4 disciplines of execution pdf download

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

By using our site, you agree to our collection of information through the use of cookies. To learn more, view our Privacy Policy. To browse Academia. Peter Essens. Alexander van Velzen. Wendi Peck , Natalie J Webb.

A strategy is irrelevant if you cannot implement it. That is the collective realization of public and private leaders after decades of obsession with strategy and strategic thinking.

That realization has led to a voracious market for ideas on execution, alignment around strategy and predictable achievement of strategic results. Many performance management systems or tools, all meant to help organizational leaders implement their strategic goals and objectives, fail to provide results. We suggest a framework in which strategic and operational goals can be translated into a handful of meaningful metrics that we define as whole goals.

Whole goals can then used to drive decision-making and to hold leadership accountable for achieving measurable results. We believe the ability of a public organization to measure and evaluate its performance is of critical importance if today’s leaders and managers are expected to promote successful execution of organizational strategic goals and objectives. Prem Ramburuth. Christine Z Miller. This paper describes lessons learned from teaching a distributed virtual course on Collaborative Innovation Networks COINs over the last 12 years at five different sites located in four different time zones.

The course teaches students how to leverage virtual collaborative creativity in the Internet age by making best use of e-mail, social media, and the Web. In this paper we extend 6 principles of teamwork by Richard Hackman to the virtual realm. David Tuffley. Purpose: the aim of this thesis is to determine the qualities and characteristics of effective leaders of integrated teams operating in virtual environments.

Research paradigm and methodology: The study was conducted using the Design Research paradigm in which a series of six review cycles were conducted using a combination of qualitative and quantitative data collection methods. Findings: The study establishes: 1. Research limitations: The project uses Design Research to determine leadership factors. These are then synthesised into a Process Reference Model, yet there is little or no theory base for applying Design Research in this way.

The usefulness of this approach should be confirmed by follow-up research. Practical implications: Project managers in the Software Engineering sector specifically, and more generally in other sectors using virtual teams to perform projects will benefit from using this Process Reference Model to better coordinate their teams to achieve objectives.

The increasing use of ad-hoc multi-national joint military units in a diversity of operations has made effective teamwork a critical mission success factor. The objective of our study is to support commanders in guiding and controlling the team towards effective performance.

We developed a model and an instrument of critical factors of command team effectiveness – the CTEF model and instrument. In a follow-up study we will apply and validate model and instrument in national and international military exercises using a web-based version of instrument. Toni Doolen. Bill Casey. Log in with Facebook Log in with Google. Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we’ll email you a reset link.

Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. The 4 Disciplines of Execution – Sean Covey. Jesus Chavira. Related Papers. Military Command Team Effectiveness: Model and instrument for assessment and improvement. Eight Ways to Build Collaborative Teams.

International Public Management Review Are we driving strategic results or metric mania? Evaluating performance in the public sector. Journal of Workplace Learning Effects of leadership style on team learning. Lessons from the Collaborative Innovation Networks Seminar. A Design Research approach to developing a Process Reference Model for leadership of integrated teams in virtual environments.

Do you remember the last major initiative you watched die in your organization? Did it go down with a loud crash? Or was it slowly and quietly suffocated by other competing priorities? What happened? The 4 Disciplines of Execution can change all that forever. The 4 Disciplines of Execution 4DX is a simple, repeatable, and proven formula for executing on your most important strategic priorities in the midst of the whirlwind.

When a company or an individual adheres to these disciplines, they achieve superb results—regardless of the goal. Simply put, this is one book that no business leader can afford to miss. Any organization can create these same kinds of breakthrough results if they apply the principles and processes taught in this book! The 4 Disciplines of Execution offers a proven process for engaging the hearts and minds of every employee toward this vital goal. I highly recommend this book to any leader committed to making customer loyalty a mission-critical goal.

At The Ritz-Carlton, I believe the only way to strengthen operational excellence is through flawless execution. This book is a must-read for any leader who wants to achieve that which is extraordinary in their company!

As the Chief Product Architect for FranklinCovey, Sean organized and directed the original teams that conceived and created The 4 Disciplines of Execution and has been an avid practitioner and promoter of the methodology ever since. Truly a profound work! These execution principles are a must for any government agency that is seeking to be world class. Many teams have applied this intuitive approach to build engagement and increase execution and accountability.

For years we have struggled with creating focus for our people. We have used priority sheets, standards of performance measures, and other methods. When you read this book, you will never look at work or life the same!

The 4 Disciplines of Execution tells you everything you need to know to make your wildly important goals a reality. This simple, effective model is easy to understand, easy to apply, and delivers results. It works! The authors here have developed a real- world, practical guide for navigating through the obstacles to success. The 4 Disciplines provide a simple, common-sense way to help achieve real results. As we continue to invest in our employees, this process remains critical to achieving our overall corporate goals.

If you want to succeed with your strategic plan, utilizing this process and methodology will pay dividends. And, the process of continual, quick accountability checkups encourages excellence. The disciplines allow any leader the ability to move beyond the vision into the flawless execution of strategy. This book is a great gift to any leader in any organization. Disciplined leveraging of this work will profoundly help raise the standard of executional excellence in any and all organizations.

It provides a simple, actionable approach for success at all levels of any organization. The process creates maniacal focus and leads to uncommon results. He can accomplish wonders. There is nothing in life more exhilarating than to achieve something important to him and to achieve it with excellence. In The 4 Disciplines of Execution, the authors have captured the principles and procedures that are key to human achievement.

Although The 4 Disciplines of Execution begins as it must with theory, the greatest contribution of this book to educational administrators is its powerful focus on the fundamentals of the process of execution.

For that reason, this book is must reading for every college and university administrator with responsibility for achieving strategic goals. The value of The 4 Disciplines of Execution centers on connecting everyone specifically, concretely, and visibly to the fulfillment of that mission.

Every single person has a clear role to play, is measured on it, and can celebrate his or her contribution to its achievement. Whether delivering combat aircraft to the navy or dramatically improving an urban public education system, the focus on executing a few critical goals with excellence makes the difference between failure or success.

Most important, employees are more engaged in their work. Their work is meaningful. It contributes to a team, and they can be proud of what they have accomplished. It is truly a how-to manual for teams committed to achieving their wildest dreams and a must-read for leaders who have chosen to achieve greatness! The approaches recommended will ensure focus, line-of-sight from tasks to goals, and the production of simple dashboards to give vital and timely feedback. As a leader in the public sector, I found myself revisiting these principles over and over again at a time when resources were dwindling, while the need for human services was rising.

I saw a room full of winners. After applying these disciplines and this methodology throughout my entire organization, we saw improved employee engagement and teamwork during a time of downsizing, and we achieved our stretch business objectives. Thank you, FranklinCovey, for cracking the execution code! This book provides great guidance for leaders who want to stay focused on their most important goals.

 
 

 

4 disciplines of execution pdf download.Conclusion and Next Steps

 

These undesirable consequences are greatly magnified by complexity. This project will attempt to address this deficit. The high-level objectives are to develop a framework to facilitate better planning, monitoring and control of technical activities.

This will be achieved through the identification, development and integration of suitable existing concepts and techniques into a complexity management framework. This should apply to all complex projects and particularly those relating to safety critical engineering projects. Primarily, the project builds upon the research which has been previously undertaken by this author in project failings, complexity and existing tools and techniques.

The framework will be evaluated through questionnaire survey of several of its component parts, a review against the recommendations from literature and through case study application of the tools and techniques. It is the goal that all or parts of this framework can be put to practical application within industry.

Statement of Ethics This dissertation, including literature research, questionnaire survey and conclusions, has carefully considered and adhered to the three principles of ethics specified by the University of York. These are-to do no harm, to ensure informed consent from human participants and to uphold sound principles of data confidentiality: Do No Harm No physical system or entity has been developed which could cause harm of any kind. The work undertaken pertains to literature research, the gathering of non-sensitive and non-confidential data via a questionnaire survey, and the development of research conclusions.

Informed Consent Information which is freely available in the public domain has been appropriately referenced within this dissertation. Some information was acquired by direct requests to, and discussions with, the authors; at all times the authors have been made aware of the purpose of the request and the nature of the critical evaluation. Questionnaire respondents freely participated and were made aware of the purpose of the survey beforehand. Confidentiality of Data No sensitive or confidential data has been acquired, used or released during the course of this dissertation.

