Quotes from Larry Bossidy

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.

Many people strategize themselves into the wrong businesses.

is responsive, not proactive. Give him candid feedback. He doesn't show the passion for the role we need.

performing at the level that is essential for the company's success.

Sometimes there's no way around it—you have to let people go. But again you do it as constructively as you can.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

The foundation of changing behavior is linking rewards to performance and making the linkages transparent.

The behavior of a business's leaders is, ultimately, the behavior of the organization. As such, it's the foundation of the culture.

We don't think ourselves into a new way of acting, we act ourselves into a new way of thinking.

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.

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.

If you can't describe your strategy in twenty minutes, simply and in plain language, you haven't got a plan.

Operations To execute well there must be accountability, clear goals, accurate methods to measure performance, and the right rewards for people who perform. But now, more than ever before, leaders need to design flexible operating plans. In the past a company might make one or perhaps two profound changes in its operations each year.

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.

Execution has to be a part of a company's strategy and its goals. It is the missing link between aspirations and results. As such, it is a major—indeed, the major—job of a business leader. If you don't know how to execute, the whole of your effort as a leader will always be less than the sum of its parts.

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.

There are seven essential behaviors that form the first building block of execution: Know your people and your business. Insist on realism. Set clear goals and priorities. Follow through. Reward the doers. Expand people's capabilities. Know yourself.

If you have leaders with the right behavior, a culture that rewards execution, and a consistent system for getting the right people in the right jobs, the foundation is in place for operating and managing each of the core processes effectively.