of performance, what is the one area where change would have the greatest impact?

4DX says easy, does hard. First, the disciplines will sound deceptively simple, but they take sustained work to implement.

4DX is counterintuitive. Second, each of the 4 Disciplines are paradigm shifting and might even fly in the face of your intuition.

4DX is an operating system. Third, the 4 Disciplines are a matched set, not a menu of choices.

While every one of the disciplines has value, their real power is in how they work together in sequence.

we have found nothing that drives the morale and engagement of a team more than winning.

People want to win. They want to make a contribution that matters.

nothing is more motivating than belonging to a team of people who know the goal and are determined to get there.

The 4 Disciplines work because they are based on principles, not practices.

Practices are situational, subjective, and always evolving. Principles are timeless and self-evident, and they apply everywhere.

Just as there are principles that govern human behavior, there are principles that govern how teams get things done,

Think of the 4 Disciplines as the operating system of a computer—once it’s installed, you can use it to run almost any strategy you choose,

Discipline 1 is about applying more energy against fewer goals

To succeed, you must be willing to make the hard choices that separate what is wildly important from all the many other merely important goals on your radar.

If the scoreboard isn’t clear, the game you want people to play will be abandoned in the whirlwind of other activities.

W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement, taught that any time the majority of the people behave a particular way the majority of the time, the people are not the problem. The problem is inherent in the system.2 As a leader, you own responsibility for the system. Although a particular person can be a big problem, if you find yourself blaming the people, you should look again.

To achieve a goal you have never achieved before, you must start doing things you have never done before.

W. Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement, taught that any time the majority of the people behave a particular way the majority of the time, the people are not the problem. The problem is inherent in the system.2 As a leader, you own responsibility for the system.

When you work on that many goals, you actually work on none of them, because the amount of energy you can put into each one is so small, it’s meaningless.

People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.

team

Many teams have multiple goals—sometimes dozens, all of which are priority one. Of course, that means that nothing is priority one.

We don’t have dragons swooping down and knocking us off our priorities. What we have are gnats. Every day we have gnats getting in our eyes, and when we look back over the last six months, we haven’t accomplished any of the things we said we were going to.

To achieve a goal you have never achieved before, you must start doing things you have never done before.” It

People play differently when they’re keeping score.

the highest level of performance always comes from people who are emotionally engaged

if your team doesn’t know whether or not they are winning the game, they are probably on their way to losing.

The real enemy of execution is your day job! We call it the whirlwind

First, if you are going to create significant results you will eventually have to execute a behavioral-change strategy.

Second, when you undertake a behavioral-change strategy you will be battling the whirlwind

human beings are genetically hardwired to do one thing at a time with excellence.

In short, people weren’t sure what the goal was, weren’t committed to it, didn’t know what to do about it specifically, and weren’t being held accountable for it.

The 4 Disciplines are rules for executing your most critical strategy in the midst of your whirlwind.

Whatever strategy you’re pursuing, your progress and your success will be based on two kinds of measures: lag and lead.

Lead measures are quite different in that they are the measures of the most high-impact things your team must do to reach the goal.

Acting on the lead measures is one of the little-known secrets of execution.

People play differently when they are keeping score. It’s not about you keeping score for them.

until you apply Discipline 4, your team isn’t in the game.

making commitments to their team members, rather than solely to the boss, shifts the emphasis from professional to personal.

The team can direct enormous energy to the wildly important goal without getting blocked by the shifting whirlwind of change all around them.

Improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively… the more you multitask… the less deliberative you become;

human beings are genetically hardwired to do one thing at a time with excellence

Improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively… the more you multitask… the less deliberative you become; the less you’re able to think and reason out a problem,

The second discipline is to apply disproportionate energy to the activities that drive your lead measures.

Rule #1: No team focuses on more than two WIGs at the same time.

The only reason you fight a battle is to win the war.