Flawless Execution

by James D. Murphy

  We had a system in place to expect the unexpected, to anticipate obstacles but provide a pathway to answers when the plan went afoul. Let’s say that a small cog in this enormous cycle was to take out the enemy surface-to-air missile sites—the SAM sites. Not easy, but we knew how to do that. A weapons system called the F-16 Wild Weasel would do the job nicely. All we’d have to do is get that F-16 across a long stretch of hostile air space over to a hostile SAM site so he could fire a missile down the radar beam and take it out. While he’d be doing that, the pilot would have to dodge a fusillade of return fire with his back exposed. With all the turning and burning, he’d certainly run out of fuel before returning to friendly airspace.

  Our commander knew all this, but when he stood up before us, all he said was: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is what I want to do. I want to wipe out every Iraqi SAM site in this kill box in three days. You understand what I want. You know the intent of your mission. I don’t care what it takes. Just make it happen.” Now, obviously we got more information than that, but once he’d communicated his intent, that’s pretty much all we needed to know; we went to work. We began the process called Plan-Brief-Execute-Debrief-Win. We used it when we trained. We used it when we flew in combat. It was second nature to us. First, everyone involved in the mission got involved in the planning. The Intel people collected intelligence on the SAM sites. The F-16 Wild Weasels got terrain briefs, updated their targeting plans, and loaded HARM (High-speed Anti-Radiation Missiles) missiles on their jets. Because we didn’t want them exposed, we tasked a four-ship of F-15s to sweep the area for Migs before the mission and then escort the package during the mission. We also had some KC-10 tankers to refuel us.

  The elements of the mission took shape.

  Once each team had its plan, we coordinated them and then briefed each team in minute detail. Timing was always important, so we started with a time check. Then we went through each and every step of the mission—the threats, the weather, the contingencies, the problems we may have, and the exact way we’d handle those problems, all the way down to who refueled first on the tanker and where the others would wait until they got on the boom to refuel (in this case, two in formation off the left wing, one off the right wing).

  From the briefing, we executed that mission. What is execution? Execution is nothing more than flying the brief. It is the unfolding of a scripted play. If all went well, we’d take off, hit the air refueling tankers, fly to the kill box, eliminate the SAMs, and return to base within a minute of the briefed time line. If that wasn’t how the mission went, we had contingency plans. For instance, if we were attacked by enemy fighters, we had a plan. If one of the Wild Weasels had to abort, we had a plan. If two Wild Weasels aborted, we had a different plan. If we had too many problems, we had a plan for shedding tasks—shedding until we were down to the essentials to accomplish the primary mission. (We even had a plan if the sunlight created too much glare!)

  Execution is the unfolding of a play scripted down to the last second.

  When the mission was over, each one of these teams had a nameless, rankless debrief, which was an extraordinarily powerful part of the process because each of these units immediately broke down the mission and looked for ways to improve their execution. We looked for root causes attributable to even the slightest misstep and then came up with a list of lessons learned. Then, unlike that CEO I talked to in the hall, we had a mechanism for feeding those lessons learned directly into the next planning cycle even if the next mission was headed out in a matter of hours. (In fact, it can go even farther. If that lesson learned was so important, if it could save the lives of another flight crew, we would feed that lesson learned up or down the chain of command to all of the fighter squadrons in the wing, a process that accelerated everyone’s experiences, everyone’s learning curve as if they’d flown that mission with me that day risking their own lives. In the end, we all execute better.)

  Remember: No mission is perfect. Let’s say we didn’t get all the SAMs. In the debrief, the pilots might be saying, “The intent was to take out the SAM sites, but three are still up and this is what I learned from the mission today: The intelligence guys forgot to tell us that mobile Triple A might be in the area. We Wild Weasel guys, therefore, had no reason to brief a contingency plan called a multi-axis attack. Had we done so, we would have reverted to our contingency and the mission would have been executed as briefed. Feeding that lesson learned back into our next brief should result in the full achievement of our objective—taking out the SAMs in the kill box.”

  That’s how debrief moves information back into the planning process and keeps you accelerating learning experiences and constantly improving. In fact, if you took only the top lesson learned from each one of those squadrons and funneled it back into the system—all the way up to the leader—then the leader would have a chance to understand what went on and massage, change, or tailor the intent to make the next mission even more effective.

  We did this every day for every mission. We were always tightening our plans, getting smarter, adapting, pulling off the next mission a little easier than the last. This is how we adapted and stayed one step ahead of the competitive rate of change in our environment. This is how we accelerate our learning process, keep our pilots alive and move one step closer to flawless execution, something my CEO desperately needed in his company.

  Sadly, this is something businesses do poorly. Our experiences with the top corporations in the world bear this out. Businesses rarely see execution as a process and almost never debrief. What a mistake. Without that process, without that debrief, mistakes are glossed over and those valuable lessons learned do not go back up the ladder to the leaders. In a fighter pilot’s world, this process is everything. That’s how we keep pilots alive. That’s how we win wars.

