It's Not Rocket Science: 4 Simple Strategies for Mastering the Art of Execution

Part Three Summary

This chapter has covered immense ground in an effort to help you build a culture that does the following:

• Attracts, develops, and retains great people.
• Fully supports all aspects of the master the art of execution (MAX) process.
• Builds long-term vitality into your organization by firming its foundation, committing to essential cultural fundamentals, and dismissing misguided pursuit of quick fixes to improve results.

To help you accomplish these objectives, you've been equipped with:

• Indisputable awareness that to improve your business, “It's the culture, stupid!”
• The knowledge and responsibility that cultural health is a primary leadership responsibility and that ultimately your culture is in your image.
• An outline of the five cultural pillars you must continue to strengthen to support MAX and the ultimate few objectives (TUFs) fully: core values, mission, performance standards, core competencies, and people.
• A strong reminder that culture, like a garden, is never done—if you don't shape it in your image, society and its accompanying trends, such as entitlement and an absence of absolutes, will do the job for you.
• A blueprint of words, concepts, and mind-sets you must continuously weave into your culture, as well as those you must diligently work to weed out.

Perhaps the key word in this summary thus far lies in the last sentence: diligently. Diligent means “done or pursued with persevering attention; painstaking” (Dictionary.com, n.d.). Diligence is not ...