Flawless Execution

by James D. Murphy

  Have you ever heard the term gold-collar employee? An article in the Harvard Business Review first brought this concept to my attention. Gold-collar employees are not senior executives; rather, they are the absolutely essential, must-have employees who keep your business running. These are the men and women who staff the front desk in a hotel or drive the delivery trucks or handle the baggage. In the world of a fighter pilot, they are the refuelers, maintainers, weapons loaders, and life-support people who make sure the G-suits are functioning properly.

  Gold-collar employees are the people without whom you can’t run a business. They are worth their weight in gold by being there (versus a golden parachute employee, who is one you’ve jettisoned yet makes money on the way out). But what makes them valuable? First, they have the training to get the job done. More importantly, they have the discipline to do their jobs. They show up on time, they drive their routes, they care about the customer, they adhere to the standards—and they have the will to do their jobs exactly how you want their jobs to be done. That’s an employee who parks in the employee-of-the-month spot.

  Do you have the same discipline as these must-have employees? Or, said another way, are you setting the standard and living your corporate discipline? Once again, I learned the hard way just how important that is to the process. While everyone at Afterburner knows our standards guide cold, in the early years our people were getting mixed signals. It was me. Maybe it was just here and there, but on more days than I care to admit, I was relying on others to pick up the pieces. Most obvious to all—my attire. I wrote the standards on attire, but I was cutting corners. If you want your people to wear business casual, then you better wear business casual. If you want your training to take hold with your new people, then you have to see to it that what’s written in the guide is acted out by you. If you wear jeans, you undercut the discipline. If you wear a coat and tie, you undercut discipline. Discipline means you do exactly what is asked of you. You don’t undershoot the standard; you don’t overshoot it either. You hit it on the nose. And for it to work company-wide, that starts at the top.

  CONTINUATION TRAINING

  Once a year, we fly everybody to Atlanta, and we have a two-day standards seminar. All we do is focus on our standards. We know that it takes exactly forty-one minutes for our main speakers to go through the task saturation keynote, and we know our facilitators have forty-one minutes to get through a STEALTH debrief. Our content, our pacing—everything’s been refined over nine years and is down to a science, one that’s been developed and modified before over a million participants. We know what works and what doesn’t, what gets the message through and what distracts. But we never take for granted that all fifty-one of our people are staying current. It’s the old 100-80-80 rule. As the leader, I have 100 percent of the knowledge and enthusiasm and dedication, but the person under me can at most have just 80 percent of that knowledge, enthusiasm, and dedication—and the person below that, only 80 percent of the person above him. It dilutes quickly. So we have our recurrency training, our continuation training, our two-day seminar, and we make sure that everyone is up on the dress codes, up on the content and has the pacing down cold.

  Continuation training is secondhand to pilots and to many other professionals, including lawyers, doctors, and accountants. In our field, and each of theirs, staying fresh, keeping up with the changes in their professions, is so important that continuing education courses are required by law. In truth, they should be required at every company, no matter what size. Maintaining the essential skills to fly a commercial airliner is no less important than maintaining the essential skills to sell a high-speed Internet connection. If your pilots can’t fly, if your salespeople can’t sell the basic service, you have no business. You’re grounded. If you have an annual sales meeting, as most companies do, put aside a day for recurrency training, continuation training. Few of us can say that we couldn’t do a little better by spending a half day fine-tuning our essential life skills.

  Fighter pilots rate their experience on how many hours they have in the jet. They know they’re not in training command anymore; they’re in the F-15. They’re frontline fighter pilots now. Every hour in the F-15 puts them higher and higher and higher in that level of experience and training. The more hours they have, the sharper and broader their skill sets.

  High-time pilots get no slack. They train, they have recurrency requirements, and they have the same standards as the new hot stick on the block. But guess what? Those high-time pilots are the first in the briefing room, the first to criticize themselves, and the first to work the squadron ever closer toward Flawless Execution.

  Training isn’t something that gets in the way. Training is the way that gets you there.

  CHAPTER 18

  People

  “Get the right people on the bus, in the right seats.”

  —JIM COLLINS, author of Good to Great:

  Why Some Companies Make the Leap … and Others Don’t

  I hear this comment so frequently I can repeat it in my sleep: “People are the most valuable asset to our company.”

  I think that’s exactly right, but rarely do companies put much thought into the people process of the company. Don’t get me wrong. I fully understand that an entire industry has grown around tools to help companies screen employees better. But there is still something missing.

  I first realized how important this is as I was finishing my F-15 training at Luke Air Force Base in Arizona. At this point in my military career I had been in the Air Force just eighteen months and flying jets for a grand total of just 280 hours. I had passed my initial flight screening; survived jet school, or UPT as we called it in the Air Force; made it through our high “G” training in the centrifuge; graduated from fighter pilot lead-in training; survived combat land survival and water survival; and was finally sitting at the top F-15 school, where only the best are invited in. What struck me was that each man in my class came from a different background, a different part of the country, and a different educational system, but we were all incredibly similar. We all dreamed about the same things, laughed at the same jokes, drank the same type of beer, talked in similar patterns, had similar mannerisms, and chewed gum the same way. Most importantly, we were all getting paid about $24,000 a year to risk our lives on a mission objective that someone else had written. The attention to detail, the esprit de corps, camaraderie, and overall quality of this group was impressive, and we were working for the government! How in the world did this happen? Would you like to have such a team in your organization?