  As I said, it was, and no doubt is, hard being an American military fighter pilot. It’s dangerous. But it’s a lot less dangerous than being our enemy. Our jets may be no better than the Mig-29s and Sukhoi SU-31s but we have a process no air force in the world equals. Future Picture. Strategy. Leaders Intent. The Plan-Brief-Execute-Debrief-Win cycle. All supported by our standards, our training, and our people.

  So does this work in business? How does it work in you? Let’s look at the model again.

  In business, think of the Flawless Execution Model as a tool for energizing systems. After almost ten years of corporate training and coaching some of the world’s top companies, I began to see a problem. Most companies had smart and competent leaders who were passionate about their work and focused on their company’s success. They had employees working hard to do the job and fulfill the company’s mission. But rarely did these organizations execute like we did in our squadrons. Why? These same companies said they had great strategy, and their people were the best in the industry—so why the lack of execution?

  I quickly realized that “strategy” was the most misunderstood and misused word in corporate America. My first book, Business Is Combat, was about aligning your team or organization around a very clear mission, which is critical to winning in combat as well as in business. If you execute flawlessly against the wrong things and never get to your end goal, you can have the best tactics and the most passion, and still lose. In this day and age of doing more with less, finding out what those “right things” are that we need to execute against is even more critical.

  This did not go unnoticed by the United States Air Force. During the weeks leading up to Operation Desert Storm, a brilliant Air Force fighter pilot, Colonel John Warden, was tapped by General Chuck Horner, then Chief of Staff, to plan the air war. Warden mapped out the Iraqi “system,” narrowed down the number of prospective targets from several hundred thousand to just the critical targets, then tested the plan against the Future Picture—get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait. General Horner liked what he saw, and the plans were approved. In action, the plans spawned a level of execution that few battlefields have ever witnessed, then and now.

 
I met Colonel Warden three years ago. In the years since retiring from the Air Force, John has spent his time distilling the techniques he used in the Air Force down to an understandable body of knowledge he calls the Prometheus Process. As fellow ex-fighter pilots applying our techniques to the business world, we saw a fit between our focus on execution and his interests in systems, centers of gravity, and Future Pictures. As one fighter pilot to another, we started to blend our messages, even our minds.

  As Colonel Warden has discovered, every company is a system. Every industry is a system. Every division operates as a system. Even your body operates as a system. They all have interrelated parts. To achieve success, all the parts have to work in concert. It’s like a car. A car is a system. If the wheels fall off, the car won’t work—the system has broken down. Same with you. You may make it to a meeting with a buyer, but without your sales literature, you’re system doesn’t work and you’re reduced to becoming the cliched glib salesperson with his hands flapping in the air.

  A systemic approach is key to the Flawless Execution Model.

  How does a system work within a corporation when you employ the Flawless Execution Model? Let’s use a common corporate process—a competitively bid contract—as an example. Let’s say a contract is up for providing catering services to a sports stadium. The request for proposals (RFP) goes out to a dozen highly qualified companies. The contract is for sixteen retail food outlets in a major sports stadium. The sports stadium wants to know your credentials relative to the bid, a detailed list of your menu items, the variety, the quality of service you’ll guarantee, and of course, what their slice of the revenues will be.

  Management wants it; you want it. The contract is worth upwards of $5 million. Winning the contract fits into the overall Future Picture for the company and certainly supports the leader’s intent, so you assemble a team to prepare the bid. Who do you bring in? You need the facilities people to lay out food stations and the placement of the equipment, and to analyze the flow of food from the freezer to the customer. You need the signage people to come up with an abbreviated version of your normal store signage. You need the menu people to consider the actual food items that will be listed for sale. You do time management studies to make sure the products can be prepared quickly so you avoid the death spiral of unhappy customers waiting in long lines. The finance people have to look at margins and royalty rates. The supply chain people need to study the influx of business in a compressed time frame and determine how they will make sure the raw ingredients are there for each item. Human Resources has to map out a plan to train the counter people and the grill chiefs. Special considerations have to be made for the surges in traffic at the intermissions. And each one of these “departments” has to figure out what the competition is going to do and how they can beat their proposal.

  Each of these departments, or “silos,” meets and, together as one, attacks the specifications of the RFP. Is it war? You bet. You ask yourself all of those tough questions. How much royalty should we pay the stadium? How much will the competition pay? How many menu items do we need to have to make our bid competitive? How much capital will we have to invest? What does the overall picture look like when we’re up and operating?

  Then you get the good news. You won. Now you’re in the execution phase. Now you have to perform. Are you ready? Guess what? The planning process made you ready. Because you had everyone involved in the planning process, you have universal buy-in to the execution. The purchasing department starts purchasing and the signage people start writing contracts and when an obstacle comes up, you find out about it during the day’s debriefing. The lessons learned get fed back into the next day’s planning cycle, continuously, right up to opening day, right through the entire season, right up until the last sale is made for the season. As in the military, you start writing standards and the process stays in place; it’s scaleable. Every day the concessions operate a little better, the flow of raw materials is a little smoother, worker satisfaction goes up, customers like your people—the system works.

