Flawless Execution

by James D. Murphy

  Look at the external threat factors but also the personal drivers behind those factors, whether it’s the attitude of a company or their Future Picture or their culture or the problems your threat had that morning on the way to the office. You can’t be too informed.

  You also have to look at internal threats. They are in your own company, within the four walls of your building. One famous general’s quote rings true to this: “We have met the enemy and the enemy is us.” What are these internal threats? We call them CIA. Complacency, Indifference, and Apathy. Whether you’re in a strong economy or a weak economy, you cannot be complacent about growing or developing new products or going into new markets. Do you think your customers are really satisfied with last year’s product? Never. But do they tell you? Do they push you to get out of the box and come up with something radically different? No. Customers don’t want change; they like the status quo. They may want a new feature or faster service but rare is the day that they ask for something revolutionary.

  Do you get a wake-up call before you’re dead in the water? Not likely. You have to fight complacency, indifference, and apathy with the certain knowledge that someone’s about to do you one better. In truth, companies that are complacent, indifferent, and apathetic are the ones most vulnerable to innovation. Take disruptive technologies. Disruptive technologies are always over the horizon—but they are there. Wi-Fi is evolving into a wireless broadband product for homes and businesses that completely bypasses the copper lines the telephone companies have spent billions of dollars to put in-ground. That’s disruptive. The iPod? Will it disrupt sales at the record stores? Probably. What do you think the future of the video store is with cable systems testing On-Demand TV? The fact is, see them or not, you can count on something being out there ready to tickle the tail of the dragon.

  When you look at threats, look at the internal factors as well—communication, proficiency, training, and the personal drivers behind them all. Pfizer is the largest pharmaceutical company in the world. We have worked with them for over seven years. They have seen massive change in their industry—mapping the human genome, mergers, compliance issues, and scandals, to name a few. Recently, I was working with Pfizer Australia and we were in the middle of planning a workshop to ready their marketing and sales teams for a new year of product introductions. They split our planning teams into four major drug areas, such as central nervous system drugs and cardiovascular drugs. Each group was responsible for their respective categories.

  Like most industries, the pharmaceutical industry is extremely competitive, so when we started down the path of listing threats, our teams intuitively focused on the competition. To look at their whiteboards you would think that this was the most competitive industry in the world. I said, “Fine, now what about the internal threats?” It took a while, but they finally discovered that the biggest threat they had was not from the outside but from the inside—from a lack of collaboration between marketing and medical. You see, in the pharmaceutical industry research and development scientists work on the next generation of drugs, while medical specialists evaluate the drug trials to ensure the drug is safe and performs as advertised, and the marketing people make certain that the sales department is armed with the proper information, samples, and technical expertise to convince doctors to prescribe the drugs. The problem came up between the medical guys and the marketing guys. The medical guys were science-based and black and white. For the most part they were quiet and hesitant to make any statements or claims until all the evidence was in. The sales and marketing guys were outgoing and action oriented; they would rather die than wait on anything. Medical was not providing marketing with the trial information or timelines required to make marketing plans. The marketing guys wanted to launch today. The medical guys had fundamental and legal obligations to ensure that any information that went out into the field was based on sound scientific research, regardless of marketing’s timelines. Encouraging this group to go through the process to identify threats led the group to realize that their own lack of communication and collaboration was much more important than any outside competitor. Pfizer now plans with both teams imbedded with each other, sharing the responsibility of joint mission objectives.

  At Afterburner, we ask people to list their internal and external threats, but we also break those threats down to those that are controllable versus those that are uncontrollable. Weather is a good example. Fighter pilots can’t control weather, so they highlight it as an uncontrollable threat and deal with it later, in the last step to planning called contingency planning.

  Finally, prioritize the threats. Which ones pack the most lethality—which ones can do you the most damage? Put them on top of your list. Make certain you understand them, plan for them, and have a resource to deal directly with them. Which leads us into the next step.

  STEP THREE: IDENTIFY YOUR AVAILABLE RESOURCES

  Now, who or what are your available resources? They are people, money, systems, technologies, products, clients, time, known strengths, services, or skills of the team that help you negate your threats and accomplish your mission objective. Do you have anybody or anything on your team that can help you eliminate or negate those threats? Now, I know what you’re thinking out there. You’re thinking, “Well, Murph, that’s great. I already knew that I’ve got people on my team or services that can help me.” But fighter pilots out there turning and burning, putting missiles on Migs or bombs on target, can’t really stop and spend time talking to the maintainer who’s turning the wrench on the bottom of that $30 million F-15 they’re already flying. Or spend much time with the supply officer in the back office who is supplying us with our G-suit, to help keep oxygenated blood in our heads so we don’t pass out when we’re pulling nine G’s. Or maybe gab with the ground controllers or the AWACs (Airborne Warning and Control). Wanna bet? Fighter pilots know exactly what the maintainer does, what the supply officer with the G-suit does, and how the AWACs are trained and what they can do for him. Fighter pilots know their jobs and how they perform them.

