Alive and Well at the End of the Day, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER 21DRIVING EXECUTION

If you can’t execute well, it doesn’t matter what the strategy is.

—Tom Peters

Coming as it does at the end of the book, a chapter on execution might seem like an afterthought: with all the important matters properly treated, time to finish off by looking at execution. Nothing could be further from the truth. There’s a good case to be made that this chapter should be the first chapter in the book. But the ideas about execution will make so much more sense being built from all that you’ve learned.

Alive and Well really is a book about execution: safety execution. Execution means everything. We began by identifying the toughest safety challenges leaders face every day. The common element for most of those challenges is the need for better execution; the solutions offered in the succeeding chapters will translate into better safety execution. Nowhere in this book is there to be found any suggestion that the solution to these safety challenges is to create more procedures or launch new programs. Instead, the focus has simply been on things for leaders to do to lead and manage safety better.

The ideas and leadership practices described in this chapter will serve to unite everything you’ve read in Alive and Well, creating a coherent strategy to successfully drive safety execution.

WHAT IS EXECUTION?

As with other words that are part of a leader’s vocabulary like accountability and culture, when execution is tossed around in everyday conversation, ...