Introduction Video Transcript

I am Leland Russell. I’m here to give you a brief introduction to Leadership In FastTime®.

To put Leadership In FastTime® into context, I’ll paraphrase a famous science fiction author who said, "The universe is a big place, perhaps the biggest.”

Well, leadership is a big subject, perhaps the biggest. In the last three years alone, over 5,000 books have been published on leadership. So there is little doubt that leadership is critically important and there is no shortage of leadership theories. The one thing that seems to be missing is a straightforward way to measure leadership effectiveness.

How would you measure it? Would it be based on how well you score on a generic checklist of leadership traits or your organization’s leadership profile?

Those are certainly valid indicators, but the ultimate measure of a leader’s effectiveness is what they actually accomplish. This is the results indicator. Great leaders, whether it’s entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Nelson Mandella or Sheryl Sandberg, who helped make Facebook the most popular social network in cyberspace—have one key ability in common: the ability to execute strategies that achieve outstanding results.

Whether you are a seasoned leader at the top or an emerging leader on the way up, you’ve probably found that executing effectively in today’s enviroment can be a challenge… and you’re not alone. A wide range of research reveals that 70 to 90% of organizations are failing to execute effectively. It’s not surprising that, when an international research group asked CEOs from 40 countries to rate their greatest concerns from a list of 121 different challenges, “Execution Excellence” was ranked number one.

What does it take to achieve “Execution Excellence”?

A proven formula emerged from our research and hands-on Execution work with leaders in the Fortune 500, non-profit sector, government agencies and the military. An especially useful source has been the Desert Storm air campaign---one of the most successful campaigns in military history. Because of its size and complexity and the fact that it was such a rapid victory, it contains valuable lessons for leaders everywhere. We presented what we learned about Desert Storm in the book, Winning In FastTime®, which I co-authored with Colonel John Warden, the architect of the air campaign.

During one of our writing sessions, I asked Colonel Warden a seminal question, “How would you describe the success formula of Desert Storm?” He paused for a moment and then crisply replied, “Think Strategically, Focus Sharply, and Move Quickly.”

This sums up in six words a powerful framework for Execution Excellence that has been acknowledged as highly effective by leaders in many well-known forward-leaning organizations. To learn more about how they’ve applied Leadership In FastTime® and the results they’ve achieved, download our featured article, How You Can Meet Your #1 Leadership Challenge.

If you are wondering whether or not it’s worth your time, consider these three questions: