J.R. Lowry continues his discussion with executive coach Jim Huling about The 4 Disciplines of Execution (4DX), the book he co-authored with Chris McChesney and Sean Covey. In this second part, they discuss the last two disciplines: Keep a Compelling Scoreboard and Create a Cadence of Accountability. Together, they explore how keeping score can promote higher team engagement and the true value of a fully accountable workplace culture. Jim also emphasizes why the 4DX approach must be implemented with simplicity in mind, as well as how AI tools are reshaping management systems, human connection, and collective effort.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/jim-huling-2.

—

Watch the episode here

Listen to the podcast here

The Four Disciplines Of Execution (Part 2), With Jim Huling

Co-Creator of the 4DX Methodology and Former Global Managing Consultant at FranklinCovey

This is part two of our discussion with Jim Huling, co-author of the bestselling book The 4 Disciplines of Execution, also called 4DX. Last time, we covered Jim’s career journey and the first two of the four disciplines. In this second part, we’ll cover the third and fourth disciplines and some broader aspects of implementing the 4DX methodology. Let’s dive back in.

—

Keep A Compelling Scoreboard

Let’s move on to discipline three, which is about a compelling scoreboard. You were mentioning in the back of the stores, who’s measured the most kids’ shoes, that kind of scoreboard. Why is visibility so critical to the 4DX process?

I love this question and I love this discipline, by the way. You’ll hear a little bias in my wisdom, but we call discipline three, the discipline of Engagement. We call discipline one, Focus. Discipline two, we call Leverage, the idea of small action and big results. We call discipline three, the discipline of Engagement, because it is designed to be the discipline by which people get engaged. Time has moved on now a bit, but when this idea was formulated for us, or cooking on the stove, so to speak, it was not a time when the visibility of scorekeeping was common.

It was more common that a score was on a spreadsheet. At the weekly meeting, the boss would open up the laptop. It was one of those kinds of things, but it was never like it is in a football game. I live in the Southeast of the United States, which you know both for the religious level and football. It is true of me as well. The beautiful idea was that we thought, “What if we were playing a football game?” We said, “We’re going to save some electricity, and we’re only going to light up the scoreboard at the end of each quarter.” It’s this big idea. Who cares?

You would have a revolution in the United States. You’d have people marching in the streets saying, “Turn on the scoreboard.” It would take so much away from the game. With that simple context, we thought, “Why don’t we go all in on the visibility of these scoreboards?” More importantly, let’s do something that in those days, you won’t find this radical now, but it was radical in the beginning. We say to the leaders, “It’s not your scoreboard. It’s the team’s scoreboard. They own it.”

To push that envelope, we said the team gets to design it. The team gets to put anything they want on the scoreboard. We had hospitals with surgical masks on their scoreboard. The Harley-Davidson people had all kinds of biker gear on their scoreboards. All these companies in these teams, you could look at that board and you could say, “I know exactly whose scoreboard that is.” You could ask those people, and they would say, “That board there is ours. That’s our board.”

It was this magical intangible of ownership starting to happen because if people owned the board by extension, they owned the results that were displayed on the board. We did not see that coming. We didn’t see the whole engagement thing coming. There was a time when people began to say that the four disciplines are all about engagement. It’s not about results, and I was not unhappy with that portrayal. I feel like it’s insufficient, not having the conversation we’re having now. For somebody to say the whole point of 4DX is to get your team highly engaged, I can sleep well at night with that summary as well.

It’s incomplete, but what a powerful thing. If you don’t mind me adding commentary, we still live in a time of apathy. We still live in a time of skepticism. You don’t find a lot of corporations where people are highly engaged in winning at their goals at work. The scoreboard is one of the things that gives them that.

The Gallup data that gets quoted all the time, 30% of people are engaged at work. Those numbers haven’t moved since Gallup started measuring them 25-plus years ago. The point you made a minute ago about being able to sleep well at night by engaging the workforce. It is a relatively rare thing in the scheme of things to have a workforce that rallies around like, “These are our numbers. We have ownership of this.”

Certainly, I look at engagement as a massive force multiplier. When you talked about leverage being inherent in the second discipline. I also think it’s inherent, maybe one step removed in the third, because if you can get 250,000 people at Marriott, or however many thousand at Payless, or whatever. All thinking about this. All bought in and all driving toward that one wildly important goal, that’s a heck of a lot more powerful than 100 liters at the top of the organization being focused on it, and hoping everybody else comes along for the ride. It’s a very different construct. It’s a piece that a lot of companies miss. They don’t think enough about it. How do I let employees feel like this is theirs?

