• The 4 Disciplines of Execution

  • Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals
  • By: Sean Covey
  • Narrated by: Sean Covey
  • Length: 3 hrs and 38 mins
  • 4.6 out of 5 stars (737 ratings)

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The 4 Disciplines of Execution

By: Sean Covey
Narrated by: Sean Covey
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Publisher's summary

An insightful new work from the multimillion-copy best-selling author Sean Covey and the FranklinCovey organization, based on their work with hundreds of thousands of employees and large companies. It unveils the essential disciplines proven to help businesses and individuals realize their most important goals.

A publishing phenomenon, Sean Covey and the FranklinCovey organization have become one of the most respected brands in the highly competitive world of thought leadership in business. In his latest work, Covey lays out an unprecedented plan for goal-realization that will revolutionize the way we approach our dreams.

The 4 Disciplines of Execution provides a simple, proven formula for achieving the goals that every individual or organization needs to reach. From Marriott to the U.S. Navy, Covey and his team have worked with more than 200,000 people in hundreds of organizations to improve performance, identifying and honing four secrets of perfect execution:

  • Focus on the Wildly Important
  • Act on the Lead Measures
  • Keep a Compelling Scoreboard
  • Create a Cadence of Accountability
By allowing teams to separate those urgent tasks that demand attention merely to keep a company alive—called the “whirlwind”—from new, “wildly important” goals that promise to break new ground, these disciplines empower leaders to accomplish what is by far the most difficult aspect of creating results: executing a strategy that requires a change in behavior. Simply put, this is a work that no business, however small or large, can afford to pass up.

©2012 FranklinCovey Co. (P)2012 Simon & Schuster

What listeners say about The 4 Disciplines of Execution

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Liked abridged version

Good read. Great concepts. Glad I went for the abridged version. couldn't imagine a need for 5 more hours of this book in the full version.

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8 people found this helpful

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    4 out of 5 stars
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    4 out of 5 stars

Specific instructions regarding weekly planning

It's an excellent brief book.

The main idea of the book:
Pick 1-2 wildly essential goals, and focus on them. Don't work on several things simultaneously.

Ideas
1) There're 20 % efforts, levers if you will in any process. We should define that sort of shots that produce 80% results
2) Visual displaying data about the score you gained is essential.
This scoreboard must be as simple as a soccer scoreboard.
3) Visibility drives accountability
4) Results drive engagement
5) A manager should create a weekly meeting when every responsible person reports about the current progress. Everyone should choose only 1-2 most important things they can do to move forward the score.
6) Weekly commitments (2-3) must represent a specific deliverable, and it must influence the lead measures.
7) Profoundly impacted engagement has the following qualities: - the more specific the commitment, the higher accountability (when what, and what is the outcome (deliverable)) - it's aligned to moving the scoreboard.

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6 people found this helpful

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Excellent information

Where does The 4 Disciplines of Execution rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

Any additional comments?

Covey does it again! Great insight and useful templates to put together a real program for my team to work on their wildly important goals. I was able to put this to actual practice with my team and set standards for following up on our most important issues we face to make our company and team work more efficiently.

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2 people found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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Great book if you have a hard time setting goals

If you could sum up The 4 Disciplines of Execution in three words, what would they be?

Truly very helpful.

What did you like best about this story?

I love how they go into detail to help you get started in getting your team on board with these ideas. Very helpful if your teams have been struggling to attain certain goals.

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Keep it simple..

It's harder than you think. Strategy is great, but execution is what gets you paid.

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1 person found this helpful

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    5 out of 5 stars
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    5 out of 5 stars

The management book Aristotle would have written.

Lots of really good uncommon common sense. it's interesting chiefly because following these principles is the only way I've ever really gotten things done. whether in high school or early on working with teams.
when I'd been successful I'd accidentally followed these principles.

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Good start but falls off in step 4

I liked everything they wrote about setting your wildly important goals and the techniques to measure those goals but it falls off in the final execution.

Basically, their strategy for meeting your goal in the face of everything else you're doing (the whirlwind as they call it) was to tell your staff that it is important and they should meet their commitments regardless of what is happening in their whirlwind.

But they give absolutely no solutions or even suggestions on how to manage the things competing for your staff's attention. Step 4 boils down to "tell your staff to do more".

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    5 out of 5 stars
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Must read!

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

This is a great book that simplifies the very complex topic of improving execution.

Any additional comments?

I'm buying this book for my team!

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Outstanding

Too large a divide stands between strategy and execution. This book bridges the gap marvellously.

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great for getting it done

vision for a company is so important but with out execution it's only a dream.

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