Implementation Execution Quotes

The elegance under pressure is the result of fearlessness.

[Said during a debate when his opponent asserted that atheism and belief in evolution lead to Nazism:] Atheism by itself is, of course, not a moral position or a political one of any kind; it simply is the refusal to believe in a supernatural dimension. For you to say of Nazism that it was the implementation of the work of Charles Darwin is a filthy slander, undeserving of you and an insult to this audience. Darwin’s thought was not taught in Germany; Darwinism was so derided in Germany along with every other form of unbelief that all the great modern atheists, Darwin, Einstein and Freud were alike despised by the National Socialist regime. Now, just to take the most notorious of the 20th century totalitarianisms – the most finished example, the most perfected one, the most ruthless and refined one: that of National Socialism, the one that fortunately allowed the escape of all these great atheists, thinkers and many others, to the United States, a country of separation of church and state, that gave them welcome – if it’s an atheistic regime, then how come that in the first chapter of Mein Kampf, that Hitler says that he’s doing God’s work and executing God’s will in destroying the Jewish people? How come the fuhrer oath that every officer of the Party and the Army had to take, making Hitler into a minor god, begins, “I swear in the name of almighty God, my loyalty to the Fuhrer?” How come that on the belt buckle of every Nazi soldier it says Gott mit uns, God on our side? How come that the first treaty made by the Nationalist Socialist dictatorship, the very first is with the Vatican? It’s exchanging political control of Germany for Catholic control of German education. How come that the church has celebrated the birthday of the Fuhrer every year, on that day until democracy put an end to this filthy, quasi-religious, superstitious, barbarous, reactionary system? Again, this is not a difference of emphasis between us. To suggest that there’s something fascistic about me and about my beliefs is something I won't hear said and you shouldn't believe.

The success of a strategy largely depends on it's implementation. You can have a good strategy, you can have a winning game plan, but ultimately you and your team have to implement the strategy and execute and put the game plan into action if your business is going to succeed.

You can’t make people listen to you. You can’t make them execute. That might be a temporary solution for a simple task. But to implement real change, to drive people to accomplish something truly complex or difficult or dangerous—you can’t make people do those things. You have to lead them.

Be creative while inventing ideas, but be disciplined while implementing them.

When efforts that are wisely executed, the situation and condition don't affect the performance.

Consider an AI that has hedonism as its final goal, and which would therefore like to tile the universe with “hedonium” (matter organized in a configuration that is optimal for the generation of pleasurable experience). To this end, the AI might produce computronium (matter organized in a configuration that is optimal for computation) and use it to implement digital minds in states of euphoria. In order to maximize efficiency, the AI omits from the implementation any mental faculties that are not essential for the experience of pleasure, and exploits any computational shortcuts that according to its definition of pleasure do not vitiate the generation of pleasure. For instance, the AI might confine its simulation to reward circuitry, eliding faculties such as a memory, sensory perception, executive function, and language; it might simulate minds at a relatively coarse-grained level of functionality, omitting lower-level neuronal processes; it might replace commonly repeated computations with calls to a lookup table; or it might put in place some arrangement whereby multiple minds would share most parts of their underlying computational machinery (their “supervenience bases” in philosophical parlance). Such tricks could greatly increase the quantity of pleasure producible with a given amount of resources.

Commitment, trust, and voluntary cooperation are not merely attitudes or behaviors. They are intangible capital. They allow companies to stand apart in the speed, quality, and consistency of their execution and to implement strategic shifts fast at low cost.

A powerful process automatically takes care of progress, productivity and profits.

It's not what you know; it's not even who you know; it's what you implement that counts.

The right of self-determination of the peoples includes the right to a state of their own. However, the foundation of a state does not increase the freedom of a people. The system of the United Nations that is based on nation-states has remained inefficient. Meanwhile, nation-states have become serious obstacles for any social development. Democratic confederalism is the contrasting paradigm of the oppressed people. Democratic confederalism is a non-state social paradigm. It is not controlled by a state. At the same time, democratic confederalism is the cultural organizational blueprint of a democratic nation. Democratic confederalism is based on grassroots participation. Its decision-making processes lie with the communities. Higher levels only serve the coordination and implementation of the will of the communities that send their delegates to the general assemblies. For limited space of time they are both mouthpiece and executive institution. However, the basic power of decision rests with the local grassroots institutions.

I'll do it later", is where you burry your dreams

Strong executive commitment is a success factor for implementing Scrum, and management can best demonstrate their support of the transformation through their actions.

Reading one page of a book and implementing is much better than reading the book to completion and doing nothing. Books are meant to be used.

Obama has repeatedly defied the limits of his constitutional authority, aggregating powers unto himself in ways past presidents have not. During more than six years as president, Obama has nullified laws, created laws, delayed the implementation of laws, and issued exemptions from and waivers to laws, much of which has been accomplished through executive branch rule making.

Jan van Leyden announced that a new world order [anabaptism] had been revealed to him and promptly began to implement it. Money was abolished; polygamy was legalized; marriage was made compulsory for women. Those who dissented faced execution.

You were supposed to be like me," Kevin said. "You were a gift, another player for the master to train. You had two days to win him over: an initial scrimmage with us to show off your potential and a second scrimmage to prove you could adapt to and implement his instructions and criticisms. If afterward he decided you weren't worth his time you would be executed by your own father." Neil swallowed hard. "How did I do?" "Your mother wouldn't risk failure," Kevin said. "You never made it to the second practice. She disappeared with you overnight.

In fact, neither explanation does Jobs and Apple justice. As the case of the forgotten Iowa inventor John Atanasoff shows, conception is just the first step. What really matters is execution. Jobs and his team took Xerox’s ideas, improved them, implemented them, and marketed them.

At the board meeting, the VP did just that. He took the blame for the failure to meet the manufacturing objectives and gave a solid no-nonsense list of corrective measures that he would implement to ensure execution. The list started with what he was going to do differently, not about what other people needed to do. Now, the VP was

the first businesses in the United States to implement Owen’s 8-hour day was the Ford Motor Company. In 1914, it not only cut the standard workday to eight hours, but it also doubled its workers’ pay in the process. To the shock of many at the time, this resulted in a significant increase in productivity, and Ford’s profit margins doubled within two years of implementation.

The final element is execution. The only way a strategy can get implemented is if we dedicate resources to it. Good intentions are not enough—you’re not implementing the strategy that you intend if you don’t spend your time, your money, and your talent in a way that is consistent with your intentions. In your life, there are going to be constant demands for your time and attention. How are you going to decide which of those demands gets resources? The trap many people fall into is to allocate their time to whoever screams loudest, and their talent to whatever offers them the fastest reward. That’s a dangerous way to build a strategy. All of these factors—priorities, balancing plans with opportunities, and allocating your resources—combine to create your strategy.

