The 4 Disciplines of Execution Summary and Review

ABOUT THE BOOK:
Blog Title: The 4 Disciplines of Execution Summary
Book Name: The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals
Author: Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, Jim Huling
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Size: 352 Pages

About Author:

Before talking about the “The 4 Disciplines of Execution Summary” let’s first discuss the book author. Sean Covey is an American business executive, author, speaker and innovator. He is President of FranklinCovey Education. Covey is devoted to transforming education throughout the world through a Principle-centered leadership approach. He is the New York Times Bestselling author. Chris McChesney is the keynote speaker and co-author of the #national best seller book “THE 4 DISCIPLINE OF EXECUTION”. Third Co-author of this book is Jim Huling. He is a FranklinCovey speaker. He is Dynamic, inspirational and authentic. As a CEO, Jim was the one who adopts the 4 discipline of execution and used it to drive performance throughout the entire organization for almost five years. Through these discipline principles, Jim wanted leaders and their team to achieve extraordinary results.

Overview:

The 4 Disciplines of Execution Summary is a simple, repeatable and proven formula for executing for your most important strategic priorities in the midst of the whirlwind. in The 4 Discipline of Execution, the author has mentioned 4 disciplines and by following it you can achieve extraordinary results. Leaders can achieve breakthrough results, even when executing the strategy requires a significant change in behavior from their teams. 4 discipline execution is not a theory its a proven set of practices that have been tested and refined by hundreds of organizations and thousands of teams over many years when team or organization or an individual follow these disciplines, they will for sure get desirable results. 4 discipline execution gives a new way of working and thinking that is essential in today’s working and competitive climate.

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Let’s begin with The 4 Disciplines of Execution Summary:

The 4 Disciplines of Execution Summary, Discipline 1) Focus on wildly important

The first discipline of The 4 Disciplines of Execution Summary asks you to work on your finest effort on the one or two goals that will make all difference, instead of giving mediocre efforts to the dozen of goals, the first discipline says that Execution starts with focus and without focus other three discipline will unable to help you.

Here You are asked to narrow the number of goals which you are attempting to accomplish beyond the day-to-day demand of your whirlwind, Discipline 1 ask you to focus on fewer goals, here author says that narrowing your focus in discipline 1 doesn’t mean narrowing the size and complexity of your whirlwind(here whirlwind means your day job and goals means new activities),  Your whirlwind includes all the urgent activities that are necessary to sustain your business day to day.

Focusing on wildly important means narrowing the number of goals you are attempting to accomplish beyond the day-to-day demand of your whirlwind (as I mentioned whirlwind is your day to day job and goals here means new activities so you are asked to focus on narrowing your goals, should have focused on fewer goals)

Here author says that if a team or group focuses on two or three goals beyond the demand of their whirlwind, then they will often accomplish them, but if they set 10 or 20 goals, then they will achieve only one or two, instead of moving forward they will move backward, if they go for eleven or twentieth goal in addition of their whirlwind( day-to-day job), then their entire focus will be lost, they lose their entire focus.

Now you must be thinking like why this happens, why we can’t focus on more goals along with our day-to-day job, so answer for this is that human beings are genetically hardwired to do one thing at a time with excellence, we can only devote our focus on one thing and can get excellent result by focusing on one thing, for example, Steve Jobs,  would have come up with different products, but he focused only on one product, he focused only on “Wildly important” product and results we all can see, focus on fewer things to get great results.

What is conventional thinking and 4 Discipline of Execution (4DX Thinking)?

Conventional thinking: People with such thinking believe that all their goals come under priority one, and they can succeed by multitasking, and they can complete 20, 25,30 goals addition to their whirlwind(day-to-day job) just what all they need is hard work and working for long hours.

4DX Thinking(4 discipline of Execution): people with such thinking knows that many of their goals are important but only one or two out of those many goals are wildly important, and those wildly important goals in short known as WIGs, and they know that their finest efforts can be given to only those wildly important goals at a time.

The leaders Challenge

Now comes the big question: Why there is so much pressure of expanding rather than narrowing the goals? If we understand the importance of focus then why we still fail to do it?

For this, you can say that its the external force which always put pressure on us, yes external force can be the reason but the actual real culprit is always to be one person and that one person is “YOU”

The Real Enemy is no one but we, us or I.

Other reason you want yourself or your team to drive high because you are ambitious and creative, you are a kind of individual organization like to promote, the problem is creative and ambitious people always want to do more, not less and if this describes you then you are almost hardwired to violet the first discipline of execution.

How to Identify Wildly Important goals, WIGs:

The author says that Wildly Important Goals are the Goals which can make all the  difference because it is your strategist tipping point because you will be going to apply a disproportionate amount of energy to it, but how you will find whether the goal is a wildly important one or not, because most of the time it is very confusing to know the WIGs, If you select your wildly important goals by asking what is the most important? then you may find your mind running with circles why? Because your urgent whirlwind always competes to be the most important work, hence it can create confusion and can make our mind think that urgent work is the actual important work and this confusion can fool us to know the actual wildly important goals.

Hence author says that to understand and to know the wildly important work, don’t ask what is important, instead, begin asking? If every other area of our operations remained at its current level of performance, what is the one area where change would have the greatest impact? this question will change your way of thinking and will for sure clear your confusion.

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The 4 Disciplines of Execution Summary, Discipline 2) Act on the Leader Measures

The second discipline is to apply disproportionately energy to the activities that dive your lead measures, this provides the leverage for achieving the lag measures. Discipline 2 is the discipline of Leverage, Lead measures are the measures of the activities that connected to achieving the goal.

Discipline 2 take 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, further Discipline two defines the leveraged actions that will enable the team to achieve that goal.

Discipline 2 requires you to define the daily and weekly measures, the achievements of which will lead to the goal, then each day, week team will identify the most important actions that will drive those lead measures, this way your team will create the just-in-time plan that enables them to quickly adapt, while remaining focused on WIGs.

Difference between Conventional thinking and 4DX Principle:

Conventional Thinking: Keep Your Eye on the Lag measures: the quarterly results, the sales numbers, pounds lost stress out, Bite your nails whiles wait.

4DX Principle: Focus on moving the lead measures, these are the high leverage actions you take to get the lag measures to move.

Lag measures: measures the Goal or measures results. ( Monthly sales report)

Lead Measures:
Predictive – Measures something that leads to the goals
Influenceable – something that we can influence. (Number of Out of stocks)

In discipline 2, you create lead measures the movement of which will become the driving force for achieving the WIG.

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The 4 Disciplines of Execution Summary, Discipline 3) Keep A compelling Scoreboard

The third discipline is to make sure that everyone knows the score at all times so that you can tell and see whether they are winning, this is the discipline of engagement.

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The 4 Disciplines of Execution Summary, Discipline 4) Create the Cadence of Accountability

The Fourth Discipline is to create the Cadence of Accountability, Discipline 4 is where Execution actually happens, Discipline 1, 2 and 3 actually set up the game, but until you don’t apply discipline 4 your team isn’t in the game. Discipline 4 is which brings the team members together and that is why it encompasses the other disciplines.

Discipline 4 Conventional thinking and 4DX Principle

Conventional Thinking: Accountability on our team is always top down, we meet with the boss periodically and he tells us how we are doing and what next we should focus on.

4DX Principle: Accountability on our team is shared, we make commitments and then we accountable to our boss, but more important to each other, for following through.

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This is the end of The 4 Disciplines of Execution Summary. This was Discipline one out of 4, If you want to know all discipline more deeply then do buy this book from the given link:

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