It's Not Rocket Science: 4 Simple Strategies for Mastering the Art of Execution

Introduction

Our world, often said to be changing at a pace that is “faster than ever,” has created an unhealthy peer pressure of sorts that has compelled impulsive business leaders, ungrounded by basic and foundational disciplines, to get caught up in the “move faster” whirlwind. The result for many has been far more motion than progress: successions of doomed-to-fail fads, phases, silver bullets, flavors of the month, and hosts of knee-jerk forays into follow-the-pack fantasies that drain resources, and confuse and demoralize customers, associates, and shareholders. To be fair, it is easy to get caught up in the “change for the sake of change,” and “do it faster and more often” group mind-sets when you consider the near-incomprehensible realities around us:

• Sir Ken Robinson, international advisor on education to governments, observed: “The world is changing faster than ever in our history. Our best hope for the future is to develop a new paradigm of human capacity to meet a new era of human existence” (Robinson 2009).
• “The rate at which companies get bumped off the S&P [Standard and Poor's] 500 has been accelerating. Back in 1958, a company could expect to stay on the list for 61 years. These days, the average is just 18 years…. General Electric, [is] the only company that's remained on the S&P Index since it started in 1926” (Regalado 2013).
• In Great by Choice, authors Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen (2011) somewhat apologetically examine how 11 of the 60 companies Collins ...