What Ibarra calls the “ plan-and-implement” model—the idea that we should first make a long-term plan and execute without deviation, as opposed to the “ test-and-learn” model—is entrenched in depictions of geniuses. Popular lore holds that the sculptor Michelangelo would see a full figure in a block of marble before he ever touched it, and simply chip away the excess stone to free the figure inside. It is an exquisitely beautiful image.

There, in my murder theater, young Roman gladiators offered up their lives for my amusement; and all the deaths that took place there not only had to overflow with blood but also had to be performed with all due ceremony. I delighted in all forms of capital punishment and all implements of execution. But I would allow no torture devices nor gallows, as they would not have provided a spectacle of outpouring blood. Nor did I like explosive weapons, such as pistols or guns. So far as possible I chose primitive and savage weapons—arrows, daggers, spears. And in order to prolong the agony, it was the belly that must be aimed at. The sacrificial victim must send up longdrawn- out, mournful, pathetic cries, making the hearer feel the unutterable loneliness of existence. Thereupon my joy of life, blazing up from some secret place deep within me, would finally give its own shout of exultation, answering the victim cry for cry. Was this not exactly similar to the joy ancient man found in the hunt?

Harman was right: those pictures were worse. But, leaving aside the fact that photographs of death and nudity, however newsworthy, don't get much play in the press, the power of an image does not necessarily reside in what it depicts. A photograph of a mangled cadaver, or of a naked man trussed in torment, can shock and outrage, provoke protest and investigation, but it leaves little to the imagination. It may be rich in practical information while being devoid of any broader meaning. To the extent that it represents any circumstances or conditions beyond itself, it does so generically. Such photographs are repellent in large part because they have a terrible reductive sameness. Except from a forensic point of view, they are unambiguous, and have the quality of pornography. They are what they show, nothing more. They communicate no vision and, shorn of context, they offer little, if anything, to think about, no occasion for wonder. They have no value as symbols. Of course, the dominant symbol of Western civilization is the figure of a nearly naked man being tortured to death⁠—or more simply, the torture implement itself, the cross. But our pictures of Christ's savage death are the product of religious imagination and idealization. In reality, with his battered flesh scabbed and bleeding and bloated and discolored beneath the pitiless Judean desert sun, he must have been ghastly to behold. Had there been cameras at Calvary, would twenty centuries of believers have been moved to hang photographs of the scene on their altarpieces and in their homes, or to wear an icon of a man being executed around their necks as as an emblem of peace and hope and human fellowship? Photography is too frank to allow for the notion of suffering as noble and ennobling...

especially in the key task of translating broad strategic concepts into feasible operational orders. Marshall understood that Eisenhower had a talent for implementing strategy. And that job, Marshall believed, was more difficult than designing it. “There’s nothing so profound in the logic of the thing,” he said years later, discussing his own role in winning approval for the Marshall Plan. “But the execution of it, that’s another matter.” In other words, successful generalship involves first figuring out what to do, then getting people to do it. It has one foot in the intellectual realm of critical thinking and the other in the human world of management and leadership. It

Over a two-year period, the Obama administration delayed the implementation of the Affordable Care Act twenty-eight times, ostensibly to give employers time to comply with the law.9 This was a blatantly unconstitutional power grab by the executive office. Congress alone has the power to legislate, and once a law is passed and signed by the president, the executive branch has a constitutional responsibility to enforce that law. Obama had no legal authority to issue such delays, particularly in regard to employer and individual mandates. These mandates would have been (and are) painful and probably would have resulted in even larger losses for the Democrats in the 2014 election cycle.

To implement Prioritize and Execute in any business, team, or organization, a leader must: • evaluate the highest priority problem. • lay out in simple, clear, and concise terms the highest priority effort for your team. • develop and determine a solution, seek input from key leaders and from the team where possible. • direct the execution of that solution, focusing all efforts and resources toward this priority task. • move on to the next highest priority problem. Repeat. • when priorities shift within the team, pass situational awareness both up and down the chain. • don’t let the focus on one priority cause target fixation. Maintain the ability to see other problems developing and rapidly shift as needed.

David Kaiser and Lovisa Stannow, respectively the Chair of the Board and Executive Director of Just Detention International (JDI), one of the most intrepid organizers against prison rape and for implementation of PREA, cites analyses in 2011 Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) reports, showing that there are over 216,600 cases of sexual abuse in prisons in a single year. They continue, “that’s almost 600 people a day—25 an hour.”[113] The most vulnerable among all groups are trans persons, the increasing number of mentally ill that have been taken in by the prisons, and also women. Nearly half of these violations, according to still more recent BJS studies, are committed by prison staff, the very ones, observes JDI pointedly, whose job it is to ensure their safety from such violation.

When it comes to the Obama administration, we have observed how it has operated by implementing the “Chicago Way,” an approach to government Obama learned in his days serving the Daley Machine in Chicago. It’s a “my way or the highway” style that combines unaccountability and illegal secrecy with brazen favoritism toward allies and the punishment of political enemies. Despite the idealism with which he promised he would govern, President Obama has proven quite comfortable operating in the morally bankrupt idiom of the urban politico. We have detailed shady dealings with cronies, clear and present dangers to our national security, cozy relationships with union bosses, ethically questionable appointments, abuse of power in the use of executive orders, double talk on ethics reform, politicization of government agencies such as the Internal Revenue Service, and, of course, the widespread practice of “crony capitalism,” which rewards friends of the president and the Democratic Party.

Leaders, some of whom are politicians in this book while others are soldiers, must be able to master four major tasks.2 Firstly, they need comprehensively to grasp the overall strategic situation in a conflict and craft the appropriate strategic approach – in essence, to get the big ideas right. Secondly, they must communicate those big ideas, the strategy, effectively throughout the breadth and depth of their organization and to all other stakeholders. Thirdly, they need to oversee the implementation of the big ideas, driving the execution of the campaign plan relentlessly and determinedly. Lastly, they have to determine how the big ideas need to be refined, adapted and augmented, so that they can perform the first three tasks again and again and again. The statesmen and soldiers who perform these four tasks properly are the exemplars who stand out from these pages. The witness of history demonstrates that exceptional strategic leadership is the one absolute prerequisite for success, but also that it is as rare as the black swan.

