Flawless
Execution
Use the Techniques and
Systems of America’s
Fighter Pilots to Perform
at Your Peak and Win
the Battles of the
Business World
James D. Murphy
IN MEMORIAM
IT IS WITH GREAT DESPAIR AND REGRET THAT WE HAVE LOST A CORNERSTONE MEMBER OF OUR TEAM. STEVE “ROTHMAN” KENNY WAS NOT ONLY A WARRIOR TO US ALL; HE WAS A FAMILY MEMBER, FACILITATOR, AND, MOST IMPORTANTLY, A GOOD FRIEND. STEVE DID NOT SURVIVE AN EJECTION FROM HIS A-4 SKYHAWK. THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO STEVE. WE WILL ALWAYS HAVE ROTHMAN IN OUR HEARTS AND ON OUR MINDS.
CONTENTS
Foreword
1 The Language of Flawless Execution
2 The Flawless Execution Model
3 An Introduction to Flawless Execution
4 Future Picture
5 Strategy
6 Leader’s Intent
7 The Flawless Execution Engine
8 Planning
9 The Brief
10 Briefing: Steps Five through Seven
11 Briefing: Steps Eight and Nine
12 Execute
13 Coping Mechanisms and Task Shedding
14 Debrief
15 The STEALTH Debrief
16 Standards
17 Training
18 People
19 Individual Execution
Index
Acknowledgments
Also by James D. Murphy
Copyright
About the Publisher
FOREWORD
I am an American fighter pilot. I fly the United States Air Forces F-15 fighter, a supersonic jet with twin afterburning engines that ranks among the premier aircraft in the world. I can scramble to the jet, jump in, and, with just a few movements of my hands, crank up the engines, scan the 350 switches and dials in my cockpit, push up throttles to full afterburner, and in a matter of seconds be in a vertical climb and passing through 15,000 feet. Once I’m airborne, I am in command of a jet capable of dogfighting on either side of the sound barrier. I can climb high enough to see the curvature of the earth, or fly 500 feet off the ground in the black of night. Either way, when we’re on a mission, when this plane and I are in our groove, it’s comfortable; it’s under control. I am one with this jet; I am defined by this intensely intimidating, highly effective, extremely lethal machine that can be sent virtually anywhere in the world.
The key word in that previous paragraph is “when”—when we work together. A supersonic jet is a temperamental beast. It is built for speed and agility. Those attributes give me a decided advantage in the air but I do pay a price for them. Fast and agile though the F-15 is, it operates inside an envelope that has razor-thin margins for error. This jet demands that I give it my undivided attention. It’s constantly testing me. Sometimes I have just seconds to make choices that can save me or kill me. Fixate on one instrument and I lose the data from another—perhaps I fly it into the ground. If I don’t listen carefully to the sounds this jet feeds me, I won’t hear tones in my helmet or important radio calls from my wingman, and it’s game over. Throw in checking my wingman’s “six,” terrain clearance, working my radar, weapons selection, navigation, making sure I know where the enemy is, and managing my avionics, and you can see how fighter pilots live and breathe the word “execution.” I have to be sharp, alert; my situational awareness has to be crackling like fireworks. I have to sense and see things that ordinary people would not. In a nutshell, I have to execute—flawlessly—or this environment, this jet, this business of flying supersonic aircraft, will kill me.
That’s the world of a fighter pilot. It’s life at Mach One—fast, and in many ways thrilling, but absolutely unforgiving. Small mistakes can be lethal; our margins for error are tiny—there’s just no room for a pilot who doesn’t stay ahead of the jet. There’s no room for sloppy execution.
That was then. Now is now. Now I’m a businessman. I specialize in the art of improving corporate and individual execution, which, simplified, is nothing more than the ability of one person to perform his task without repetitive mistakes. I specialize in this art because it’s how I lived my life as an F-15 fighter pilot. If I failed to execute my mission properly, there was an incredibly good chance I was going to be a smoking hole in the ground. Not a nice day. The pursuit of flawless execution was the dividing line between life and death, between a successful mission and a scrub, between losing a wingman and bringing your squadron home together.
But was it so important in business? I thought it should be, but there were far too many examples around me that together seemed to say that flawless execution really didn’t matter. Salespeople could have their sales pitches shot full of holes and suffer little more than the temporary misery of a long flight home. In the field, a technician or an installer or a repair man could spend two hours on a job site that required only one—and the company was no worse for the wear. And how many times had I seen a front desk clerk at a hotel or a sales clerk in a store bumble the most basic questions? I couldn’t count. In business, if you failed to execute your mission properly, there was always another day. Sure, a promotion might be delayed, but the reality is, in the F-15, you die; in the boardroom, the corporate vice president has another day.
I started Afterburner, Inc. in 1996. I developed a training syllabus that demonstrated to corporate America how the unique tools used to train fighter pilots could be used in business to raise an individual’s level of execution—as well as a corporation’s. The better each individual executed, the more certain the corporate mission would be successful. As more and more people learned the tools and applied them, doing their jobs as if their lives depended on it, the more successful the company would be. Every mission, I said, was utterly and vitally important. Each salesperson, every front desk clerk, every installer, and every person in the marketing or manufacturing department was important.