The only thing that is in addition to that is to imagine if those concepts, which may start at the leadership level, permeate all the way down to the front line. What if you have frontline hourly workers who are at the end of a shift, cheering because they hit their number, and the team on the other side of the warehouse missed theirs? What if you have that kind of thing going? It’s not the whole answer, but it’s a powerful piece of an answer, which is a highly focused, highly engaged, intelligent workforce in pursuit of a goal that’s worthy of that level of commitment.

How Leaders Should Keep Score

For the leaders who feel uncomfortable with this, how do you advise them to keep score to participate in the process of the scoreboard without micromanaging or demoralizing, or taking away that sense of ownership that we’ve talked about?

It’s a wonderful question. Like most great questions, there might be 5 or 6 reasonable answers. They would all be fun to do that, but for simplicity’s sake, a place where I’ve drawn the line as a consultant and an executive coach, still trying to help leaders understand this, is that everything above the frontline can be a digital scoreboard. It can be in the software. You can have all of your graphs, charts, permutations, and calculations. That’s what leaders love.

Leaders love to look at all of that, and they should. That’s what their job is. It’s to see the zoomed-out view. Let the team have its scoreboard in its style. Don’t homogenize or institutionalize the team’s scoreboard. If they want to make a digital one, fine. If they want to have a physical one, that’s fine, too. If they do something that you cringe a little bit, like you don’t want your other grad school buddies to see your team has a scoreboard with Harley-Davidson gear on it or something, which should be nothing wrong with that, but get past that.

Let the team have a board that looks like it belongs to them, and they’ll perform against it in a way that you want them to. That’s the only thing I would draw that line. Let leaders have a leader scoreboard and let the team have its own scoreboard. It’s a good place to start.

In your point about physical versus digital. At this point, we move mostly into digital, but I can remember in the day doing my consulting work applying things like Lean technology, where you’d have your whiteboard that was your scoreboard. There’s something that is rewarding about going up to that whiteboard, erasing the old number, putting in the new number, or adding the next day’s numbers, or whatever the case may be. You get a tactile sense to it in the same way that you do when you write something down on paper as opposed to typing it into your laptop or whatever. Even in this modern era, where everything has been digitized, there’s still something to be said for a good old-fashioned whiteboard scoreboard.

Even though you and I can’t explain how it works, we know it does work. There is something different about the physicality of something that makes it feel simply more personal. That’s enough to know. If it helps the team have a 0.1 improvement in focus and follow-through, I would do it. Especially if it was that easy to do. You’ve helped to hit this point very well.

Create a Cadence of Accountability

Let’s move on to discipline four, which is about creating a cadence of accountability. I know you have a very big commitment to the fact that it needs to be at least weekly.

It starts by differentiating how your concept of accountability differs from performance reviews, check-in meetings, and all those kinds of things. That’s a great way to frame that question. To do and to answer it, let’s zoom out again to look at a big picture first, and then we’ll be as detailed as we want to be. The big picture, the whole world struggles with accountability and follow-through. Look at New Year’s resolutions. You make it to day four now?

By the second Friday, they’re done.

“I’m gone. I’m not doing that anymore.” I’m not trying to be critical. I’m trying to be reasonable in saying that, as a species on the whole, we struggle mightily with being accountable and consistently following through. That’s the challenge we have to try to solve because otherwise, discipline 1, 2, and 3, who cares? If you’re not doing it, who cares? It was just another workshop. It was just another great idea that doesn’t go anywhere. We had to find something that would stick, and the two things that we concluded and were proven out in the early implementations are that a week is almost the perfect planning segment.

I should be careful to say that Dr. Steven Covey said this in 1985 in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. The unit of time of one week is almost perfect in its ability to do two things. It’s long enough to accomplish something, and it’s short enough that you have to start. It has urgency and importance built into it. We started with this idea of, what if we established a cadence every single week where we never went more than seven days without feeling a sense of accountability, or are we doing what we said we would do?

That became a powerful beginning. The only other thing that we added into that, which was, I don’t mind saying. For some people, it was controversial, but for the vast majority of the world, it was transnational. We made it personal. In other words, we advocated that in the weekly meeting between you and your team, both you and every member of your team would say out loud whether they followed through on the commitment they made last week.

