Description
Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals
The 4 Disciplines of Execution is about a simple, repeatable, and proven formula for reaching the goals you–as an individual or as part of a team or corporation–just have to reach. Covey calls these wildly important goals, and he takes the listener on a fascinating and profitable exploration of why we so often fail to execute these goals and what can be done to fix this crucial problem.
In his experience, the thing that most undermines the ability to execute is what he calls the Whirlwind–which includes those urgent tasks that must be done simply to keep an organization alive. The Whirlwind occupies the vast majority of every employee’s day; it never goes away and it cannot be ignored.
As Covey shows, the only way to execute on new, important goals is to separate those goals from the Whirlwind–and that’s exactly what the Four Disciplines do. They allow leaders to accomplish what is by far the most difficult aspect of creating breakthrough results: executing a strategy that requires a change in behavior. Only by narrowing the focus of a strategy, insuring that everyone on the team understands the goal, knows what to do to reach it and knows whether progress is being made toward it, will a leader produce consistent breakthrough results all the while sustaining the urgent work being done in the Whirlwind.
The 4 Disciplines of Execution are:
- Focus on the Wildly Important
- Act on the Lead Measures
- Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
- Create a Cadence of Accountability
These Four Disciplines have evolved out of thousands of interviews and consulting projects. For more than a decade FranklinCovey has been studying what it takes to achieve wildly important goals, honing its approach by working more than 13,000 teams and about 200,000 people in hundreds of organizations. Now, they’ll share success stories from a wide range of companies–including Marriott, Kroger, even a famous Navy carrier ship–that have implemented the four disciplines in a way that resulted in greater profits, increased market share, and improved customer satisfaction.
As Covey shows through key success stories, when a company or individual adheres to these disciplines, they uniformly see superb results—regardless of the goal–and this new way of thinking is essential to any company that wants to not only weather, but thrive in this economy.
