Chris McChesney

Who they are

McChesney is named first on The 4 Disciplines of Execution, with Sean Covey and Jim Huling. FranklinCovey's launch release for the book, dated 3 May 2012, names the three authors and the company, and says the authors had spent more than a decade studying why execution fails and how to improve it. The release says they had worked with more than 13,000 teams and 200,000 people. Those are the company's own figures from a promotional release, and the release gives no outcome data.

Beyond the book, a biography is not recorded here.

Key papers

McChesney, C., Covey, S., and Huling, J. (2012). The 4 Disciplines of Execution: Achieving Your Wildly Important Goals. New York: Free Press.

Key ideas

The book proposes four disciplines for turning a strategy into results: focus on the wildly important goals, act on the lead measures, keep a compelling scoreboard and create a cadence of accountability.

The first asks a team to choose a very small number of ambitious outcomes and rank everything else below them. See Wildly Important Goal. The second separates results that arrive too late to change from behaviours a team can act on today and count. See Lead Measure and Lag Measure. The third keeps those counts visible. The fourth is a short, regular meeting at which each person reports against the last period's commitments and makes new ones. See Cadence of Accountability.

Cal Newport adapted the disciplines for individual work in Deep Work (2016), using his own academic year as a trial.

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