Wildly Important Goals

The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

Excel Still More Journal

Okay, my new friend Rich Howe, from Richmond TX, has turned me on to a great new book. It is designed for business and company leaders, but it includes timeless principles. I see application for the individual, the family, the church, and business.

All that is required of you going in is an Excel Still More mentality. You just have to desire to see better. And you have to be open to a better way of getting there. The proven wisdom of these four principles is repeated all over. But will it's next success story be yours? 

- What is a wildly important goal and how do you focus on it?

- What are lead measures and how do I confidently identify them?

- How do you construct and keep a compelling scoreboard along the way?

- How can a cadence of accountability keep you moving straight to your goal?

- What is one area of your life where you will implement these strategies today?

Transcript

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Welcome to season five of the Excel Still More Podcast. I'm still your host, Chris Emerson, and I'm here to encourage you and your walk with the Lord, and I'm glad you've joined. The program continues to be sponsored by Cunningham Financial Group. John is a good friend, and he's helped me and my family in everything from stock and mutual fund investing to annuities, life insurance, and retirement planning. I certainly commend him to you if you have needs in any of those areas. You can reach him at 205-326-7364. Thank you again for your ongoing encouragement and support. Let's get started. I'm excited to share with you the content of a book that I've jumped headlong into. It's one of those books where I'm underlining on every page and taking lengthy notes in my phone and thinking there are countless ways that I can use this. And so, kind of real time, while I'm finding application in my own life, I would like to go ahead and introduce it to you and show you these four crucial principles that relate to a pretty common theme for you and me. And that is, you know, setting goals for better, for growth, for progress, and then realizing those goals. I try to read a lot about achievement and every couple of months put an episode in that is goal related because I mean that's the title of the program, Excel Still More. I've said many times, a lot of people don't know what better looks like, but even when you do, it's kind of like, how do I get there with so many daily things vying for my attention, things that I need to do just to keep operating, how can I give special attention to growth? And because everybody is different, I think maybe presenting different things that work for different people, or in the case of today's literature, what works for leaders very often, and incredibly in the corporate world may actually be just the ticket for you. So the book is called The Four Disciplines of Execution Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals. And while I'll put a link to Amazon in the show notes, I'm not exactly recommending this to you. I mean, I think you would enjoy the read, but it's pretty dense in terms of its content. It is entirely secular, which is not a bad thing. They're just saying, look, in the business world, there are things that just keep working for people, and maybe you might want to do them too. And for us, we have to go ahead and make that connection as people who have God in the center of our lives. So just knowing going in as a Christian, you'll need to do that work, but mainly because it's a book for leaders. If you are a leader, if you have authority over a team that you're trying to move in a certain direction, then I would think that this book would very much be a benefit to you. And while that may not be everybody, it certainly does include a lot of people, depending on how you look at it. I mean, a husband is leading the team of his marriage, parents are leading the team of their family. If you are an elder or even a deacon or preacher or class teacher, then you have a group that you're trying to move towards better. Certainly if you have employees or people who work under you or you own a business. The book opens with a lot of stories about people who are able to turn companies and teams around very, very quickly, and that may be of interest to you. But if not, have no fear, that's where my job comes in. I've got 20 minutes to kind of cliff note some of it for you, share with you four extremely important principles, and I will show you some of the application that can shrink down to just you. I mean, in some senses, you are the manager of your own life. You are your own team, and you can apply it that way, and then we'll talk some about the family and we'll work our way outward. It's not a corporate book of practices, or it would be too specific to that field and not useful. As I said, it's four principles that are timeless, limitless, and I think just great. Okay, I need to jump in, but let me give props to the person who recommended this. Recently, I was down in the Houston area at the Alston Road Church doing a weekend on evangelism. That's down there in the Sugarland area. And I had lunch at the Howe's house, Robin and Rich. And it was really enjoyable. Rich is a faithful disciple of Christ. He is also an executive in an oil company. He has a lot going on. He's very impressive, at least to me, and I enjoyed picking his brain and talking about a variety of things. And along the way, he asked me if I'd read this book, and he kind of recapped some of the points. And so I ordered it. It was home when I got here, and I've been digging in. Okay, here are some of the introductory thoughts of this book that I think might be good for us here at the beginning. There is a difference between strategy and execution. Strategy is figuring out what needs to be done and a good process for doing it. We're generally pretty good at that. Anything you think your family needs to accomplish, you're probably pretty good at laying out a plan that should work. It's the execution and the consistent execution that is much, much harder. They talked about how they polled all these MBA execs and all these companies, like thousands of them, and they said, What is harder to implement, strategy or execution? And they said, Well, it's it's the execution, it's carrying it out. And then they asked them, when you were in your master's training, was there more curriculum focusing on strategy or execution? And of course they all said, strategy, you know, the methods behind what you're doing. And so they said to them, look, that's the problem. Setting things up and how to do so is so much of the focus that we forget that that's just the beginning. And man, that right away really resonated with me. I can tell you what I need to do better. I can tell you a plan that no doubt would carry it out. I can probably even start that plan. But if you get back to me 90 days later, I started to notice reading through this book that there are things in which I have been successful and there are things in which I have totally failed. And I've been confused by that. Like, wait a minute. Both of those had good strategies. I'm the same person trying both of them. Why did some get me to another level and some did not? Well, the answer is we need a good dose of both. So the first two principles I will share are about making sure the strategy is established correctly, and the second two principles will be about execution and how to maintain progress. But I think we need to admit right away, whatever it is you choose today, whatever you say, this is what I'm picking and this is how I'm going at it, we both need to admit that there is a lot of headwind trying to prevent you from getting there. The book uses the term whirlwind, and it represents just the daily function, which are crucial because they keep the daily operations going. But if we aren't careful, they will zap all of the energy in the room and there'll be none left for progress. This also struck me right between the eyes, because as a husband and father, as a preacher, as a friend, there are just daily things that have to happen. Isn't that true for you at home, at work? There's just this cadence of operations that are needed week in and week out. And what happens in companies is people are so enamored with those things, they're so busy with those things that they just don't have time for some big strategy, even if it promises the most magnificent things. They may even admit that those things are awesome, but daily minutiae, if we aren't careful, just zaps it. And so a lot of really great plans, they don't blow up into oblivion on a given day. They just die of suffocation as the daily activities take all the oxygen out of the room. So I think for me, just the awareness that that happens has opened my eyes to thinking through it better. I was thinking about our church here in Lindell recently. We made a decision last year that every fifth Sunday night before services, we would have our young men, like our junior high boys, conduct services. And we all decided it was hugely important. We trained for it and we had a really great service. But over the next three months, we just got back to normal stuff and we didn't think about it. We loved what it would mean. We loved how it would develop those young men. Everybody knew it was an awesome idea. But Sundays are Sundays. You've got sermons and classes and communication and all those different things. And by the time we just whirlwinded our way through regular behavior, a fifth Sunday came and we skipped it. And then we skipped it again. And we finally came back and said, we're doing this again next month, and we've re-upped our energy towards it. But I'm going to be using the principles from this book to make sure that it is transformational for our youth and not just something that slowly dies away. Okay, that was too long of an intro, just like all my sermons. So let me cut to the chase. Four things for you to think about. Number one, focus on the wildly important goal. Basically, this is a strategy decision. It's an exploratory decision. You have to decide what is most important in my personal life right now. From now to the end of this year, what is the most crucial thing to me? The wildly important thing that I want to see happen. Families could sit down at the dinner table and say, from now to the end of this year, what do we need to work on that is more important than everything else? It doesn't mean we're going to drop everything else. It means this matters more and it demands our attention. Now, there are a couple of rules in selecting your wildly important goal. It will not always be your wildly important goal. It is probably something you can accomplish in a reasonable amount of time and then you can modify it or create a different goal. So don't be too like generic and existential, like let's all get to heaven. You know, that's great, but how do you work on that specifically? And how do you know if you're making progress towards it? So key in on the word focus on wildly important goals. Focus has two meanings here. One is it has to be somewhat narrow, something real and achievable. And that may be hard for you. I'm more of a big picture, wide guy, you know, just this picture of me five years from now that's better, and then I kind of try to pursue it. When you ask me to narrow that down, Chris, pick something specific and at the top of the heap and let's go after it. I'm not great at that. But when your focus is too wide, you head in all directions. When your focus is narrow, you head in one direction, and you can very clearly tell if you're making progress. Also, the word focus means clear. So it's narrow and it's clear. This is sometimes called a mission statement or something like that, where you have a clear, articulated goal. One of the recommendations for companies is that you pick something with description, like