  You have to do the same thing in business. You have to know the people in the back office and what they can do for you. Administration, public relations, marketing, manufacturing? These people are resources. Talk to them; listen to what they say. Understand what they do. Ask yourself: How can they help me? You have to walk the manufacturing floor and talk to the factory workers. You have to know what goes in that widget that you’re selling. I know it’s tough to do but, one day, you’re going to be turning and burning, and you’re going to wish you had.

  Then there are the assets outside your immediate circle of influence. Do you know how to get in touch with that vendor who can help you close the next deal? Have you met the owner of the restaurant who might give you a better table when you’re entertaining a client? The devil’s in the details. Look at everything and everyone as a potential asset and think about how they might help. Listen to everyone, know how to reach them. Access everything. Look for nuggets of gold everywhere.

  If we knew we were going to have a SAM threat, we asked ourselves, what did we have in our inventory list (we call that a “frag” or fragmentary order), today, that we could use to negate that threat? Well, we might have had aircraft performing the Wild Weasel mission on our team that day. These are men and women fighter pilots who leap out of bed every day, looking to hunt and track down surface-to-air missiles. So we knew we had that asset on our playlist today. That’s a strength that we had because our Wild Weasels had technology built into their missiles that overcame this particular model of SAMs.

  The Voit company was one of the leading manufacturers of Volleyballs and soccerballs when the racquetball phenomenon took off. Naturally, as a recreational sports company that made balls, they decided to get into that business, too. Now, Voit wasn’t known for racquetballs, but that didn’t deter management. They knew how to make great balls and they had distribution in the sporting goods outlets, so they went to work. They designed a ball, came
up with attractive packaging, and had a terrific price point—but no one in the company knew how to position their new racquetball versus all the other round balls. It was a tough problem. All racquetballs had to be the same size and weight, and they had to have a specific bounce; those rules were in the federation rule books. So what made one ball different from the other?

  The company was stumped. Their New York advertising agency was stumped.

  Well, it turns out a salesman was walking through the factory one day when he saw this cannon-like gun firing the new racquetballs against a wall. Bam! Bam! Bam! He asked what was going on. The quality control specialists said they were testing balls to test breakage. Did it all the time, he said.

  Breakage! thought the salesman. Breakage was the number one complaint in the industry! So this quick-thinking, Leaning-Forward fighter pilot of a salesman called up the marketing department told them what he saw. The marketing people called their advertising agency and when Voit rolled out their racquetball ads the headline was a winner: “We Fired Our Balls Against a Concrete Wall at 120 Miles per Hour. Guess Who Won?”

  Voit became the number one ball in the category.

  Once you have listed all of your support assets for the mission, line them up or match them up with possible threats (Post-it notes work well). Do you have enough resources to negate the threats? Do you need all the available resources for the mission at hand? Do you need an ally or an outside source to help? This simple process will give you and your team enormous situational awareness into the potential mission at hand.

  Walk the factory floor. There’s just no telling where you’ll find inspiration, ideas, knowledge, or that one quick fact that closes a sale. Identify your combat-support assets—your team’s weapons, your team’s people and services—and do this now, in the planning room—not in the chaos of battle. Match these assets up with your threats and I guarantee that you will help negate the threat.

  STEP FOUR: EVALUATE THE LESSONS LEARNED

  Everyone has experiences; someone has been there before. Step four is to tap into those experiences and apply those lessons that fit our mission. Has a team gone before us in a similar situation? Did they make mistakes or did they win big? Wouldn’t you like to talk to these individuals before you embark on a similar mission? Did the Wild Weasels take out the SAM site earlier today? Did they have any lessons learned about mobile triple A that was not planned to be in the area but was encountered? If they did have a lesson learned about mobile triple A, we then add it as a planning contingency and adjust our tactics based on this lesson, today! Right now—before we finalize our plan and brief our aircrews.

  Has a salesman been to a specific buyer? Does he know the buyer’s trigger points? Has someone been to the client’s office before? One of my clients rents space in a building that has no parking lot. To make matters worse, his office is next door to a small science museum that seems to be packed with kids. The day I went to introduce myself to him the parking meters were full and the nearest parking lot was ten minutes away. It was a sweltering day, so when I arrived I was a mess. Lesson learned: On the next trip I changed my tactic—I took a cab.

  In corporate America, you can’t hide the truth and you can’t make excuses, not that everyone’s got the message. But Merck got it. When an internal study determined that VIOXX, a leading drug for arthritis, might be related to heart attacks, they took the high road and pulled VIOXX off the market entirely. They knew the lessons learned. Tylenol had a potential disaster in the 1980s when someone put poison in some of their bottles. Instead of waiting to see if only a very few bottles were affected, or worse—make excuses or give a public statement about the misfortunes of the terrorist mindset—they immediately removed all of their bottles from the shelves and developed tamper-proof bottles. It is still one of corporate America’s great success stories. Tylenol flourished in the aftermath and still dominates its category today. You never hide from the truth, never cover mistakes with lies.

