Win Every Day: Proven Practices for Extraordinary Results

by Mark Miller

Great ideas don't matter if you can't execute--bestselling leadership expert Mark Miller offers a proven, research-based method for creating workplaces where everyone performs at the highest level.

All high performance organizations have one thing in common: execution. The men and women who work there sustain performance at seemingly otherworldly levels of precision, accuracy, and consistency. In the fifth and final book of Mark Miller's High Performance series, he uses his trademark business fable format to show how any organization can cultivate the kind of everyday habits that yield extraordinary results.

Miller tells the story of Blake Brown, a CEO who learns how to help his team to consistently excel at execution from a perhaps unlikely source: his son's high school football coach. The story is fictional, but the principles and practices are very real, derived from years of research led by a team from Stanford University. Miller and his team interviewed leaders and employees from numerous world-class organizations, including the Navy SEALS, Starbucks, Apple, Southwest Airlines, the Seattle Seahawks, Mayo Clinic, Cirque du Soleil, and more. The lessons learned were then field-tested with over seventy businesses employing over 7,000 people. Miller gives you proven tools to release the untapped potential in your people, create a strong competitive advantage, and win not just on game day but every day.

Genres: Leadership, Business

160 pages, Hardcover

Published March 10, 2020

About the author

My career at Chick-fil-A began over forty years ago as an hourly team member in one of the local restaurants. Shortly thereafter, I became the sixteenth corporate employee — my first job: working in the warehouse. Since that day, I have worked all across the business from starting our Corporate Communications group and our Quality & Customer Satisfaction Team to leading in Restaurant Operations, Training & Development, Leadership Development and more!

For the last twenty years, I have focused much of my time on serving leaders, helping them grow themselves, their teams, and their organizations. In addition to my role at Chick-fil-A, I’ve also had the privilege to teach and lead in not-for-profit organizations domestically and globally. Although the context is different in every organization, the problems have common roots and so do the solutions.

Along the way, I have been fortunate to author (and co-author) a few books – eight and counting. Today, more than a million books are in print in 25+ languages. My approach to writing has always been to find what is true in principle and figure out how to make it applicable to the real world.

Reviews

[William "Spig" · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really enjoyed this book. The ideas and concept cast a vision for leading in an environment where all hands execution is critical. Great book very beneficial. Recommended. #wineveryday @leaderserve

[Jay · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Win Every Day” is another great installment in the series of books by Mark Miller that follow CEO Blake Brown on his journey to lead his team and organization. While this is a fictional work, it is packed with lessons that can be applied in every business. I highly recommend the entire series.

[John Vonhof · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mark Miller’s new book, Win Every Day: Proven Practices for Extraordinary Results is written in a fable format, popular in today’s exciting business books. Blake is the CEO of a company and Tom is his son’s high school’s new head football coach. Together they face similar challenges. Blake needs to ‘fix’ his company. Tom needs to build a team from scratch. Their problems are the same—how can they execute everything needed to get their people to perform at the highest level possible. As the fable unfolds, readers learn the principles necessary to execute well. The story works as it winds between Blake’s and Tom’s points of view. In reality, Tom is the stronger leader and coaches Blake through the principles. At one point, Tom tells Blake “that communication is the oxygen of execution.” There are nuggets of gold throughout the story. In the end, the key is execution. Whatever your role, in a company, on a team, or life in general, the book will help you be the best you can be.

[Bill Pence · Rating 5 out of 5]