When applying agile practices at the portfolio level, similar benefits accrue: • Demonstrable results—Every quarter or so products, or at least deployable pieces of products, are developed, implemented, tested, and accepted. Short projects deliver chunks of functionality incrementally. • Customer feedback—Each quarter product managers review results and provide feedback, and executives can view progress in terms of working products. • Better portfolio planning—Portfolio planning is more realistic because it is based on deployed whole or partial products. • Flexibility—Portfolios can be steered toward changing business goals and higher-value projects because changes are easy to incorporate at the end of each quarter. Because projects produce working products, partial value is captured rather than being lost completely as usually happens with serial projects that are terminated early. • Productivity—There is a hidden productivity improvement with agile methods from the work not done. Through constant negotiation, small projects are both eliminated and pared down.

At the reception given by Jinnah on 14 August 1947 when Asghar Khan and Lt Col (later Maj. Gen.) Akbar Khan met Jinnah, Khan told Jinnah that they were disappointed that the higher posts in the armed forces had been given to British officers who still controlled their destiny. According to Asghar Khan, ‘the Quaid who had been listening patiently raised his finger and said, “Never forget that you are the servants of the state. You do not make policy. It is we, the people’s representatives, who decide how the country is to be run. Your job is only to obey the decision of your civilian masters.”’4 Could any politician have the temerity to say this to the army chief today? The answer has to be a resounding no. Hence, democratic governance in Pakistan instead of being a tripod of the executive, legislature and judiciary looks more like a garden umbrella in which the army is the central pole around which the other organs of the state revolve. Consequently, civilian governments in Pakistan have neither defined national security objectives nor developed strategies to implement them.

The president and his subordinates have engaged in diplomatic negotiations that facilitate Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons despite his oft-repeated public pledge that the United States, under his leadership, would prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Furthermore, he and his administration have concealed from the American people an agreement with the Iranian government—a longtime, avowed enemy of the American people—about how a “Plan of Action” enabling Iran to enrich uranium will be implemented.

The president has willfully defrauded the American people in the enactment and implementation of Obamacare. In addition, he has unilaterally and unlawfully amended and “waived” the statute’s terms—guided by his knowledge that timely, lawful application of the deeply unpopular law would be devastating to his party’s electoral prospects and would have made him a one-term president.

As a federal district court in Texas recently ruled, federal law “mandates the initiation of immigration removal proceedings whenever an immigration officer encounters an illegal alien who is not ‘clearly and beyond a doubt entitled to be admitted.’” Moreover, the court explained, the Department of Homeland Security does not have “prosecutorial discretion” to ignore this requirement; Congress, not the president, has the plenary power to make immigration law; and the executive branch may not “implement measures that are incompatible with Congressional intent.

There are dangers in this model of succumbing to “committee-itis.” If too many people are jointly responsible for the execution of firm business, the chances that implementation will be deferred increase exponentially.

The president has willfully defrauded the American people in the enactment and implementation of Obamacare.

to implement anti-corruption initiatives, such as enacting “codes of conduct for local assemblies” and “improving transparency in executing hospitality expenses

support the operation of each public organization, and executes the Code by handling violation reports of the Codes and inspecting the implementation status of public organizations

the American system of checks and balances disperses federal lawmaking authority among multiple, overlapping political forums. As a result, federal policymaking power is shared: Congress is given the primary power to draft laws, subject to the president's veto and judicial review; the executive branch is given the primary power to implement laws, subject to congressional oversight and judicial review; and the courts have the primary power to interpret laws, subject to a variety of legislative and executive checks, including the appointment process, budgetary powers, and the passage of "overrides"-laws that explicitly reverse or materially modify existing judicial interpretations of statutes.

Changes in priorities should drive changes in projects, not the other way around. In reality, often project ideas are allowed to trump strategy, and the opinions of a single, powerful executive trump the logic of the strategic plan.

If your needs are not attainable through safe instruments, the solution is not to increase the rate of return by upping the level of risk. Instead, goals may be revised, savings increased, or income boosted through added years of work. . . . Somebody has to care about the consequences if uncertainty is to be understood as risk. . . . As we’ve seen, the chances of loss do decline over time, but this hardly means that the odds are zero, or negligible, just because the horizon is long. . . . In fact, even though the odds of loss do fall over long periods, the size of potential losses gets larger, not smaller, over time. . . . The message to emerge from all this hype has been inescapable: In the long run, the stock market can only go up. Its ascent is inexorable and predictable. Long-term stock returns are seen as near certain while risks appear minimal, and only temporary. And the messaging has been effective: The familiar market propositions come across as bedrock fact. For the most part, the public views them as scientific truth, although this is hardly the case. It may surprise you, but all this confidence is rather new. Prevailing attitudes and behavior before the early 1980s were different. Fewer people owned stocks then, and the general popular attitude to buying stocks was wariness, not ebullience or complacency. . . . Unfortunately, the American public’s embrace of stocks is not at all related to the spread of sound knowledge. It’s useful to consider how the transition actually evolved—because the real story resists a triumphalist interpretation. . . . Excessive optimism helps explain the popularity of the stocks-for-the-long-run doctrine. The pseudo-factual statement that stocks always succeed in the long run provides an overconfident investor with more grist for the optimistic mill. . . . Speaking with the editors of Forbes.com in 2002, Kahneman explained: “When you are making a decision whether or not to go for something,” he said, “my guess is that knowing the odds won’t hurt you, if you’re brave. But when you are executing, not to be asking yourself at every moment in time whether you will succeed or not is certainly a good thing. . . . In many cases, what looks like risk-taking is not courage at all, it’s just unrealistic optimism. Courage is willingness to take the risk once you know the odds. Optimistic overconfidence means you are taking the risk because you don’t know the odds. It’s a big difference.” Optimism can be a great motivator. It helps especially when it comes to implementing plans. Although optimism is healthy, however, it’s not always appropriate. You would not want rose-colored glasses in a financial advisor, for instance. . . . Over the long haul, the more you are exposed to danger, the more likely it is to catch up with you. The odds don’t exactly add, but they do accumulate. . . . Yet, overriding this instinctive understanding, the prevailing investment dogma has argued just the reverse. The creed that stocks grow steadily safer over time has managed to trump our common-sense assumption by appealing to a different set of homespun precepts. Chief among these is a flawed surmise that, with the passage of time, downward fluctuations are balanced out by compensatory upward swings. Many people believe that each step backward will be offset by more than one step forward. The assumption is that you can own all the upside and none of the downside just by sticking around. . . . If you find yourself rejecting safe investments because they are not profitable enough, you are asking the wrong questions. If you spurn insurance simply because the premiums put a crimp in your returns, you may be destined for disappointment—and possibly loss.

Dissent and democracy go hand in hand. It’s also good management technique. What traditional executives don’t consider is that decisions arising from debate are implemented much more quickly because explanations, alternatives, objections, and uncertainties have already been aired. As a result of democracy, employees have had their say, and projects or ideas have been analyzed from every point of view.

