Every CEO has a vision for his or her company; that is the easy part! Few companies ever fail because there wasn’t a vision; they fail because they can’t execute the vision and get concrete business results. As someone once said, “Vision without execution is hallucination.” And as Jim Collins said in Built To Last: Successful Habits Of Visionary Companies, “Great performance is about 1% vision and 99% alignment,” so the secret isn’t having some unique or phenomenal vision. It is creating a vision, getting everyone to understand it and their role, and then executing like crazy. The Execution Tune-up consists of four key elements for every CEO and executive team:
Barriers to Growth – Every company hits very predictable walls as it tries to grow profitably. These walls can’t be avoided and each one presents a new challenge to executive teams in terms of leadership skills, infrastructure required, and marketplace dynamics. The key is to know when a company will hit its next wall, and what to start doing in advance to get ready to get over the wall as painlessly as possible and get back to profitable growth. The Execution Tune-up provides clear understanding of these walls, their causes, where they occur and what CEO’s should do to prepare themselves and their leadership teams to climb over these walls quickly.
Rockefeller Habits – Strategic execution is the name of the game for effective implementation of any vision. Translating the long-term vision and strategies into short-term goals and tactics that every employee understands and supports is the payoff. Verne Harnish (founder of YEO) wrote the book, Mastering the Rockefeller Habits: What You Must Do to Increase the Value of Your Fast-Growth Firm, on these simple, practical tools that every great company CEO and executive team use to set priorities, utilize the right metrics, and establish an effective executive team meeting rhythm. Implementing these habits is a huge first step in preparing for the walls that can become barriers to profitable growth.
CEO Leadership – In today’s fast-moving, complex environment, executive teams and companies have to be both smart and healthy. Smart is actually the easy part; getting a group of smart executives to work together in a healthy manner is not only the challenge but how to become a great company. There are four specific steps for working on the healthy side of executive teams.
The Execution Roadmap™ – Getting a company’s entire vision, from core values, purpose, mission, and BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) to SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats), to three-year focus areas to one-year initiatives to 90-day tactical priorities is a critical step toward alignment of the executive team and then the entire company. Too many companies spend two and three days each year in retreats to come up with grandiose strategic plans that far too often then gather dust on a bookshelf during the year. Every strategic plan must be dynamic, and there must be a way to translate all of the long-term visionary elements into practical bite-size pieces that an organization can accomplish in short bursts. The Execution Roadmap™ captures everything from most strategic to very tactical on one page and provides a clear roadmap for executive team leadership.
The Execution Tune-up provides understanding, simple and practical tools and a methodology, The Execution Maximizer™ that every CEO can use on his own with his executive team to gain alignment and actually execute his/her plan and achieve concrete results.
Biography: Jim Alampi is managing director and owner of Alampi & Associates LLC. He coaches CEOs and executive teams in the areas of strategy, leadership, executive development, and business improvement. He created the proprietary process, The Execution Maximizer™ to help CEOs execute their vision and get results. Alampi earned his bachelor’s degree from Rutgers University, and served three years as an officer in the U.S. Army. He has led three public companies ranging from $325 million to $1.5 billion in revenue, started three entrepreneurial companies and served on over 20 Boards of Directors. He joined TEC originally in Chicago and has been a member in Michigan.