Win Every Day is Mark Miller’s fifth, and final, book in his High Performance Series. This book focuses on execution, the hallmark of all high performance organizations. As the book begins, Blake, the CEO, becomes aware of a nightmare for his organization. A very bad customer experience involving a previously loyal customer has gone viral. A video has been viewed by more than a million people in just twenty-four hours.
Blake goes to Ashley, the new head of Production for some answers. She tells him that the organization’s execution has been slipping for several years, but has seemed to level off. It’s obvious that changes need to be made. But first, she states that leadership has to determine if performance is “good enough”. After all, they have been successful against their current competition. But the organization will need to decide how great they want to be.
Blake is also the chairman of the local school board. In that role, he encounters a similar problem with the school’s football team. They have been good, but not great, winning about 60% of their games over the past several years. Is that good enough? It is ultimately decided that it is not, and they decide to hire a new coach.
Ashley attends the next executive committee meeting and tells the leaders that the organization is not great at details. The organization has been making mistakes on 7% of their orders. Blake asks what would happen if their reputation for accuracy and execution rivaled their reputation for customer service.
Tom is hired as the new football coach at the high school. He has moved to the area to be close to his Dad who is very ill. As Tom is introduced to, and speaks to, the entire study body, he casts a powerful vision of what the football team can be. After listening to him, Blake decides to reach out to Tom to see what he can learn from him, and they set up regular mentoring meetings.
Even though he has never played football, Blake’s son Clint is so inspired by the new coach’s vision, that he decides to attend the tryouts, which actually turn out to be more like an extended orientation for the team. In the first three sessions, the coach goes over his three fundamentals. The first is Pursue Mastery. The essence of Pure Mastery is the decision and resulting personal effort to do whatever you are doing right. It is a lifelong pursuit. The coach uses these sessions to determine who will embrace his fundamentals before they ever take the field.
Blake brings what Clint has told him about the first tryout to his team at work. Ashley tells him that he and the other leaders are going to have to paint a compelling vision of the future, and help people to see the value of pursuing mastery.
Tom’s second fundamental is Own the Numbers. If you Own the Numbers, you can hold each other accountable, but more importantly, each person can hold themselves accountable. Blakes decides to visit with some of the employees on various teams in his organization regarding Tom’s Own the Numbers fundamental. What he finds out is not at all encouraging. It doesn’t appear that Own the Numbers is a part of the company’s culture.
Tom uses a competitive exercise to teach his team his third fundamental, which is Help Others Win. He goes on to tell his team that he cares about each them as people, not just as players, and that he wants them to Win Every Day for the rest of their lives. Their time on his team is intended to serve as a launching pad for them to accomplish more in their lives than they had imagined possible.
Blake is convinced that the ideas Tom is teaching his players could have a tremendous impact in his organization as well. In one of their mentoring meetings, Tom shares with Blake that for each of his fundamentals, leaders have additional responsibilities, and then he shares those with Blake.
Ashley’s team presents their plan to improve execution across the organization to
Tom’s senior leadership team. That plan borrows heavily from Coach Tom’s fundamentals, as they believe it captures well what the best organizations in the world are doing. The plan is adopted and they begin to implement it across the organization.
Meanwhile, Tom’s football team goes on to have a very successful season as they implement his three fundamentals.
Mark Miller has given us another excellent book - based on extensive research and validation - to learn from. He completes his High Performance series by telling us that high performance organizations all do four things:
1. Bet on Leadership
2. Act as One
3. Win the Heart
4. Excel at Execution
Here are some of my favorite takeaways from the book:
• What are the implications of settling for less than your best?
• Everything we do should ultimately contribute to superior levels of execution.
• Your past does not determine your future.
• No individual, team or organization will ever drift into greatness.
• Mastery is a level of skill in which three things are true: the desired behavior is consistent, execution is flawless, and the behavior is second nature.
• If you measure what matters, results will improve.
• Communication is the oxygen of execution.
• Communication creates focus, and focus is essential for elite levels of execution.
• We are in the execution business. Our customers come to us with clear expectations – they want what they want the way they want it when they want it. Our job is to execute.
• Execution is not one more thing – it is the thing.
• Our competition is arrogance and complacency.
• We don’t always control the outcomes, but we do control our effort.
• When you Win Every Day, you can live a life with no regrets.

[Todd Gragg · Rating 1 out of 5]

Mark Miller's message of high performance leadership continues to get buried underneath bad storytelling. The story line of Blake and his family continues down a rabbit hole of all things southern, evangelical, and conservative. This is dominating and overpowering the good business principles Mr. Miller is attempting to convey. I wish Mr. Miller would go back to letting the message drive his books instead of the story, otherwise go write fiction and stop pretending to sell business books.

[Lisa Kosak · Rating 5 out of 5]

The American spirit strives to win whether it is in our personal or professional lives. In these trying times, companies will feel the need to step up initiatives to bring back jobs, production, and sales. Winning does not just pertain to coming out on top regardless of how our teams are treated.

Mark Miller is one of my favorite authors. I have read every one of his books and he just published his fifth installment of books in his High-Performance series. His latest book Win Every Day – Proven Practices for Extraordinary Results focuses on execution to create a remarkable organization. Mark’s books are business parables where the reader becomes a part of the story and engages with teams every day as they identify and tackle organizational problems.

Our business parable focuses on CEO Blake Brown who learns how to consistently cheer his team on to excel at execution after identifying some internal customer service issues. Coincidently, he receives ideas and leadership from an unexpected source, his son’s new high school coach who is working with the team to bring up their performance and teaching them how to win every day in one form or another. The coach uses a variety of approaches and field trips to teach valuable lessons to the team that brings them results where everyone wins. Blake takes these same strategies and applies them to his company to win every day in a variety of areas, not just increasing profits.