The attack on 9/11 was a localized event, affecting only a relatively small number of Americans. As indicated earlier, the general threat of terrorism, even factoring in the large death toll on that tragic day, produces a statistically insignificant threat to the average person’s life. People across the country, however, were gripped with fear. And because we are an object-oriented people, most felt the need to project that fear onto something. Some people stopped flying in airplanes, worried about a repeat attack—and for years afterward, air travel always dipped on the anniversary of 9/11.4 Of course, this was and is an irrational fear; it is safer to travel by plane than by car. According to the National Safety Council, in 2010 there were over 22,000 passenger deaths involving automobiles, while no one died in scheduled airline travel that year.5 Nevertheless, Congress responded by rushing through the USA PATRIOT Act six weeks after 9/11—a 240-plus page bill that was previously written, not available to the public prior to the vote, and barely available to the elected officials in Congress, none of whom read it through before casting their votes.6 Two weeks previous to the bill’s passage, President Bush had announced the establishment of the Office of Homeland Security to “develop and coordinate the implementation of a comprehensive national strategy to secure the United States from terrorist threats or attacks.” He explained that “[t]he Office will coordinate the executive branch’s efforts to detect, prepare for, prevent, protect against, respond to, and recover from terrorist attacks within the United States.”7 The office’s efforts culminated in the creation of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) one year later as a result of the Homeland Security Act of 2002. This law consolidated executive branch organizations related to “homeland security” into a single Cabinet department; twenty-two total agencies became part of this new apparatus. The government, responding to the outcry from a fearful citizenry, was eager to “do something.” All of this (and much, much more), affecting all Americans, because of a localized event materially affecting only a few. But while the event directly impacted only a small percentage of the population, its impact was felt throughout the entire country.

Practically, administrative agencies often work out of the public’s eye to implement the laws passed by Congress and the executive orders signed by the president.

many shipwrecks and engineering disasters were blamed on faulty tables. These mathematical tables were calculated by hand, and the mistakes were simply the result of human error. This caused Babbage to exclaim, “I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam!” This marked the beginning of an extraordinary endeavor to build a machine capable of faultlessly calculating the tables to a high degree of accuracy. In 1823 Babbage designed “Difference Engine No. 1,” a magnificent calculator consisting of 25,000 precision parts, to be built with government funding. Although Babbage was a brilliant innovator, he was not a great implementer. After ten years of toil, he abandoned “Difference Engine No.

�Communication and a clear mutual understanding between two or more people builds the best route to success in any venture. I don’t expect… * immediate action, * instant perfection, * total comprehension * complete implementation, or * flawless execution. I do expect the best communication and honest effort to create the best plans for the best results while being able to stay on the same page as much as possible. If that concept doesn’t work for you, then you won’t be working with me.

good storyteller, build good relationships internally and externally with key ecosystem constituents, take calculated risks, be quickly adaptable and flexible, communicate humbly but firmly, recruit all the time, implement sound business processes, and execute-execute-execute pragmatically within your ecosystem with purpose! If not, success will be just a pipe dream or fleeting experience, as building a start-up successfully is quite difficult. And great ideas don’t just come to you. You must pursue them. Regardless of what your vision for the future is, find ways to keep strengthening your pragmatic combination of mind-set, skill set, direction, strategies, know-how, and execution! If the featured young

pragmatic psychology, skill set, strategy, and execution may just make you hard to beat! The commonly touted 80-20 rule in business states that roughly 80 percent of effects (outcomes) result from 20 percent of the causes. I prefer to think of it in the sense that about 80 percent of our results can come from 20 percent of our activities. I also believe that people should focus 80 percent of their time on (thinking about, planning, and implementing) the solution and not on (bickering and complaining endlessly about the people or the issues around) the problem, and that success stems from roughly 80 percent psychology and 20 percent mechanics. That being said, I coach my own

scripting language is a programming language that provides you with the ability to write scripts that are evaluated (or interpreted) by a runtime environment called a script engine (or an interpreter). A script is a sequence of characters that is written using the syntax of a scripting language and used as the source for a program executed by an interpreter. The interpreter parses the scripts, produces intermediate code, which is an internal representation of the program, and executes the intermediate code. The interpreter stores the variables used in a script in data structures called symbol tables. Typically, unlike in a compiled programming language, the source code (called a script) in a scripting language is not compiled but is interpreted at runtime. However, scripts written in some scripting languages may be compiled into Java bytecode that can be run by the JVM. Java 6 added scripting support to the Java platform that lets a Java application execute scripts written in scripting languages such as Rhino JavaScript, Groovy, Jython, JRuby, Nashorn JavaScript, and so on. Two-way communication is supported. It also lets scripts access Java objects created by the host application. The Java runtime and a scripting language runtime can communicate and make use of each other’s features. Support for scripting languages in Java comes through the Java Scripting API. All classes and interfaces in the Java Scripting API are in the javax.script package. Using a scripting language in a Java application provides several advantages: Most scripting languages are dynamically typed, which makes it simpler to write programs. They provide a quicker way to develop and test small applications. Customization by end users is possible. A scripting language may provide domain-specific features that are not available in Java. Scripting languages have some disadvantages as well. For example, dynamic typing is good to write simpler code; however, it turns into a disadvantage when a type is interpreted incorrectly and you have to spend a lot of time debugging it. Scripting support in Java lets you take advantage of both worlds: it allows you to use the Java programming language for developing statically typed, scalable, and high-performance parts of the application and use a scripting language that fits the domain-specific needs for other parts. I will use the term script engine frequently in this book. A script engine is a software component that executes programs written in a particular scripting language. Typically, but not necessarily, a script engine is an implementation of an interpreter for a scripting language. Interpreters for several scripting languages have been implemented in Java. They expose programming interfaces so a Java program may interact with them.

Sanctions that target individuals rather than entire countries would allow Congress to put pressure on the executive branch when it doesn’t act. And these sanctions cost virtually nothing to implement. They’re the equivalent of a nextgeneration cancer treatment that targets cancer cells instead of the whole patient.

A B-plus plan brilliantly executed beats an A-plus plan that never gets implemented, every single time.

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

Set specific goals. 2. Define activities, resources needed, responsibilities. 3. Set a timetable for action. 4. Forecast outcomes, develop contingencies. 5. Formulate a detailed plan of action in time sequence. 6. Implement, supervise execution, and evaluate based on goals in step one.

knew that judges had no idea what they were deciding upon. They had not actually spent any time in the tenement housing looking the poor in the eye, smelling the stench of rotting tobacco and foul bedding. Almost a century later, in the 1970s, the business leadership saying “management by wandering around” became popular, a style of managing whereby executives walked through the workforce in an unstructured manner, just listening and interpreting. Several historians believe that it was Abraham Lincoln who first implemented the informal management style when he visited Union Army camps to inspect the troops in the early part of the Civil War. For Roosevelt, the Cigar Bill incident was a learning experience: leaders learn best by interpreting a situation firsthand.