In sum, our company set out to train a world of corporate fighter pilots—men and women who set the bar high, prepared for their mission, executed it as if their very lives depended on it, debriefed their experiences to accelerate their learning curve, and then went out and did it better the next time. I envisioned a world of Leaning-Forward dedicated, action-oriented men and women trained the way the United States military trains the most successful fighter pilots in the world—men and women with a passion for flawless execution.
Clearly, that message resonated with CEOs. By 2004, that idea I’d had eight years earlier had been turned into a bustling, multinational corporation ranking 212th on the Inc. 500. We were now fifty-one men and women strong, all of us training the average person how to do his or her job better. More than 100 of the Fortune 500 corporations have employed us to train more than 1,500,000 businessmen and women in the skills used by fighter pilots—skills that help them execute their tasks better than they ever thought possible.
The truth is, in business, tomorrow is not just another day. Second-rate standards, second-rate performance, and second-rate desire lead to the graveyard of corporate America. Capital markets dry up. Customers do walk away from poor customer service or marginal products. Compromise infects the organization. Revenues fall, companies suffer astronomical capital losses; there are decimated pensions plans and empty retirement accounts—and companies go belly up.
In my first book, Business Is Combat, I talked about the elements necessary to create a flawlessly executing corporation. I drew parallels to the highly successful organizational and executional tactics of the military aviation community. I spelled out how a company could create a fighter pilot “culture,” a Petri dish that would nurture the growth of individuals and align them toward the company goals. I t
alked about how corporations needed to orient their assets—and indeed themselves—toward the execution of critical missions.
This book is different. This book focuses on the individual, and that distinction is very important. Great companies are built around extraordinary individual execution; the better the individual executes, the better the company performs. Take sales. If an individual improves its closing rates, the company benefits with higher revenues (and the salesperson takes home a fatter commission check to the family). In production, if an individual contributes to the overall manufacturing efficiency, the company becomes more profitable through reduced costs. Even simpler—in the hotel industry, if the individual at the front desk can correctly check in a guest the first time, the transaction will improve the customer experience, which will enhance the company’s image, which in turn improves the likelihood that the company will enjoy repeat business from that customer.
It’s all very circular, but it begins with how well an individual executes.
But individuals rarely act alone. Individuals are invariably part of a team; men and women invariably work in groups. Groups require leadership; individuals require missions and tasks. Then, and only then, this team of individuals executes as a group—a group measured on its collective execution, a group benefiting from the individual execution of each of its members.
Thus, the goal of the individual is to flawlessly execute. This in turn achieves the aims of the group—a flawless mission. When you do this over and over again, exceptional performance becomes a self-replicating strand of DNA that accelerates the evolution of the company into a higher species.
The results are predictable. You win and the group wins. And that is what this book is about. You will gain a trainable, learnable, repeatable process—bred in military aviation—that improves execution. It’s about achieving Flawless Execution.
CHAPTER 1
The Language of Flawless Execution
FLAWLESS (FLA-less): Without flaw; perfect. Syn: Faultless
EXECUTION (ek-so-KYU-shon): A carrying out; a doing; a performing. Syn: Accomplishment
The ability to perform a task in the prescribed manner—Flawless Execution—is one of the most daunting yet vitally important missions facing corporate America today. With fewer workers underpinning the manufacturing base; with consumers demanding more for their money in terms of products or services; with intense pressures from the financial sector to meet financial targets, Flawless Execution has become the drumbeat of modern American business. How do we execute better? Is there a learnable, teachable, repeatable process to improve execution?
In fact, there is. It was developed in one of the most unforgiving laboratories in the world—the military jet fighter. In the aftermath of accidents, mistakes, and miscalculations that, since the 1940s, have cost uncountable aircrews their lives, Flawless Execution has become the theme in our book of lessons learned.
Born of necessity; due to the international conflicts that put our men (and now women) into harm’s way, the United States military long ago came to grips with the need to train people how to execute flawlessly. Nowhere was it accomplished with more fervor, with more thought or study, or with a more fanatical dedication to institutionalizing the results than in the training of America’s fighter pilots.
To understand Flawless Execution, you must first understand the language. Throughout this book, I use language that is different from what you’ll find in corporate America, and here’s why: Too many corporate words carry around baggage that I want you to shed. I don’t want you to assume that you know what I mean when I use certain words, so instead, I use the words that we pilots use when executing our mission. Why? Language from the pilot’s world will be largely new to you, so I can fill each word with the exact meaning I want you to have. Let me give you an example.
The Flawless Execution Model is based on a pyramid. The pyramid describes how a “mission” is executed. The heart of the pyramid is the execution engine. Here we introduce you to a cycle called the Plan-Brief-Execute-Debrief-Win cycle. Each of these four “phases” leads back to “Win,” where the process starts all over again. Visualize these words as five points on an ever-connecting, ever-looping cycle. To achieve Flawless Execution, every task will have a specific Plan-Brief-Execute-Debrief-Win cycle.