here's the starting line, here's where we are, here's the finish line, here's the desired outcome, and here's the deadline, the amount of time between now and when we want to see that goal achieved. A family sits down and says, we have got to give more attention to the scriptures together. It needs to be the center of our lives. There's nothing more important than that. So for the next six Tuesday nights in a row, we're going to work through the book of James together at 7 p.m. That is a wildly important goal with focus, with a time frame, and it's easy to measure the progress. I do think being specific adds the fear that we might fail, but you just have to be willing to adjust. If the kids get sick or things happen and you get to six weeks and you're on James 3, then you just modify a bit and say, hey, by the end of the next month, we're going to accomplish this. If you say, I'm going to lose 10 pounds by Thanksgiving, and that's really, really important to me, you may have to modify, but at least you're aiming at something. It's like that old idea. If you're aiming for nothing, you hit it every time. Or I might say, if the target is too broad and obscure, you won't even fire the arrow. Okay, number two, let's say you've locked in on that goal and you've been specific and you're excited about it. Number two is act on lead measures. Now, like I say, this is a business book. They use business jargon, but I want you to understand what they're saying. We often react to lagging measures. Here is a car company, they need to sell cars, they don't really know how it's all going, they have suspicions, they get to the end of the month and they get their sales report. It's a lagging indicator because it doesn't come out to the end of the month and it shows that they've not done well and everybody gets upset and then they panic on how to fix it. But one problem is you waited a whole month to realize what everybody already knew was happening. And number two, you end up reacting to the data in a way that's really just trying to change that outcome instead of digging in on initial causes that are the more powerful things that shape that outcome. So they tell companies to focus not on the lagging indicators that may come out months later and then reacting to it. I want to know what are the lead measures you can put attention on today that are predictive and influenced. Here's what they mean by that. Here's something we're going to do at the beginning of the month because we have predicted that this is the single best thing we can do, the most potent thing we can do that we believe will affect the outcome. And it is something that is influenced. In other words, we actually as a team have the power to do it. It's not something out of our control that we hope happens or we'll just have to wait for it to happen. Here's a car company of salesmen going, well, we're just gonna have to wait until the interest rates change and then things will get better. That won't work. So maybe a car company at the beginning of the month gathers its employees together and says, We believe that better customer initial experiences are the best way to produce more sales. So we want that to become the main early measure that we're changing. And we believe that will help us achieve our wildly important goal. And we also believe that every single team member can actually do that. In fact, it's literally something that you have to do, and this input eventually brings about a great output. So for you as an individual or as a family or as a church or company, once you've decided what your goal is, my question for you is this What are one or two things that you believe done on the front end will make the greatest impact towards that outcome? Make sure you pick things that you and your family, you and the church, you and your employees can actually do. Things that people will do if they are trained and it is properly emphasized. One of his examples is losing weight. You don't just wait till you go to the doctor and get a bad report and then panic. Long before you go to the doctor, you make a couple of decisions. Hey, I think if I stop eating this and I start eating this, that's the greatest lead measure to that outcome. And it's something I can control. I decide what to eat and what not to eat. And if I can stay properly motivated, then I believe that things will work. So those first two things are not surprises and they're more on the strategy side, but they're also really great, and I'm finding a lot of ways to use them. Number three, keep a compelling scoreboard. Look, the truth is most people play differently when they're taking score. When there are winners and losers and scores, and it's measurable how you're doing, people tend to be more emotionally involved and put in greater effort. Now that may not always be a good thing. If you come any night of the week except Wednesday before sundown, you will see the Emersons playing pickleball about a block away from our house. We took score for the first couple of months, but it always ended emotionally and tragically. So we stopped taking score and we enjoy it a lot more. But what naturally happened is the intensity went down and we don't play as hard and we don't play as well and we don't care because it's not scored. And that may sound great for a family game of pickleball where the outcome doesn't matter, but if it's something that really does matter, like your health or your relationship with God, or the way your children are learning and growing, or the future of your company that provides for your family, just not taking score and generally being a good person and not creating a system with some drive in it is probably going to lead to some form of, well, losing because the game was going on even if you didn't choose to play it. In the book, they talk about bowling with a curtain in front of the pins. You can do that for a while, but you're gonna get bored and wonder why you're even trying. I want to know how many