Be Strategic in 15 Seconds

It’s a really good thing to be tactical. It’s important to have a bias for action, to focus on getting things done.

Write the strategy, build a plan, sure. But spend most of your time in execution mode to make things happen.

Of course, the down side is that it’s easy to be so focused on execution day to day, that we don’t step back and ask the strategic questions to make sure we’re on track, and make sure we’re not missing more significant opportunities to achieve and exceed our goals & expectations.

Stepping back from execution to be strategic is everybody’s job, and it doesn’t have to take longer than 15 seconds to give your work a gut-check. Here are a few questions to ask yourself every once in awhile to make sure you’re on track:

• Why are we doing this?
• What’s the objective? What does success look like?
• How will I know this is successful? How will I measure it?
• Has anything changed (at the company, in the market, with our customers) since we last decided this was worth doing?
• Would our customers think this is a good idea?
• If I started this project from scratch, is this still how I would do it?

Keys to Being Excellent at Anything

If you want to be really good at something, it's going to involve relentlessly pushing past your comfort zone, along with frustration, struggle, setbacks and failures. That's true as long as you want to continue to improve, or even maintain a high level of excellence. The reward is that being really good at something you've earned through your own hard work can be immensely satisfying.

Here, are the six keys to achieving excellence that have been found most effectives:

• Pursue what you love. Passion is an incredible motivator. It fuels focus, resilience, and perseverance. Do the hardest work first. We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain. Most great performers, Ericsson and others have found, delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That's when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.
• Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4½ hours a day.
• Seek expert feedback, in intermittent doses. The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments. Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.
• Take regular renewal breaks. Relaxing after intense effort not only provides an opportunity to rejuvenate, but also to metabolize and embed learning. It's also during rest that the right hemisphere becomes more dominant, which can lead to creative breakthroughs.
• Ritualize practice. Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it. The best way to insure you'll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.

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Planning Vs Execution

Planning without execution is another form of wasting time. If you plan to do something, but don’t do it, what’s the point? Many companies and marketers, however, do a lot of this. Lots of planning, lots of meetings, lots of PowerPoint presentation, but no action.

It’s fine to not execute everything you plan for. In fact, that’s a required part of the process. You have to plan and create a strategy, sometimes, to know whether execution is even worth it. But you should also make sure, despite investing time in a good plan & strategy, that you always have a bias for action and velocity towards getting something done to measure, optimize, and drive results. Plans don’t execute themselves.

Execution without strategy isn’t a whole lot better. It’s basically guessing. Too often marketers today confuse having a “bias for action” with moving straight to execution on a new idea. Sometimes it works, but most of the time it doesn’t. Why? Because you didn’t take the time to know what success should look like, understand whether your execution is the best way to get there, and be thoughtful about how you’ll not only execute, but measure the revenue-generating results that come out of that work.

This doesn’t mean spending forever building a strategy. It just means having a plan and roadmap before the train leaves the station.