  Lessons learned can be big or little, your experience, the group’s experience, or an experience from another company. We search them out write them on the whiteboard, take them apart and feed the mission-critical ones into the planning process.

  STEP FIVE: DEVELOP COURSES OF ACTION/TACTICS

  At this point your team should be armed with a mission objective, know the threats, have identified the available resources, and have inserted lessons learned. Now it’s time to develop a menu of potential courses of action. To do that, we break into small groups and brainstorm ideas. At Afterburner we like a minimum of three groups. Two groups are asked to develop courses of action based on the threats and the available resources, while the third group is allowed to go wild—to develop courses of action assuming a perfect world with unlimited resources.

  After about an hour, we merge the groups and, through open planning, look at what we have. For sure, there will be two sets of tactics based on reality and one set of tactics based on an ideal scenario. The two sets of tactics based on reality may be quite different from one another, or they may be similar. Either way, it doesn’t matter. We want ideas. We want creativity. That is why we break up into small groups to ensure that one person or a group of type A’s does not control or dominate the brainstorming session. We want everyone’s ideas. In fact, the more ideas, the better, because from these three groups we pick the tactics most likely to accomplish our mission. How do we do that?

  When we bring the three groups together, we analyze and finalize our plan. This requires good facilitation and the ability to put ideas visually in front of the group, usually with whiteboards. Each team lays out its tactics; all of us walk through and pick them apart. It will soon be clear where the strongest elements are for a perfect course(s) of action or tactic based on the collective brainstorming of the group and the work that was done in steps two and three. Once this course(s) of action is decided by your team, we now need to put some accountability around the tactic.

  Timing

  Once you’ve decided on the best course(s) of action, it is mandatory to attach a timeline to the mission. Who will do what, when?

  In the world of air combat, the term decision matrix is used to describe tactical timelines. A decision matrix puts courses of action on the horizontal line, with hash marks representing decision points. Let’s assume we are flying a mission involving four F-15s against a hostile enemy force. We expect to engage these “Bandits” in air-to-air combat. This decision matrix will start sixty nautical miles out from the merge (the point at which we will pass nose to nose on our intercept), with hash marks at forty, thirty, twenty, fifteen, and ten nautical miles. At each hash mark our four-ship of F-15s will perform a series of functions in relationship to the adversaries. For example, at the sixty-miles-to-merge point we will attempt to declare the threat “hostile” and commit our forces. If the threat is flying together we will keep our four ships together in line abreast formation. If we encounter multiple groups or separate formations from the threat, we will counter by splitting our four ships into two groups of two.

  At the forty-miles-to-merge point, we will start a climb into thinner air to maximize our missile capabilities and our first launch advantage (missiles aerodynamically perform or shoot farther in the thinner air at high altitude). If the threats are hostile and they meet our shoot criteria, we will ensure that all F-15s are locked on to different targets. At twenty nautical miles our missiles are in the air.

  At fifteen miles we will decide whether or not to continue as a four-ship. If at fifteen miles one of us is spiked (a term used when an enemy fighter has locked on to you with his radar, indicated by a tone and display in our cockpits), that pilot must break the radar lock and abort by doing a diving 180-degree turn in full afterburner. If you’ve launched a missile and are not spiked, you will continue to the merge. If you are supporting a missile and you are spiked, you will do a defensive maneuver and attempt to dump the spike. If you are successful, you continue to the merge; if not, abort.
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br />   These are our courses of actions laid out on a timeline. This simple timeline enables me to make quick decisions in a mission that will be decided in less than three minutes. Timelines put accountability into the plan. They specify who does what, when. Who will develop what, and when will the marketing collateral materials be finished? If our threat (competitor) launches their fall fashion line before we do, when do we launch our counter campaign? Who will make the call?

  Timelines put who, what, and when into the plan. Taken together, the tactics that survived the collective brainstorming of our team are now laid out like a map with an accountability trigger specifying who does what course of action, when. Think you have the perfect plan? We never assume this; before we finalize the course(s) of action, we always “Red Team” the plan.

  The Red Team

  How would you beat yourself? How would you undermine your sales presentation, defeat the features of your products, turn your price point into a disadvantage, or render your marketing campaign ineffective? During Desert Storm, the planners handed their war plans over to a team that was set up to take it apart and defeat it. Can you imagine that? After all those brilliant, experienced minds came up with the war plan, they gave it to another team and said: “Beat it up. Defeat our plan.” What’s more, the Red Team had an inside track. They were not the enemy. They were not making guesses about timing, tactics, or the performance characteristics of one aircraft or the other. They knew everything.

  Beat it they did. Not entirely. But during the Desert Storm planning process the Red Team found weaknesses, weaknesses that would have cost lives in the field. The Red Team made the plans tighter, more foolproof.