Status Updates From The 4 Disciplines of Execut...

In the end, it’s far more important to the leaders of frontline teams to feel understood than it is for their ideas to be adopted.

In the end, it isn't actually the scoreboard that's compelling. Although teams enjoy creating their own scoreboards, what ultimately drives engagement is the game the scoreboard represents. You'll never hear a sports fan saying, "Did you see that game last night? What an amazing scoreboard!" The scoreboard was absolutely necessary, but it was the game that interested them.

W. Edwards Deming, the management and quality expert, said it best when he told executives that managing a company by looking at financial data (lag measures) is the equivalent of “driving a car by looking in the rearview mirror.”

Saying no to good ideas, in order to say a focused yes to great ideas, is the key to extraordinary results.

“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.