The 4 Disciplines Of Execution

The 4 Disciplines Of Execution outlines the path that company leaders and individuals must follow to set the right goals and improve behavior to achieve success on a bigger, long-term scale.

Which would you rather have, a lot of peaches that are just okay, or a few of the most giant, juicy, and sweet peaches you’ve ever had?

If you’ve ever had a mediocre peach, you’ll likely know the latter option is far better. But you can’t have the best peaches if you try to make all of them good. That’s why you have to thin the tree so that it focuses on growing only a few to be the best.

Your goals are just the same way. When you set too many, you run out of energy to put into all of them and end up succeeding at none. That’s why you need to prioritize just a single Wildly Important Goal, or WIG.

To find these you have to think and ask yourself the right questions to find out what makes the most difference. A company executive might do this and set the WIG of cutting costs by 20% before the end of the year. As a rule, make them specific and focus only on what has the biggest impact on success.

If you can find a goal to set that will knock down many others you have, that’s a great place to start.

NASA’s experience putting the first man on the moon is a perfect example of how powerful being specific is. Prior to President Kennedy’s declaration in 1961 that they would get to the moon by the end of the decade, the organization wasn’t very specific.

Their initial ambiguous goal was to expand “human knowledge of phenomena in the atmosphere and in space.” Once Kennedy helped them get specific, their success took off, literally!

So the first discipline focuses on what your goals should be. Disciplines two and three describe how you should keep score of your goals in a way that leads to success. To understand how to do this, you’ve got to know the difference between lead and lag measures, which is discipline two. A lag measure is what happens after you put in the work. One example is losing weight. If you only focus on these, however, you’ll end up depressed. That’s why you need to identify the lead measures, or actions that will get you to achieve your lag measures. For our losing weight example, eating healthy and exercising three times a week are good examples of lead measures. Discipline three involves keeping score to help yourself, or your team if you’re a business, remain motivated. Think of kids playing a soccer game.…