Number of words is 39, as counted by the MS Word word count. This includes all of the body of the report, but excludes the appendices which are included in the project submission for completeness and interest. Blanka Pesja. Abstract Music competitions, as a commonly used selection method, measure how well a student competes; in other words, how well someone performs in comparison to others.

This does not necessarily fit well with music education in which the qualitative approach to authentic development and autonomous artistic goalsetting differs significantly from the approach of the competitions. Competing in music copies sports and business models where getting ahead of others is the reward and, as such, resembles a game format with winners and losers.

Applied games offer music educators the possibility to make competition part of the curriculum; not as a motivational tool but rather to prepare students for the professional reality of the competitive culture in which the student is about to operate. One of the obvious game mechanics reflecting the act of scoring within a contest is a scoreboard. Presenting music students with a hands-on experience with competition by implementing a scoreboard instantly creates a clash of aspirations and objectives from which the following questions emerge: what do music educators, who are interested in applied games, need to take into consideration when applying the game mechanic of a scoreboard?

Subsequently: what do art educators as well as students need to realize about competition and competitiveness and how can this insight reshape the use of a scoreboard in art education? The outcome of a mixture of quantitative and qualitative research presented in this paper should broaden the understanding of music competitions within the educational toolbox as well as help students who struggle with the question whether or not to enter a competition to come to a well-argued decision and assist with their preparation.

Log in with Facebook Log in with Google. Remember me on this computer. Enter the email address you signed up with and we’ll email you a reset link.

Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. The Four Disciplines of Execution. Luis Felipe. Related Papers. International Journal of Project Management Analyzing project management research: Perspectives from top management journals. Lessons from the Collaborative Innovation Networks Seminar. Integration of technical development within complex project environments – Project.

Execution starts with focus. Every week, we work with dozens of leadership teams across the world and, almost with- out exception, they acknowledge that they need greater focus.

De- spite this desire, they continue to find themselves with too many competing priorities, pulling their teams in too many different direc- tions. One of the first things we want you to know is that you are not alone.

The inability of leaders to focus is a problem of epidemic proportions. We also want you to know that when we talk about narrowing your focus in Discipline 1, we are not talking about narrowing the size and complexity of your whirlwind, although, over time, atten- tion to WIGs might have that effect. Your whirlwind includes all of the urgent activities that are necessary to sustain your business day to day.

Simply put, Discipline 1 is about applying more energy against fewer goals because, when it comes to setting goals, the law of dimin- ishing returns is as real as the law of gravity. Confronted with so many goals the team members will stop listening let alone executing. Why is this so? The fundamental principle at work in Discipline 1 is that human beings are genetically hardwired to do one thing at a time with excel- lence.

But to the wildly important goal you want to devote your best effort. His focus was leg- endary. And so were his results. Science tells us the human brain can give full focus to only a single object at any given moment.

Particularly when people try to perform similar tasks at the same time, such as writing an email and talking on the phone, they com- pete to use the same part of the brain. Trying to carry too much, the brain simply slows down. They are suckers for irrel- evancy. Right now more than a hundred airplanes might be approaching, taking off, or taxiing around, and all of them are very important, especially if you happen to be on one of them!

The controller is aware of all the other planes on the radar. She lands one airplane at a time. WIGs are like that. They are the goals you must achieve with total excellence beyond the circling priorities of your day to day. To suc- ceed, you must be willing to make the hard choices that separate what is wildly important from all the many other merely important goals on your radar. Then, you must approach that WIG with focus and diligence until it is delivered as promised, with excellence.

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! People who try to push many goals at once usually wind up doing a mediocre job on all of them. Or you can leverage this principle to achieve your top goals, one at a time, again and again. If you understand the need to focus, why is it so difficult to actually do it?

Being aware of these tendencies is a good place to start. One reason you may drive your team to take on too much is that, as a leader, you tend to be ambitious and creative.

You are exactly the kind of individual organizations like to promote. The problem is that creative, ambitious people always want to do more, not less. Another reason you might lead your team to go after too many goals is to hedge your bets.

In other words, if your team pursues everything, then it seems likely that something might work. It also ensures that, if you fail, no one can question the level of effort your team gave.

Even though you know that more is not better, it looks better, especially to the person above you. So, you may resist the in- creased accountability for results that would come with fewer goals and instead rely on the sheer volume of effort to drive your success.

However, the greatest challenge you face in narrowing your goals is simply that it requires you to say no to a lot of good ideas. Nothing is more counterintuitive for a leader than saying no to a good idea, and nothing is a bigger destroyer of focus than always saying yes. Instead, they filter in one at a time. We say no to good ideas every day.

We say no to great ideas in order to keep the amount of things we focus on very small in number so that we can put enormous energy behind the ones we do choose. When we met with the leader responsible for creating a new interface to compete with the iPhone How would you like that assignment? They only make one. As Stephen R. However, the second trap, trying to turn every- thing in the whirlwind into a WIG, is even more common. Once caught in it, you try to turn everything in the whirlwind into a goal.

Within the whirlwind are all of your existing measurements for running the organization today, illustrated below as dials. Many of the dials require dozens of changes in human behavior in order to move them.

Focusing on one WIG is like punching one finger through the paper—all your strength goes into making that hole. Unless you can achieve your goal with a stroke of the pen, success is going to require your team to change their behavior; and they sim- ply cannot change that many behaviors at once, no matter how badly you want them to. Trying to significantly improve every measure in the whirlwind will consume all of your time and leave you with very little to show for it.

In other words, if you want high-focus, high-performance team members, they must have something wildly important to focus on. But how do you decide which of many possible goals should be your WIG? Sometimes, the choice of a WIG is obvious, but at other times it can be confusing.

Because the urgent priorities in your whirlwind are always competing to be the most important and a very good argument can usually be made for choosing any one of them. Have you ever had one of your people seriously hurt in an accident? The problem in this conversation is that the leaders are asking the wrong question.

In the words of Discipline 1, you can focus on the wildly important. Your wildly important goal will come from one of two categories: either from within the whirlwind or from outside it. Poor project completion time, out-of-control costs, or unsatisfactory customer service are all good examples. How- ever, it could also be an area in which your team is already performing well and where leveraging this strength could result in significant im- pact. For example, increasing patient satisfaction in a hospital from the 85th percentile to the 95th percentile could increase your revenue dramatically.

Outside the whirlwind, the choices tend to be about repositioning yourself strategically. Remember that this type of WIG will require an even greater change in behavior, since it will be completely new to your team.

In es- sence, once a WIG is achieved, it goes back into the whirlwind. Every time this happens, the whirlwind changes. Ultimately, this is what enables your team to pursue the next WIG from a stronger foun- dation. We got to work with the new president of a large thrift-store chain just as he was asking himself these questions. When we got into the WIG discussion, some of his reports thought this emphasis needed to continue. Others wanted more emphasis on hiring more disabled workers.

Still others argued that their top WIG should be growth. The range of choices was baffling. They helped thousands become self-reliant and find a new sense of self-worth, while sustain- ing the day-to-day financial and operational results that made their mission possible.

This in itself is a huge challenge. Nar- rowing the focus for an entire organization or even a large portion of an organization, however, is a much bigger challenge. So we want you to gain a high-level understanding of the rules for applying Discipline 1 organizationally before we move into Discipline 2. This rule acts like a governor on an engine. When you are deeply into the 4 Disciplines of Execution there may be dozens or even hundreds of WIGs across the entire organization, but the key is not to overload any single leader, team, or individual performer.

Remember, they are all dealing with the incessant demands of the whirlwind. Keep this rule in mind as you consider the remaining three rules. If you violate this one, you will have lost your focus as an organization. Rule 2: The battles you choose must win the war. The only reason you fight a battle is to win the war. What about the other major division—the technology team? What role did they play in this revenue WIG?

Did they have any role at all? At first, they felt left out of the WIG. This was a major criterion new customers would use to choose a provider— perhaps the most important criterion. As it turned out, this group had to fight the key battle in achieving the WIG, which in turn cleared the path for the other divisions as well. Once the top-level WIG is chosen, the next question is critical. As you begin to choose the battles to win the war, you have begun to both clarify and simplify your strategy.

This process will be covered in de- tail on page Rule 3: Senior leaders can veto, but not dictate. Without involvement, you cannot create the high levels of commitment that execution requires. While the senior leaders will undoubtedly determine the top-level WIG, they must allow the leaders at each level below to define the WIGs for their teams.