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.

His name is C. J. Skender, and he is a living legend. Skender teaches accounting, but to call him an accounting professor doesn’t do him justice. He’s a unique character, known for his trademark bow ties and his ability to recite the words to thousands of songs and movies on command. He may well be the only fifty-eight-year-old man with fair skin and white hair who displays a poster of the rapper 50 Cent in his office. And while he’s a genuine numbers whiz, his impact in the classroom is impossible to quantify. Skender is one of a few professors for whom Duke University and the University of North Carolina look past their rivalry to cooperate: he is in such high demand that he has permission to teach simultaneously at both schools. He has earned more than two dozen major teaching awards, including fourteen at UNC, six at Duke, and five at North Carolina State. Across his career, he has now taught close to six hundred classes and evaluated more than thirty-five thousand students. Because of the time that he invests in his students, he has developed what may be his single most impressive skill: a remarkable eye for talent. In 2004, Reggie Love enrolled in C. J. Skender’s accounting class at Duke. It was a summer course that Love needed to graduate, and while many professors would have written him off as a jock, Skender recognized Love’s potential beyond athletics. “For some reason, Duke football players have never flocked to my class,” Skender explains, “but I knew Reggie had what it took to succeed.” Skender went out of his way to engage Love in class, and his intuition was right that it would pay dividends. “I knew nothing about accounting before I took C. J.’s class,” Love says, “and the fundamental base of knowledge from that course helped guide me down the road to the White House.” In Obama’s mailroom, Love used the knowledge of inventory that he learned in Skender’s class to develop a more efficient process for organizing and digitizing a huge backlog of mail. “It was the number-one thing I implemented,” Love says, and it impressed Obama’s chief of staff, putting Love on the radar. In 2011, Love left the White House to study at Wharton. He sent a note to Skender: “I’m on the train to Philly to start the executive MBA program and one of the first classes is financial accounting—and I just wanted to say thanks for sticking with me when I was in your class.

If you are porting a single-threaded application to a multithreaded environment, you can preserve thread safety by converting shared global variables into ThreadLocals, if the semantics of the shared globals permits this; an applicationwide cache would not be as useful if it were turned into a number of thread-local caches. ThreadLocal is widely used in implementing application frameworks. For example, J2EE containers associate a transaction context with an executing thread for the duration of an EJB call. This is easily implemented using a static Thread-Local holding the transaction context: when

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

Over time, one of this engine's most potent impacts is in prioritizing investments for customer-driven growth by shifting the annual planning process. Instead of starting with the silos, leaders start with the customers' lives, identify priorities, and then determine collectively the investments to improve them to earn the right to growth. Without alignment among your executive team to regularly review the customer journey that this engine affords, investments are not fully optimized. Tactical actions are budgeted and implemented by silo, but complete customer experiences that drive growth are not improved. Rinse and repeat.

The lack of personal experience of child welfare executives and leaders might be a serious handicap in understanding and implementing the subtle nuances required for systemic improvement.

Implementing functional test automation will get the team to work closer and prepare the system for the use of executable specifications later.

Relentless Innovation author Jeffrey Phillips favors a possibly apocryphal line from Einstein. The story is that Einstein was asked how he would tackle a particularly tough problem—saving the world, in some tellings—if he had only an hour to do so.6 Einstein’s approach? He’d spend 55 minutes defining the problem and 5 minutes solving it. That is, Phillips says, just about the opposite of what executives normally do. He paints a picture of harried execs deciding immediately on a solution, launching into its implementation, and then cooling down with email. It’s all task, task, task—symptomatic of a work culture that’s getting too busy to innovate, that’s become infatuated with efficiency. We might be doing with our time, but are we developing?

I felt super-frustrated. We’d hired all these talented people and were spending tons of money, but we weren’t going any faster. Things came to a head over a top-priority marketing OKR for personalized emails with targeted content. The objective was well constructed: We wanted to drive a certain minimum number of monthly active users to our blog. One important key result was to increase our click-through rate from emails. The catch was that no one in marketing had thought to inform engineering, which had already set its own priorities that quarter. Without buy-in from the engineers, the OKR was doomed before it started. Even worse, Albert and I didn’t find out it was doomed until our quarterly postmortem. (The project got done a quarter late.) That was our wake-up call, when we saw the need for more alignment between teams. Our OKRs were well crafted, but implementation fell short. When departments counted on one another for crucial support, we failed to make the dependency explicit. Coordination was hit-and-miss, with deadlines blown on a regular basis. We had no shortage of objectives, but our teams kept wandering away from one another. The following year, we tried to fix the problem with periodic integration meetings for the executive team. Each quarter our department heads presented their goals and identified dependencies. No one left the room until we’d answered some basic questions: Are we meeting everyone’s needs for buy-in? Is a team overstretched? If so, how can we make their objectives more realistic?

The idea that as a leader you can focus on strategy and delegate its implementation to great people is a fallacy. You don’t want to micromanage, and you do need to tailor the amount of oversight you give to the leader in question.2 But time is limited, and faced with urgent priorities, even the most talented people will let difficult, longer-term projects slide. Leaders must get out in the field to confirm that these projects are actually happening. They also must make sure the “machinery” works everyday—that employees have the tools and processes they need to execute their decisions, and further, that they’re working hard to improve these tools and processes.

Crews that fight forest fires in Oregon are now so heavily Hispanic that in 2003, the Oregon Department of Forestry required that crew chiefs be bilingual. In 2006, the department started forcing out veterans. Jaime Pickering, who used to run a squad of 20 firefighters, says the rule means “job losses for Americans—the white people.” Zita Wilensky, a 16-year veteran, was the only white employee of Miami-Dade County Domestic Violence Unit. Her co-workers made fun of her and called her gringa and Americana. Miss Wilensky says her boss gave her 60 days to learn Spanish, and fired her when she failed to do so. It is increasingly common, therefore, for Americans to be penalized because they cannot speak Spanish, but employers who insist that workers speak English are guilty of discrimination. In 2001, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission forced a small Catholic college in San Antonio to pay $2.4 million to housekeepers who were required to speak English at work. There are now about 45 million Hispanics in the country. What will the status of Spanish be when there are 130 million Hispanics, as the Census Bureau projects for 2050? In 2000, President Bill Clinton decided that the prohibition against discrimination because of “national origin” in the Civil Rights Act of 1964 meant that if a foreigner cannot speak to a government agency in his own language he is a victim. Executive Order 13166 required all local governments that receive federal money (all of them, essentially) to translate official documents into any language spoken by at least 3,000 people in the area or 10 percent of the local population. It also required interpreters for non-English speakers. In 2002, the Office of Management and Budget estimated that hospitals alone would spend $268 million every year implementing Executive Order 13166, and state departments of motor vehicles would spend $8.5 million. OMB estimated that communicating with food stamp recipients who don’t speak English would cost $25.2 million per year.

