The Cart Blog

Covey: Four Disciplines

Just listened to Stephen Covey’s Four Disciplines of Execution. Classic Covey, no big surprises. The four disciplines are:

1. Focus on your Wildly Important Goals
2. Create a compelling scoreboard
3. Translate lofty goals into specific actions
4. Hold each other accountable all the time

What differentiates a Covey book from the typical “execution” or “decision-making” tome written by some ego-driven CEO is Covey’s distinctively avuncular manner. Somehow it makes it easier to take the hard messages.

The timing of this was serendipitous, because I just had a chance to listen to an HBR Ideacast in which the authors of Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls were interviewed. They discussed how the decision making cannot adequately be evaluated in isolation.  Instead, they argued that including quality of execution and follow-through would yield a more holistic measure of decision making effectiveness.