It’s been a decade long experience working at different levels and in all these years no matter what level in the organization I stand it’s all about Execution…. Execution… Execution and Execution.
The recent stock market crash made me relook at the fundamentals of the companies whose stock price fell from the tops and recovered with the same pace but many a companies did not recovered even a 25% from the bottom.
RAM CHARAN and GEOFFREY COLVIN studied over a 40 different companies on the fortune 500 list which failed to deliver and came up with a conclusion that it all because of failure in Execution, one of the top the reason they pointed that leads to failure in execution is people problems. Ram writes in his book that the CEO’s just weren’t worrying enough about the right things: execution, decisiveness, follow-through, delivering on commitments and so on… but my experience tells something beyond this.
I have met a lot of people at various levels, being in a consulting role gives you an opportunity to talk to a lot of people and based on what I discovered in the past decade listening and talking to a lot leaders thought of writing this blog and named it a “Mouthful of Mind”
The very important role of a leader is to communicate their vision, this does not mean that a Leader should be talkative… how often we fail to clearly communicate what is in our mind, believe me this is the toughest things to do. You can try this in your team, just walk up to your leader and ask him/her to explain his vision and how he plans it to achieve in the next three years. You will be surprised many of them will fail to explain the vision to you… it’s not that they don’t know but finding the right words to communicate is the vision is what bothers them… and some of the folks you too would have talked to will tell you a few jargons in a English statement which is less than two sentences and call it their vision… go back and ask to decipher the jargons and you will face a real tough time to understand what the leader wants to communicate.
Let me share what I learnt, I call this “SO WHAT PRINCIPLE” , this is a power mantra for execution excellence, remember execution required you to be prepared to do things at a ground zero level and so every time you face a question or a task or problem statement or a business case ask yourself or the one who is tell you SO WHAT…
Let’s take a day to day example that happens in all our homes… Your wife complains that the maid comes late …. ask her “SO WHAT” … then she will tell you the impact and then again ask her “SO WHAT” … she will tell you the pros and cons and how it effects … ask “SO WHAT” again… if she is in a good mood she will enumerate to you various circumstances and finally tell you the biggest problem or the very big Impact … here is the point … execution excellence is achieved by focusing on the biggest impact but how often we get caught as a so called leader in killing a lot of time focusing on trivial issues,
The bottom line is unless you can talk your mind out very clearly you will not be able to get the work done… my first mantra in execution excellence is “A Mouthful of Mind”…