  It was no accident. The Air Force knew exactly what it took to be a fighter pilot. It knew the character traits, the cultural background, the physical and psychological traits required to excel in the cockpit of an F-15 or F-16.

  Most companies don’t have more than fifty years of experience understanding the unique requirements for a job function that has remained relatively constant for five decades. Sure, our planes are magnitudes faster today than they were in 1947 and the cockpit load twice that, but the basic job is the same. Fly a mission; get back alive.

  In order to get a pilot slot in the USAF I had to pass a basic aptitude test, a rigorous physical exam, a psychological profile, and a test that looked at my eye-hand coordination, spatial memory (how well do you operate in a multidimensional environment), and basic aviation knowledge. This was just to get in the door! Then I had eighteen months of high-intensity training with plenty of opportunities to wash out before I arrived at an F-15 unit. Why did the Air Force invest so much in assessing us? Because it takes over $6 million to get an F-15 pilot trained and ready for combat.

  How much does it cost your company every time one of your employees doesn’t work out? Lost training costs, travel, an investment in your staff’s time, lost productivity, and the all-important lost opportunity costs. Dr. Brad Smart, the author of the book Top Grading, studied more than fifty corporations and found out that it costs an average of fourteen times a person’s
salary for a miss-hire in the $100,000 range and twenty-eight times the salary in the $100,000-$250,000 range! Smart goes on to say that 50 percent of all employment situations result in a miss-hire.

  Look at your organization. Do you know what qualities it takes to excel in your own environment? Not the skills your business requires, but the character and culture it will take to be successful in your unique environment. At Afterburner, we screen new employees rigorously, and we’re so good at it that we developed assessment tools our clients can use when they screen prospective employees. But there is so much more to it than that. People can fake their way into the wrong job. You can talk yourself into a bad hire. No, what you have to do is be forever mindful of that vague, nebulous thing called “fit.” In the end, does a person fit your corporate culture?

  In the business of training companies, culture is something we see firsthand. Marriott wants engaging, outgoing people at the front desks of the Resident Inns. When I spoke to more than 600 of them, I was struck by how similar they were—well-groomed, happy people who seemed more interested in me than in themselves.

  Southwest Airlines is well known for its unique culture. They want people who like to work with each other. Get through the gate at Southwest and you’ll probably see a few photos from the last Halloween or birthday party. This is a company that likes to have a little spirit rub off on its customers—after all, the airline may be no frills, but it doesn’t cost any money to laugh.

  Accountants probably don’t need to laugh all day, but they do want a culture that matches their interest in accounting. Would it be appropriate to transfer Southwest’s culture to an accounting firm? Probably not.

  That’s part of the Air Force’s secret. I had to pass a lot of written tests, but I also had to shake a few hands and have a few dinners with the guys in the squadron. Those dinners were about culture—would Jim Murphy fit in?

  In my previous book, we discussed setting the bar high in order to create an elite team in which only the top performers are attracted. One only has to look at special forces teams like the Navy’s SEALS to see the top-notch talent they attract. The point is this: It is not always about the best compensation package or the benefits you offer but the pride and self-satisfaction you get by being part of a special team. Good companies make their people into exceptional workers. Exceptional workers execute better because they have something more at stake than themselves—they have their peers, their culture, the approval of those around them. In companies that bring the right people together, however the process, those factors lead to Flawless Execution.

  CHAPTER 19

  Individual Execution

  Up until now, we’ve dealt with the art of Flawless Execution from the larger, corporate perspective. The leadership develops a Future Picture that then translates into strategies through open planning, which is then fed into the execution engine. But what about small companies and small teams? What about you? More times than I care to remember, entrepreneurs and small business owners have come up to me and said: “Murph, I’m too small to make this work.” They worry that they have to have a large company mentality and, even more daunting, a large corporate pock-etbook to achieve Flawless Execution.

  Nothing could be further from the truth, but I understand their point. Small business is the backbone of America. In a small business, resources are lean, money is precious, and no one has enough time—kitchen remodeling companies, lawn and garden services, print shops, small accounting firms, retailers of all sorts. Pick one: Everyone is busy; money is precious. “What resources do I have to spend on anything other than running my business?” they ask. “Isn’t there enough to do just to get by?”

  All the more reason to pay close attention, because in a small business, mistakes have a disproportionately higher impact on the company than they do in a large corporation. Now you’re in a world where one flawed mission can be crippling and instantly spin uncontrollably into a death spiral. Things are extraordinarily “real” in a small business. In a large corporation, you might be able to lose control of the finance department for a few weeks or suffer a cash flow crunch, but in a small business, that cash flow crunch can feed instantly into vendors who won’t ship, creditors who won’t wait, and a healthy company suddenly unable to pay its bills. A prominent, thriving small business can be gone in mere months. I know. I’ve seen it happen and so have you. There’s no buffer, no “department” to hide in.