High performing organizations do four things that create excellence:

1. Bet on leadership
2. Act as one
3. Win the heart
4. Excel at execution

Obviously, every organization must agree that they aim to be great, excel, and unique. Moreover, leaders need to be sincere in doing their best, encourage others to be the best for families, customers, vendors, and ultimately the world. Teams need to sincerely buy-in. Teams should pursue mastery, own the numbers, and help others to win. On the other hand, leaders should coach for life, focus on processes, and communicate.

Mark offers some key takeaways from Blake’s journey. Most importantly, Black acknowledges that he is the root cause of how the company experienced some failures and he is the key to encouraging everyone to win.

1. The past does not determine the future
2. Communication is the oxygen of execution
3. Our competition is our own arrogance and complacency
4. When you win every day, you can live a life with no regrets
5. Execution is not one more thing – it is THE thing
6. We can’t win every day without everyone
7. If I don’t make the right choices, my team never will
8. We want to measure activities that actually help us win more “games”
9. If we own the numbers, we can hold each other accountable. More importantly, we can hold ourselves accountable
10. Mastery is a level of skill in which three things are true: the desired behavior is consistent, execution is flawless, and the behavior is second nature.

I love nothing more than a good story and Mark Miller is a master parable writer. I learned lessons that “stuck” in my mind because I was learning from a story and the ideas flowed in order and made sense. In particular, I was fascinated by how Blake learned so much from his son and his son’s coach. They learned how to teach teams new ways of growing, supporting each other, and how everyone could win. So often we see how sports analogies and business strategies are the same, we just use different terms.

If you love easy reading stories that teach you lessons as you grow in your career and impact your teams then Win Every Day is a must-read. You will find yourself lost in the book eager to see how the lessons from a high school sports team and those of a successful company seeking a new status are entwin

[Roy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mark Miller continues The High Performance Series that includes his books Chess Not Checkers (2015), Leaders Made Here (2017), Talent Magnet (2018), and Win the Heart (2019). In his easy-reading style, Millers tells the story of Blake Brown, CEO of an established company who faces challenges that every organization faces. In Blake’s case, however, he cares and wants to see his organization turn into an example of execution excellence. In this last (?) in the series, Blake faces a firestorm of criticism of his company that spread through social media when they failed a customer. This premise serves as the basis for important management lessons that Blake learns from his son’s new football coach.

We learn of Blake’s – and, by extension, that of any leader who wants to execute well – discovery of what it takes to get better than “good enough”. Based on extensive research, this business allegory identifies what it takes to pursue the goal of flawless execution, what we are told is a mentality to “win very day”. As the story unfolds, we learn that there are three key pursuits that everyone in an organization must internalize if the organization is going to succeed. Further, there are three complementary attributes that every leader needs to adopt in order to support the actions of everyone in the organization.

One refreshing aspect of all the books in this series is that Miller acknowledges that the solution – and the underlying problem – lies with the leader at the top of the organization. It is the vision and, more importantly, the culture of the organization that will determine its success. The character Blake acknowledges that he is the root cause of how the company experienced the spectacular failure that was emblematic of a culture of “good enough”. Blake does not stop with this level of enlightenment but demonstrates that a mid-level manager new to the organization holds the key to implementing a successful cultural shift. There is no ivory tower in Blake’s organization, good ideas can come from anywhere. In fact, the executive staff can often be the source of the approach of “good enough” and never improving the level of company performance.

This is a quick read that is packed with information. Although it does not take much to get through the story, it takes a lot to implement the change that we see in an organization like Blake’s – or like many of ours. If execution excellence is desired – or if competitors seem to continually outpace you – read this book and take its lessons. Then go back and read the other four in the series.

[Dr. Byron Ernest · Rating 5 out of 5]

Back in 2012ish my son was obsessed with the term "Win the day!" because growing up he was a rabid Oregon Ducks football fan. At that same time I had just become principal of a state turnaround academy. My son even made me a plaque, declaring "Win The Day!" out of a 2X4 he found in the barn for my office. This is still one of my most valued possessions. You can check out my 2012 blog here: https://byronernest.blog/2012/11/04/w... .

Winning the day can mean many things, but to me it means giving all I have every day and making the most out of the things I can control. That's why I love the title of Mark Miller's book that was just released this past week, Win Every Day. The book is based on Miller's findings that high performing organizations do these four things: 1. Bet on leadership; 2. Act as one; 3. Win the heart; and 4) Excel at execution. I love the fact that Miller uses some sports analogies in the book to make the points. He makes the point that if you execute well you do not need a lot of plays.

