If you’re going to be in the winner’s circle, it will be because your organization is able to create and then deliver your business idea to the marketplace.

Many companies try to substitute strength of effort in place of doing it right---they put in excessive work and achieve results at a high price paid by a core group of key performers.

Others try to cost-cut their way to success – while they should be investing in initiatives that will give them greater returns and enhanced capability, they resort to belt tightening.

There are times when costs must be cut and costs always need to be managed, but for too many companies, it becomes their default strategy, undercutting other efforts, and demonstrating a fundamental lack of confidence in the organization’s ability to deliver results through more optimistic initiatives.

In this section of the learning system you’ll be exposed to ideas, stories, tools, and tactics that can augment the capacity of your organization to deliver the performance required for success.

It’s not about you or you and a few star performers, it’s about the power and productivity of a high-performing enterprise in its entirety.

The goals of extraordinary execution are:

1. Fulfilling your brand promise by creating products and services that your customers value to the point that they give you their loyalty based on their own self-interest.

2. Building an organization that executes the game plan in ways that build and sustain competitive advantage.

If you are going to act – and acting for best effect is what business is about – then why shouldn’t how you act create both stronger operational muscles and growing capabilities?

Are you ensuring that your company is getting better every day? Can you honestly answer yes?

Why do some companies settle for less? There are several reasons.

1. They manage to customer demands rather than to leading in the market by anticipating evolving customer expectations.

2. They react more to fix problems than to imagine and create opportunities (they are reactive, rather than proactive).

3. They fall into the trap of confusing the status quo with efficiency.

4. They strive to improve how effectively they work their processes, without considering whether the process itself is becoming outdated or obsolete.

5. Do you have another reason that explains why you do it?

The challenge of this section is to move beyond being a company doing business-as-usual to one constantly striving to produce extraordinary business results.

How does any living, thinking entity do that?

1. They are self-aware – becoming self-conscious about how they do what they do. They monitor themselves. They think about themselves.

2. They imagine what could be and figure out ways to make those imaginings real.

3. Their vision, thinking and practices are purposeful and coordinated.

4. They seek feedback about their performance and then use it to improve.

5. Their parts work together instead of in competition with each other.

If you can agree with these statements so far, then think about their implications.

For extraordinary results, it boils down to getting the right information, sharing information effectively, learning from experience and applying what’s learned in the pursuit of a worthy purpose.

We’ve talked about the worthy purpose in the sections about the business idea, shared purpose and brand promise.

They Can’t Act On Information They Don’t Have:

Think about exactly what information has to flow within working relationships in order for people to be most productive, to play their parts well.

If we look at those people not as individuals, but as parts of a system, we can make some assumptions.

Systems find ways to transmit vital information; they can’t function otherwise, so they tend to find a way.

When the systems in question are complicated human organizations, people find a way to transmit vital information, often in spite of the formal processes.

How Processes Age:

A process becomes established because it’s reasonably efficient.

Over time, however, changes occur, usually a compilation of little modifications that alter how things are supposed to be accomplished.

Particularly in hierarchical organizations, people find ways to make the process work without ever formally changing the way it’s supposed to be done.

They usually lack the power to officially alter a process simply because it’s become a little inefficient for them individually.

It’s also a way to build job security - by keeping your secrets to yourself.

Nobody can get it done as well as you if they don’t know all of your shortcuts and secrets.

Multiply those personally customized applications across the organization and you have a recipe for people becoming disconnected from the work of everyone else. It certainly isn’t in the best interests of the enterprise.

Eventually, a process becomes outdated or even obsolete. Its basic assumptions have changed. Workers have informally ad libbed to keep things running, but the weight of tradition forces them to give the appearance of adhering to the formal process as it was established.

Another factor that contributes to misalignment is that the organization’s processes are interconnected, and changing one process has ramifications for others.

When individuals operate individually, rather than as part of a coordinated whole with others who understand the overall business goals, their incremental individual changes end up having drastic effects on the whole system.

On the surface, dealing with this issue seems too complicated, and managers commonly say things like, “We don’t have the time for that. Just get the work done.”

In time, the ways that work gets done at individual workstations leads the organization to become misaligned with your current intentions.

Maintaining Alignment Is Critical:

If people have the power to talk amongst themselves about correcting minor misalignments as they occur, the drift between action and intention is halted.

Maintaining alignment between effort and intentions is much more efficient when information is communicated effectively---when there are good working relationships, when people trust each other and when the common purpose is compelling.

Passing information creates opportunities for people to talk together about the work and to listen to what others have to say, until a true understanding occurs.

If the business goal is understood by everyone, then people can understand how to make modifications as they are needed, while keep the enterprise aligned.

Think of it as creating the capacity for genuine internal customer satisfaction feedback, along the internal value chain, as needed.

To work well under emerging future circumstances while being efficient today, everyone needs to assume responsibility for focusing on how we work, not just what we do.

This streamlines activities within the context of current business ideas and the overall game plan. Think of it as everyone being able to step up and act as a leader, at appropriate times.

We aren’t saying that everyone’s the boss of everyone around them.

Rather, they are all responsible for their own efficiency within the game plan and (simultaneously) for acting to support the success of everyone else working toward the common purpose – that’s what being on the same team is all about.

You can’t order people to anticipate the needs of teammates, nor to work to enable their success. Real teamwork---being dedicated to the success of the team as a whole---doesn’t come from mandates, but from people having good working relationships.