The idea is that in every meeting, everybody makes at least one commitment that is going to help the team move the score. It doesn’t necessarily have to be a certain size or elegant or complex, but it has to be real so that each person on the team says, “This week, I’m going to check in with IT and see if we can find a solution to that problem we’re having in the system,” whatever it is. One week later, you sit around a circle or a table or on a Zoom call with your team, and you have to say out loud, “Last week, I committed to resolving that issue in IT.” Your moment of truth is you either say, “I did it,” or “I didn’t get to it.” You could almost stop there. I can see on your face, you get all the depths of this. There’s no shame involved. There’s no, “I can’t believe you didn’t do it.” There’s nothing of that.

The moment of accountability of being in the presence of your teammate and having, in a sense, made a promise, and in this example, not keeping that promise, it carries its own weight. I’ve said to many leaders around the world that it’s a self-correcting exercise. You almost don’t have to do anything. It will work its magic. Typically, that person in that moment, without being in any way berated, will say, “This doesn’t feel very good.” At least on their own, they will say, “I will not be in this position next time.” You’ve just lifted the execution capability of an entire team with a simple practice of being accountable not to the boss, but to each other.

It’s that feeling of letting your team down that is the driving force. You take that and you multiply it times 250,000 or something. You get everybody, every week, getting this much more accountable. Pretty soon, you will have created an unstoppable force. The teams that are doing that can’t be stopped. I might sound like an infomercial. I don’t mean to, but they don’t want to be stopped. This is the best feeling they’ve ever had at work. They feel like this fraction, and they’re doing something. They wouldn’t give it up if you gave them the chance to.

This is building habits, building the compounding effect that comes with things, and all of that. All those incremental improvements compound and pile up. Also, just to be very active, if you’re doing it weekly, 52 times a year, it’s like a little mini success party if you get it done. Everybody wants to be 52 and 0. They don’t want to be 48 and 4, or 36 and 16, or whatever the case may be. To me, it’s the same thing as agile software development, the idea of a daily stand-up.

What I have always loved about that model for development is that nobody gets any place to hide. You’re going to say what you’re going to get done that day. The next day, you’re going to come back and say, “Did I get it done?” It brings that day-to-day discipline because when things go wrong, it’s when people feel like, “I got a month to do this. I’m not going to start worrying about it until day 28.” You’ve wasted 28 days, and you go into a complete scramble for the last two. Most of the time, you don’t finish what you’re supposed to do, and you don’t achieve as much. All of this comes back to the word discipline and being committed to the process.

If you take what you said and nudge it one step further, all those people who end up not doing what they committed to do, to some degree, feel lessened. They’ve lost something. I’ve never been a part of any use of discipline where it was a shame party, where anybody was embarrassed, or anything like that. I wouldn’t be part of anything like that. I don’t believe that’s a very powerful thing to do, but accountability has a natural consequence. When it’s implemented in a supportive environment like this, it is itself motivated.

It makes you say, “This is never happening to me again.” I’ve made my own decision to raise my game. If you’re my boss, you don’t have to tell me to raise my game. You don’t have to give me a lecture on how important it is to follow through. I don’t need anything. I’m sitting there with twelve of my peers. All of them did what they committed to do, and I’m the only one. I don’t need anything else. I’ll be here next week, and my scorecard will show that I got everything done. It’s such a powerful thing. I don’t know why we don’t use it in more ways. Like anything, it can be misused. Accountability can become a hammer if you’re not careful, but it can also become a fire that lights people up.

Simple Implementation Of The Four Disciplines Of Execution

We talked a good amount about the four disciplines. Let’s talk a little bit about the implementation of them. Undoubtedly, you’ve run into teams that are skeptical that this is another flavor-of-the-month management program. With all those organizations that you guys have worked with over the years, how did you get them past the point of skepticism? What were the key levers for moving that?

It’s interesting to me at this stage of my journey for you to ask me that. My answer is so different from what it would have been in the very beginning. Now, I would say, you have 300,000 organizations around the world using this methodology. It’s one of the largest and most implemented methodologies in the world. It’s easy to stand on, “Do you mean you don’t want those kinds of results?” To ask the opposite question, “Are you completely happy with the results you’re currently getting?” A question to which every leader says no. You can stand on that.

In the beginning, though, we had to find ways of illustrating that 4DX could bring something that the leader alone could not do. I think this was the heart of all of the methods that we would try in a conversation between you and me as two executives, for example. I’m trying to help you see the power of the methodology in the hope that you’ll want to adapt. You’re trying to be sure that you’re not just picking up one more book or one more system, which may or may not yield any results.