This not only leverages the knowledge of these leaders, but also creates a greater sense of ownership and involvement. Simply put, they become more engaged in a goal that they choose themselves and that supports a worthy organizational goal. Senior leaders then exercise their right to veto if the battles chosen are not going to win the war.

Implementing Discipline 1 enables an organization to quickly turn a broad strategy into clearly defined WIGs at every level. It is not solely a top—down process, but neither is it exclusively bottom—up. In the process, the entire organization mobilizes around the focus that matters most and takes ownership for driving the result.

Every WIG at every level must contain a clearly measure- able result, as well as the date by which that result must be achieved. As deceptively simple as this formula may seem, many leaders often struggle to translate their strategic con- cepts into a single from X to Y by when finish line.

Typically, however, goals lack this kind of clarity. The formula from X to Y by when makes that possible. That said, remember that a WIG is not a strategy. A WIG is a tactical goal with a limited time frame. Use your own judgment. Just remember that a WIG should be within a time frame that balances the need to create a compelling vision with the need to create an achievable goal. They also lacked the results that the Soviet Union was producing.

But in , President John F. Just a glance at this table 9 shows the difference between conven- tional organizational goals and a true WIG. So, what kind of results were these objectives driving for NASA? Russia went into space first with satellites and cosmonauts while the United States was still blowing up rockets on launchpads. Contrast the goals with the goal: one clear, measur- able WIG.

Now, with its reputation at stake on the world stage, NASA had to determine the few key battles that would win that war. In the end, three critical battles were chosen: navigation, propul- sion, and life support.

Why choose this as our goal? That goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win. What do you think happened to accountability within NASA when the challenge of putting a man on the moon was publicly an- nounced? It went through the roof. This is particularly clear when you remember that the spacecraft they would use had only a tiny frac- tion of the computing power of the smartphone in your pocket.

Even worse, the engineers and scientists still had no operational technology for winning the three necessary battles. Now, consider a different question: When accountability soared, what happened to morale and engagement? It, too, went through the roof. Most leaders find this surprising. We tend to think that when accountability is at its highest, the pressure makes morale go down.

The reality is the opposite: Narrowing your focus increases both ac- countability and the engagement of your team. When a team moves from having a dozen we-really-hope goals to one or two no-matter-what goals, the effect on morale is dramatic. When President Kennedy said to the moon and back by the end of the decade, he threw that switch. Even though you still have to deal with the whirlwind and its myriad demands, you also have a finish line, something clear and important at which you can win.

And, when times are tough, they want it even more. When we started on this journey years ago, we did not intend to focus on defining or even refining strategy.

However, we quickly learned that the line separating strategy and execution is blurry. Ap- plying this first discipline will sharpen your strategy more than you think it will. But what it will really do is make your strategy execut- able.

Your bubble is complicated and chaotic. The four rules for implementing Discipline 1, outlined above, give an entire organization a framework for doing this successfully. For more examples and process steps, see sections 2 and 3. At some point, you will want to cheat on them, even just a little. We know. We often want to do the same inside our organization. They simply yield pre- dictable consequences. He grasped as many as he could possibly hold, but when he tried to pull out his hand, he found the neck of the pot was too narrow.

Un- willing to lose his catch, and yet unable to withdraw his hand, he burst into tears and bitterly lamented his disappointment. Discipline 2 is the discipline of leverage. Discipline 2 then defines the leveraged actions that will enable the team to achieve that goal.

The illustration below shows the relationship between lag measures and lead measures at the team level. While a lag measure is hard to do anything about, a lead measure is virtually within your control. And, the more you act on the lead measure, the more likely you are to avoid that roadside breakdown.

Once you have defined your wildly important goal it would seem natural, even intuitive, to then create a detailed plan listing all of the specific tasks and sub tasks required for achieving the goal in the coming months. Long-term plans created by most organizations are often too rigid. Not surprisingly, they also end up on your shelf collecting dust after only a few months.

With Discipline 2, you do something quite different from that. Discipline 2 requires you to define the daily or weekly measures, the achievement of which will lead to the goal. Then, each day or week, your team identifies the most important actions that will drive those lead measures. In this way, your team is creating a just-in-time plan that enables them to quickly adapt, while remaining focused on the WIG.

A lag measure is the measurement of a result you are trying to achieve. We call them lag measures because by the time you get the data the re- sult has already happened; they are always lagging. The whirlwind is full of lag measures such as revenue, accounts payable, inventory numbers, hospitalization rates, asset utilization, and so forth. Lead measures are different; they foretell the result. They have two primary characteristics.

First, a lead measure is predictive, mean- ing that if the lead measure changes, you can predict that the lag mea- sure also will change. That is, the team can make a lead measure happen without a significant dependence on another team. In Discipline 2, you create lead measures, the movement of which will become the driving force for achieving the WIG.

We strongly believe that understanding lead measures will be one of the most important insights you take from this book. You know that rainfall is an important factor in corn production, so rainfall can be predictive of the corn harvest. But is it a good lead measure? Rainfall fails the test because both characteristics are equally important. Other measures, such as soil quality or fertilization rates, however, easily meet the test. Now take another illustration with which many people are inti- mately familiar: a WIG of achieving weight loss.

Obviously, the lag measure will be your weight as reflected by the bathroom scale. Just as important, how- ever, these two lead measures are also directly influenceable by you. Achieve these two lead measures at the level specified, outside your daily whirlwind, and you will see your lag measure moving when you step on the bathroom scale.

Where do leaders normally fixate, on lead measures or on lag measures? Think about your last meeting with the other leaders in your organization. What were you discussing, analyzing, planning, and agonizing about? Lag measures and, usually, your inability to move them. Often, they obsess over these lag measures. The school might hire tutors or reserve more time for uninterrupted reading. In any case, the school is likely to do better if it tracks data on time spent reading or in tutoring lead measures rather than hope and pray that the reading scores lag measures will rise of their own accord.

We see this syndrome every day all over the world and in every area of life. And, in virtually every case, fixating solely on the lag measures fails to drive results. There are two reasons almost all leaders do this. Second, data on lag measures is almost always much easier to obtain and more visible than data on lead measures. That data is often hard to get, and it can take real discipline to keep getting it. Without lead mea- sures, you are left to try to manage to the lag measures, an approach that seldom produces significant results.

Imagine this scenario: You and your team have been working hard on a goal to improve customer satisfac- tion. Now, imagine instead that you are tracking the two most predictive lead measures of customer satisfaction, and for the past three weeks your team has performed well above the standard on those measures. Do you think your experience will change when the new customer sat- isfaction results arrive?

It will be like stepping on the scale knowing that you have met your diet and exercise measures every day. You already know that the lag measure will change. The plant had been struggling to meet its targeted water production levels for several years and the leaders were anxious to identify the lead measures that would drive water production to new levels. We began by asking them to discuss what they thought a good lead measure for increasing annual water production would be.

They seemed confused. It is still a lag. Those are the two main things that keep us from producing more water. Everyone in the room agreed with his diagnosis. Quickly, they identified their first lead measure: Increase per- centage of shifts with full crews from 80 percent to 95 percent.

The sec- ond lead measure was even easier: Increase percentage of compliance to preventive maintenance schedules from 72 percent to percent. Their strategic bet was that if the plant ensured full crews and a reduction in machine downtime, it would achieve a significant in- crease in water production.

Over the next few months, the teams put a disproportionate amount of effort into those two lead measures, above their day-to-day whirlwind. Not only did their water produc- tion increase, it grew at a rate far greater than expected. There were dozens of things that needed improvement and focus, not just crew staffing and pre- ventive maintenance; and by trying to improve everything, they re- mained trapped in their whirlwind.

They spent every day spreading their energy across so many urgent priorities and trying to move all the dials at once that in the end, nothing moved. Obviously, this problem is not unique to the leaders in this plant. If we followed you around for a few days we would likely observe two predominant activities. One, you would spend most of your time bat- tling your whirlwind, and two, a lot of your remaining time would be spent worrying over your lag measures.

The problem with these two activities is that they consume enormous energy and produce little, if any, leverage beyond sustaining your whirlwind. The key principle behind lead measures is simply this: leverage. Lead measures act like a lever, making it possible to move that rock. Now consider the two primary characteristics of a lever. Look around you. Who else has achieved this goal or something like it?

