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Aim — Fire — Ready?

George B. Weathersby

Chairman & CEO, Genesys Solutions, LLC

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A common complaint about many senior executives is that they follow a sequence of “Ready, Fire, Aim!” – showing a propensity to “pull the trigger” before their strategy is both clearly defined and widely understood. As you read this, most organizations are in no position to successfully execute senior management initiatives for the new year.

The propensity to decide prematurely and to act without effective preparation is often the result of the corporate planning process being overtaken by the events of the market, competition, technology, or internal corporate changes.  The usual prescription is to increase attention on the planning process, to advance the planning dates within the annual cycle, and to increase the bureaucratic authority of the planning officers.  Of course, this solution is destined for mediocrity because it does not address the organization’s actual ability to execute.

Steven Case recently wrote that the AOL-Time Warner merger has failed to meet any of its promised objectives.  Competing internet access providers were not integrated, content was not significantly repurposed, and executive teams defended their turf instead of delighting their clients.  The net effect was that the “Merger of the Century” became what Case describes as the “worst corporate mistake of the century”—and as a result of this massive failure to execute, their shareholders lost tens of billions of dollars of market value while Jerry Levin and Steve Case lost their jobs.

Only the CEO and the senior management team can ensure that their enterprise can effectively execute its most important initiatives, but most leaders manage with zero real information about their organization’s ability to execute. The best strategies in the world fail to produce value when leaders delegate responsibility for execution without creating any mechanism for accountability. The delicate balance is that the accountability for execution cannot be delegated below the senior level but the responsibility for execution must be delegated down to the lowest levels of leadership in the enterprise.

Only when an organization is fully ready to execute can an executive have confidence of achieving their aim and their organization’s ability to fire. That confidence can only come from the direct measurement of execution capability across the enterprise. At Genesys we can show you not only how to measure your organization’s execution capability, we can show you how to do something about it.