Gary Tomlinson is an entrepreneur and founder of five successful businesses. Today, he is an accountability consultant and professional speaker based in North Carolina.

Here’s an excerpt of an interview I did with Gary, discussing my newest book, Six Disciplines Execution Revolution.

Tomlinson: “Your first book, Six Disciplines for Excellence, is a highly regarded strategy execution methodology. Why did you write Execution Revolution?”

Harpst: “When I wrote Six Disciplines for Excellence we were trying to help businesses understand a basic step by step methodology to create an environment of lasting excellence. A lot of businesses are able to have a period of good growth and good profitability but not many are able to sustain it.”

“The mission of our company was to document basic step-by-step methodologies to help organizations achieve and sustain lasting change. The purpose of Execution Revolution was to help business leaders understand that their biggest problem isn’t the problem that’s right in front of them — it’s building an organization that knows how to draft a plan and execute it. A company that knows how to do that can solve any problem. It’s a perspective change.”

Read the entire interview here.

Dan Mulhern, the First Gentleman of Michigan, hosts Everyday Leadership: Making Work Work, a weekly look at leadership in business and the issues that impact the workplace.

In the first hour, Dan interviewed me, as well as Jim Epolito (President/CEO - Michigan Economic Development Corporation), and Bill Emmerson (CEO - Quicken Loans).

Listen to the podcast here.

I have great news!

The 50-city “Economic Acceleration: Breaking The 3% Speed Limit” speaking tour continues in 2009 in a big way!

You can get the agenda, complete details, and registration information here, but the cities locations coming up in January, February and March include:

• Austin, TX
• San Antonio, TX
• Dallas, TX
• Houston, TX
• Memphis, TN
• Nashville, TN
• Knoxville, TN

I’m excited to continue our 50-city Economic Acceleration speaking tour with business and community leaders in Texas and Tennessee.  I want to share the vision and a specific plan for changing the economic development equation in each of these communities.  

If you have any questions about what I cover during this tour, please see the agenda here.

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!

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.

Quadrant II of the Business Excellence Model (the upper right-hand quadrant) is all about being able to balance growth with profitability and performing predictably and consistently.  This requires a disciplined organization, one that’s learned to execute its strategy well enough to address the needs of today, while building for tomorrow - at the same time.

Sustainable excellence isn’t possible unless an organization learns to systematically increase its capacity to execute, and to do so faster than the rate at which its challenges are growing.

The Growth Paradox

It’s ironic that the better an organization executes today, the bigger its challenges will be tomorrow. That’s the reason it’s so difficult to balance strategy and execution over the long-term. Without an aggressive, proactive approach, organizations cannot identify or address their challenges in sufficient time, to avoid drifting into one of the other quadrants.  The good news is that the sooner these challenges are caught and addressed, the lower variability the business undergoes.

Performance in Quadrant II is difficult to sustain. Few companies are able to achieve this kind of performance for long periods of time. But this is what the Execution Revolution is all about:  the process of changing the game by focusing on how to successfully plan and execute strategy more effectively, while managing the inevitable surprises along the way.

All revolutions are based on a core set of ideas. 

The ideas in my new book, Six Disciplines® Execution Revolution, emerged from my twenty-seven years of experience as CEO and co-founder of three businesses.  Twenty of those years were with Solomon Software, which implemented more than 60,000 businesses management systems in small and midsized businesses, across almost every industry imaginable, before it was eventually sold to Microsoft in 2001.

Since that time, I’ve focused my attention on helping other businesses benefit from the many mistakes I made as a CEO, and the mistakes I see others make every day. My new book describes the cumulative learning after investing $20 million, and over 100 man-years of research and field experience.  

The first premise of my new book is that what most business leaders think is their greatest challenge really isn’t. All business leaders face new challenges each day and are tempted to think of the latest problem at hand as their “biggest.” No matter what the problems are today, however, they’ll be different tomorrow and they will be bigger. 

This leads to the second premise of the new book. There is one business problem that, if solved, makes solving all other problems easier.  Knowing how to plan and execute, while overcoming “today’s surprises,” is the most foundational capability any organization can have. The inability to do this is the problem that business leaders must solve. With the capability to execute continuously, they gain control of their businesses. Without it, their businesses are relegated to a reactive, fire-fighting existence.

The final premise of the new book is that an opportunity exists for small and midsized businesses to leapfrog a whole generation of impractical, large-company approaches that have been used to attack this problem. Over the past few decades, progress in a variety of best practices and technologies (primarily funded by large businesses) has created the foundation for a next-generation program that will overcome the barriers keeping solutions out of reach for all but the largest of businesses.

Given the pace and unpredictability of the business world, we leaders often feel there’s not much that we do control.  This new book, however, describes the first complete program for a business to take control of the one thing it can, so that it is better equipped to deal with all the things it can’t.  It’s my hope that the real-world experience of our team, the investment that’s been made, and the completeness of the program will help you realize this isn’t just another book. 

It’s the beginning of a revolution – an Execution Revolution.

As Karl Albrecht said in his book Corporate Radar, “The majority is not always right, the conventional wisdom is not always wise, and the accepted doctrine could well be flawed. The more fashionable an idea, the more it is likely to be exempt from critical evaluation. Breakthrough thinking sometimes calls for contradicting the most widely held assumptions and beliefs.”

Consider what you think is your biggest business challenge. Is it growth? Competition? Innovation? Cost containment?

I’d like to challenge how you think about your biggest business challenge. In fact, I propose that what you think is your biggest business problem, isn’t.

The foundational challenge - one that transcends all other business problems - is executing strategy. In other words, building an organization that has the ability to plan and execute, while at the same time, overcoming the inevitable surprises - is the biggest and toughest challenge in business.

The good news? This one problem, if solved, will make solving all other problems easier.

That’s what the Execution Revolution….is all about!