Execution wins: maintaining focus in a ninety-day world

Execution wins: maintaining focus in a ninety-day world

Do you sometimes feel that time is subject to constantly increasing inflation? What felt like a full day, month or even year yesterday seems to have vanished in a flash. Where has time gone? A quarter has passed, and daily business has caught up with you.

“Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” Peter Drucker once said. I fully agree, and add: “Operations beat strategy before lunch!”

This is another reason #StrategyExecution fails. What was elevated to the absolute priority and #Focus at the beginning of the year, following the approval of a new strategy, falls victim to daily business. It is Groundhog Day, every day or, here, every quarter. People seem naturally to stumble, wander off course and lose focus about every ninety days.

💪 Two practical proposals for strategy execution

1. Separate operational and strategic meetings

Strictly separate operations meetings, running the business, from strategy meetings, developing the business. Experience shows that item seventeen, the strategy execution update, gets dropped from an already crowded weekly leadership agenda. Operations beat strategy before lunch! Keep the weekly leadership meetings for operational topics. At the same time, make sure you schedule at least one monthly leadership meeting devoted exclusively to strategy execution progress. An hour is enough. Never allow operational topics into it, even when a department is “on fire”.

2. Take a closer look at the quarter

Meet quarterly for a more detailed review lasting half a day to a day. Look back on the past quarter’s strategy execution achievements and agree which rocks to tackle next quarter. This approach comes from Gino Wickman’s classic “Traction”. Some of my clients already invest two full days. A quarterly RUN meeting reviews and looks ahead at the operational #Focus; quarterly DEVELOP does the same for strategy. This prevents operational topics from creeping back into the all-day DEVELOP agenda.

Want to escape the hamster wheel of operations beating strategy before lunch? Consistently separate operations and strategy meetings and establish a ninety-day rhythm for reflecting backwards and forwards. Ideally, do both: quarterly RUN and quarterly DEVELOP.

Find further tips in the GCP playbook “Execution Wins – Successful Strategy Execution”. The link to the free GCP content playbook is in the comments.

Please contact me if you would like to make your strategies even more effective. I look forward to hearing from you.