Now, I could have used words like “analyze,” or “implementation,” as one might in the corporate world, and if I had, I would be understood before another word came out of my mouth. But that’s not what I want. The Plan-Brief-Execute-Debrief-Win cycle is quite different—and infinitely more powerful—than the regime of Plan-Implement-Analyze. With it you have a mechanism that thoroughly prepares you for your mission, gives you a list of scripted responses for contingencies, and contains the most powerful weapon in business—the debrief. At the end of every mission, the entire team sits down and debriefs. Mistakes are identified, root causes are unearthed, and a better way to do things works its way right back up into the planning cycle that begins the very next day—or the very next hour. Imagine the advantage. On a four-day sales trip, lessons learned from day one are built into the planning for day two. Learning experiences are accelerated; individual performance is supercharged.
Let me give you another example: At the top of this pyramid is the starting point. It is called Future Picture. Now, you may think you understand what I mean by Future Picture, but throw out whatever you’re thinking because we’re talking about the Flawless Execution definition of Future Picture. Future Picture is a high-definition picture that shows in great detail the future as you want it to be. We paint this picture in a resolution high enough to let any level of management, or any team member, zoom into it at any detail and find within it clarity, composition, and texture. This is accomplished by crafting a twelve-point descriptor, each word of which has purpose and meaning that when dissected withstands microscopic scrutiny. The Future Picture is a statement of what you intend to have happen.
The perfection of that picture is in detail—detail fine enough to give your team information sufficient to visualize how their personal contributions will help attain that picture. The Future Picture governs both group and individual execution. Because it’s richly textured, it neatly interlaces with latitude, the proper amount and degree of which individuals must be given so that as they execute, they can adjust their execution within the boundaries of the Future Picture to ensure Flawless Execution. What are these boundaries? They will vary, that’s for sure, but every task, every mission, every job we perform has to contribute to the attainment of the overall Future Picture even when (not if!) we encounter a problem. The trick is preparing for problems by having a portfolio of contingencies planned out in advance that, when used, nevertheless move us forward toward the Future Picture. Let’s throw out the more rigid, organizational words of objectives-strategies-plan for the simpler, leaner, more dynamic, and ultimately more realistic guiding principle called the Future Picture.
This raises an interesting point. How does latitude work in a model called Flawless Execution? Good question. The answer is this: The Flawless Execution Model is not a model in pursuit of the elusive “five 9s.” Humans are not machines. Rigid executional tactics work in machines, but they do not work in humans. Humans need flexibility. Humans innovate, adapt, improvise—sometimes to a preplanned “contingency” script—but machines don’t. Five 9s may be attainable in a “closed” environment like a computer, but it isn’t in humans. Flawless Execution is not the pursuit of perfection; rather, it is the pursuit of a method of operation that, when done correctly, can be replicated by the organization. Latitude, therefore, recognizes our human nature. Latitude, when exercised against a clear understanding of the intent of the organization (or the mission), lets people overcome obstacles that with rigid rules would be insurmountable. It allows the individual to inject initiative and training into a situation even as the rules change. Think of it as a football game. A receiver runs a broken pass route, but instead of giving up, he exe
cutes a preplanned alternate route and the pass is completed. It wasn’t the play called in the huddle. It wasn’t flawless. But the process delivered a flawlessly executed play nonetheless, and the team achieved its goal of moving the ball closer to the end zone.
Then there is something we call Standards. Again, toss out your old definition. How often has a golden opportunity unexpectedly arisen for which you were ill prepared? I was going to the bank to make a deposit and as I walked down the sidewalk, I happened to walk into a client I’d been trying to talk to all week. Was I ready? You bet. I had a practiced, polished elevator pitch ready to go—and I had the delivery, the inflection, the choice of words I’d used based on the situation I was in, down to a science. But here’s the neat part—every one of my partners was as prepared as I was and each of them would have kicked into the same pitch. Would you be ready? Do you have a well-practiced pitch you could deliver in the brief time of a ride in an elevator? Could you go into action and deftly turn that chance encounter into a valuable opportunity? By practicing standards, a chance encounter can be as productive as a full-blown sales call planned months in advance. I’ll tell you in a later chapter about a California F-16 fighter pilot who ended up flying Combat Air Patrol over New York City on September 11, 2001, with the Vermont Air National Guard—a pilot no one in Vermont had ever met before, all because of Standards.
Which leads me to training and people. As you explore the Flawless Execution Model, you’ll be introduced to a new way of looking at training and a new way to accelerate the competency of your people. The Air Force believes in finding the right person with the right skills for the right job. That done, they like to send recruits up the learning curve as fast as they can. Why? Because we live in a dangerous world and the sooner new pilots overcome the experience curve the better. The Air Force does that by using a series of feedback loops called Lessons Learned, catalyzed by an invaluable process they call the Debrief. You and your people will overcome learning curves too—if you throw away your old notions and understand exactly what I mean by a Lessons Learned and Debriefs.
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