Just Exactly What “Things” are we Talking About?
I am tired of hearing about execution – we know that just having a strategy without execution is a formula for failure. We all have seen great execution companies be successful with little or no intentional revenue strategy – therefore, we assume that a company without a strategy but with disciplined execution will be successful – right?
WRONG! Execution alone only is successful if you are lucky or there is no competent competition or the economy is great, or you are in the right place at the right time, etc. Lucky can look like the market’s fulfillment phase (where the market just wants your company to produce more to fulfill their demands), in a bubble, a great economy, a great market, or bad competition.
There are the 3 reasons that declaring execution as the critical focus for success is as incomplete as saying all an athlete needs is more practice to become a champion.
- Execution alone is just tactics with little or no intentional value being created for the customer. Execution is about doing something and doing it over and over again with discipline. Execution may or may not even need to be right if you are lucky, in a bubble or in the right place at the right time – it is about producing something the customer can buy that is at least close to what the buyer really wants. Columbus discovered America, and he wasn’t even looking. After 10,000 tries, Edison discovered the light bulb, and sticky notes were a mistake. So luck and right place at the right time matter! Of those 3, only Edison’s results were even intentional, but with the other two, the execution created an unintentional result that was accepted by the market (luck). While there was market success, there is no intentional brand, strategic direction or value proposition for any of these. When value is defined by random and unaligned execution, the value in the eyes of the market will normally be low, and there is little loyalty. As long as you are lucky or in a bubble or in a great economy, you may applaud your business wisdom and your ability to execute even though the execution is random, aligned to nothing, and the value is likely short-lived – you were lucky.
- Execution becomes the rationale for not thinking about how to get better – I am so busy executing I don’t have time to plan. Because you are so busy keeping up, you clearly don’t have time to plan so you just keep going. Imagine if medicine was practiced the same way. Your doctor would say to you “I am so busy treating you, I don’t have time to find out what is wrong and what we need to do to help you attain health.” Why is it that medicine starts with diagnostics and a treatment plan based on a strategic goal of health, but business has decided it is good enough to just execute faster and better – the strategic goals will take care of themselves?
- You can execute yourself out of business – execution without strategy is random, chaotic, expensive and is aligned to nothing. When people say I would rather execute well around a marginal strategy than to have a great strategy marginally executed, when people say this, they are just avoiding the work required to have both
Who created this silly myth? These two things do not exist separately any more than gravity and momentum exist separately for a downhill skier. We can ignore these things, or say they are separate but they function as a unit and impact you as a system regardless of your level of planning.
In our CEO Formula for “Revenue Generation”, we talk about the Revenue Strategy and execution as common elements multiplied by the degree to which they are aligned with each other. It is your job to be sure you have a revenue strategy and that your execution is aligned to that strategy. If you manage these two intentionally the alignment can be VERY high (it can approach 100%). If the strategy and execution are not intentionally managed, the degree of alignment will approach 0%. The key question is do you want to approach full alignment 100% or no alignment 0%? The higher the degree of alignment, the greater your return on those resources invested in the production of predictable revenue growth.
The crazy part is people believe they can execute perfectly in the absence of a revenue strategy and be successful. In one sentence, with no strategy, there is no real way to intentionally create value or even measure the quality of the execution. If you can’t measure your execution against your strategy, you have a strategy based on a requirement for good luck, which is always followed by BAD LUCK.
Even with great execution, when there is no strategy, if your luck is “bad” or your chaos is high, you don’t last long enough to ask “what happened?”
So, stop this conversation and go get a CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) or some other strategic revenue thinker to help you get an intentional revenue strategy. With an intentional revenue strategy you can create a great aligned execution that will result in intentional, long-term, sustainable value for the customer.
With that combination of a good revenue strategy aligned to a disciplined execution, you will make money with good luck or bad, and you can predict your revenue future based on the quality of your intentional revenue strategy, the discipline of your execution and your degree of alignment.
Now imagine if in addition, you have GOOD LUCK – you will be unstoppable.