Planning versus Execution

Why does it happen?

You have selected the best people and you have got really bright ideas how to make your business run. The market needs you and is just waiting for you. Why is your business stuck despite all predictions? Here is where we meet the term execution: right people combined with realistic strategies to modulate an effective operating system. Once a plan is made up, it has to be executed, and the severe control of execution is leader’s primary duty. The leader is assigned to ensure company’s success by observing the way every member of the team is executing his part of the plan.

The wrong put of the stress

Planning versus execution. One thing is to be remembered: plans for success are not success itself! The emphasis on planning by neglecting execution is a too often a mistake made by leaders of even good companies with the highest qualities. Usually the problem is not the error in strategy but the crack between strategy and execution.

In their book dedicated to this topic (Execution. The Discipline of Getting Things Done), Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan mention three key ideas of how execution must be seen: The first one suggests that the execution is a discipline. The authors say that the execution is basic to strategy and must shape it. It happens too often that plans are not dynamic and are not supported by processes and not followed by real results.

The second idea is that the business leader must control execution of plans through an intense dialogue with every member of the team involved. In other words, execution is the job of the leader.

 Execution has to be a part of thinking: “execution has to be embedded in the rewords system and in the norms of behavior”. To make execution possible means to create a collective effort based on a chain reaction theory. A thing to be understood is that an idea does not produce results by itself. Once the idea is announced it has to be elaborated in the smallest details which will assure the following execution. The biggest mistake of lack of execution consists in delegating to someone else than the leader the work of bringing abstract thoughts to fruition.