Execution—The Discipline of Getting Things Done

Larry Bossidy and Raum Charan wrote a best selling management book a few years ago with the above title. It was recommended to me by a superintendent friend of mine. I read it and found most of it to be very standard management fare. That is, the standard disciplines of Plan, Organize, Lead (Motivate) and Control. The need to employ feedback based on objective data relating the results obtained to the results desired.

I was impressed however by one section of the book realizing that it applied really well to the greatest impediment to improving our education performance. This was the assertion that if you wanted to create a “performance organization” you needed to create an environment that valued and indeed expected what the authors called “robust dialogue.” In education there is no robust dialogue worth mentioning. Political correctness and Group Think work exceedingly well to suppress the truth and also the synergy that truly robust dialogue could facilitate. Due to this “soft” environment opportunities to do better are regularly missed. This sort of environment is one where people wear their “feelings on their sleeves” and develop no mental toughness that an environment valuing intellectual honesty (being able to look objectively at our own shortcomings and resolve to do better) and robust dialogue.

If you honestly think about it you know that people often know the truth but have learned to suppress it and “be nice.” This creates far more stress than a good argument in the name of better understanding of different attitudes about problems. Synergy by definition requires constructive interaction in a group setting. This is especially true in continuous quality improvement (CQI) activities. The robust dialog that is required to make CQI really work is vital to the process. Since there is no robust dialogue in education worth noting, CQI cannot work. Yet, huge amounts of money are spent on “going through the motions” CQI programs so that school organizations can claim they are using CQI to improve their performance. Another area impacted by the be-nice ethic is the lack of constructive criticism in performance reviews. You may say, “What’s the use, with tenure it makes no difference.” But people will react to scrupulously objective feedback especially if it relates to activities that support the organization’s mission.

While examples of truth suppression are ubiquitous in education one of the worst examples is the case of the school board member who was told on visiting a high school in a large district that 150 9th graders were reading between the 1st and 6th grade levels. That amounted to about a third of the 9th grade class in that school. He expressed his concern about it at the next board meeting. There was no response from any of the administrators or other board members. The board president deftly moved on to the next agenda item. There was a response however, the next day the “assistant superintendent of instruction” sent an email to the entire staff and board with The Blueberry Story attached. This is a “story” whose moral is basically that improvement is required but until society and parents send better students to school the educators can’t do anything. The other action taken was to tell the principal who told the board member the truth that their contract would not be renewed (hence they were fired). So the message to the entire organization was that poor performance was OK but telling the truth was a hanging offense.

Oh, when I discussed the book with the superintendent who recommended it I highlighted the robust dialogue and intellectual honesty section. The superintendent said that there was nothing in the book on that topic. I had to fax copies of those pages as proof to make the point. This experience proved to me once again that educators have such a strong filter preventing any information that conflicts with their education school and on the job training that new beneficial insights and knowledge are not allowed into their consciousness. Thus, until education leaders are retrained by outsiders who are strong enough to break through that filter the massive improvement so desperately needed cannot happen.