As a leader, we owe it to all those we serve to “Win Every Day!” Miller taught us in this great book that our choices are the only things we can control. He told us to "Choose wisely" (p.127). The bottom line according to Miller is that we can be encouraged and even challenged, but if we want to be great, we will have to decide. This book is so appropriate for everyone to read right now as we are dealing with the global outbreak of Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19). This challenge is top of mind for individuals and organizations across the world. Because of the ever changing and fluid nature of the situation, it would be wise for us all to contemplate how we excel at execution. This is a book that every person in the world should take time to read and reflect on right now. We must WIN EVERY DAY!

[Heather Racey · Rating 4 out of 5]

The result of extensive market research, Miller exposits into narrative the three main principles he believes are at the core of success: Pursue Mastery, Own the Numbers, and Help Others Win. Mastery is defined by consistent, flawless execution. Owning the Numbers focuses on personal responsibility for tangible, measurable goals. And Helping Others Win broadens the reader’s scope to look outside of themselves. Without this last element, these principles could easily destroy a team in an effort of an individual to achieve greatness.

I’m not sure how I felt about business narrative as a literary form. Some of the lessons felt forced into the narrative; but particularly at the end when we saw the coach’s father at the end of his life, the final message was impactful. We invest in people because people are eternal. Nothing will be quite so rewarding as being a good steward of the relationships God has given us.

[Daryl J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I will admit that I am a Mark Miller fan. I was fortunate to receive an advance copy of Mark’s latest book, “Win Every Day.” It’s the fifth installment in his High Performance series. While it is a stand-alone book, it wouldn’t hurt to read the other four books. Miller is a gifted story-teller, and he doesn’t disappoint in this short, but powerful, leadership fable. Touching the heart and the mind, “Win Every Day” discusses the importance of how an organization must execute in order to deliver excellence. Another winner and must read for all leaders and managers.

[Jon Hembree · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve read several of Mark Miller’s books now and have enjoyed them all. He writes in the “business parable” style, which brings good, solid leadership principles and practices couched in a compelling story. But that doesn’t mean it’s all fluff. Not by any means. Miller’s book is well-researched, and based on the best practices of amazing companies. I highly recommend this book, as well as any others from Mark Miller.

[Tiffani Alisha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Love, love, LOVE this final book in the High Performance series. I’m a huge fan of Mark Miller’s writing style and I couldn’t put this one down! There were key points on executing successfully everyday whether at home, work or anywhere else. I bought copies for all the members of my team and plan on doing a book club with them in which we talk about the principles such as pursuing mastery every day! I’ll also be recommending this book to our CEO as a corporate initiative!

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

The final installment in this parable is just as easy to read as the others and just as enjoyable. Some may not enjoy using stories to explain how to apply business principles but Mr. Miller does an excellent job in carrying this out and the stories aid in making them stick. Well worth the short time investment to read.

[Sharon · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the first book that I've read by Mark Miller. I am hooked. Even though this was a business fable, it was still real. It went back & forth between a high school football team and a business.
The processes for extraordinary results were totally achievable. You needed to have buy-in from everyone involved.

[Tom Minturn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Mark’s best book so far! It is the 5th and final in this series. It is a culmination of his work! Execution is key to any successful business. I meet with other business owners to discuss business principles and disciplines and these leaders know so much but fail to execute. This is a book that I will pass on and recommend to other leaders!

[Cody · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book is absolutely perfect, if you’re an adolescent who likes football and wants to learn more about basic principles of business. If you are not all of those things then this book is not for you. It would have been a much better read if it was a nonfiction self-help style of book instead of this fictional story.

[Terrence · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another awesome leadership fable from Mark Miller. If you are interested in improving execution then this a good quick read to get your juices flowing. It was definitely a ‘kick in the pants’ for me.

[Dan Mingo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mark Miller is a master at putting amazing strategies into story form. A great story with progress towards learning how to Win Every Day. Loved it!

[Melissa Snyder · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easy read with super practical points for business and life.

[Maureen · Rating 2 out of 5]

A few useful ideas here, but I don’t think the overused “business fable” format added much insight, though it did add a lot of padding.

[Arun Narayanaswamy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good business fable as the author says.
Good learning overall. Nothing much to write in detail though.

[Eric Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent system for leadership. Leans i to the soft skills which I love and believe are the most important.
Highly recommended.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is straightforward and packed full of valuable information regarding execution. For so many companies, execution is daunting, but Win Every Day really distills the subject down to three key strategies and then explains those strategies in detail chapter by chapter. It’s a short book, written in fable format, which makes it very engaging. You can forget at times you’re reading a serious business book. The strategies describe are easy to understand, but not necessarily easy to put into place. When you’re working with people, things aren’t easy, and execution does involve people getting on board to win every day. Nevertheless, it is one of the best books I’ve read on the subject and it’s quite beautiful in its simplicity. I received an ARC.