The 4 Disciplines of Execution

Discipline 1: Focus on the wildly important requires you to go against your basic wiring as a leader and focus on less so that your team can achieve more. When you implement Discipline 1 you start by selecting one (or, at the most, two) extremely important goals, instead of trying to significantly improve everything all at once. We call this a wild

Rule #4: All WIGs must have a finish line in the form of from X to Y by when.

keeps your organization alive and you can’t ignore it. If you ignore the urgent, it can kill you today. It’s also true, however, that if you ignore the important, it can kill you tomorrow. In other words, if you and your team operate solely from within the whirlwind, you won’t progress—all your energy is spent just trying to stay upright in the win

That doesn’t mean you abandon all your other important goals. They’re still on your radar, but they don’t require your finest diligence and effort right now. (Still, some of those goals might never be worthy of your finest diligence and effort—some of them never should have taken off in the first place!)

prime suspect behind execution breakdown was clarity of the objective: People simply didn’t understand the goal they were supposed to execute.

Behavioral-change strategies are very different from stroke-of-the-pen strategies. You can’t just order them to happen, because executing them requires getting people—often a lot of people—to do something different. And if you’ve ever tried to get other people to change their ways, you know how tough it is. Changing yourself is hard enough.

The real enemy of execution is your day job! We call it the whirlwind.

Discipline 3 is the discipline of engagement. In principle, the highest level of performance always comes from people who are emotionally engaged and the highest level of engagement comes from knowing the score—that is, if people know whether they are winning or losing.

measures are ultimately the most important things you are trying to accomplish. But lead measures, true to their name, are what will get you to the lag measures. Once you’ve identified your lead measures, they become the key leverage points for achieving your goal.