The Secret Formula to Strategy Execution Success
There’s a formula out there that could be the key to executing your strategy with a minimum of roadblocks and a maximum of success—and it’s simpler than you might think.
Success in your business, or in life in general, is based on two simple factors: how clear your intentions are, multiplied by the attention that you give it. This is also known as ‘The Success Formula’.
In other words, no matter how well-documented your goals are, you won’t reach them if you don’t attend to them. Similarly, if you don’t have any goals, all the hard work in the world isn’t going to drive you towards success. As we said, it’s a simple formula—but it has far more depth than at first glance.
UNDERSTANDING THE FORMULA
To fully understand this formula and what it can do for your business, you have to know about its context. After all, you can’t expect to do algebraic equations if you don’t know basic mathematics, so why expect anything different for a business success formula?
What that translates to is that your business needs to be operating along certain parameters for this formula to be effective. We’ve been showing you plenty of these over this series of blogs, but in this case we’re talking about the quarterly strategy schedules. A quick reminder: you should be pulling back every 90 days to re-evaluate your three-year goals, as well as coming up with some new quarterly projects—no more than three. We recommend this timeline because it gives you enough time to accomplish the work, but still maintain momentum.
If you’re not doing this, then the Success Formula is going to be a lot less useful.
INTENTION VERSUS ATTENTION
Let’s take a look at the first part: your intention. You’ll get this from your 90-day re-evaluations. The, (up to) three projects that you and your team think will drive your business forward are your intentions.
However, what we haven’t discussed before is the attention section of the formula. We’ve discussed how a 90-day review can keep up momentum, but the human mind is notoriously fickle when it comes to maintaining attention, even over this relatively short period of time. To combat that, you need to take an even shorter timeframe: a weekly meeting rather than a quarterly one.
During these weekly meetings, you aren’t discussing intentions anymore: you know what you are trying to achieve through your quarterly meetings. You are discussing your attention on each of those three intentions. What are you doing about it this week? How is your team working towards those goals? What are they doing right now? This is the latter half of the equation: the attention.
HOLD THEIR ATTENTION
In essence, you are taking the big picture of the quarterly projects and bringing it down to a more actionable timeframe. For much the same reason that we advocate for simplifying key roles and creating visible accountability for your employees, we also advise that business owners and stakeholders keep their teams laser-focused on one or two KPIs.
Weekly meetings help to re-affirm your team’s focus, as well as redefine the week’s work in the context of the long-term. Without the quarterly meetings, you’d lack intention. Without the weekly meetings, you’d lack attention. Both are important in the Success Formula, and ignoring one at the expense of the other is an exercise in futility.
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