Enabling Entrepreneurs To Execute On Their Million Dollar Idea

Martin Zwilling is a Forbes.com, Harvard Business Review and Huffington Post contributor and the Founder and CEO of Startup Professionals, a company that provides services to startup founders around the world. His background includes a 30 year track record as an executive in general management, computer software development, product management and marketing. He is currently a mentor to a number of start up founders, works with several Venture Capitalists in Silicon Valley and sits on the selection committee of two local Angel Investor groups. 

With such a background, he is particularly well placed to comment on the characteristics of successful start-up organisations, and in this context he recently blogged about FranklinCovey's latest thinking on effective execution, and how it applies to this category of business

For most people, execution is one of those things that seems obvious after the fact when done correctly, but is hard to specify for those trying to learn to do it better. Recently, I finished a new book on this subject, The 4 Disciplines of Execution by Chris McChesney, Sean Covey, and Jim Huling, which seems to talk to startups as well as the corporate world it was written for.

These authors argue effectively that the hard part of executing most strategies is changing human behavior – first the people on your team, then partners, vendors, and most importantly, customers. No startup founder or leader can just order these changes to happen, because it isn’t that easy to get other people to change their ways. Changing yourself is tough enough.

I believe the best business leaders follow (these 4 key disciplines) to expedite the change and forward progress implicit in the successful execution of a million dollar idea:

These four disciplines must (however) be implemented as a process, not as an event. That means your team needs to see them as a normal and continuous focus, not a one-time push which fades in the rush of other daily priorities. The team needs to see the process practiced by the startup founder, as well as preached regularly.

Startup founders also need to realise that building and managing a company is quite different from learning to search for and solidify an idea that can grow into a company. Every entrepreneur has to navigate that personal change from thinking to doing to managing.

It’s not only the change from thinking to managing, but also the change and learning from constant iterations. Major changes, called pivots, are terrifying to a team that has put months of constant focus into executing what they thought was a great idea. If you don’t have an execution process, you have chaos.

Zwilling's comment that 'these 4 Disciplines must be implemented as a process, not as an event' is particularly telling and has been at the heart of FranklinCovey's work to refine our approach over the past 10 years. Throughout this time we have developed beyond initial learning events into what is now a comprehensive end to end process that starts with the translation of (and engagement with) critical goals at all levels. We then enable the accreditation of front line leaders as facilitators, and coaches, of the thinking so they can both support their teams and hold them accountable to the discipline of execution on a weekly basis.