What did they do differently? Use your imagination. What 20 percent of what you do has as much or more leverage on the WIG than 80 percent of what you do? A small portion of activity will always be terrifically effective. A distinguished high-end department store at the prestigious Phipps Plaza Mall near Atlanta was under heavy pressure from new competitors—discounters as well as two major national chain stores that had recently moved into the area. Revenues were down 8 percent from the previous year.

Adopting 4DX, the store managers announced only one WIG for the year, which was to match revenue numbers from the year before through increasing average transaction rates the amount purchased in any given transaction.

Sell more! We worked late one night with the manager of the shoe depart- ment, which seemed to be doing better than the other departments. How do they sell? Then she would bring out six pairs of shoes instead of one pair to show the customer. I noticed your Gucci bag will go really well with those sandals. You like those red shoes? How about these? All you need to do is sign here. How many pairs of shoes do your people show in a day? How would our systems monitor that?

Your people will track themselves. Each time a salesperson did these three things with a customer, he or she would check off a column. Besides, a fraud would surface even- tually. Transaction averages were tracked for every employee. When the lead measures started moving the lag measure, they would be able to see the correlation. The sales team became maniacally focused on the three lead measures, and these levers worked. It was exciting when the lag measure started to move up—it turned out there was a direct correlation between the leads and the achievement of the lag measure.

That was a ten-point improvement in three months. For the store managers, the doorway of understanding opened. None of the lead measures were news to them. We knew they could measure that behavior. We have learned that the lead measures are usually already there in the business, but no one is tracking them. Management was swimming in data, but not focusing on the data that would really make a difference. The key is to isolate and consistently track the right levers.

They could see if Jane was showing one hundred or three hundred pairs of shoes per day. They could track the number of charge accounts each salesperson set up. Their energy went up, and their results followed.

They will never manage the same way again. Of course, at times it may take some intense effort to identify the lead measures with the most leverage. An intriguing example comes from the amazing turnaround of the Oakland Athletics, in the s one of the poorest teams in Major League Baseball.

The team played in a dilapidated stadium, atten- dance was low, and signing great players seemed more and more out of reach. No way could they bid successfully for players against wealthy teams like the New York Yankees, who could dip into a budget five times that of Oakland.

But how? He knew that people come to watch baseball for many reasons: Some want to see star players, some enjoy the atmosphere of the ball- park, and some just want a night out. But people always come to see a winning team. So, he began to ask himself what really produces wins in base- ball.

No one had asked this question seriously before. Most people assumed that great players were essential to a winning team. But, Alderson thought, suppose there were more to it? He and his assistant manager Billy Beane brought together the best thinkers they could find on the subject: What produces wins? The answer, of course, is the highest number of runs, but what exactly contributes to runs?

What are the lead measures that create a run? Their hard research began to serve up factors that had always been there but that no one had ever noticed before.

The most productive players were the ones who could just get on base. If they could get to one base and then another and then another, they could score runs much more reliably than the power hitters everyone valued so much, and who commanded astronomical salaries. As in the old fable, the tortoises turned out to provide much more leverage than the hares.

After Alderson left, Billy Beane became the new manager. He did the unthinkable, going on a binge of recruiting nobodies. The play- ers he hired were some of the most awkward and unvalued prospects, and he paid relatively little for them.

Oakland became a laughing- stock. What was Beane thinking? Then, a sort of magic developed on the field. Unaccountably, Oakland started winning games again. The poorest team in the league—at least financially—won the division title.

The next year they did it again. Stirred by victory, the fans returned, and little Oakland with its dingy stadium consistently fin- ished near the top of the standings year after year.

Instead of falling to the bottom where they belonged, they rarely stood lower than first or second in their division. What Billy Beane did was to track the on-base record of players across the league and then recruit from those who were very good at getting on base. But they were de- pendable workhorses who could be relied on to get on base.

Getting on base was the best predictor of producing runs. And, in baseball, runs are the name of the game. The Oakland management team reframed the game by acting on the lead measures that produce wins. The bigger the rock, the more leverage you will need.

Not only did each incident mean that a member of their crew was hurt, it also meant a delay in the completion of a tightly sched- uled construction project, increased insurance rates, and potentially, the loss of their safety rating.

Once the WIG was established, they had to determine the lead measures that were both predictive of fewer accidents and influence- able by the team. The first idea they considered was to conduct more intensive safety training. It was highly influenceable, as they could simply make everyone go to more training.

The leaders ultimately rejected that idea, however, since their people had already undergone signifi- cant amounts of training that had allowed them to achieve their cur- rent levels of safety. They decided to measure compliance via six safety standards: wear- ing hard hats, gloves, boots, and eyewear, as well as using scaffolds and roof braces to keep workers from sliding off the roof.

They were certain that enforcing these six standards at high levels of compliance would be both predictive and influenceable in reducing accidents. One of the most challenging aspects of their lead measure was simply getting the data.

The lead measure, compliance to safety standards, had to be physically observed. This meant that construction foremen had to move among the various crews to check whether the people were wearing their hard hats, gloves, and safety glasses and that scaffolds and roof braces were firmly in place.

Moreover, they had to do this despite a never-ending stream of distractions: subcontractor issues, late shipments, customer concerns, and weather delays. However, because reducing safety incidents was the wildly important goal, and because safety compliance was the primary leverage point for achieving it, they made it happen week after week.

The lesson in this story is that lead measure data is almost always more difficult to acquire than lag measure data, but you must pay the price to track your lead measures. The WIG for every airline flight is a safe landing. In the s many serious airplane crashes were caused by pilot error. In , Major Pete Hill, a very experienced test pilot with the US Army, crashed one of the biggest airplanes ever built because he forgot to make sure the tail elevators were unlocked before taking off.

As a result, pilots got together and adopted a clear set of lead measures called a preflight checklist. Today, the preflight checklist is the great- est predictor of arriving safely. On modern commercial aircraft, the checklist is often automated so the plane cannot take off until the pilot has checked off each item.

The preflight checklist is a perfect example of what we mean by a high-leverage activity. Going through the checklist takes a few min- utes but can have enormous impact. One hundred percent compli- ance with the checklist is also an excellent example of a lead measure: It is predictive of a safe landing and influenceable by the pilots.

Driving the lead measures for a single WIG is a challenging enough objective in the midst of your whirlwind. Leaders who insist on more than two WIGs in Dis- cipline 1 despite our advice always change their minds once they begin to understand lead measures in Discipline 2. I run the bakery.

But none of these things are true. Sometimes, the choice of a WIG is obvious, but at other times it can be confusing. Because the urgent priorities in your whirlwind are always competing to be the most important and a very good argument can usually be made for choosing any one of them. Have you ever had one of your people seriously hurt in an accident? The problem in this conversation is that the leaders are asking the wrong question.

And once you stop worrying about everything else going backward, you can start moving forward on your WIG. In the words of Discipline 1, you can focus on the wildly important. Your wildly important goal will come from one of two categories: either from within the whirlwind or from outside it.

Poor project completion time, out-of-control costs, or unsatisfactory customer service are all good examples. However, it could also be an area in which your team is already performing well and where leveraging this strength could result in significant impact. Outside the whirlwind, the choices tend to be about repositioning yourself strategically.

Launching a new product or service, either to counter a competitive threat or seize a huge opportunity, could be a WIG that would make all the difference. Remember that this type of WIG will require an even greater change in behavior, since it will be completely new to your team.

In essence, once a WIG is achieved, it goes back into the whirlwind. Every time this happens, the whirlwind changes. Ultimately, this is what enables your team to pursue the next WIG from a stronger foundation. We got to work with the new president of a large thrift-store chain just as he was asking himself these questions. His predecessor had put the company on a firm financial and operational footing, updating marketing and advertising, the look and feel of the stores, and the accounting procedures.

When we got into the WIG discussion, some of his reports thought this emphasis needed to continue. Others wanted more emphasis on hiring more disabled workers.

The range of choices was baffling. They helped thousands become self- reliant and find a new sense of self-worth, while sustaining the day-to-day financial and operational results that made their mission possible. This in itself is a huge challenge. Narrowing the focus for an entire organization or even a large portion of an organization, however, is a much bigger challenge. Rule 1: No team focuses on more than two WIGs at the same time.

This rule acts like a governor on an engine. When you are deeply into the 4 Disciplines of Execution there may be dozens or even hundreds of WIGs across the entire organization, but the key is not to overload any single leader, team, or individual performer. Remember, they are all dealing with the incessant demands of the whirlwind. Keep this rule in mind as you consider the remaining three rules.

