We are starting a new ongoing series on ProductivityCast called BookCast. Each BookCast, we bring you a productivity book that we have read and discussed the merits and demerits. We each come at the material from different backgrounds and experiences, therefore, some of us will dislike and some of us will dislike the material, and that will make for an enlightening discussion for you.
For our first BookCast, we bring you The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey and Jim Huling.
I have been recommended this book so many times and so I wanted to bring this book to the ProductivityCast team to dive into its major tenets and discuss them.
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In this Cast | The 4 Disciplines of Execution (BookCast)
Ray Sidney-Smith
Augusto Pinaud
Art Gelwicks
Francis Wade
Show Notes | The 4 Disciplines of Execution (BookCast)
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The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey and Jim HulingTodoist
Raw Text Transcript | The 4 Disciplines of Execution (BookCast)
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Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.
Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.
Francis Wade 0:26I'm Francis Wade.
Art Gelwicks 0:27 And I'm Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17
Welcome back, everybody to ProductivityCast the weekly show about all things personal productivity. I'm Ray Sidney-Smith.
Augusto Pinaud 0:23
And I'm Augusto Pinaud.
Francis Wade 0:24
I'm Francis Wade.
Art Gelwicks 0:25
And I'm Art Gelwicks.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:26
Welcome, gentlemen. And welcome to our listeners. This week, we are starting a new ongoing series on ProductivityCast that we're calling book cast. And so book cast is where we're going to bring a new productivity book Well, a new to, hopefully you productivity book, but it could be an old book as well, that we're reading. And we want to discuss the merits and demerits of the material. I'm hoping that we each come at the material from different backgrounds and experiences, and therefore some of us will love and some of us will potentially not love the material, and that will make for an enlightening discussion for you. For our first book cast, we bring you the four Disciplines of Execution, achieving your wildly important goals by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim healing. I have been recommended this book so many times. And so I wanted to bring this book to productivity cast to dive into the major tenants and discuss them. So a little bit about the book First, the book is described on Amazon and pulling this from the Amazon description page. It says, Do you remember the last major initiative you watch die in your organization? Did it go down with a loud crash? Or was it slowly and quietly suffocated by other competing priorities? By the time it finally disappeared? It's likely no one even noticed what happened. Often the answer is that the quote unquote whirlwind of urgent activity required to keep things running day to day devoured all the time and energy you needed to invest in executing your strategy for tomorrow. And then it goes on to say that the four Disciplines of Execution can change that forever. It says the four Disciplines of Execution are for dx is a simple, repeatable and proven formula for executing your most important strategic priorities in the midst of the world win. And that includes the four disciplines being focused on the wildly important act on lead measures, keep a compelling scoreboard create a cadence of accountability. And so with that, the authors are Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim healing. Sean covey is not only notably the son of the late Dr. Stephen Covey, but he is also the senior vice president of innovations and products at Franklin Covey. And so he has been at the Franklin Covey company for quite a while. And obviously, he's the author of many other books, and and obviously helps with his father's company. Chris McChesney is the global practice leader of execution for Franklin Covey. And he's, of course, one of the primary developers of 40x. And then Jim huling is the managing consultant for Franklin Covey's four dx delivery of that material across the world. So he's he's responsible for the 40x methodology and the quality of the worldwide delivery. So those are the author's that's a little bit about the book. And as I noted in our lead up, the book is divided into four parts. What the methodology is 40x is broken up into four parts. And so I thought we would kind of have our conversation in those four parts. The book itself is designed in, it was designed in three sections, they go into the four Disciplines of Execution, then they talk about installing 40x, with a team, and then installing it on the macro level and installing 40x in your organization. But I think for our purposes, since we're going to talk about this kind of on the personal productivity level, we could talk about this on the four disciplines, each individually. So where do we want to get started with the conversation? Let's start with focusing on the wildly important, let's talk about what they mean by that and what wildly important goals are. And we'll go from there.
Francis Wade 4:23
I actually spent this past weekend working with a fertilizer company to develop their strategic plan. And one of the challenges my clients always grapple with is how do you separate that which is essential from that which is nice to have. And most strategy documents that I've read have done by other consultants with their clients look like mega Long, long laundry lists so they're like everything and the kitchen sink. And as you go through the kitchen sink, after the fact, you have a really hard time. Figuring out just what the strategy is you can see that they're doing 30, they want to do 30 things. But the 30 things don't actually fit together. In any kind of coherent, they don't tell a story. They don't provide a rationale or reason. They don't, they don't reveal what, what what Kaplan and Norton called a strategic hypothesis, which is the idea behind the strategy, they just look like a lot of stuff to do. And to give him what the author say, if you can find the and I'll go a step below, just saying what's wildly important, what's, what's the wireless, most important thing is, what's the hypothesis and the sequence of core activities, and how they fit together, and how you describe them to other people. That blob of information, which gets created come get created, doing a retreat is the most important. And it's got to be separated at all times from everything else that's nice to have, or everything else
Art Gelwicks 5:58
that's kind of emergent, for instance, brings out a really good point of the separation of critical versus desirable. But I think in a lot of cases, especially when we start to look at it at the personal level, those critical items aren't coming from us. They're coming from outside factors. And that becomes a significant weighing on how do you make that decision? Is it really your call in those cases, and that's, that sets the drive on what you need to focus on. A lot of the initial text focuses on development of the strategy, and then the execution of the strategy. Well, from a personal productivity standpoint, I think a lot of us don't have control over that strategy part. That strategy is getting defined for us by external forces. If you have not only just work things, but you have, say, kids that have to go to college, you have bills to pay, things like that become those wildly important goals. Because if you don't do them, nothing else really happens. So I think quantifying it around that around what's, what's the critical, what's the desirable. And then honestly, not excluding all the desirable things, when I work with clients in the corporate space, will go through and define a list of requirements on a project and I go through the same exercise, what do you need to have, what do you want to have, I always tried to include a couple of the once into the overall need listing. Because it makes, it makes the overall execution more effective. Those are the things you can say, look, it's just going off the rails, we just need to pull a couple things out, you can pull the ones out, and not affect the needs, and still have everything meet the requirements. So I think the focus on the wildly important is critical. But I also want to make sure that people don't put blinders on the fact that it must be only those things, you still have to keep a holistic look.
