One of my favorite business/sales books is Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan’s Execution. It’s the best book written on getting shit done. The greatest challenge I’ve ever seen with achieving success isn’t the lack of ideas, but rather understanding how to execute on the idea. Getting shit done is all about the “how.”

“How” are you going to get to the CEO? “How” are you going to reach quota? “How” are you going to get 6 new logos? “HOW” are you going to displace the competition? “How” are you going to renew the account? “How” are you going to . . ? The answer to these questions is the true difference between the average and the great, the successful and the failures. If you wanna be a badass, then learn to execute.

I’m reading Execution again (for the 4th or 5th time) with my team. Every time I read it, I’m reminded of how good the book is.

The value in this book to sales leaders and sales people is its ability in teaching how to deliver. Sales is a complex profession. Sales leadership is even more complex. Our success is deeply rooted in our ability to execute against difficult, shifting, emotional environments. Therefore, being damn good at executing is the key to winning and this book is good at teaching you how to execute.

Over the next few weeks, I thought I’d share our book club with the community.  I will be sharing good quotes from the book to help that deliver killer insight in how to get shit done and what it takes to execute.

I hope you enjoy it, and feel free to share your thoughts.

To kick it off, I’m thinking the quote would be a definition of execution.

Execution —

Execution is a systematic process of rigorously discussing hows an whats, question, 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 an their various disciplines, and linking rewards to outcomes. It also includes mechanisms for changing assumptions as the environment changes and upgrading the company’s capabilities to meet the challenges of an ambitious strategy.

In it’s most fundamental sense, execution is a systematic way or exposing reality and acting on it.

If you’re goal is to be a true badass who get’s shit down and knows how to deliver, their is not better skill to hone than ability to execute.

This should be fun.