If you violate this one, you will have lost your focus as an organization. Rule 2: The battles you choose must win the war. The only reason you fight a battle is to win the war. What about the other major division—the technology team? What role did they play in this revenue WIG? Did they have any role at all? At first, they felt left out of the WIG. After some careful research, they determined that the most impactful lower- level WIG they could set for themselves would be to improve their record for continuous, uninterrupted service.

This was a major criterion new customers would use to choose a provider—perhaps the most important criterion. As it turned out, this group had to fight the key battle in achieving the WIG, which in turn cleared the path for the other divisions as well.

Once the top-level WIG is chosen, the next question is critical. As you begin to choose the battles to win the war, you have begun to both clarify and simplify your strategy.

This process will be covered in detail on page Rule 3: Senior leaders can veto, but not dictate. Without involvement, you cannot create the high levels of commitment that execution requires. While the senior leaders will undoubtedly determine the top- level WIG, they must allow the leaders at each level below to define the WIGs for their teams.

This not only leverages the knowledge of these leaders, but also creates a greater sense of ownership and involvement. Simply put, they become more engaged in a goal that they choose themselves and that supports a worthy organizational goal.

Senior leaders then exercise their right to veto if the battles chosen are not going to win the war. Implementing Discipline 1 enables an organization to quickly turn a broad strategy into clearly defined WIGs at every level.

It is not solely a top-down process, but neither is it exclusively bottom-up. In the process, the entire organization mobilizes around the focus that matters most and takes ownership for driving the result. Every WIG at every level must contain a clearly measurable result, as well as the date by which that result must be achieved.

Typically, however, goals lack this kind of clarity. The formula from X to Y by when makes that possible. That said, remember that a WIG is not a strategy. A WIG is a tactical goal with a limited time frame. Use your own judgment. They also lacked the results that the Soviet Union was producing.

But in , President John F. Just a glance at this table9 shows the difference between conventional organizational goals and a true WIG.

The improvement of the usefulness, performance, speed, safety, and efficiency of aeronautical and space vehicles; 3. The development and operation of vehicles capable of carrying instruments, equipment, supplies, and living organisms through space; 4. The establishment of long-range studies of the potential benefits to be gained from, the opportunities for, and the problems involved in the utilization of aeronautical and space activities for peaceful and scientific purposes; 5.

The preservation of the role of the United States as a leader in aeronautical and space science and technology and in the application thereof to the conduct of peaceful activities within and outside the atmosphere; 6.

Cooperation by the United States with other nations and groups of nations in work done pursuant to this Act and in the peaceful application of the results thereof; 8. The most effective utilization of the scientific and engineering resources of the United States, with close cooperation among all interested agencies of the United States, with close cooperation among all interested agencies of the united states in order to avoid unnecessary duplication of effort, facilities and equipment.

So, what kind of results were these objectives driving for NASA? Contrast the goals with the goal: one clear, measurable WIG. Now, with its reputation at stake on the world stage, NASA had to determine the few key battles that would win that war. In the end, three critical battles were chosen: navigation, propulsion, and life support. Navigation posed the formidable challenge of moving a spacecraft through space at eighteen miles per second to a precise location on the moon, which was also moving rapidly in its elliptical orbit around Earth.

Why choose this as our goal? What do you think happened to accountability within NASA when the challenge of putting a man on the moon was publicly announced? It went through the roof. This is particularly clear when you remember that the spacecraft they would use had only a tiny fraction of the computing power of the smartphone in your pocket. Even worse, the engineers and scientists still had no operational technology for winning the three necessary battles.

Looking back, you might say human beings had no business being on the moon in Now, consider a different question: When accountability soared, what happened to morale and engagement? It, too, went through the roof.

Most leaders find this surprising. We tend to think that when accountability is at its highest, the pressure makes morale go down. The reality is the opposite: Narrowing your focus increases both accountability and the engagement of your team. When President Kennedy said to the moon and back by the end of the decade, he threw that switch. Even though you still have to deal with the whirlwind and its myriad demands, you also have a finish line, something clear and important at which you can win.

Everyone wants to feel that they are winning and that they are contributing to something meaningful. And, when times are tough, they want it even more. When we started on this journey years ago, we did not intend to focus on defining or even refining strategy.

However, we quickly learned that the line separating strategy and execution is blurry. Applying this first discipline will sharpen your strategy more than you think it will. But what it will really do is make your strategy executable. Your bubble is complicated and chaotic. This is why Discipline 1 requires you to translate your strategy from concepts to targets, from a vague strategic intent to a set of specific finish lines. The four rules for implementing Discipline 1, outlined above, give an entire organization a framework for doing this successfully.

For more examples and process steps, see sections 2 and 3. Discipline 1 provides clear, unmistakable finish lines so people know exactly what success looks like. Finally, remember that the four rules of focus are unforgiving.

At some point, you will want to cheat on them, even just a little. We know. They simply yield predictable consequences. He grasped as many as he could possibly hold, but when he tried to pull out his hand, he found the neck of the pot was too narrow. Unwilling to lose his catch, and yet unable to withdraw his hand, he burst into tears and bitterly lamented his disappointment.

Like the boy, you might find it hard to let go of a lot of good goals until you start serving a greater goal. Discipline 2: Act on the Lead Measures The second discipline is to apply disproportionate energy to the activities that drive your lead measures. This provides the leverage for achieving the lag measures. Discipline 2 is the discipline of leverage.

Discipline 1 takes the wildly important goal for an organization and breaks it down into a set of specific, measurable targets until every team has a wildly important goal that it can own.

Discipline 2 then defines the leveraged actions that will enable the team to achieve that goal. The illustration below shows the relationship between lag measures and lead measures at the team level.

While a lag measure is hard to do anything about, a lead measure is virtually within your control. And, the more you act on the lead measure, the more likely you are to avoid that roadside breakdown. Once you have defined your wildly important goal it would seem natural, even intuitive, to then create a detailed plan listing all of the specific tasks and sub tasks required for achieving the goal in the coming months.

Long-term plans created by most organizations are often too rigid. Not surprisingly, they also end up on your shelf collecting dust after only a few months. With Discipline 2, you do something quite different from that. Discipline 2 requires you to define the daily or weekly measures, the achievement of which will lead to the goal.

Then, each day or week, your team identifies the most important actions that will drive those lead measures. In this way, your team is creating a just-in-time plan that enables them to quickly adapt, while remaining focused on the WIG. These are the high- the sales numbers, pounds lost. Bite your nails while the lag measures to move. A lag measure is the measurement of a result you are trying to achieve.

We call them lag measures because by the time you get the data the result has already happened; they are always lagging. The whirlwind is full of lag measures such as revenue, accounts payable, inventory numbers, hospitalization rates, asset utilization, and so forth. Lead measures are different; they foretell the result. They have two primary characteristics. First, a lead measure is predictive, meaning that if the lead measure changes, you can predict that the lag measure also will change.

Second, a lead measure is influenceable; it can be directly influenced by the team. That is, the team can make a lead measure happen without a significant dependence on another team. In the months ahead, your team will invest consistent energy toward moving these lead measures and, as we have seen with hundreds of teams, this investment will be the key to their success. We strongly believe that understanding lead measures will be one of the most important insights you take from this book.

You know that rainfall is an important factor in corn production, so rainfall can be predictive of the corn harvest. But is it a good lead measure? Rainfall fails the test because both characteristics are equally important. Other measures, such as soil quality or fertilization rates, however, easily meet the test. Now take another illustration with which many people are intimately familiar: a WIG of achieving weight loss. Obviously, the lag measure will be your weight as reflected by the bathroom scale.

This is a good start, but what are the lead measures that will be predictive of achieving the goal and, equally important, that you can influence? Just as important, however, these two lead measures are also directly influenceable by you.

Achieve these two lead measures at the level specified, outside your daily whirlwind, and you will see your lag measure moving when you step on the bathroom scale. Where do leaders normally fixate, on lead measures or on lag measures? Think about your last meeting with the other leaders in your organization.

What were you discussing, analyzing, planning, and agonizing about? Lag measures and, usually, your inability to move them. Often, they obsess over these lag measures. The school might hire tutors or reserve more time for uninterrupted reading. In any case, the school is likely to do better if it tracks data on time spent reading or in tutoring lead measures rather than hope and pray that the reading scores lag measures will rise of their own accord.