There we are in the yin and yang of that conversation. If I have real stories and real examples, it makes that conversation so much simpler, and that’s what we did. We very quickly had a dozen or so. We’re blessed by this with some stories that were astonishingly great. When Marriott became a huge adopter, that became a very easy way of saying, “The best companies in the world are using this model.”

In the absence of that, you have to appeal, and this was always my way to the simplicity of it. I have a former CEO. When I could say to a leader, “Let me give you the whole four disciplines.” It’ll take me about 90 seconds to explain it to them. I could say focus, leverage, engagement, and accountability. There was something in that, and I’m not saying it had anything to do with me. I’m saying the power of that simplicity was compelling to an overworked and overwhelmed leader looking for an answer. To hear it said like that was a breath of air.

The last thing you want to do as a CEO or as a senior leader is deploy something that people are going to struggle to understand. That’s particularly in these large service-oriented businesses that have thousands and thousands of frontline workers. You need something that they can grab onto relatively easily. If you try for something more complicated, their eyes glaze over, and you lose them. It becomes the discarded flavor of the month management program.

Another story that you’re embarrassed by and you hope nobody tells. If you and I could put a placard on a wall, I think we would agree that simplicity is the best friend of execution. If we could just hold to that. Occam’s razor is the simplest. It’s got to be the best one. The same is true of 4DX. The same is true of execution. The simplest way you approach it is typically going to be what you will adapt and what you will sustain. Complexity works against all of that every single time.

Jim Huling: The simplest way you approach a business is typically the one you will adopt and sustain.

How 4DX Applies To Creative Organizations

We talked a lot about processing kinds of organizations, services, and businesses. How does this work in more creative organizations like an advertising firm or a media company?

We’ve had quite a number of these. Even the original team designing, at that time, the next and upcoming fighter jet design was using 4DX. We have quite a number of colorful stories like that. If I give the true answer to your question, in my view, those kinds of organizations that rely on fluidity, creativity, a dynamic movement of ideas, and all of the things that we think of and are grateful for in teams that work in that type of arena still struggle to get the end result delivered in the promised way on the day it was from.

Even though I have the highest value for people who work in all professions that rely more on the heart than the mind, or the creative spirit rather than the strength of will, I have a huge respect for all of that.

I’ve also been a good friend to those teams because when you dig down, you find that they are always late, over budget, and often miss the mark. I’m not trying to oversimplify, but they are, in a sense, from the same dilemma that a person running a production line in a manufacturing plant has. It’s conceptually the same.

The nature of the solution is different, but the nature of the problem is still the same. It’s been a refreshing thing. I don’t want to seem disingenuous by not saying that the more creative the team’s orientation is, the less they warm naturally to the principles of discipline. That’s true. This is not just a natural act, where people who are used to working in a uniform way, “This is the only way to do it.” We do have to work, bend, adapt, and flex, but the adaptation is quite simple. Once we find it, what do we need to mold?

One of the things I like best about 4DX, and I don’t know if everybody would like me saying it this way, but I find it to be bendable, so it can be shaped around the team. It can be molded around the way the team can work the best with it. 4DX sounds rigid when you say it, but once you start implementing it, it’s quite fluid.

It has a few simple principles, and if you violate those, you lose some of its power. No question. Outside of those few simple things, you have tremendous freedom to work, play, adapt, and track in the way that makes the most sense for your team. I don’t know if bendable is the right word, but it’s the simple word I’ve always used. Most people get the idea of that pretty quickly when we say it.

It resonates, Jim. One of the questions I was about to ask you is, we live in a world with a lot of uncertainty and volatility. How does the structured process line up against that? To your point, it’s structured at the very basic skeletal level. How do you apply the substance on top of that, the meat on the bones, or whatever? There is a lot of variability, and your metrics can change over time. Your wildly important goal can change over time.

You’ve got the ability to adapt, but also, even in the face of maybe answering the question I was going to ask you. You can tell me whether I’ve done a decent job of it. Even in the face of all of this volatility and uncertainty that we’re facing, you still have to get up every day and have at least a couple of meals a day.

