“Plans are only good intentions unless they immediately degenerate into hard work” —Peter Drucker
For much of my career I have focused on helping organizations grow. This focus on growth has allowed me to sit at the interesting intersection of strategy, innovation, marketing, sales, and customer success in a number of leadership roles across a few industries.
With the benefit of this experience and perspective, I can clearly see that there are two consistent ingredients required for success: Strategy and execution.
I have written extensively about how important it is for organizations to develop agile and flexible strategic plans designed to achieve long-term goals in a hostile VUCA business environment.
However, a plan by itself is useless. There is something even more important to success than having a plan. What could that ingredient be?
A bias to action.
Most Plans Just Gather Dust
Despite the enormous investment of time and resources that leaders of organizations put into developing their strategic plans for the future, most fail. Why?
There are many common reasons why organizations don’t achieve the results they define in their strategic plans. These can include a bad strategy, flawed situational awareness, unrealistic goals, unforeseen (VUCA!) scenarios, weak teams, and even poor leadership. However, by far the biggest culprit is bad or non-existent execution.
Strategy without execution is a complete waste of time.
Business leaders know that nothing good happens in business until someone does something. The alternative to this proactive approach is simply to wait for the universe (or your competitors) to take action. In my experience, this reactive approach never ends up well. Unfortunately, too many people wait for things to happen instead of proactively making them happen. With this approach, you don’t make forward progress. You don’t learn anything.
Mary Kay Ash, they dynamic founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics said it best: “There are four kinds of people in this world: Those who make things happen, those who watch things happen, those who wonder what happened, and those who don’t know that anything happened!”
A bias to action is what makes things happen.
Focus on Execution
A common ingredient to every successful startup or highly functioning executive team that I’ve been involved with in my career has been a simple operating philosophy that I like to call “Move Fast and Get S#!T Done.” Over the years I’ve shortened it and made it a little more politically correct by referring to it by the acronym: “MFGSD”.
It boils down to a laser-like focus on execution.
Effective leaders make sure their teams know the vision and strategy of the strategic plan, ensure they have the support and resources they need to execute, and then get out of the way.
MFGSD!
How do you create this bias for action? It starts with effective leadership and developing your team. The goal is to move your people up what I call the “action ladder”:
- Level 0 – Ignorant of opportunity or threat, therefore no action
- Level 1 – Can identify there is an opportunity or threat
- Level 2 – Proposes a viable solution for opportunity or threat
- Level 3 – Can develop a plan of action to address opportunity or threat
- Level 4 – Can develop a plan of action for opportunity or threat, and it is feasible
- Level 5 – Solving the opportunity or threat by executing the plan of action
If you have ever had a “star” employee on your team, you will recognize how valuable (and rare!) Level 5 players are. They make sure important things get done.
Most execution problems are easy to fix. Start with your people. You have two basic options: Get the people in your organization motivated to perform at a higher level than they are today, or get higher-level people into your organization.
Go Forth, MFGSD!
The late Herb Kelleher, co-founder and former CEO of Southwest Airlines, said something that in my opinion perfectly sums up the concept of being strategic, having a bias to action and the MFGSD ethos: “We have a strategic plan. It’s called doing things.”
The important lesson for leaders – there is a very long list of things in the world you cannot control. Execution is not one of them. You can control your actions.
Pick a direction. Create a plan. Execute. React to what you learn. Keep going.
MFGSD!
That’s it. A very simple concept, and extremely powerful if you (and your team) practice it.
-Onward