People tell me that I’m much more precise with words than most people. They’re right especially in the world of execution. This weekend’s contribution to the Blog is a glossary. I guarantee that you’ll find some words and definitions that you’ve never seen before. A common set of words for everything from Strategy to Execution has been missing. Everyone from CEO’s and Government leaders to Project Managers and Team Members need to have a common language when working on anything from Strategy to Execution.

To give an example, many organizations I work with use the following words completely interchangeably. They are not the same. I’ll share more in future posting how the confusion or willingness to interchange these words have a direct connection to why execution fails to meet expectations more than 50% of the time.

• Action
• Task
• Project
• Outcome
• Work
• Objective
• Goal
• Result
• Initiative
• Program

You can see the impact if a team was committed to achieving a particular outcome as compared to if they were committed to achieving a particular initiative. They might be quite successful in achieving the initiative, but not achieve the outcome that the initiative was put in place to achieve. On the other hand, if the team was committed to achieving a particular outcome, and the initiatives that they started with weren’t achieving the expected outcome, you can imagine that they’d change initiatives. That would be part of what they’d committed to. The difference in success or failure is immense.