Want to succeed? Execute!

We've all known successful people who are successful because they know how to get things done. In other words—they execute!

In "Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done," (Crown Business, 2002) authors Larry Bossidy, chairman of Honeywell International, and Ram Charan, author of "What the CEO Wants You to Know," prove that the difference between success and failure in any organization lies in execution.

The authors claim that execution paces everything in an organization, that it's "a specific set of behaviors and techniques that companies need to master in order to have competitive advantage." And they make the argument that execution is the biggest issue facing business today.

To prove their point the authors take readers beyond the recent headlines of the success or downfall of major companies to explain what went right or wrong. In many cases, the CEOs of such companies as Gillette, Hewlett-Packard, Kodak, AT&T, British Airways and Lucent Technologies lost their jobs because they didn't deliver what they said they would.

What Bossidy and Charan have termed, "the gap nobody knows" is the chasm between what a company's leaders want to achieve and the organization's ability to achieve it. They have clearly illustrated that putting this culture of execution in place is hard, but have equally demonstrated that losing it is easy.

In most of the chapters, the authors give personal experience to illustrate a point, such as why leaders have to live their businesses.

A fast read, "Execution" is structured in three parts—why execution is needed, the building blocks of execution and the three core processes of execution. Within each chapter, they offer common sense suggestions for creating a framework for cultural change toward execution.

At each step you begin to understand where some of the country's leading CEOs made key mistakes or critical changes. Dick Brown, CEO of EDS, is one such success story. He positioned EDS well by successfully linking a change in the business culture with positive business outcomes.

The book spends quite a bit of time covering how the people in your organization are linked with strategy and operations. It sounds elementary, but touches on everything from engaging them in the process to building leaders and dealing with nonperformers.

"The heart of the working of a business is how the three processes of people, strategy and operations link together," say the authors.

The book ends with a letter to a new leader, offering valuable advice for which many business executives would have to pay top-dollar from a consultant. e