Both of my books, the best-selling “Six Disciplines Execution Revolution” and the award-winning “Six Disciplines for Excellence” are now available as audio books.

Each audio book is on 4 CDs, and are available for U.S. retail $24.95 exclusively from Six Disciplines Publishing.

Order your audio books here!

In many of my recent speaking engagements, rather than diving in on heady topics like strategy formulation and methods for improving execution, I begin my discussions by focusing on what every organization has: “Susan”.  My story about Susan supports our mission at Six Disciplines:  To revolutionize strategy execution. Every person. Every day.

Susan is really a metaphor for that special kind of person in your organization: hard working, valuable to the team, loyal, enthusiastic, driven, and so forth. Going way beyond her salary, your company invests a lot in keeping Susan “happy”, such as medical, dental, vision, computer, desk, lighting, heating, air conditioning, vacation time, holidays, bonuses, supervision, etc.

For every day, hour and minute that Susan is working for your company, what are you doing, specifically, to help her improve “her batting average”? In other words, what are you doing to help her make better decisions, to work on the right things, to make fewer mistakes, or at least not to make the same mistakes as before?

With every activity Susan works on for your organization, in support of your strategy and goals, it all comes down to four choices:

1. This is something I did and I should have (good!)
2. This is something I did, but shouldn’t have (not so good)
3. This is something I didn’t do, but should have (not so good)
4. This is something I didn’t do, but shouldn’t have anyway (good)

Over the next several posts, I’ll be sharing with you a repeatable method for helping every “Susan” in your organization to make better decisions.

Strategy execution is considered by most business leaders and research as a universal challenge. Indeed, most would assert that it’s the biggest challenge in business.

How big is this challenge?

Let’s back it up with some poignant statistics:

• A McKinsey study of 1,077 companies over a decade that only 9 were superior in both growth and profitability.
• An astounding 90 percent of well-formulated strategies fail - due to poor execution.
• Only 5 percent of employees understand their organization’s strategy.
• Only 2-3 percent of a community’s organizations contribute most, if not all, of that community’s growth and employment.

This short list is a sobering reminder of how difficult the challenge of executing strategy really is.  Achieving a balance between strong strategy and strong execution is extremely difficult, and therefore extremely rare.  And, because it’s rare, it’s very highly valued.

To some, this is viewed as an insurmountable deterrent. To me, it  has tremendous upside potential.

For the first time, we’re now able to integrate proven best practices, harness the incredible power of the Internet, and offer a complete strategy execution program that will enable small and midsized companies to address this challenge directly.

It’s a revolution that’s already underway.  And we’re looking forward to being a major driver of this Execution Revolution.