Summary and review ofExecution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

Reviewed by Diario de un Inversor · UpdatedJuly 8, 2026

Our review

Larry Bossidy ran AlliedSignal and Honeywell after decades training at General Electric; Ram Charan advises large corporations. Their thesis is uncomfortable for the strategy industry: most plans fail not because they are badly conceived but because nobody defines who does what, with which resources and by when, and because leadership delegates execution as if it were an administrative chore. The authors break execution into three processes that must connect — people, strategy and operations — and argue that the CEO has to participate personally in all three. The most useful part is their insistence on «robust dialogue»: meetings where numbers are challenged and commitments named aloud, as against the ritual meeting where everyone nods. The book has obvious flaws: it is repetitive, the examples come almost entirely from large American corporations, and the tone is didactic to the point of fatigue. But it corrects a real and widespread error — confusing formulating a strategy with having carried it out.

Key takeaways

• Strategies fail more often for want of owners, resources and deadlines than from bad design.
• People, strategy and operations are three processes to be connected, not separate departments.
• «Robust dialogue» replaces the ritual meeting with explicit challenge of the numbers.
• The examples come from large corporations and scale poorly down to small organisations.

Fact

Published in 2002; Larry Bossidy was CEO of AlliedSignal and of Honeywell after a long career at General Electric.