UNDERSTANDING EXECUTION

To understand execution three things must be kept in mind:

• Execution is a discipline and integral to strategy.
• Execution is the major job of the business leader.
• Execution must be a core element of an organization's culture.

Execution is a systematic process of rigorous;y discussing hows and whats, questioning, tenaciously followsing 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.

In its most fundamental sense execution is a systematic way of exposing reality and acting on it. Most companies don't face reality very well.