Chris McChesney > Quotes

“As legendary Harvard marketing professor Theodore Levitt put it, “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“If you’re not keeping score, you’re just practicing.”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“You have to decide what your highest priorities are and have the courage—pleasantly, smilingly, unapologetically—to say no to other things. And the way you do that is by having a bigger ‘yes’ burning inside.”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“there will always be more good ideas than you and your teams have the capacity to execute.”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“once you’ve decided what to do, your biggest challenge is in getting people to execute it at the level of excellence you need.”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“In fact, in our initial surveys we learned that only one employee in seven could name even one of their organization’s most important goals. That’s right—15 percent could not name even one of the top three goals their leaders had identified. The other 85 percent named what they thought was the goal, but it often didn’t remotely resemble what their leaders had said.”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“you ignore the urgent, it can kill you today. It’s also true, however, that if you ignore the important, it can kill you tomorrow.”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“you might find it hard to let go of a lot of good goals until you start serving a greater goal.”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“Basically, the more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish. This is a stark, inescapable principle that we all live with.”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“Habitual multitaskers may be sacrificing performance on the primary task. They are suckers for irrelevancy.”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“People who try to push many goals at once usually wind up doing a mediocre job on all of them. You can ignore the principle of focus, but it won’t ignore you.”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“only one employee in seven could name even one of their organization’s most important goals.”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“To achieve a goal you’ve never achieved before, you must do things you’ve never done before.”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“managing a company by looking at financial data (lag measures) is the equivalent of “driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror.”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“Rule #1: No team focuses on more than two WIGs at the same time.”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“until you apply Discipline 4, your team isn’t in the game.”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“Lead measures are quite different in that they are the measures of the most high-impact things your team must do to reach the goal. In essence, they measure the new behaviors that will drive success on the lag measures,”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“Improving our ability to multitask actually hampers our ability to think deeply and creatively… the more you multitask… the less deliberative you become;”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“Whenever you see a man on top of a mountain, you can be sure he didn’t fall there.”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“A good lead measure has two basic characteristics: It’s predictive of achieving the goal and it can be influenced by the team members. To”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“Just as there are principles that govern human behavior, there are principles that govern how teams get things done,”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“We don’t have dragons swooping down and knocking us off our priorities. What we have are gnats. Every day we have gnats getting in our eyes, and when we look back over the last six months, we haven’t accomplished any of the things we said we were going to.”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“The cadence of accountability is a rhythm of regular and frequent meetings of any team that owns a wildly important goal. These meetings happen at least weekly and ideally last no more than twenty to thirty minutes. In that brief time, team members hold each other accountable for producing results, despite the whirlwind.”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“the more you try to do, the less you actually accomplish.”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“THE WHIRLWIND”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“The inability of leaders to focus is a problem of epidemic proportions.”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“A staggering 81 percent of the people surveyed said they were not held accountable for regular progress”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“To achieve a goal you have never achieved before, you must start doing things you have never done before.”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“embracing a concept is not the same as applying it.”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

“any time the majority of the people behave a particular way the majority of the time, the people are not the problem.”
― Chris McChesney, The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals