The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals

After having several entrepreneurs recommend the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals (4DX) to me, I finally got around to reading it. Quick review: it’s awesome and every entrepreneur should spend the $11 to buy it on Amazon. Here are the four disciplines:

1. Focus on the Wildly Important
2. Act on the Lead Measures
3. Keep a Compelling Scorecard
4. Create a Cadence of Accountability

Imagine taking the core execution elements of Mastering the Rockefeller Habits or Traction: Get a Grip on Your Business and distilling it down into four disciplines and you have the 4DX book. This is important because the disciplines are all attainable and there’s less touchy feely stuff that turns some people off from the other books (e.g. I love core values and culture stuff but some people see that as being beneath them).

Here the four disciplines rephrased into simpler terms:

1. Make no more than one or two very important goals with a clear metric and deadline
2. Track two or three metrics that are leading indicators for the goals (e.g. if the goal is to sign 100 new customers, a leading indicator would be number of qualified opportunities in the pipeline)
3. Develop a spreadsheet or report for everyone to see that has the leading indicators and goal metrics (real-time, if possible)
4. Meet once a week for 20-30 minutes to talk about what was done the previous week and what will be done the next week to hit the targets (accountability!)

Seriously, every entrepreneur should buy the book and run this process (a couple critical goals, leading indicator metrics, central dashboard with the metrics, and a short weekly meeting talking about actions to hit the metrics). I recommend The 4 Disciplines of Execution.

What else? What are some more thoughts on the book and the four disciplines?