Planning and Execution

“Planning and execution. That’s all there is.”

The room was absolutely packed. My friend Nate had invited me down to Palm Springs and treated me to a surprise evening at the Purple Room, a drag queen musical. Our dinner table was right near the front, and Jeremy, seated to my right, caught my attention early as he dropped various business knowledge bombs between numbers. He was in his 60s, a successful entrepreneur who’d felt the full weight of the wins and losses that come with a long career of company building.

His point was that when a project or venture goes sideways, it’s almost always one of those two. Sometimes the plan was wrong from the start. Sometimes you executed flawlessly against a plan that was never going to work. Sometimes the plan was right and the execution fell apart. Occasionally it’s both.

It’s been 11 years since that conversation. I’ve replaced post-mortems with a simple stress test: did we have the right plan, and did we execute the plan?