Jim Huling

The 4 Disciplines of Execution aren’t designed for managing your whirlwind. The 4 Disciplines are rules for executing your most critical strategy in the midst of the whirlwind.

Goals cannot sound noble but vague. Targets cannot be so blurry they can’t be hit. Your direction has to be so vivid that if you randomly woke one of your employees in the middle of the night and asked him ‘Where are we going?’ he could still answer in a half-asleep stupor.

We believe all leaders facing this challenge should have this quote prominently displayed in their offices: There will always be more good ideas than there is capacity to execute.

When 4DX becomes habitual, you can expect not only to reach the goal but also to see a permanent rise in the level of your team’s performance. The ultimate aim of 4DX is not just to get results, but to create a culture of excellent execution.

Great teams invest their best efforts in those few activities that have the most impact on the WIGs: the lead measures. This insight is so crucial and so distinctive, yet so little understood that we call it the secret of excellence in execution.

Steve Jobs of Apple had a big company to run, and he could have proudly brought many more products to market than he did; but he chose to focus on a handful of ‘wildly important’ products. His focus was legendary. And so were his results.

W. Edwards Deming, the management and quality guru, said it best when he told executives that managing a company by looking at financial data (lag measures) is the equivalent of ‘driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror.’