- Most quarterly work happens in the last two or three weeks of the quarter.
- Four at-bats a year means one miss costs 25 percent of your capacity to execute.
- Monthly cycles give you twelve at-bats, and you can pivot.
- Velocity needs speed and direction.
On this page
What actually happens in a quarterFour at-bats or twelveSpeed and directionJust the calendar monthTracking it inside the monthI ran on quarterly goals in multiple businesses. I like the idea behind it: decide what the most important things are and put those in first. But they run on ninety-day cycles, and a quarter is way too long.
What actually happens in a quarter
In practical execution, what I saw in multiple businesses is that people don’t work on their quarterly goals until the end of the quarter. In the last two or three weeks, everybody turns on the gas and actually gets them done. So you have two and a half months of wasted time.
I’m an operator. I’m a CEO. I don’t like that kind of wasted energy and time.
Four at-bats or twelve
This is the biggest problem. You only get four at-bats every year to move yourself toward your big goals, because there are four quarters. If you mess up on one of those, you have just dropped 25 percent of your capacity to execute.
So what I do instead is run on monthly cycles of execution. Just calendar months. Now you have twelve at-bats and you can pivot. You still measure execution, but you are compounding effort every month toward your one-year goals.
Now you have twelve at-bats and you can pivot.
And you take less risk, because you are deciding every month instead of every quarter. A bad decision costs you a month, not a quarter.
Speed and direction
Velocity requires speed and direction. You need to be going fast and in the right direction. If you’re going fast in the wrong direction, you’re going to crash. If you’re going slow in the right direction, you’re going to get passed up.
Monthly cycles give you the speed. Setting your goals and running a decision pitch meeting every month makes sure you are actually moving in the right direction. In today’s world, with AI and technology changing so fast, you need to be able to pivot fast. Pivoting once a month is a much better system.
Just the calendar month
Not quarterly. Not six-week sprints. Monthly. It’s easy to understand, because it’s just what the calendar month is. Nobody has to calculate when the next sprint starts.
Tracking it inside the month
Every week, every person who has a priority in the cycle gives an update. What’s been accomplished? Any challenges? Is it on course or deviating? Months are really short, so if something is deviating, we have the conversation that week, not at the end.
At the end of the month, every priority gets one of two statuses: executed or failed. You track that percentage for each area, for the company and for each person. That way you know. Hey, we’re at like a 60 percent execution rate right now. We need to make some adjustments.
You do this every calendar month, and you are stacking up your wins.
