From a young age, Chris McChesney fell in love with Stephen Covey’s application of principles over best practices. He wanted to be a part of Franklin Covey so much that he landed his first job with them over thirty years ago by pretending to be a newspaper reporter as a fake intern. That’s dedication. Today McChesney is a National Best-Selling Author, Keynote Speaker, and Global Practice Leader with Franklin Covey. He sat down with Dustin Odham to discuss how to create some wildly important goals this summer.

McChesney’s book, the 4 Disciplines of Execution, proved influential to Odham in his career path, so he asked McChesney to share the origins behind the approach. Through a Franklin Covey consultant some twenty-five years ago, McChesney saw doing unique work with organizational design that first got his wheels turning. Eventually, the portion that drew the most interest for McChesney was execution and how to execute strategy effectively.

The 4 Disciplines of Execution came out ten years ago, and with a decade of putting these ideas into practice, the question is, what makes these disciplines still valid today?

“There were a couple of things that were just huge,” McChesney said. “One of them was the whirlwind. People are shocked when they learn that we were at this for three years before putting our finger on the whirlwind and this idea of urgency addiction. It’s not about executing a goal. It’s about executing a goal in the face of this other force, which is the energy required to maintain the operation.” And the second thing was a conscious decision not to let the four disciplines be an overarching system. That doesn’t mean learnings from the years of putting these ideas into practice can’t change over time. There is a second edition of the book.

“Between the first and second editions of the book, there were some common areas where leaders struggle,” McChesney said. “We were so close to the methodology, we knew what we meant, but sometimes what you mean isn’t what you say. And we were much more deliberate about it in the second edition.”