  Then there’s the logic-proof compartment inside the head of every small business owner that I’ve ever met. No matter how you say it, every small business owner thinks he or she has a unique set of problems that no outsider could possibly help.

  Thankfully, Flawless Execution works in a small business, a home business, and in you. There’s nothing about a “corporation” that’s written into the rules. There’s nothing about a fancy conference room or teams of executors that makes the Flawless Execution Model work. Quite the contrary. Flawless Execution is a bottom-up process, to change the way one person develops the Future Picture, one person plans, one person briefs, one person executes, one person debriefs. It’s designed to help one person out of a tight corner, one person to sell better, one person to collect payables better, one person to do whatever they want in life better than anyone else. If you apply that to a small company, that helps that one small company grow and be profitable. As I’ve said before, corporate success is based on individual execution, whether you’re a company of one or of 1,000. Remember the Army’s most successful recruiting campaign in its history? An Army of One … You can be in meatpacking, beverage distribution, machine tooling—it doesn’t matter. I don’t care if your conference room looks more like a closet filled with cartons of supplies. Flawless Execution is a people process, not a corporate process. It works in me, in my team, in my squadron, and in the air wing. It works in you, in your people, and in your company. To illustrate, let me give you examples of Flawless Execution in two entirely unrelated but highly individualistic settings: marlin fishing and medicine.

  Marlin fishing is different than normal fishing, because it’s truly a team effort. You have the angler, who’s cranking the marlin—a 1,000-pound fish—and the captain, who has to drive the boat. Because these fish swim at thirty-five miles an hour, and the boat is trolling at nine miles an hour, the fish can strip off so much line that driving the boat is key. The captain has to anticipate where the fish is going. If a fish runs and strips off 500 yards of line and starts turning, and if the captain doesn’t anticipate that turn—let’s say he’s steering the boat in the wrong direction—he’s going to run over the line or strip the fish off. That’s a bad day in the charter business; worse in a marlin tournament.

  But there’s more. Once you get the marlin up to the boat, then the first mate has to lead the fish alongside—grab the leader and bring the fish in close enough without himself being yanked overboard and without breaking a line or pulling the hook out of the fish’s mouth. Then a third person has to tag the fish because the only way you get credit for catching one of these things is to tag the marlin. And then there is an observer. The observer verifies the catch. “Good tag. Good release. You get 500 points.” That’s how they catch marlin. This is their sport and their game and they’re deadly serious about it.

  I’d never been marlin fishing until several years ago, but I decided to try it. I went down to Florida, found my charter, and got on the boat. There we were, the four guys on our angler team—a first mate and a captain, a tag-man, and me. We were all sitting there, and there were hooks around me—large ones, razor sharp— and we had six lines going out the back of the boat through outriggers, an intricate system. The boat was making its way through some hefty seas. Nothing happened for hours and hours and hours. I just sat there watching the lines and lures skipping across the water as the boat trolled along.

  All of a sudden, one of those fish hit, the reel went off, and the line started stripping. It was going out so fast you could hear it sing. It was literally ma
king the reel burn. The captain started yelling instructions. But me? I didn’t know what to do. Everybody was screaming at everybody, and they were bumping into each other, people almost getting hooked with gaffs, almost getting thrown overboard. The fish came to the boat, and more people were screaming and yelling, and it was very dangerous. We were at sea with these huge waves—it was hard to even stand—and all this was going on. I was sitting there thinking to myself: “Wow. We should have had a briefing before we left the docks. Someone should have told me that if one of the reels went off, Murph, in the first half hour, you’re the angler. I want you to get in the seat, and I want Ed here to help you strap in and then everybody else stay clear of the area. When the fish gets here, only the first mate goes forward. And when he touches the leader, nobody else talks. Angler can’t talk; captain can’t talk. The first mate will be in charge of the whole situation.”

  But, of course, I’d been told none of this before we shoved off despite the fact that marlin fishing is incredibly dangerous. If I’d accidentally put my arm back and hit the tag man—who’s got this sharp pole that pops the tag onto the fish—I’d get tagged!

  But why should it be like that? The next night at the docks, I gave them a talk about Flawless Execution. I told them what it was like sitting alert in an F-15 squadron when the horn went off and the other pilots had to scramble. We went from dead sleep to a flat run, jumped into our jets, strapped in, looked over these 350 instruments, started, taxied, and pushed up the throttles to full afterburner and got up into the night sky all in less than five minutes to find that bogie. You think that’s not dangerous? Moreover, the maintainer and the weaponeers went from a dead sleep, and all of those people were scrambling around our jet, too. In that world, everybody had to know their position because, if they didn’t, somebody was going to get sucked up into a jet intake.