We see this syndrome every day all over the world and in every area of life. And, in virtually every case, fixating solely on the lag measures fails to drive results. There are two reasons almost all leaders do this. First, lag measures are the measures of success; they are the results you have to achieve.

Second, data on lag measures is almost always much easier to obtain and more visible than data on lead measures. That data is often hard to get, and it can take real discipline to keep getting it. Imagine this scenario: You and your team have been working hard on a goal to improve customer satisfaction. Now, imagine instead that you are tracking the two most predictive lead measures of customer satisfaction, and for the past three weeks your team has performed well above the standard on those measures.

Do you think your experience will change when the new customer satisfaction results arrive? It will be like stepping on the scale knowing that you have met your diet and exercise measures every day.

You already know that the lag measure will change. The plant had been struggling to meet its targeted water production levels for several years and the leaders were anxious to identify the lead measures that would drive water production to new levels.

We began by asking them to discuss what they thought a good lead measure for increasing annual water production would be. They seemed confused. It is still a lag. To help, we asked them what their lead measure would be for monthly water production.

Those are the two main things that keep us from producing more water. Everyone in the room agreed with his diagnosis. Quickly, they identified their first lead measure: Increase percentage of shifts with full crews from 80 percent to 95 percent. The second lead measure was even easier: Increase percentage of compliance to preventive maintenance schedules from 72 percent to percent. Their strategic bet was that if the plant ensured full crews and a reduction in machine downtime, it would achieve a significant increase in water production.

Over the next few months, the teams put a disproportionate amount of effort into those two lead measures, above their day-to-day whirlwind. Not only did their water production increase, it grew at a rate far greater than expected.

This is a good illustration of the process for defining lead measures, but it also helps to make an important point. There were dozens of things that needed improvement and focus, not just crew staffing and preventive maintenance; and by trying to improve everything, they remained trapped in their whirlwind. They spent every day spreading their energy across so many urgent priorities and trying to move all the dials at once that in the end, nothing moved.

Obviously, this problem is not unique to the leaders in this plant. If we followed you around for a few days we would likely observe two predominant activities. One, you would spend most of your time battling your whirlwind, and two, a lot of your remaining time would be spent worrying over your lag measures. The problem with these two activities is that they consume enormous energy and produce little, if any, leverage beyond sustaining your whirlwind.

The key principle behind lead measures is simply this: leverage. Lead measures act like a lever, making it possible to move that rock. Now consider the two primary characteristics of a lever. How do you choose the right levers? Look around you. Who else has achieved this goal or something like it? What did they do differently? Analyze carefully any barriers you foresee and decide together how to overcome them. Use your imagination. What 20 percent of what you do has as much or more leverage on the WIG than 80 percent of what you do?

A small portion of activity will always be terrifically effective. A distinguished high-end department store at the prestigious Phipps Plaza Mall near Atlanta was under heavy pressure from new competitors—discounters as well as two major national chain stores that had recently moved into the area.

Revenues were down 8 percent from the previous year. What to do to stop the bleeding? Adopting 4DX, the store managers announced only one WIG for the year, which was to match revenue numbers from the year before through increasing average transaction rates the amount purchased in any given transaction.

Sell more! We worked late one night with the manager of the shoe department, which seemed to be doing better than the other departments. How do they sell? Then she would bring out six pairs of shoes instead of one pair to show the customer. I noticed your Gucci bag will go really well with those sandals.

You like those red shoes? How about these? All you need to do is sign here. How many pairs of shoes do your people show in a day? How would our systems monitor that? Your people will track themselves. Each time a salesperson did these three things with a customer, he or she would check off a column. Besides, a fraud would surface eventually. Transaction averages were tracked for every employee. When the lead measures started moving the lag measure, they would be able to see the correlation.

The sales team became maniacally focused on the three lead measures, and these levers worked. It was exciting when the lag measure started to move up—it turned out there was a direct correlation between the leads and the achievement of the lag measure. That was a ten-point improvement in three months. For the store managers, the doorway of understanding opened. None of the lead measures were news to them.

We knew they could measure that behavior. We have learned that the lead measures are usually already there in the business, but no one is tracking them. Management was swimming in data, but not focusing on the data that would really make a difference. The key is to isolate and consistently track the right levers. They could see if Jane was showing one hundred or three hundred pairs of shoes per day. They could track the number of charge accounts each salesperson set up.

They became teachers, watching people, demonstrating how to do suggestive selling and sharing best practices. Their energy went up, and their results followed. They will never manage the same way again.

Of course, at times it may take some intense effort to identify the lead measures with the most leverage. An intriguing example comes from the amazing turnaround of the Oakland Athletics, in the s one of the poorest teams in Major League Baseball. The team played in a dilapidated stadium, attendance was low, and signing great players seemed more and more out of reach.

No way could they bid successfully for players against wealthy teams like the New York Yankees, who could dip into a budget five times that of Oakland. But how?

He knew that people come to watch baseball for many reasons: Some want to see star players, some enjoy the atmosphere of the ballpark, and some just want a night out. But people always come to see a winning team. So, he began to ask himself what really produces wins in baseball. No one had asked this question seriously before. Most people assumed that great players were essential to a winning team. But, Alderson thought, suppose there were more to it?

He and his assistant manager Billy Beane brought together the best thinkers they could find on the subject: What produces wins? The answer, of course, is the highest number of runs, but what exactly contributes to runs? Their hard research began to serve up factors that had always been there but that no one had ever noticed before. They discovered that the mighty sluggers who hit home runs were often not all that productive. The most productive players were the ones who could just get on base.

If they could get to one base and then another and then another, they could score runs much more reliably than the power hitters everyone valued so much, and who commanded astronomical salaries. As in the old fable, the tortoises turned out to provide much more leverage than the hares.

After Alderson left, Billy Beane became the new manager. He did the unthinkable, going on a binge of recruiting nobodies.

The players he hired were some of the most awkward and unvalued prospects, and he paid relatively little for them. Oakland became a laughingstock. What was Beane thinking? Then, a sort of magic developed on the field. Unaccountably, Oakland started winning games again. The poorest team in the league—at least financially—won the division title. The next year they did it again. Soon they were locked in battle with the mighty, wealthy, Yankees for the pennant.

Stirred by victory, the fans returned, and little Oakland with its dingy stadium consistently finished near the top of the standings year after year. Instead of falling to the bottom where they belonged, they rarely stood lower than first or second in their division.

What Billy Beane did was to track the on-base record of players across the league and then recruit from those who were very good at getting on base. But they were dependable workhorses who could be relied on to get on base. Getting on base was the best predictor of producing runs. And, in baseball, runs are the name of the game. The Oakland management team reframed the game by acting on the lead measures that produce wins.

Through hard research, sifting through endless statistics to get at the key factors that produced runs, they discovered high- leverage lead measures no one had noticed before.

The bigger the rock, the more leverage you will need. Not only did each incident mean that a member of their crew was hurt, it also meant a delay in the completion of a tightly scheduled construction project, increased insurance rates, and potentially, the loss of their safety rating. Once the WIG was established, they had to determine the lead measures that were both predictive of fewer accidents and influenceable by the team.

The first idea they considered was to conduct more intensive safety training. It was highly influenceable, as they could simply make everyone go to more training. The leaders ultimately rejected that idea, however, since their people had already undergone significant amounts of training that had allowed them to achieve their current levels of safety.

The leaders at Younger Brothers then looked more carefully at the primary causes of accidents plaguing the company and developed a different idea for their lead measure: Compliance to safety standards. They decided to measure compliance via six safety standards: wearing hard hats, gloves, boots, and eyewear, as well as using scaffolds and roof braces to keep workers from sliding off the roof.

Within one year of focusing on the lead measure of compliance to safety standards Younger Brothers Construction achieved the best safety record in the thirty-year history of the company. One of the most challenging aspects of their lead measure was simply getting the data. The lead measure, compliance to safety standards, had to be physically observed.

This meant that construction supervisors had to move among the various crews to check whether the people were wearing their hard hats, gloves, and safety glasses and that scaffolds and roof braces were firmly in place. However, because reducing safety incidents was the wildly important goal, and because safety compliance was the primary leverage point for achieving it, they made it happen week after week. The lesson in this story is that lead measure data is almost always more difficult to acquire than lag measure data, but you must pay the price to track your lead measures.

The WIG for every airline flight is a safe landing. In the s many serious airplane crashes were caused by pilot error. In , Major Pete Hill, a very experienced test pilot with the US Army, crashed one of the biggest airplanes ever built because he forgot to make sure the tail elevators were unlocked before taking off.

