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

Part ThreeGet the Culture Right!

As a young sales manager, whenever I would attend training and hear a speaker begin talking about culture, I'd get turned off. I wasn't there to hear about a bunch of warm and fuzzy culture nonsense; I wanted to learn how to get the hard numbers. As the years passed and I wised up, I learned that you couldn't get hard, sustainable numbers without a supporting, “warm and fuzzy culture.” The quality of one's cultural foundation makes the attainment of an organization's ultimate few objectives (TUFs) either feasible or impossible.

In this part I'm going to try to make the process of building a high-performance culture of execution (a culture where the right things are consistently done) very practical for you. I will outline five cultural pillars that comprise your organization's foundation and offer strategies for improving each one. Likewise, I will create a clear portrait of what the optimal culture looks like and offer specific concepts that must be woven into the foundation. In addition, I will present potential cultural infections and threats to your organization's foundation, as well as the strategies for preventing or removing them.

As the chapters progress you should clearly see how vital the right culture is in sustaining a process like master the art of execution (MAX) and how without it, MAX would never be fully leveraged, most likely fizzle into the fray, and become the latest failed flavor of the month.

Getting the culture right is ...