These potential advantages of DNA computing over the traditional approach and the seminal experimental work of Adleman, demonstrating the practical in vitro implementation of a DNA algorithm for solving an instance of the Hamiltonian path problem, caused a strong increase of interest in DNA computing over the past years. Although the set of “bio-operations” that can be executed on DNA strands in a laboratory (including operators such as synthesizing, mixing, annealing, melting, amplifying, separating, extracting, cutting, and ligating DNA strands) seems fundamentally different from traditional programming languages, theoretical work on the computational power of various models of DNA computing demonstrates that certain subsets of these operators are computationally complete. In other words, everything that is Turing-computable can also be computed by these DNA models of computation. Furthermore, it has also been shown that universal systems exist, so that the programmable DNA computer is theoretically possible. The algorithms for DNA computing that have been presented in the literature use an approach that will not work for NP-complete problems of realistic size, because these algorithms are all based on extracting an existing solution from a sufficiently large initial population of solutions. Although a huge number (≈ 1012) of DNA molecules (i.e., potential solutions to a given problem) can be manipulated in parallel, this so-called filtering approach (i.e., generate and test) quickly becomes infeasible as problem sizes grow (e.g., a 500-node instance of the traveling salesman problem has > 101000 potential solutions).

Define the metrics. Strive to make the KPIs reachable to ensure that executives can see the full picture. This can be retention rate to assess deviations Figuring out a simple assessment means can make it easier to keep a hand on business objectives to introduce amendments to the strategy. These steps will contribute to the successful release of your Salesforce implementation and allow one’s enterprise to gain more from Salesforce.

These are some of the bigger issues the developer testing strategy needs to address, but there will be smaller ones too, which still need to be handled to avoid diverging implementations and misunderstandings. Here are some questions that may be helpful in reaching such an understanding: Which tests give bang for the buck and which don’t? What types of tests are we running and how do they overlap? What types of tests are we avoiding (and why)? How large should a test preferably be? (Size depends on the level of abstraction too.) How many layers is a single test allowed to touch? Do we optimize for speed of execution or test simplicity? How do we handle test data and its setup? How do we approach integrations with external systems? What testing frameworks and libraries do we use? What trade-offs are we willing to make in the spirit of working with legacy code?

Managers are frontline leaders who worry about day-to-day tactics: they create, implement, and execute detailed plans that allow the organization to either do new things or do existing things more efficiently.

In practice, the order is random, varying from one execution to the next. This is intentional; making the sequence vary helps force programs to be robust across implementations

Shower praise on one’s lord though he may be reticent and mediocre, and ensure that he can execute his duties without blundering. This will help cultivate his confidence. If he is an unyielding or intelligent leader, it is an act of “great loyalty” to be a thorn in his side to the extent that, before implementing his designs, he respects you enough to contemplate “What would my pesky retainer think?” Without such retainers, the lord will pay no attention to his men, thinking that his domain is full of panderers who cajole him to gain favor. He will then become conceited.

● Developing your first-ever leadership strategy and don't know where to start? ● Are you stuck with a particular phase of leadership strategy? ● Having a tough time achieving corporational milestones with your robust strategy? If you're facing these questions and confused regarding canvassing a robust leadership strategy, this article can help you solve these queries. Several factors affect the development of a leadership strategy, such as the influence of decision-making processes for leadership/management, the personnel brought on board for strategy development and the resources involved. There are specific "keys" to effective leadership that help in efficient development and deployment of strategies. Professionals who want to develop robust strategies and move up in their leadership career can opt for online strategy courses. These courses aim to build concepts from the grass-root level, such as what defines a strategy leadership and others. What is a Leadership Strategy? Leadership is required for leading organisational growth by optimising the resources and making the company's procedures more efficient. A leadership strategy explicitly enlists the number of leaders required, the tasks they need to perform, the number of employees, team members and other stakeholders required, and the deadlines for achieving each task. Young leaders who have recently joined the work-force can take help of programs offered by reputable institutes for deepening their knowledge about leadership and convocating successful strategies. Various XLRI leadership and management courses aim to equip new leaders with a guided step-by-step pedagogy to canvass robust leadership strategies. What it Takes to Build a Robust Leadership Strategy: Guided Step-By-Step Pedagogy The following steps go into developing an effective and thriving leadership strategy:- ● Step 1 = Identify Key Business Drivers The first step involves meeting with the senior leaders and executives and identifying the business's critical drivers. Determining business carriers is essential for influencing the outcome of strategies. ● Step 2 = Identifying the Different Leadership Phases Required This step revolves around determining the various leadership processes and phases. Choosing the right techniques from hiring and selection, succession planning, training patterns and others is key for putting together a robust strategy. ● Step 3 = Perform Analysis and Research Researching about the company's different leadership strategies and analysing them with the past and present plans is vital for implementing future strategies. ● Step 4 = Reviewing and Updating Leadership Strategic Plan Fourth step includes reviewing and updating the strategic plan in accordance with recent developments and requirements. Furthermore, performing an environmental scan to analyse the practices that can make strategies long-lasting and render a competitive advantage. All it Takes for Building a Robust Leadership Strategy The above-mentioned step by step approach helps in auguring a leadership strategy model that is sustainable and helps businesses maximise their profits. Therefore, upcoming leaders need to understand the core concepts of strategic leadership through online strategy courses. Moreover, receiving sound knowledge about developing strategies from XLRI leadership and management courses can help aspiring leaders in their careers.

