What Your Company Needs for Execution II

Last week I wrote a post entitled What Your Company Needs for Execution which addressed a business' ability to seize opportunities when they arise. In this months Harvard Business Review, Donald Sull addresses seven points to consider on whether your company has good business execution practices. Last weeks post addressed the first three. Here are the next two:

4. Core values with teeth. Assess whether your business leaders articulate values that underpin agility and drive hiring, promotion and firing decisions.

5. The right conversations. Sull states that managers of larger businesses spend nearly three quarters of their time in discussions with co-workers. That is an amazing number (no idea if it is accurate, but the point that it is a lot is taken). A business’ execution ability relies on how well managers, up and down the organization, can set up and lead discussions for action. There are four types of right conversation:

(1) making sense of volatile situations;
(2) deciding what to do, not do, or stop doing;
(3) soliciting and monitory commitments to deliver; and
(4) making corrections midcourse.

The "right conversations" point is interesting to me. Sull addresses what he considers to be the right conversations and the need for managers to get away from wrong conversations. He did not address, however, the need for proper balance of these conversations. I have seen several business law clients (as well as business law firms), spend a lot of time in planning mode - where conversations are spent on what we could do. I see less strategic conversations focused on value-added action.

Source: Are You Ready to Rebound? Donald Sull, Harvard Business Review, March 2010.