Executive Toughness and Focusing on Process

When leading any team to victory, you can’t underestimate the value of strategy or that burning desire to win built deeply within yourself and everyone else on the team.

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D. Brown Management
January 5, 2019 2 minute read
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While these are the most visible and exciting parts of the story, they represent a very small part of the whole picture.  

Quote: The problem lies in the fact that they are so focused on those results that there is less and less emphasis on the process of what it takes to achieve those results. John Wooden. Book: Executive Toughness by Dr. Jason Selk.

Whether in the military, sports, or business, few failures can truly be attributed to a failure of strategy or the team really not wanting to win bad enough. The book Executive Toughness describes this well.  

Consistently winning comes from rigorous and daily practice of hundreds of details over years.  

The reason behind many of these details will be completely misunderstood by those going through it the first time.  

Craig Mullaney describes this very well in The Unforgiving Minute:  A Soldier’s Education. 

A great coach (or manager) has the stamina to stick with the rigorous training, providing small corrections to the process along the way.

Think of a contracting business like you would a project. Consider a few major outcomes on your scoreboard.

Which one are you the most unhappy with? 

Drill-down on that outcome metric until you have the equivalent of a Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and can see the Critical Path.

Average is Rare and Rarely Valuable
Study the differences between the varying levels of performance and work to close those gaps. Seeing how the average is trending can be very valuable to visualizing the trajectory, and that goes for every element on a Contractor's Scoreboard.
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