EXECUTION COMES OF AGE

Business leaders are beginning to make the connection between execution and results. After Compaq’s board fired Pfeiffer, chairman and founder Ben Rosen took pains to say that the company’s strategy was fine. The change, he said, would be “in execution. . . . Our plans are to speed up decision-making and make the company more efficient.” When Lucent’s board dismissed CEO Richard McGinn in
October 2000, his replacement, Henry Schacht, explained: “Our issues are ones of execution and focus.”

Clients of high-level headhunters are calling and saying, “Find me a guy who can execute.” Writing in IBM’s 2000 annual report, Louis V. Gerstner said of Samuel Palmisano, the man who would succeed him, “His real expertise is making sure we execute well.” Early in 2001
the National Association of Corporate Directors added “execution” to the list of items that directors need to focus on in evaluating their own performance. Directors, the group says, have to ask themselves how well the company is executing and what accounts for any gap between expectations and management’s performance. Very few
boards now ask these questions, the group noted.

But for all the talk about execution, hardly anybody knows what it is. When we’re teaching about execution, we first ask people to define it. They think they know how, and they usually start out well enough. “It’ s about getting things done,” they’ll say. “It’s about running the company, versus conceiving and planning. It’s making our
goals.” Then we ask them how to get things done, and the dialogue goes rapidly downhill. Whether they’re students or senior executives, it is soon clear—to them as well as to us—that they don’t have the foggiest idea of what it means to execute.

It’s no different when execution is mentioned in books, newspapers, or magazines. You get the impression (implicitly), that it’s about doing things more effectively, more carefully, with more attention to the details. But nobody really spells out what they mean.

Taken from: Execution The discipline of Getting things Done