Solid Leadership. Sound Strategy. Flawless Execution.

“The failure to execute is a major concern of executives because it limits organizational growth, adaptability and competitiveness. The problem is how to close the gap between the strategy and the actual results,” writes Mary Lippitt, author of the article “Fix the Disconnect between Strategy and Execution”.

Five Critical Success Factors

By Laurie Clarke, COO, The Tatham Group

The Tatham Group offers 5 critical success factors to ensure operational excellence. These include: FOCUS, ALIGNMENT, PEOPLE, TECHNOLOGY and COMMUNICATION.

Springing out of winter habits

Maybe it was the distinct lack of snow, the longer days or the overnight emergence of patios (yes, in Canada, this is a big deal), but if all those hints weren’t a dead giveaway that spring had finally sprung, then it had to be the sale on chocolate eggs. In fact, for the first time in nearly a century, Easter this year came much earlier than usual thanks to good ‘old Emperor Constantine and the Council of Nicea AD 325, who decreed that Easter should fall around the time of the vernal equinox (or when the length of day and night is nearly equal in every part of the world).

Bureaucracies Live Forever

This came in as a forwarded email from one of our colleagues in the Philippines:

“The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That’s an exceedingly odd number. Why was that gauge used? Because that’s the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US railroads.

Why did the English build them like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that’s the gauge they used.

Why did ‘they’ use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old, long distance roads in England , because that’s the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads? Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads? Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing. Therefore the United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot.

Bureaucracies live forever.