Larry Bossidy > Quotes

“But if you have to choose between someone with a staggering IQ and an elite education who’s gliding along, and someone with a lower IQ but who is absolutely determined to succeed, you’ll always do better with the second person.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“The hardware of a computer is useless without the right software. Similarly, in an organization the hardware (strategy and structure) is inert without the software (beliefs and behaviors).”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“The behavior of a business’s leaders is, ultimately, the behavior of the organization. As such, it’s the foundation of the culture.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“The foundation of changing behavior is linking rewards to performance and making the linkages transparent.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“We don’t think ourselves into a new way of acting, we act ourselves into a new way of thinking.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“If you can’t describe your strategy in twenty minutes, simply and in plain language, you haven’t got a plan.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“You must be in charge from the start of each cycle, to the reviews, and to the follow-up steps you take to make sure the things that are supposed to happen do, in fact, happen. This is how you acquire both the knowledge and the authority to run the business as an integrated, reality-based whole. It is how you ultimately assure that all three processes are linked.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“While understanding reality is crucial, equally important is communicating it to your people. In part that means, as noted earlier, knowing your people and listening to their concerns.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“To understand execution, you have to keep three key points in mind: Execution is a discipline, and integral to strategy. Execution is the major job of the business leader. Execution must be a core element of an organization’s culture.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“Identifying goals requires a level of savvy and expertise to achieve the right balance. That, in turn, requires the realism and the knowledge of the business and the people that constitute the first two of our seven essential behaviors. Choosing the wrong goals can be disastrous. All too often the wrong goals are set because the leader isn’t realistic about the ability of the people to achieve them. Articulating the right goals is the first step. The people in the organization then have to execute and that means setting priorities and benchmarks.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“How many meetings have you attended where everyone seemed to agree at the end about what actions would be taken but nothing much actually happened as a result? These are the meetings where there’s no robust debate and therefore nobody states their misgivings. Instead, they simply let the project they didn’t like die a quiet death over time.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“The gap between promises and results is widespread and clear. The gap nobody knows is the gap between what a company’s leaders want to achieve and the ability of their organization to achieve it.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“Competition for the best leaders will be intense. One way to ensure that you have the right people in the right jobs in this rapidly shifting environment is by writing job descriptions for the kind of people you need in each job as it will exist tomorrow, then match those descriptions against the talents and abilities of the peole holding those jobs today. If you don’t have the right leaders for the environment, then it is incumbent to move quickly and make the necessary changes. You must also begin now to cultivate the leaders of the future, testing and evaluating people for their ability to execute in the face of new challenges and circumstances. Operations”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“is responsive, not proactive. Give him candid feedback. He doesn’t show the passion for the role we need.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“KNOW YOUR PEOPLE AND KNOW YOUR BUSINESS. In Execution we stress the need for domain knowledge, the kind of granular understanding of how the business makes money that goes beyond profit and loss statements.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“is more process- than results-oriented. We haven’t seen the ability to pull through results. He is more knowledgeable than others but doesn’t perform. His people standards are not high enough, and he isn’t demanding. His leadership skills are underdeveloped. Make sure he gets some help.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“Execution is a systematic process of rigorously discussing hows and whats, questioning, tenaciously following through, and ensuring accountability. It includes making assumptions about the business environment, assessing the organization’s capabilities, linking strategy to operations and the people who are going to implement the strategy, synchronizing those people and their various disciplines, and linking rewards to outcomes. It also includes mechanisms for changing assumptions as the environment changes and upgrading the company’s capabilities to meet the challenges of an ambitious strategy.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“The Duke team identified four basic groups of competencies: functional skills, business skills, management skills, and leadership skills.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“IDENTIFY CLEAR GOALS AND PRIORITIES.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“At a meeting in a formal, hierarchical setting, a powerful player can get away with killing a good idea. But informality encourages people to test their thinking, to experiment, and to cross-check.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“Without execution, the breakthrough thinking breaks down, learning adds no value, people don’t meet their stretch goals, and the revolution stops dead in its tracks. What you get is change for the worse, because failure drains the energy from your organization. Repeated failure destroys it.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“But knowing your people is not enough. They need to know you. It is absolutely critical during trying times that you as a leader are accessible, that you project a sense of confidence tempered by concern, that you share as much undistorted and unfiltered information as you can, and that you act decisively. Remember that people are constantly searching for indications about their leader’s ability to carry them through a raging storm and they will interpret or misinterpret the slightest signals, whether those signals are sent intentionally or mistakenly. INSIST”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“An environment of fast growth can cover a multitude of sins, but an era of slow growth will magnify every shortcoming of every person in the business, especially the leaders.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“performing at the level that is essential for the company’s success.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“FOLLOW-THROUGH. Follow-through is a constant and sequential part of execution. It ensures that you have established closure in the dialogue about who will be responsible for what and the specific milestones for measurement. The failure to establish this closure leaves the people who execute a decision or strategy without a clear picture of their role. As events unfold rapidly amid much uncertainty, follow-through becomes a much more intense process. Milestones need to be placed closer together so there is less room for slippage, and information needs to flow faster and in more detail so that everyone knows how the strategy is evolving. Follow-through”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“Thus you have to rely on yourself to contain your own ego and recognize your inevitable blind spots. Be particularly cautious about losing your ability to listen. Not only do you need expertise from both within and outside the company to shore up your blind spots and weaknesses, but also a pipeline to people willing and able to bring you diverse views and bad news. Above all, you need to be able to recognize when you’re part of the problem.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“Las estrategias fracasan más frecuentemente debido a que no son bien ejecutadas. Las cosas que se supone que deben ocurrir no ocurren.”
― Larry Bossidy, El arte de la ejecución en los negocios

“Execution not only ensures efficient use of resources in a credit and cash-starved world, but also provides the feedback loop needed for the business to adjust to changes—big or small—in the external world.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“One way to ensure that you have the right people in the right jobs in this rapidly shifting environment is by writing job descriptions for the kind of people you need in each job as it will exist tomorrow, then match those descriptions against the talents and abilities of the peole holding those jobs today. If you don’t have the right leaders for the environment, then it is incumbent to move quickly and make the necessary changes. You must also begin now to cultivate the leaders of the future, testing and evaluating people for their ability to execute in the face of new challenges and circumstances.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

“That person is primarily operational and doesn’t seem to have the strategic perspective.”
― Larry Bossidy, Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done