pins are falling over, how many I have left, and what my score is. For me, this just means measuring progress. If I'm doing the journaling or Bible read, I keep a tally of how many days in a row. Uh, if I'm working on uh push-ups or poundage or whatever, I track that every day. I want to see where I am. I know what my goal is. If it goes one way, it kind of alerts me a little bit. If it goes the other way, it indicates that I'm doing it well. It's kind of like in school, we homeschool our kids, but there's occasional exams or testing or questions, maybe about curriculum or maybe about Bible class. And if we're regular about that, we're kind of testing where they are, and they know that there's a bit of a score there. You know, you you either know it or you don't. And it creates some accountability for them, it creates a little bit of drive in them. And we're not really talking about beating other people. We're just talking about that kind of innate joy that you get when there is a score that wins and you achieved it. Video game programmers figured this out a long, long time ago. If they just give you a game to play, you'll get bored. But if they give you the ability to record a new high score, you'll fight for it the rest of your life because winning is fun. And then lastly, is create a cadence of accountability. Accountability is huge. Answering to someone, sharing with someone, find someone who has the same goal as you so that you can work on it together and you can pick each other up and you can tell each other what needs to be said, and you can kind of work your scores together and maybe even compete in a productive way. But more than just that, it's the idea of a cadence of accountability. The book recommends that companies have a short weekly meeting just to ask, how are we doing? What have we accomplished? Do we all still understand how important this is? And how are we going to make changes this week? They tell a story of a guy who told his daughter she could use the car every weekend if she washed it every Saturday morning. And at lunch on Saturday, they would always talk about it, accountability. And it went fine for several weeks. But then he goes off on a business trip for two weeks and he comes back and the car is dirty. And he's like, What's the deal? And she said, Are we still doing that? Which is something I could totally hear a teenager saying. But then again, maybe all of us do that sometimes. When the accountability falls off, unless it's become like a super uber consistent habit for you, then things can falter pretty quickly. Here are a couple of bonus tips on accountability. If you're working with a team like family or church members or groups or whatever, create enough space where they get to come up with ideas. Like everybody shares the wildly important goal, but how to achieve it, give them some room. Have the accountabilities around the kitchen table or whatever once a week, and let people report on how they've worked towards that goal. Not things they've done that you told them to do, but things that they chose to do that they're pretty proud of, that they feel like is a score for them and that you get to really encourage. I mentioned to you that this material can work well on an individual level where it's just you, which makes this last thing kind of tough. I mean, who's your accountability partner if it's something you're working on on the inside? But I actually think we can establish a cadence of accountability with inanimate objects. For instance, if you have one of those Apple watches with the rings, you and that watch are in a relationship. It shows you every day where you are, it congratulates you when you're successful, and you can make that the thing that you're accountable to. For me, for like Bible reading and prayer, my journal is my accountability partner. If I look down and I see a blank spot where I didn't write a prayer one day, it's like it's looking back at me going, What's the deal, buddy? This is what we do. You're not gonna leave me blank, are you? And that may seem weird to you, but it's really worked because for like five years in a row, even when I get a day or two behind, I'm just not gonna do that to my buddy. I go in and I completely fill it in. So find something, or probably even better, someone that you can be accountable to that can help you keep your own score and that can help you answer for your progress and make sure there is something regular about that. The cadence is crucial every morning or once a week as a waypoint towards your goal. All right, let me recap this and let's get out of here and get to work. Number one, focus on something very clearly and narrowly that really, really matters to you or the people you love. Number two, figure out front-end behavior that you can control that you think is the best possible input and commit to it. Number three, find a way to keep score, find a way to measure progress, find a way for victories along the way. And number four, create a cadence daily, weekly, monthly, some kind of accountability, which will have you answering to others for your behavior, but also getting a ton of encouragement. I hope you find these things useful. I know that I have. Reach out and let me know how it's going for you as we use great strategy and execution to pursue our wildly important goals. Thank you so much for listening in today. If you enjoyed this program, will you share it with someone you care about? One thing I've learned over these five seasons is that there's nothing as powerful in advertising as word of mouth sharing between friends. Speaking of friends, let me once again commend you to give John Cunningham a call. He and his team have a wide variety of tools to help you use your present budget in life to build towards a more secure and hopeful financial future. Once again, you can reach him at 205 326 7364. And always remember whatever you choose to do today in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, excel still more.