I. Structure Execution, fundamentally, is about using people well and doing things well. But just as strategy—a seemingly simple issue—has become a discipline, execution also needs to become an independent discipline. The reason is that modern enterprise operational mechanisms are complex systems with numerous non-linear causal transmission links and mechanisms. At the same time, modern technologies such as large-scale precision manufacturing, remote monitoring systems, and instant communication networks place higher demands on personnel quality and knowledge levels, rendering empiricism ineffective in management. What exactly is execution as a discipline of modern enterprise management? Execution is the establishment of a scientific operational process based on human nature, setting goals and evaluation standards, clarifying reward and punishment rules, and through internal and external checks within the organizational structure, promoting the reward of the excellent and punishment of the inferior, as well as the promotion of the superior and elimination of the inferior, thereby improving the speed and quality of execution and ensuring the perfect achievement of goals. This definition delineates the basic structure of effective execution:

  1. The core of execution is the perfect achievement of goals. Note that it is the "perfect" achievement of goals, not the achievement of perfect goals—that is, completing 100% of the predetermined goals is perfect execution! If there is a deviation, one only needs to judge between the reasonableness of the goal and the execution quality of the executor, without seeking any other reasons or excuses.
  2. Execution effectiveness is measured by speed and quality. Both speed and quality are based on the cost-benefit ratio, meaning that quality is measured by maximizing benefits and minimizing costs, while speed not only reflects execution efficiency and the professional competence of the executor but is also a practical way to reduce costs.
  3. Personnel are the central nervous system of execution. By motivating executors to change their behavior and professional competence, we promote production through people. Motivation is reflected in rewarding the excellent and punishing the inferior, as well as promoting the superior and eliminating the inferior. This is the essence of execution culture: employees with high execution quality must be rewarded or promoted, while those with low execution quality must be punished or eliminated. This is iron discipline and the sole evaluation criterion; other factors such as education, seniority, and relationships cannot become standards for selecting and employing people.
  4. Personnel evaluation is based on the organizational platform. It is necessary to exclude the "relationship networks" based on personal intimacy, such as the will of superiors, nepotism, and black-box operations. These are the most lethal poison gas to morale! Numerous historical facts and business competitions show that organizations that represent only the interests of a small group (even if these people are geniuses) and protect only the interests of a small group cannot have the ability to resist risks and attacks, and are simply not competitive.
  5. Reward and punishment rules and evaluation standards are transparent. Once rules and standards are established, no one is allowed to arbitrarily change them or enjoy "extraterritorial rights." It is important to emphasize the practicality of evaluation standards, the utility of reward and punishment rules, and the need for simplicity: easy to execute, easy to check, and easy to assess.
  6. Mutual checks among organizational functional structures are the external force driving execution. Design organizational functions and structures according to business processes. Each link places demands on the upstream and is evaluated by the downstream, ultimately forming a "functionally coupled" "self-organizing system."
  7. Goals are the soul that governs all aspects of execution. Perfect execution can create an organization with strong execution capability, but execution with erroneous goals will lead to organizational collapse. Goals are the hallmark of organizational strategic choice, that is, they announce to all employees the organization's mission: where and how to obtain cash flow and profits. Goals must match the enterprise's resources. Resources here refer to both tangible and intangible assets, including existing resources and "time resources" (i.e., "kinetic resources" created over time).
  8. The bright side of human nature is the "uranium element" for organizational fission. All the above structures and processes must be built on human nature to generate sustained momentum and drive the organization to achieve qualitative leaps time and again. Laozi said: The Tao gives birth to one, one gives birth to two, two gives birth to three, three gives birth to all things. In the elements of execution, the bright traits of human nature are the "Tao" of organizational cohesion. An organization with this Tao is bound to create market miracles and a lasting legacy! II. Process To clarify the links, relationships, and interactive structures of execution, it is necessary to understand the basic process of execution, that is, the trajectory of execution elements over time. The complete cycle of the execution process is:
  9. Goal Setting Decompose strategic goals into annual, quarterly, monthly, ten-day/weekly, and daily sub-goals, and clarify responsible persons, related persons (such as distributors), and sub-projects that lead to goal achievement (such as channel decomposition in sales). The purpose of this layer-by-layer decomposition is not only to clarify the daily management goals of each department and personnel but also to see the supporting conditions for responsible persons to achieve goals, and these goals become assessment benchmarks.