Studies confirm a troubling, deeply-entrenched systematic and insidious problem, one which will not easily be redressed. Congress passed in 2003 the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA), but it was not set into action until midway through the administration of President Barack Obama in 2012. In spite of the delayed implementation—and advocacy groups for the sexually violated played a key role in the struggle to enforce it[112]—sexual violence is still an entrenched feature of U.S. mass incarceration and its social life. David

A leader’s checklist for planning should include the following: • Analyze the mission. —Understand higher headquarters’ mission, Commander’s Intent, and endstate (the goal). —Identify and state your own Commander’s Intent and endstate for the specific mission. • Identify personnel, assets, resources, and time available. • Decentralize the planning process. —Empower key leaders within the team to analyze possible courses of action. • Determine a specific course of action. —Lean toward selecting the simplest course of action. —Focus efforts on the best course of action. • Empower key leaders to develop the plan for the selected course of action. • Plan for likely contingencies through each phase of the operation. • Mitigate risks that can be controlled as much as possible. • Delegate portions of the plan and brief to key junior leaders. —Stand back and be the tactical genius. • Continually check and question the plan against emerging information to ensure it still fits the situation. • Brief the plan to all participants and supporting assets. —Emphasize Commander’s Intent. —Ask questions and engage in discussion and interaction with the team to ensure they understand. • Conduct post-operational debrief after execution. —Analyze lessons learned and implement them in future planning.

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

optimizing MCM is not a matter of a “big-bang” initiative but instead involves a deliberate step-by-step process. A phased approach will help keep implementation momentum up; foster senior executive confidence, which will increase their buy-in;

Like the project manager, a coach needs the ability to implement plays that are appropriate to the fluidity of the situation, and to change those plays at a moment’s notice. This is what will help him and his team win the game.

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.

American officials estimated millions would be spent to develop internal security systems, and State Department officials expected the Cuban government to increase internal surveillance in an attempt to prevent further acts of terrorism. These systems, which restricted civil rights, became easy targets for critics. CIA officials admitted early on in the war of terrorism that the goal was not the military defeat of Fidel Castro, but to force the regime into applying increasingly stringent civil restrictions, with the resultant pressures on the Cuban public. This was outlined in a May 1961 agency report stating that the objective was to “plan, implement and sustain a program of covert actions designed to exploit the economic, political and psychological vulnerabilities of the Castro regime. It is neither expected nor argued that the successful execution of this covert program will in itself result in the overthrow of the Castro regime,” only to accelerate the “moral and physical disintegration of the Castro government.

American officials estimated millions would be spent to develop internal security systems, and State Department officials expected the Cuban government to increase internal surveillance in an attempt to prevent further acts of terrorism. These systems, which restricted civil rights, became easy targets for critics. CIA officials admitted early on in the war of terrorism that the goal was not the military defeat of Fidel Castro, but to force the regime into applying increasingly stringent civil restrictions, with the resultant pressures on the Cuban public. This was outlined in a May 1961 agency report stating that the objective was to “plan, implement and sustain a program of covert actions designed to exploit the economic, political and psychological vulnerabilities of the Castro regime. It is neither expected nor argued that the successful execution of this covert program will in itself result in the overthrow of the Castro regime,” only to accelerate the “moral and physical disintegration of the Castro government.” The CIA acknowledged that in response to the terrorist acts the government would be “Stepping up internal security controls and defense capabilities.” It was not projected the acts of terror would directly result in Castro’s downfall (although that was a policy aim), but only to promote the sense of vulnerability among the population and compel the government into increasingly radical steps in order to ensure national security.18

Implementing Cisco IP Routing online learning,, The course content has been adjusted to Cisco IOS Software Release 15 and actually refreshed. The objective of the course is to expand upon the information and abilities from CCNA Routing and Switching and enable you to extend capabilities to plan, execute, and screen a versatile steering system. Note: Students enrolling for this course will get their course pack in an advanced organization. To have the capacity to see your advanced pack you should bring a portable PC and additionally a perfect iPad or Android tablet. The prescribed framework prerequisites and directions to get to the course unit substance can be found at the accompanying connection: Digital Course Kit Requirements and Instructions.

The software engineer had been studying how the cell processes information in order to write a computer simulation of gene expression. He showed me a book called Design Patterns, a standard text for software engineers. The text was full of different design strategies - strategies foe processing, storing, copying, organizing, accessing, and correcting digitally encoded strings of information. My colleague told me that he recognized many of these specific design patterns and strategies at work in the cell. He expressed his awe at the "sophistication of its design logic" and its resemblance to that used in the software industry. He said the cell often employs a functional logic that mirrors our own, but exceeds it in the elegance of its execution. It's like we are looking at 8.0 or 9.0 versions of design strategies that we have just begun to implement. When I see how the cell processes information, it gives me an eerie feeling that someone else figured this out before we got here.

In the olden days (half a century ago), programs were big, undifferentiated masses of code and data. Control could flow from anywhere to anywhere. Data could be accessed from anywhere. Calculations, the original purpose of computers, occurred with (relatively speaking) lightning speed and perfect accuracy. Then people discovered an awkward fact: programs are written as much to be changed as to be run. All this control jumping around and self-modifying code and data accessed from everywhere was great for execution, but it was terrible if you wanted to change the program later. And so began the long and halting road to find models of computation so a change here doesn’t cause an unanticipated problem there.

Relax. Look around. Make a call.” Our SEAL platoon and task unit had trained extensively through dozens of desperate, chaotic, and overwhelming situations to prepare for just such a moment as this. I understood how to implement the Laws of Combat that Jocko had taught us: Cover and Move, Simple, Prioritize and Execute, and Decentralized Command. The Laws of Combat were the key to not just surviving a dire situation such as this, but actually thriving, enabling us to totally dominate the enemy and win. They guided my next move.

The elements of a true leader’s vision A true leader’s vision should target specific interests and answer important questions, such as: 1.  What is the country’s interest in this vision? What is the interest of its society and business community? Who will benefit from it and how? In what way will it promote development and enhance the achievements that have already resulted from previous visions? 2.  Is the vision based upon specific plans or is it going to be implemented randomly, without any link between its different phases? 3.  Is it realistic and feasible or is it a wild vision that no amount of financial and human resources are capable of realizing? For example, giant residential and tourist complexes such as The Palm29 and The World30 islands may require huge resources that many countries cannot afford. While they may be feasible in the UAE, it would be impossible to build them in a number of other places. 4.  What is the ideal time to propose the vision? 5.  What is the best way to implement it? 6.  Is the executive team ready? Who are its members and where will we acquire the high-calibre skills necessary? 7.  How will the implementation of the vision be financed? 8.  How will we convince investors to finance the project? 9.  How will we market the finished product and what is the target market? Where and when?

