Make those great ideas work

Most of us have experienced more than our share of grand strategies designed to energize our staff—only to see such plans fall by the wayside in short order. What goes wrong? Often, it is a matter of "Execution," the title of a popular new business book by Honeywell chairman Larry Bossidy and management consultant Ram Charan. The book contains valuable insights into why so many companies can't translate creative vision into productive results.

As the authors see it: "Execution is a systematic process of rigorously discussing hows and whats, questioning, tenaciously following through, and ensuring accountability. It includes making assumptions about the business environment, assessing the organization's capabilities, linking strategy to operations and the people who are going to implement the strategy, synchronizing those people and their various disciplines, and linking rewards to outcomes." In addition, good execution builds in mechanisms for change as the business environment shifts.

Among the real-world examples cited in Execution (Crown Business), the authors point to Dell Computer as a model of disciplined execution in getting all its operations to deliver on three goals: build to order, low inventory, and technical innovation. The firm turns over its inventory 80 times a year, versus 20 times for many of its rivals. At the same time, Dell has proven that it can move fast to adjust to the business climate, as it did in 2001 when it entered the server and storage business to offset softness in the PC market.

Mike Molloy, Dell's senior manager of the Enterprise Systems Performance Test Team for server and storage products, told T&MW that meeting the test challenges presented by these new products was a critical consideration for Dell. The company had to ensure that it had the right people and procedures to do the job. Molloy's lab performs industry-standard tests on such applications as databases and messaging for e-mail. "From the beginning, we knew that we had to quickly build the test matrices that would reflect customer needs," says Molloy. That, in turn, meant forging alliances with test specialists at software partners, such as Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat.

Because of Dell's build-to-order philosophy, notes Molloy, his team gains better knowledge of the product configurations that customers want, which allows his group to develop more-focused test protocols. And in Dell products that pioneer new technology, engineers strive to integrate test as early as possible in the design process. Says Molloy, "In performance tests, we try to offer our own internal design teams the same build-to-order service that we bring to our customers."

In other words, consistent execution.

Contact Lawrence D. Maloney at lmaloney@reedbusiness.com.