  10. Organizational Structure Design Determine the organizational structure, staffing, administrative relationships, and management principles based on goals. The difficulty in organizational design lies in determining the job settings, staffing, and compensation plans for each department. From another perspective, process efficiency depends more on organizational structure settings than on personnel operational skills. If departments are too detailed and numerous, it increases communication costs and affects operational speed, easily causing "management intestinal obstruction"; if major categories are merged to reduce formal institutions and increase functional division within institutions, it can lead to rough assessment and confusion, reducing the transparency of personnel evaluation and affecting the final work quality. The ideal organizational structure design should follow two basic principles: A. Operational information flow moves unidirectionally between departments: multiple commands must be avoided, and each instruction must be ultimately responsible by the final approver; B. The transmission layers from instruction to executor should be compressed to within 3, and the final approval layers should not exceed 5 (including transmission layers).
  11. Job Function Definition Job/position descriptions and work instructions. Unlike previous job descriptions, the job description is a comprehensive description that integrates the position, responsibilities, and incumbent traits. Its advancement lies in transforming the static job description into a dynamic job description. In this description, the focus is not on the characteristics of the position or post, but on the characteristics of the job, involving the upper, lower, left, and right related persons of this job, i.e., superiors, subordinates, collaborators, the qualifications, conditions, work content, responsibilities and authorities, salary standards, etc. To make the job description more thorough, it is necessary to develop work instructions, which are essentially guides for the incumbent's vocational skills training. Thus, the combination of job descriptions and work instructions constitutes a "behavioral guide" for incumbents to improve professional quality.
  12. Performance Evaluation Standards Performance assessment indicators or KPIs. Regardless of the performance evaluation method used, if the "Rule of Three in One" can be achieved, it will generate strong execution momentum, that is, limiting the evaluation criteria to one core goal plus three derivative goals. If the evaluation criteria are complex and abstract, it is difficult to implement in daily business processes, and it also makes it impossible for executors and evaluators to check intuitively. For any position, depending on the different operational needs of the enterprise, the "one" and "three" items can be flexibly adjusted. The "Rule of Three in One" is a law that best fits human rational traits, just as the golden ratio is a natural aesthetic law; it is a principle that is easy to understand, easy to check, and easy to execute.
  13. Reward and Punishment Rules Design reward and punishment rules, evaluation forms, evaluation executors/departments, and evaluation cycles based on goal achievement or KPIs. Combine result-based rewards and punishments with process-based ones, focusing on both results and processes. The forms of rewards and punishments should primarily be economic and administrative, supplemented by spiritual ones. Some may think this is not very "humanized," but only by touching people's most sensitive nerves can management be most effective! In a commercial society, the two handles of profit (income) and reputation (position) remain the most important regulatory levers.
  14. Inspection Mechanism Design a regular inspection system based on the evaluation cycle, clarifying the content, form, time, and inspection results. Inspection must be detailed to each person and each day. Inspection is the engine of execution. Only by checking the results of each person, every day, and everywhere can execution be ensured to advance along the predetermined "path" toward the goal! Only when every executor is responsible for the day's goals every day, regardless of location, can the spirit of execution be implemented in every employee's behavior.
  15. Assessment and Evaluation Based on standards, rules, and inspection results, conduct periodic evaluations (or 360-degree assessment systems) of all executors' performance, and make economic, spiritual, or administrative reward and punishment decisions. It must be fair and just, rejecting any "special reasons," and cannot tolerate any "privileged persons." Everyone is equal before discipline, and the absolute authority of rules must be established. Only then can a positive execution culture that does not make excuses and is results-oriented be cultivated.
  16. Goal Re-setting The end of execution is a new starting point. Taking the month as the origin of the execution goal cycle, and other time units (quarter, ten-day/week, day) as references, constitutes another "Rule of Three in One" schema. Through the continuous cycle of the execution process, the organization is pushed toward new goals one after another, and organizational strength and execution capability are continuously improved—this is the "execution gene" shared by all successful enterprises. III. Mechanism After dissecting the structure and process, as the engine of execution, it is also necessary to understand how the power system of execution actually operates, that is, the mechanism of execution. Structure is static, process defines the trajectory of tasks, and what drives the organization is a "momentum" hidden behind structure and process—the mechanism. What is momentum? In "The Art of War," Sun Tzu made a precise definition of "momentum": First, "speed" generates momentum: "The rush of water can move stones." Water can carry boats but cannot lift stones, but if the water flows extremely fast, it can make stones move with the current. This is the potential energy generated by speed; Second, "position" generates momentum: "Like rolling a round stone down a thousand-fathom mountain." The nature of a round stone is to move, but on flat ground it will be still; placed on a mountain, it will roll down irresistibly. This is the potential energy generated by position. Sun Tzu said: Momentum is the control of power according to advantage. Therefore, the so-called "momentum" is to create certain conditions under which, by leveraging the nature of things, one achieves effectiveness beyond their inherent nature. From this perspective, execution is to leverage human nature, follow the logic of things (advantage), and create momentum (control of power) to achieve a geometric