As a result, pilots got together and adopted a clear set of lead measures called a preflight checklist. Today, the preflight checklist is the greatest predictor of arriving safely. The preflight checklist is a perfect example of what we mean by a high- leverage activity. Going through the checklist takes a few minutes but can have enormous impact.

One hundred percent compliance with the checklist is also an excellent example of a lead measure: It is predictive of a safe landing and influenceable by the pilots. Driving the lead measures for a single WIG is a challenging enough objective in the midst of your whirlwind.

Leaders who insist on more than two WIGs in Discipline 1 despite our advice always change their minds once they begin to understand lead measures in Discipline 2.

Beth called in Bob, her bakery manager, to get his support in improving their sagging year-over-year sales numbers. I run the bakery. But none of these things are true. Bob actually likes Beth and would also like to help the store improve sales. And Beth wants me to improve store sales? Bob is representative of so many people.

They can see the rock all too well. They begin to discuss a lot of possibilities, such as raising customer service, improving store conditions, or giving away more free samples.

After a lot of back and forth, they finally come to the agreement that the single biggest thing they can do to improve sales in their store is to reduce the number of out-of-stock items. This lead measure of reducing out-of-stocks is highly predictive of better store sales—this is well known in the retail world. Equally important, out-of-stocks is a highly influenceable lead measure.

Now, Bob sees what he can do in the bakery to drive sales. Reducing out-of-stocks is something he and his team can really influence. They can perform extra shelf reviews to check for items that are sold out, they can organize their back room so that fast moving products are easier to restock, or they can change the frequency and volume of reordering.

When a team defines its lead measures they are making a strategic bet. Disciplines 3 and 4 are designed to help the team put energy into moving the lead measures. However, the real impact and beauty of good lead measures in Discipline 2 is that they truly connect your team to the achievement of the WIG. Coming up with the right lead measures is really about helping everyone see themselves as strategic business partners and engaging them in dialogue about what can be done better or differently in order to achieve the WIGs.

When we met with them, their WIG was to close a serious revenue gap. They had fallen into the trap of trying to focus on everything at once, including pushing new products, daily inserts specials, and other add-ons, in an attempt to incrementally move the revenue number. Their focus was spread across so many initiatives that they had taken their eye off of their main product.

So, they began with Discipline 1, setting a wildly important goal to increase advertising revenue by refocusing on their core product. Everything changed when they started practicing Discipline 2: Act on the lead measures. Everybody on the team was involved in the dialogue. In practice, the plan broke down into simple lead measures: in the weekly WIG sessions people committed to hit a certain number of new-customer contacts, reactivation calls, and upsell offers.

The next week they reported the results. Individual salespeople were not only managing their own business more effectively, but also regularly communicating to each other best practices, refinements to approaches, and ways of overcoming barriers. The newspaper closed their revenue gap and shot past their goals for the year. Acting consistently on the right lead measures made it all possible.

Based on her success, Morris Communications, the parent company of the Savannah Morning News, went on to implement 4DX with their forty other newspapers. Discipline 3: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard The third discipline is to make sure everyone knows the score at all times, so that they can tell whether or not they are winning. This is the discipline of engagement. Remember, people play differently when they are keeping score. The difference in performance between a team that simply understands their lead and lag measures as a concept, and a team that actually knows their score, is remarkable.

If the lead and lag measures are not captured on a visual scoreboard and updated regularly, they will disappear into the distraction of the whirlwind. In Discipline 3, the strategic bet for your team, their lead and lag measures, are translated into a visible, compelling scoreboard. Several years ago, we were working with a group of leaders at Northrop Grumman to apply 4DX to the design and building of Coast Guard cutters. Our project began only a few months after Hurricane Katrina had significantly damaged their facility, and as we were introducing Discipline 3, they offered an example that perfectly illustrated the importance of having a compelling scoreboard.

On the previous Friday night, the local high-school team had played an important football game. As expected, the stands were full and there was the usual excitement leading up to the kickoff.

But as the game progressed, something was missing. No one was cheering. In fact, no one seemed to be paying attention to the game at all. The only sound from the stands was the dull hum of conversation. What was happening? The scoreboard had blown down during the hurricane and had not yet been repaired. There was a game going on, but it was like no one even knew.

Great teams know at every moment whether or not they are winning. A compelling scoreboard tells the team where they are and where they should be, information essential to team problem solving and decision making.

Without it, energy dissipates, intensity lags, and the team goes back to business as usual. We need to be very clear here. Visually displaying data is not new to you or your team. In fact, you may be thinking that you already have a scoreboard, or even lots of scoreboards, all captured in complex spreadsheets inside your computer. And the data just keeps coming in. Most of this data is in the form of lag measures accompanied by historical trends, forward projections, and detailed financial analysis.

In five seconds or anyone can easily see it. To understand the impact of this kind of scoreboard, imagine that you are at a park where a group of teenagers is playing basketball. Can you tell, just by watching, if they are keeping score? You can, and the indicators are obvious. These are the behaviors of a fully engaged team, and they only play at this level when the game matters— in other words, when it matters enough that they are keeping score.

Now, we need to shift the emphasis to be even clearer: People play differently when they are keeping score. This creates a very different feeling than when you keep score for them. When team members themselves are keeping score, they truly understand the connection between their performance and reaching their goal, and this changes the level at which they play.

The gray line is actual performance. At any moment, team members can see if they are winning. Is it simple? It has to be simple.

Think about the scoreboard in a football game. Usually, only six distinct pieces of data are displayed: score, time, quarter, down and distance, and time-outs. Now, think about how many pieces of data the coach is tracking on the sideline: yards per carry, completion percentage, third-down conversions, pass distribution, and even hang time and yardage for punts. The list goes on forever.

Coaches need this data to manage the game, but the scoreboard on the field shows only the data needed to play the game. Can I see it easily? It has to be visible to the team. Without a visible scoreboard, the WIG and lead measures could be forgotten in a matter of weeks, if not days, in the constant urgency of your day-to-day responsibilities.

Visibility also drives accountability. The results become personally important to the team when the scoreboard is displayed where it can be seen by everyone. So they can move past other shifts on the scoreboard. In another instance, we observed the night shift come to work at midnight and saw that the first thing they looked at was the scoreboard to see how their team was doing compared to the day shift. If your team is geographically dispersed, the scoreboard should be visible on your desktop computer or mobile phone Fore more on electronic scoreboards see Automating 4DX.

Does it show lead and lag measures? It should show both the lead and lag measures. This really helps a scoreboard come to life. The lead measure is what the team can affect. The lag measure is the result they want. The team needs to see both or they will quickly lose interest. They can see what they are doing the lead , and what they are getting the lag.

Once the team sees that the lag measure is moving because of the efforts they have made on the leads, it has a dramatic effect on engagement because they know they are having a direct impact on the results. It has to tell you immediately if you are winning or losing. Check your next report, graph, scorecard, or scoreboard before you dismiss this as obvious.

Glance at the spreadsheets that show the weekly financial data. Can you instantly tell if you are winning or losing? Could other people tell? We call it the five-second rule. This simple illustration comes from one of our clients, an events management company responsible for booking trade shows for outdoor retailers. The WIG was to book a certain number of exhibitors by a certain date. Winning or losing requires you to know two things: where you are now and where you should be now.

The difference in the scoreboard on the right is the addition of where the team should be, illustrated by the goat. Because so many of their customers were mountain climbers, they used a mountain goat to represent the performance needed each week to achieve their goal. You know that achieving the goal is getting harder, not easier. You know that the performance of the team is starting to level off, instead of climbing.

And you know that the team is closer to the end of the race than the beginning. Their problem is not the absence of data; their problem is too much of it and little sense of what data is most important. Would it change the way they engaged in the game? After implementing 4DX in thousands of teams, we can assure you that it will. Like Disciplines 1 and 2, Discipline 3 is not intuitive for most leaders.

We seldom find even a single scoreboard in most organizations that meets the four criteria listed here. Although teams enjoy creating their own scoreboards, what ultimately drives engagement is the game the scoreboard represents. What an amazing scoreboard! But with 4DX, not only do you create a game for your team, you create a winnable game. And the secret to that game being winnable is the relationship between the lead and lag measures that plays out on the scoreboard every day.

In essence, you and your team make a bet that you can move the lead measures and that those lead measures will move the lag measure. When it starts to work, even people who have shown little interest become very engaged as the entire team starts to see that they are winning, often for the first time.

