Murphy - Flawless Execution: Use the Techniques and Systems of Americas Fighter Pilots to Perform at your Peak and Win Battles in the Business World

I am an American fighter pilot. I fly the United States Air Forces F-15 fighter, a supersonic jet with twin afterburning engines that ranks among the premier aircraft in the world. I can scramble to the jet, jump in, and, with just a few movements of my hands, crank up the engines, scan the 350 switches and dials in my cockpit, push up throttles to full afterburner, and in a matter of seconds be in a vertical climb and passing through 15,000 feet. Once Im airborne, I am in command of a jet capable of dogfighting on either side of the sound barrier. I can climb high enough to see the curvature of the earth, or fly 500 feet off the ground in the black of night. Either way, when were on a mission, when this plane and I are in our groove, its comfortable; its under control. I am one with this jet; I am defined by this intensely intimidating, highly effective, extremely lethal machine that can be sent virtually anywhere in the world.

The key word in that previous paragraph is whenwhen we work together. A supersonic jet is a temperamental beast. It is built for speed and agility. Those attributes give me a decided advantage in the air but I do pay a price for them. Fast and agile though the F-15 is, it operates inside an envelope that has razor-thin margins for error. This jet demands that I give it my undivided attention. Its constantly testing me. Sometimes I have just seconds to make choices that can save me or kill me. Fixate on one instrument and I lose the data from anotherperhaps I fly it into the ground. If I dont listen carefully to the sounds this jet feeds me, I wont hear tones in my helmet or important radio calls from my wingman, and its game over. Throw in checking my wingmans six, terrain clearance, working my radar, weapons selection, navigation, making sure I know where the enemy is, and managing my avionics, and you can see how fighter pilots live and breathe the word execution. I have to be sharp, alert; my situational awareness has to be crackling like fireworks. I have to sense and see things that ordinary people would not. In a nutshell, I have to executeflawlesslyor this environment, this jet, this business of flying supersonic aircraft, will kill me.

Thats the world of a fighter pilot. Its life at Mach Onefast, and in many ways thrilling, but absolutely unforgiving. Small mistakes can be lethal; our margins for error are tinytheres just no room for a pilot who doesnt stay ahead of the jet. Theres no room for sloppy execution.

That was then. Now is now. Now Im a businessman. I specialize in the art of improving corporate and individual execution, which, simplified, is nothing more than the ability of one person to perform his task without repetitive mistakes. I specialize in this art because its how I lived my life as an F-15 fighter pilot. If I failed to execute my mission properly, there was an incredibly good chance I was going to be a smoking hole in the ground. Not a nice day. The pursuit of flawless execution was the dividing line between life and death, between a successful mission and a scrub, between losing a wingman and bringing your squadron home together.

But was it so important in business? I thought it should be, but there were far too many examples around me that together seemed to say that flawless execution really didnt matter. Salespeople could have their sales pitches shot full of holes and suffer little more than the temporary misery of a long flight home. In the field, a technician or an installer or a repair man could spend two hours on a job site that required only oneand the company was no worse for the wear. And how many times had I seen a front desk clerk at a hotel or a sales clerk in a store bumble the most basic questions? I couldnt count. In business, if you failed to execute your mission properly, there was always another day. Sure, a promotion might be delayed, but the reality is, in the F-15, you die; in the boardroom, the corporate vice president has another day.

I started Afterburner, Inc. in 1996. I developed a training syllabus that demonstrated to corporate America how the unique tools used to train fighter pilots could be used in business to raise an individuals level of executionas well as a corporations. The better each individual executed, the more certain the corporate mission would be successful. As more and more people learned the tools and applied them,