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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I have the power to choose my response.

Reality is negotiable. Outside of science and law, all rules can be bent or broken, and it doesn't require being unethical

THE WHIRLWIND

The 4 Disciplines of Execution explain, “The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.” They elaborate that execution should be aimed at a small number of “wildly important goals.

The issues surrounding technological advancements cannot be left only to tech experts, governments or business executives to address. The Fourth Industrial Revolution is here and is completely transforming the way we live and work. These unprecedented technologies require youths from diverse disciplines and backgrounds to join the conversation and become part of the revolution!

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.

begin by asking, “If every other aspect of our team’s performance remained at its current level, what is the one area where significant improvement would have the greatest impact?

We break commitments to ourselves with embarrassing regularity. How can someone trying to lose weight binge on an entire pint of ice cream before bed? How can even the most disciplined of executives fail to make 30 minutes of time per week for exercise? How can someone whose marriage depends on quitting smoking pick up a cigarette? Simple: logic fails. If you were to summarize the last 100 years of behavioral psychology in two words, that would be the takeaway. Fortunately, knowing this, it is possible to engineer compliance. Pulling from both new and often-neglected data, including photographic research and auctions, there are four principles of failure-proofing behavior. Think of them as insurance against the weaknesses of human nature—your weaknesses, my weaknesses, our weaknesses: 1. Make it conscious. 2. Make it a game. 3. Make it competitive. 4. Make it small and temporary.

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

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

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

managing a company by looking at financial data (lag measures) is the equivalent of “driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror.

The cadence of accountability is a rhythm of regular and frequent meetings of any team that owns a wildly important goal. These meetings happen at least weekly and ideally last no more than twenty to thirty minutes. In that brief time, team members hold each other accountable for producing results, despite the whirlwind.

The secret to Discipline 4, in addition to the repeated cadence, is that team members create their own commitments.

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

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,

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.

Christensen wrote for a book titled The 4 Disciplines of Execution, which built on extensive consulting case studies to describe four “disciplines” (abbreviated, 4DX) for helping companies successfully implement high-level strategies. What struck me as I read was that this gap between what and how was relevant to my personal quest to spend more time working deeply.

The kind of scoreboard that will drive the highest levels of engagement with your team will be one that is designed solely for (and often by) the players. This players’ scoreboard is quite different from the complex coach’s scoreboard that leaders love to create. It must be simple, so simple that members of the team can determine instantly if they are winning or losing. Why does this matter? If the scoreboard isn’t clear, the game you want people to play will be abandoned in the whirlwind of other activities. And if your team doesn’t know whether or not they are winning the game, they are probably on their way to losing.

Sometimes, choosing your WIG is about more than selecting the aspect of your business where the greatest results are desired; it’s about a WIG so fundamental to the heart of your mission that achieving it defines your existence as an organization.

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.

Rule #2: The battles you choose must win the war

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

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.

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,

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

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.

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

A wildly important goal (WIG) is a goal that can make all the difference.

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

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

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

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

Nothing is more counterintuitive for a leader than saying no to a good idea, and nothing is a bigger destroyer of focus than always saying yes.

If you understand the need to focus, why is it so difficult to actually do it?

Whether your WIG comes from within the whirlwind or outside it, your real aim is not only to achieve it, but also to then make the new level of performance a natural part of your team’s operation.

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

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;

Focusing on one WIG is like punching one finger through the paper—all your strength goes into making that hole.

Trying to significantly improve every measure in the whirlwind will consume all of your time and leave you with very little to show for it.

if you want high-focus, high-performance team members, they must have something wildly important to focus on.

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

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

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,

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Different leaders experience the whirlwind in different ways. A senior executive with one of the world’s largest home-improvement retailers describes it this way: “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.” You’ve almost certainly found yourself facing the whirlwind when you were trying to explain a new goal or strategy to someone who works for you. Can you remember the conversation? Your mind is centered clearly on the goal and you are explaining it in easy-to-understand terms. But, while you’re talking, the person you are talking to is backing slowly out of the room, all the while nodding and reassuring you, but trying to get back to what they would call the real work, another name for the whirlwind. Is that employee fully engaged in achieving that goal? Not a chance. Is he trying to sabotage your goal or undercut your authority? No. He’s just trying to survive in his whirlwind.

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

Discipline 1 is about applying more energy against fewer goals

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,

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

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.

the greatest challenge you face in narrowing your goals is simply that it requires you to say no to a lot of good ideas.

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.

goals lack the measurement that can tell the team when they’ve won the game.

If a goal is wildly important, surely you should be able to tell if you’ve achieved it

a WIG is not a strategy. A WIG is a tactical goal with a limited time frame.

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

Salary increases in terms of percentage are too close between the top performers and those who are not. There’s not enough differentiation in bonus, or in stock options, or in stock grants. Leaders need the confidence to explain to a direct report why he got a lower than expected reward. A good leader ensures that the organization makes these distinctions and that they become a way of life, down throughout the organization. Otherwise people think they’re involved in socialism. That isn’t what you want when you strive for a culture of execution. You have to make it clear to everybody that rewards and respect are based on performance. In chapter 4, we’ll explain why so many companies don’t reward the doers, and how those that execute do.

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.

Discipline #1: Focus on the Wildly Important As the authors of The 4 Disciplines of Execution explain, “The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.” They elaborate that execution should be aimed at a small number of “wildly important goals.” This simplicity will help focus an organization’s energy to a sufficient intensity to ignite real results. For an individual focused on deep work, the implication is that you should identify a small number of ambitious outcomes to pursue with your deep work hours. The general exhortation to “spend more time working deeply” doesn’t spark a lot of enthusiasm. To instead have a specific goal that would return tangible and substantial professional benefits will generate a steadier stream of enthusiasm. In a 2014 column titled “The Art of Focus,” David Brooks endorsed this approach of letting ambitious goals drive focused behavior, explaining: “If you want to win the war for attention, don’t try to say ‘no’ to the trivial distractions you find on the information smorgasbord; try to say ‘yes’ to the subject that arouses a terrifying longing, and let the terrifying longing crowd out everything else.

As the authors of The 4 Disciplines of Execution explain, “The more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.” They elaborate that execution should be aimed at a small number of “wildly important goals.” This simplicity will help focus an organization’s energy to a sufficient intensity to ignite real results

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

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.