Strategy & Execution Must Be Linked

There is an old saying – “work smarter, not just harder”. Many CEO’s are so set on growing their company that they burnout a lot of their top talent with excessive workloads and responsibilities, yet produce the same results. If you find your company “stuck”, go back and re-evaluate your execution plan and how well it aligns with the strategy and end goal. Be sure everyone on the team understands what success really looks like.

We all learned a valuable lesson from the fable about the Lumberjack.  If you are not familiar with it, a younger and stronger lumberjack consistently cut down less trees than an older, weaker lumberjack, who also happened to take a 15 minute break every hour.

The younger lumberjack finally got up the nerve to ask the older lumberjack how he was able to cut down so many more trees, being the older and weaker worker. It was then the older, weaker lumberjack explained that he stopped every 45 minutes to sharpen his axe and that allowed his cutting to be more effective than the younger lumberjack with the dull axe.

In this story, the younger lumberjack’s execution plan was to strike the tree as many times as fast as he could during his shift, whereas the older lumberjack had a solid strategy before he began and his execution plan had far better results and he was more effective in his efforts.

If you feel like you are continually beating your dull axe into the tree, please reach out to me and let me help you sharpen your axe.