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Chapter 5

Execution

Great Execution Is Rarer than Great Strategy

Execution is best

No strategy is better than its execution. It's hard to separate strategy from execution.

That's why execution must be your first priority as a leader.

Worrying about your organization's strategy before your team is good at executing is pointless. Execution is hard, and great execution is scarce.

  • What we lack are people who excel at running with those ideas and making them real.

Treat Execution like a Teachable Competency

Sales people start in a lower role with a clear career path and professional development strategy. As you get promoted, you become an elite sales team, whose job is to handle the top accounts

  • The idea is to take people from a relatively inexperienced station in life on a journey to become elite professionals in their field.

Experience may be overrated by some, but it's hard to find a substitute for it.

  • New managers have to learn from and through their management chain.
  • When we promote inexperienced managers to senior roles, chaos ensues. It becomes the blind leading the blind.
  • Organizations cannot scale and mature around inexperienced management staff.

Stories:

  • Data Domain - struggled until they found the correct leadership
  • ServiceNow - Lacked management execution - solved from the top down
  • Snowflake - ability to innovate, but lacked the ability to scale and mature - solved that by new leadership that had discipline.

The common mistake is relying on our innovators to also provide discipline. These don't go hand in hand.

Getting Strategy Right

Strategy obviously matters a great deal.

The problem with strategy development is that it is often reflexive, based on prior experiences and pattern matching at other companies.

  • Human nature has a strong tendency to rationalize situations, to convince us that no significant changes are necessary.
  • It's also vitally important—yet very difficult—to maintain your intellectual honesty.
  • This is why groupthink and confirmation bias are common and incredibly dangerous to the well‐being of the enterprise.
  • It is the role of leadership to maintain a culture of brutal honesty.

Stories:

  • Data Domain - EMC was forced to takeover Data Domain
  • ServiceNow - Went big, BMC went small
  • Snowflake - passed its competitors, who now struggle to catch up.

Treat every strategy with caution, and take care to avoid becoming intellectually or emotionally wedded to your preferred strategy.

  • Fail fast
  • Dog won't hunt

Strategy Problems versus Execution Problems

What you're offering doesn't resonate with the people you expected to like it.

Likewise, if your product requires world‐class execution in other departments, you are in trouble—because that kind of talent is in short supply.

  • Without strong execution, there is literally no way to know whether a strategy is failing.
  • Eliminate execution as a potential factor first, and then move on to evaluating the strategy.

You Don't Need to Hire Consultants or Strategists

“Consultants are people who borrow your watch, tell you what time it is, and then keep the watch.”

  • You are much better off working on your own strategy, without the fancy language and pretty slide deck.
  • Develop confidence in your own authority, not somebody else's.

Operators in charge of each business unit must also be the strategists for their business, and the chief executive officer must also act as the chief strategy officer.

  • If you can't trust one of your executives to set the strategy for his or her sphere of responsibility, all the consultants in the world can't fix that problem.
  • You will become a better strategist as your execution improves.
  • The bottom line is that great execution can make a moderately successful strategy go a long way, but poor execution will fail even the most brilliant strategy. That's why, in an amped up company, execution is king.