The work performed by the computer is specified by a program, which is written in a programming language. This language is converted to sequences of machine-language instructions by interpreters or compilers, via a predefined set of subroutines called the operating system. The instructions, which are stored in the memory of the computer, define the operations to be performed on data, which are also stored in the computer’s memory. A finite-state machine fetches and executes these instructions. The instructions as well as the data are represented by patterns of bits. Both the finite-state machine and the memory are built of storage registers and Boolean logic blocks, and the latter are based on simple logical functions, such as And, Or, and Invert. These logical functions are implemented by switches, which are set up either in series or in parallel, and these switches control a physical substance, such as water or electricity, which is used to send one of two possible signals from one switch to another: 1 or 0. This is the hierarchy of abstraction that makes computers work.

implement Prioritize and Execute in any business, team, or organization, a leader must: • evaluate the highest priority problem. • lay out in simple, clear, and concise terms the highest priority effort for your team. • develop and determine a solution, seek input from key leaders and from the team where possible. • direct the execution of that solution, focusing all efforts and resources toward this priority task. • move on to the next highest priority problem. Repeat. • when priorities shift within the team, pass situational awareness both up and down the chain. • don’t let the focus on one priority cause target fixation. Maintain the ability to see other problems developing and rapidly shift as needed.

Strictly speaking, business rules are rules or procedures that make or save the business money. Very strictly speaking, these rules would make or save the business money, irrespective of whether they were implemented on a computer. They would make or save money even if they were executed manually. The fact that a bank charges N% interest for a loan is a business rule that makes the bank money. It doesn’t matter if a computer program calculates the interest, or if a clerk with an abacus calculates the interest.

Similarly, Robert Goldberg, managing partner of GTG Capital and former Zynga executive, helped the company close forty acquisitions over two and a half years. He drove Zynga’s growth from thirty to 30,000 in that same timeframe—making it one of the fastest growing companies of all time. At his private equity firm, he utilizes the elements as observed by Ismail and implements them into small to mid-sized companies in an effort to realize a minimum of doubling the current growth rates. He acquires the companies fully only after he’s able to see evidence of success in doubling growth the rate.

Execute your own shift and create a future with more value for your customers and stakeholders.

Needless to say, perhaps the most extreme ideas the president floated or considered for using the military came at the end of his tenure. At that time some of his most extreme 2020 campaign advisors, including disgraced former national security advisor General Michael Flynn, recommended he use the military to seize voting machines in the 2020 election. They actually drafted an executive order to implement the idea.

As Dr. Stout explains in her book, The Shareholder Value Myth, “If 80 percent of the CEO’s pay is based on what the share price is going to do next year, he or she is going to do their best to make sure that share price goes up, even if the consequences might be harmful to employees, to customers, to society, to the environment or even to the corporation itself in the long-term.” When we tie pay packages directly to stock price, it promotes practices like closing factories, keeping wages down, implementing extreme cost cutting and conducting annual rounds of layoffs—tactics that might boost the stock price in the near term, but often do damage to an organization’s ability to survive and thrive in the Infinite Game. Buybacks are another often legitimate practice that has been abused by public company executives seeking to prop up their share price.

Troye wished that once he took office, “Donald Trump would become presidential, because I kept hoping the switch would flip and he would become actually a leader in that role sitting in the Oval Office.” She held her breath through the inauguration formalities until “literally right out of the gate, we got word of the travel ban, the restrictions, the travel restrictions—an executive order that hits with no real guidance on how to implement it. No definition of what it is. I think part of it was written in a way that didn’t quite make sense.

What Ibarra calls the “plan-and-implement” model—the idea that we should first make a long-term plan and execute without deviation, as opposed to the “test-and-learn” model—is entrenched in depictions of geniuses. Popular lore holds that the sculptor Michelangelo would see a full figure in a block of marble before he ever touched it, and simply chip away the excess stone to free the figure inside. It is an exquisitely beautiful image. It just isn’t true. Art historian William Wallace showed that Michelangelo was actually a test-and-learn all-star. He constantly changed his mind and altered his sculptural plans as he worked. He left three-fifths of his sculptures unfinished, each time moving on to something more promising. The first line of Wallace’s analysis: “Michelangelo did not expound a theory of art.” He tried, then went from there. He was a sculptor, painter, master architect, and made engineering designs for fortifications in Florence. In his late twenties he even pushed visual art aside to spend time writing poems (including one about how much he grew to dislike painting), half of which he left unfinished. Like anyone eager to raise their match quality prospects, Michelangelo learned who he was—and whom he was carving—in practice, not in theory. He started with an idea, tested it, changed it, and readily abandoned it for a better project fit. Michelangelo might have fit well in Silicon Valley; he was a relentless iterator. He worked according to Ibarra’s new aphorism: “I know who I am when I see what I do.

You can’t dabble and expect to win. What matters more than anything you do is everything you do. Once you’re clear on why your organization must change, what you intend to achieve, and how you intend to achieve it, make certain that every decision and every action is painstakingly aligned with your intentions.

Today, I will not leave the site of a great insight without taking some action to implement it. I know that ideation without execution is the sport of fools. And that making amazing dreams real is an enormous act of self-love.

To achieve big success, it’s not about ideas or information. It’s about implementation and execution.

Organizations need systematic approaches to creating alignment and managing achievement. Leaders within organizations own these responsibilities. Alan Branche, the author of a book called Implementation, said, "Strategy execution is the responsibility that makes or breaks executives" We look to our leaders to lead us to a better station in life first and foremost. There is an unwritten contract to followership. We trust our leaders to call their shot and make it.

On the other hand, when a company’s value curve lacks focus, its cost structure will tend to be high and its business model complex in implementation and execution. When it lacks divergence, a company’s strategy is a me-too, with no reason to stand apart in the marketplace. When it lacks a compelling tagline that speaks to buyers, it is likely to be internally driven or a classic example of innovation for innovation’s sake with no great commercial potential and no natural take-off capability. A Company Caught in the Red Ocean When a company’s value curve converges with its competitors, it signals that a company is likely caught within the red ocean of bloody competition. A company’s explicit or implicit strategy tends to be trying to outdo its competition on the basis of cost or quality. This signals slow growth unless, by the grace of luck, the company benefits from being in an industry that is growing on its own accord. This growth is not due to a company’s strategy, however, but to luck. Overdelivery without Payback When a company’s value curve on the strategy canvas is shown to deliver high levels across all factors, the question is, Does the company’s market share and profitability reflect these investments? If not, the strategy canvas signals that the company may be oversupplying its customers, offering too much of those elements that add incremental value to buyers. To value-innovate, the company must decide which factors to eliminate and reduce—and not only those to raise and create—to construct a divergent value curve. Strategic Contradictions Are there strategic contradictions? These are areas where a company is offering a high level on one competing factor while ignoring others that support that factor. An example is investing heavily in making a company’s website easy to use but failing to correct the site’s slow speed of operation. Strategic inconsistencies can also be found between the level of your offering and your price. For example, a petroleum station company found that it offered “less for more”: fewer services than the best competitor at a higher price. No wonder it was losing market share fast.