Some years ago, we were invited to help a low-performing plant run by a global manufacturing company to come up to the quality standards of the rest of the company. The plant was old, struggling with outdated technology, and in a remote location.

For us, it required all-day flights and a long drive to the end of a forest road in Canada to reach the plant. In 25 years, this plant had never hit its targeted production number. Additionally, they had massive quality issues in their work product, particularly with the night shifts that employed the least experienced workers.

The quality score was in the low seventies, while the rest of the company was in the high eighties. With the lights on, they can see what they need to do to improve. A shift would come in at midnight, compare their scoreboard with those of the shifts who had been working all day, and get energized to go beyond whatever the previous shift had done.

This was a hockey-playing culture: For entertainment in this remote locale, there were two hockey rinks and not much else. As 4DX leveraged the natural urge to compete, the quality score soared from 74 to 94, from worst in the fleet to best and far above the industry standard. We learned it through experience. FranklinCovey had built a worldwide reputation for helping to increase the personal effectiveness of individuals and teams, and with it, their morale and engagement.

However, in our early implementations, the increase in engagement that we observed as teams began to feel they were winning was not a subtle thing. It was palpable. In fact, we would have to have been blind to miss it. Our implementations usually involved several days of intensive work with leaders and teams, and these teams included their share of naysayers and resisters. To our surprise, we would return two months later and find that these initial resisters, along with everyone else on the team, were excited to show us what they were accomplishing.

Many believe that engagement drives results, and so do we. However, we know now, and have witnessed consistently over the years, that results drive engagement. This is particularly true when the team can see the direct impact their actions have on the results.

In our experience, nothing affects morale and engagement more powerfully than when a person feels he or she is winning. People will work for money and they will quit over money, but many teams are filled with people who are both well paid and miserable in their jobs. Discipline 1 narrows your focus to a wildly important goal and establishes a clear finish line.

Discipline 2 creates lead measures that give your team leverage to achieve the goal. This is what makes it a game: The team is making a bet on their lead measures. Disciplines 1, 2, and 3 are powerful drivers of execution, and yet, they are really only the beginning of the story. The first three disciplines set up the game, but your team may still not be in the game, as you are about to learn.

Discipline 4: Create a Cadence of Accountability The fourth discipline is to create a cadence of accountability, a frequently recurring cycle of accounting for past performance and planning to move the score forward.

Discipline 4 is where execution actually happens. This is the discipline that brings the team members all together, and that is why it encompasses the other disciplines. Many leaders define execution simply as the ability to set a goal and achieve it. After years of teaching these principles, we can tell you that this definition is insufficient. And it is even more difficult when achieving the goal requires changing the behaviors of a lot of people. Great teams operate with a high level of accountability.

Under this approach, the whirlwind soon takes over. Disciplines 1, 2, and 3 bring focus, clarity, and engagement, which are powerful and necessary elements for your success. But with Discipline 4, you and your team ensure that the goal is achieved, no matter what is happening around you. In most organizations, accountability means the annual performance review, hardly an engaging experience whether you are giving or receiving the review.

It can also mean being called on the carpet for something you failed to accomplish. On the other hand, in a 4DX organization, accountability means making personal commitments to the entire team to move the scores forward and then following through in a disciplined way.

We make commitments always top down. This meeting, which lasts no longer than twenty to thirty minutes, has a set agenda and goes quickly, establishing your weekly rhythm of accountability for driving progress toward the WIG.

This discipline literally makes the difference between successful and failed execution. In May , noted author Jon Krakauer tried climbing Mt. Everest with a group of paying climbers. As they encountered obstacles such as blizzards, 62 mph winds, and high-altitude sickness, the group began to fall apart. Some of the more headstrong climbers decided to try for the summit themselves and struck out on their own.

Team discipline was abandoned. They all had the same goal, but the loss of discipline and sense of accountability for each other in an extremely unforgiving environment turned out to be lethal. The result: eight people died. Everest; their goal was to help a blind climber, Erik Weihenmayer, reach the summit.

The team knew that on summit day they would have to get across in two hours. It took days and days of practice and night after night of tent meetings. On summit day, they actually passed sighted teams as they worked to get the entire team to the other side of the icefall in record time. This cadence of accountability was the key to successful execution of the goal. On May 25, , Erik Weihenmayer became the first blind person to stand on the summit of Mt. In the end, Erik and almost everyone on his team reached the highest peak on the planet and returned safely.

Easy to say, but hard to do. To ensure that this focus is achieved every week, two rules of WIG sessions must absolutely be followed. First, the WIG session should be held on the same day and at the same time every week sometimes even more often—daily, for instance—but never less often than weekly.

This consistency is critical. Without it, your team will never be able to establish a sustained rhythm of performance. Missing even a single week causes you to lose valuable momentum, and this loss of momentum impacts your results. It is truly amazing what you can accomplish by the simple discipline of meeting around a goal on a weekly basis over an extended period of time.

There is nothing quite like it. What is so special about holding a WIG session each week, you may ask? In many operating environments, weeks represent a natural rhythm of organizational life. We think in weeks. We talk in weeks. They have beginnings and ends. They are a staple of the human condition and make for a perfect cadence of accountability.

Second, the whirlwind is never allowed into a WIG session. No matter how urgent an issue may seem, discussion in the WIG session is limited solely to actions and results that move the scoreboard. This high level of focus makes the WIG session not only fast, but extremely effective at producing the results you want.

It also reaffirms the importance of the WIG to every team member. Many of our client organizations do exactly this: They hold a WIG session for twenty to thirty minutes and then hold a staff meeting right after, during which they can discuss whirlwind issues.

Keeping your WIG sessions to twenty to thirty minutes is a standard to strive for. When you first start holding WIG sessions they may take more time. But, ultimately, as you increasingly focus your time and attention on moving the scoreboard and nothing more, your sessions will become increasingly effective and efficient. We also recognize that depending upon the particular function or nature of your team, they may take a bit more time. Often, to keep your WIG sessions fast and focused, you may need to schedule other meetings to resolve issues that grow out of the WIG session.

WIG sessions might vary in content, but the agenda is always the same. Account: Report on commitments. Review the scoreboard: Learn from successes and failures.

Plan: Clear the path and make new commitments. The commitments represent the things that must happen, beyond the day to day, to move the lead measures. This is why so much emphasis is placed in Discipline 2 on ensuring that the lead measures are influenceable: so that the team can actually move them through their performance each week. By keeping their weekly commitments, team members influence the lead measure, which in turn is predictive of success on the lag measure of the WIG.

Susan can see from her scoreboard that two of her teams, seventh floor day shift and eighth floor intensive care, are lagging behind the others. She knows that the seventh floor team has a new supervisor who is still learning the pain-management procedures. She also knows that the eighth floor team is understaffed. Tom knows that his list of prospects is running low, so for this week his commitment might be to acquire names and contact information for ten additional prospects, ensuring he has enough to successfully move two of them to the proposal stage.

In these two examples, both leaders and team members make weekly commitments More on this in Installing Discipline 4: Create a Cadence of Accountability. The nature of the commitments might change every week because the business, along with the performance of the team, is always changing; only the process is constant. Realize that these weekly commitments are often not urgent or necessarily even new. They often are things the team should be doing naturally, but the reality is that these are the actions the whirlwind devours first.

Without the steady rhythm of accountability of Discipline 4, there will always be things the team members know they should do, but never actually do with real consistency. Monday morning WIG sessions take place in every department of this vast company. The meetings are connected by videophone to remote locations so that everyone will be on the same page at the same time.

Each group production, delivery, human resources, finance, operations, and so forth has scoreboards that are posted around the company and kept constantly updated. Everyone in the company—engineers, miners, even maintenance workers—can recite their team WIGs to you. Remember that the WIG session should move at a fast pace.

If people are running into obstacles keeping their commitments, team members can commit to clear the path for each other.

Remember that the WIG for Younger Brothers was to reduce safety incidents from fifty-seven to twelve by December 31, and their lead measure was compliance to the six safety standards they believed would eliminate the vast majority of accidents.

Imagine that you are a project manager at Younger Brothers responsible for a number of crews. In the WIG session with your boss, you would do three things: 1.

Second, the commitment must influence the lead measure. If the lead measures are influenceable, they can be moved by the weekly commitments. If they are predictive, then moving them will lead to achievement of the WIG.