  At the heart of the Flawless Execution Model is a circular, continuous process you’re involved in every day. You take a general Future Picture, map out the system, identify centers of gravity, and break it down into a plan that each Flawless Execution team or business unit can execute to accomplish the overall future picture. The marketing department, the packaging department, the manufacturing department, and the R&D department take the Future Picture and create their own process in support of the intent. If one area falls out—let’s say they’re taken out by a bomb, or they get outsourced to another company—progress toward the final outcome is not decapitated. When there’s a problem, it gets fed back to the planning stage immediately.

  When everybody’s involved in the process, you suddenly have a very powerful, replicable, scalable organization, one where people can replace people and new initiatives can come online smoothly. The alternative? We call it the bricklayer syndrome, where you lay a brick but never know exactly what the architectural design of the house is.

  This is how it looks from the 30,000-foot level. Now let’s break it down and apply it to your business.

  CHAPTER 4

  Future Picture

  Individual execution is one thing…

  Organizational execution is everything!

  Flawless execution begins with a Future Picture. What is a Future Picture? Said simplest, the Future Picture is a view of the future as we’d like something to be. That something can be a new company, the person you want to be in three years, or the reorganized mega-corporation that needs to adapt to change. It’s a well-written, clear, high-resolution, and easily communicated picture of what you want the future to be.

  When I start to explain what a Future Picture is and what we are going to expect it to accomplish, I ask our seminar attendees to indulge me in a little exercise. I ask them to plan a picnic. What could be easier than planning a picnic? I ask one person to come up with the menu, one to pick the drinks, one to select the transportation, and one to pick the location. After a couple of minutes I ask them to lay it all out for me. As you might expect, each person had a different idea on what the perfect picnic should be. Our menu planner thinks it’s a table filled with platters of cold cuts and cheeses, and our drink planner likes beer. The transportation planner picked limousines, but the location planner picked a park.

  And I thought a picnic was red checkerboard tablecloths, hamburgers on the grill, and horseshoes.

  At this point I show them a slide of Pierre Auguste Renoir’s painting Luncheon of the Boating Party.

  In this magnificent piece of art we see one man’s Future Picture of a picnic. We see men and women in festive attire on a barge cruising through the countryside, drinking red wine, eating fowl on thin-crust crackers spread with caviar. We see netting for the bugs, a linen tablecloth, glass stemware, and everyone wearing great hats. Had I shown the group this painting before we began our planning and said I wanted our picnic to reflect this painting, what kind of answers would I have gotten? Menu: rolls, thin-crust crackers, various dips and crab meat, caviar, and a roasted chicken. Drinks would include Perrier, pinot noir, white wine—and lots of it. Transportation would be by boat. Location—we’ll embark from the banks of the river at the yacht club.

  Renoir provided the team with a high-resolution Future Picture of a picnic. Anyone on the picnic planning team could look at it and answer any of the countless questions that need answers when organizing a picnic. The richness, the completeness of this Future Picture is what makes it work. It becomes a beacon. It pulls people in a common direction toward a common goal as articulated in a Future Picture having sufficient content and clarity to provide guidance down the ranks. Executing is not enough. You must execute in the spirit of a Future Picture or you will invariably execute against the wrong things.

  Think about being at the ballpark and asking your friend to order a hot dog for you. Your friend may go down to the concession stand
and execute the order to the best of his ability but what he doesn’t know is your vision of a hot dog. Is your vision of an awesome hot dog one on a plate or a hot dog wrapped in paper? Does it have pickle relish on it? Do you like mustard, onions, or green peppers? Is your idea of the perfect hot dog a big half-pounder or is it a slim hot dog like the ones you had as a kid? Are you following me? What you have in mind is your Future Picture of a hot dog: pickles, ketchup, onions, on a plate, with two napkins—and it better be a big half-pounder. In order for your friend to get this right, did you paint a high enough resolution picture to make this a reality?

  Entrepreneurs are by default the masters in the art of painting Future Pictures. Why is this? It’s because entrepreneurs sell vision. They don’t have a company. They don’t have offices or sales. So they have to paint a high-resolution Future Picture of their vision and use that Future Picture to convince venture capitalists to part with their money and cajole partners to join them—maybe even get lenders to lend them money, vendors to give them credit, and employees to join them. Entrepreneurs sell the future. They “see” the profits, the building that has a sign across the top with their name on it. They “see” the glowing magazine articles that will be written about their corporate culture or about their tireless energy or about how great they are with customer service, product design, or clever marketing, or maybe even the impact they’ve made on the economy. If they can’t paint a vivid, powerful, detailed, textured Future Picture, there will be no company.