A dynamic strategy, a breakthrough innovation, a brilliant product launch or a fantastic campaign can take you to the top of the competitor charts for a while but it’s only perfect execution that will keep you there.

Majority of product and campaign failures are a culmination of ineffective execution. It’s about moving from an idea to intent to execution.   Delivery of your idea or strategy is what will create a competitive edge for you. 

Strategy is the heart of an organization but execution is the veins to its success.

 An organizational strategy is usually built by the top management around what the company stands for and what it desires to achieve in a defined period of time. Execution is what drives your goals and delivers results; it runs all the way from the top to the bottom.

Look back to any failed strategy and more often than not it’s not the problem with the strategy it’s a problem with the execution. Strategy is what looks good on paper; execution is what has to be run down through an organization. Successful execution requires alignment, structure, definition and consequences, to but it simply execution requires behavior change.

The principle of focusing on your widely important goal is a formula that majority of the fortune 500 companies have been using globally to execute their top priorities. This principle is a discipline that is true, precise and works every single time.

This principle is laid on the grounds that the more you try to do the less you actually accomplish. The basic fundamental is that human beings are hardwired to do one thing at time with excellence. Science has gone to prove that people who try to push too many goals at once usually land up doing at mediocre job at all of them.

Somewhere down the lane this basic principle has been replaced by the ideology that leaders have to do more to be successful, which comes from the fact that it is very hard to say no to good ideas.

However focus is priority. This principle requires leaders to move from their set ideology of doing more to going back to the basics of doing less so your team can achieve more. Multi-tasking as established by Neurosciences is a myth!!

To apply this principle, you have to narrow down to selecting, at the most two significantly important goals and work towards enhancing them rather than improving everything at once.

This does not mean you abandon all your other important goals they exist on the radar but you do not require your finest diligence of attention during that period.

Take for example an air traffic controller. There may be a 100 planes approaching the radar of the controller for takeoff, landing or taxiing and each one of them is important. But for the controller only that one plane that is landing has their complete focus, because if they don’t execute getting that plane on time to the ground with excellence nothing else will matter much.

Your widely important goals are exactly the same; it’s about making the hard choice of what separates the merely important from the widely important. If your team is trying to accomplish five, ten or fifteen important goals the reality is they can’t focus and will dilute your strategy to making it almost impossible to succeed.

The move from loosely defined difficult –to-communicate collection of objectives to a narrow focused set of achievable targets by focusing on one or at the most two widely important goals helps teams distinguish what is truly important and what is the whirlwind.

You can ignore the principle of focus but it won’t ignore you. You can ignore it and get people to do a mediocre job at multiple goals or leverage the principle to achieve your top goals again and again and again.

Give your team the knowledge and tools that they need to execute your top priorities.  Book a free consultation to get more information on how we can go about imbibing a culture of execution within your organization.