amplification effect beyond the simple sum of resources. This power to create momentum is the mechanism of execution. To improve execution capability or shape an execution culture (execution discipline, execution organization), the core mechanisms are the following four key points: First, Identification. This includes employees' identification with leaders, subordinates, colleagues, systems, corporate culture, self, and rewards and punishments. We must deeply recognize that only identification can generate mutual trust, and only mutual trust is the driving force for proactive behavior, as irresistible as love. Confucius even compared virtue to lust (I have never seen anyone who loves virtue as much as they love beauty). Identification is the most precious trait of "intimacy with things" in the bright side of human nature, and it is the prerequisite for an execution organization to achieve natural group synergy (harmony with all). Second, Self-discipline. Self-discipline is not obedience to the will of leaders or others (i.e., restraining oneself and restoring propriety). Self-discipline is both training in personal morality and professional competence, and the pursuit of professional skills and quality. Complying with company rules and obeying commands is self-discipline, but more importantly, it is integrating rules and discipline into inner consciousness, thereby transcending the rules (following the heart's desire without overstepping the bounds). Only those who can discipline themselves can discipline others. Many organizations with low execution capability are due to the inability of key members to self-discipline, resulting in a loss of credibility, i.e., inability to achieve "harmony with all," which in turn makes orders ineffective or subordinates lack identification with management measures. Third, Inspection. The first two points are internal execution mechanisms; inspection is the manifestation of the organization's external coercive force. Inspection must be carried out around the set key performance standards. Inspection has the following three key points:
  17. Inspection must be conducted daily, evaluated daily, and cover every person. This is not the traditional supervisory "man-to-man" management, but rather a system established through information networks where each person automatically transmits the day's work process and results, and inspection and evaluation are conducted based on the set daily assessment indicators.
  18. Inspection must cover both process and results. When designing daily assessment indicators, not only should the results be clearly defined, but also the factors that directly affect the completion of results should be decomposed into the daily work plan. For example, distributor payment depends on the speed of channel distribution, so the relevant assessment of channel distribution must become an important part of the salesperson's daily work.
  19. The purpose of inspection is to strengthen the work style of executors. In real work, many inspections become a mere formality because the true purpose of inspection is not understood. If leaders, subordinates, or inspectors only treat inspection as a "performance evaluation" of employees, then everyone in the evaluation system will not genuinely identify with this assessment mechanism, because everyone is both an evaluator and a subject of inspection. The organizational mechanism of inspection and evaluation itself cannot automatically improve performance or even execution efficiency until both inspectors and those inspected understand that the purpose of inspection is to improve everyone's work style. Inspection is attention to what has happened, but what truly deserves attention is actually the future, not the past. By focusing on everyone's work style through daily inspection, we are focusing on the future! In the final sense, both process and results are superficial; only the willingness and actions of employees to improve proactively are the foundation for achieving all goals. And only in this interaction can a humanized organizational atmosphere and even an organizational ecosystem be established. Fourth, Rewards and Punishments. Confucius believed: Guide them with virtue and align them with propriety, and they will have a sense of shame and correct themselves; guide them with government and align them with punishment, and they will avoid punishment but have no sense of shame. This has been cited by modern advocates of humanized management and knowledge worker management as a basis for canceling or reducing punishment. Only those who have no goals, no time limits, and do not need external recognition can enjoy Confucius's ideal treatment, but this is not the principle of a commercial society. Rewards and punishments are unrelated to an individual's income level, work motivation, economic background, or educational level. Rewards and punishments are not for adjusting income or changing motivation, but for evaluating a professional's "responsibility," reminding everyone of the organizational mission or goals they bear. The only thing that must be done in rewards and punishments is to constantly pay attention to the relationship between reward and punishment rules and the actual situation, achieving reasonableness and fairness, i.e., "harmonious integration of principles and affairs." If one understands that the purpose of inspection and evaluation is to change the work style of executors, then the purpose of rewards and punishments is an assessment of the improvement of work style. In fact, the situation of rewards and punishments itself is also a weather vane for evaluating the organizational ecosystem. The above four execution mechanisms are actually a unified whole, with completely overlapping relationships. If any one link is missing, the operation of this mechanism will be hindered. Organizational execution is a system. Everyone doing well is the foundation, but it is not enough; it is also necessary to leverage the synergy of the group. The human nature foundation of execution plus the power system of execution can ensure that the potential energy of execution is maximized. Sun Tzu said: One skilled in using troops can lead them as if by the hand of one person. Those who share the same desire will win! The human nature foundation ensures the realization of shared desires, and the power system creates execution momentum, effectively organizing the group into a team, producing the synergy of leading as if by one hand. The significance of execution capability lies in combining the effectiveness of resource allocation at the fastest speed, the lowest cost, and to the maximum! In this sense, execution capability is the core competitiveness of an organization! 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