You have other things you have to do every day that are your daily habits. This, in a way, is another one of those things that’s like, the world is uncertain, but we’re going to continue to stay focused on measuring kids’ shoes, or making sure that the customer experience is right, or managing the calories that we consume, or 10,000 steps, whatever the case may be. It’s having those things that you stick with in the face of all that. In some ways, it gives people something to keep themselves grounded. In some ways, it’s probably comforting to them.

I was hoping you’d get to that Maslow-ish idea. I could tell where you were going with that statement. In a world filled with uncertainty, what people want most is some point in the universe that is still stable. Most of us can handle a lot of uncertainty if we have a place to stand. The simple rhythm of 4DX in times of chaos and uncertainty has been very comforting to teams. We still have our meeting every week. Everything is changing, but I heard we’re getting sold, but for now, we’re still meeting every week. We’re still making our commitments and updating our scoreboard.

Those simple practices, I don’t know if it’s the right word. My words are like rituals. They’re like rituals that help us stay in balance and harmony in our lives. I’m not trying to spiritualize 4DX except to say that I think there are principles involved in 4DX that you also find in other systems of thought around the world that bring inner peace and good outcomes, along with good results.

How AI Affected Management Systems And The 4DX Approach

With AI coming into the fold and consuming more and more of the routine tasks, how do you see that affecting management systems that are so process-focused, like a 4DX?

It’s a great question, and it may be that you’re more qualified to answer than me. I don’t know, but I get asked a lot about it. I’ve often wondered because of 4DX being so systemic that it makes you ask a question about something artificially intelligent. My own personal thoughts around it are twofold. I’d love to know what you think about these two thoughts, J.R. One, I think it is a force multiplier. If I’m interacting with another human on the phone on the help desk, who happens to be having a very bad day, stressed, or overwhelmed, I get a different quality of service than I do when those things are not present.

When I have those things automated to a degree of effectiveness, then the intelligence is the same entity all the time. I’m just being rational to say, “I can see where those are improved.” Those are places where there are things that can be implemented in this way and probably performed at a higher, and certainly a more consistent level than others. I’m quick to come behind that and say, “I still believe that there is a unique spark in the human soul that cannot be replicated, homogenized, or automated in that way. I believe that with all my heart.

Even I, for example. I coach a whole bunch of executives now, and I correspond with them. They’re in five different countries, 17 or 18 leaders. There’s always a temptation to automate my correspondence with them. I’m in a hurry, too. I have deadlines of my own. I resist that incredibly and fiercely because I know they will sense something is not in that email that has been in other emails, some part of me that I was able to put into that email. Does that mean I don’t spell check? Does that mean I don’t ask for, are there any mistakes in this, or is there a better way to say this? I think those things are good.

I’ve gone a little bit off field with my answer. I apologize. I come right back to my point of I think it is another time in human history when we are faced with the choice to evolve or be less effective. I don’t want to say die or any of those things. I don’t think that’s good, but when we find things we used to do with a certain degree of proficiency, and we take great pride in being the person who was able to do it, and we now find that a machine can do it at almost the same level, we come to the same crossroads human species have come too many times before where we must evolve or become obsolete.

We’re faced with that choice right now. I consider myself to be a good writer. I’ve written two bestselling books. I’m proud of my prowess in my ability to write. With things now, I’m just as good as what I can write. All that I’m left with is to say, “I need to get better and I need to find a way to protect the unique part of this writing that is me. I need to treasure and develop that while gracefully allowing the automation to do the other parts that don’t require the same.” I’m at peace with all those things. That’s the best thought I’ve been offering to leaders all over the world.

I’m not sure where I am at this point. If you think about some of the other trends, we went from the guild apprentice model to the industrial revolution factories, to automation, to offshoring, and further automation of some of the things that are going on in the knowledge economy. All of those things have happened in a way because the people in charge have not been threatened by these things. We haven’t eliminated so many front-line roles that we lose the ability to come up to the ranks. It’s hard to say how the frontline work itself will change.

The other thing is, you have people out there saying, “You can converse with a doctor that’s a machine. You can converse with a coach that’s a machine. You can converse with a therapist that’s a machine.” Are we going to be working for machines? To me, that’s where people probably start to get uncomfortable. It’s like, “I work for Grok or ChatGPT.” That’s the difference here from some of these early things. How far up the food chain does this go? Are we able to stay to keep moving ourselves further up the food chain, or do we get caught? I don’t know the answer to that question yet, and I wonder a lot about it.

You were more eloquent than I, but we both said the same thing in our own way. I’m challenged to evolve at a rate that makes me still have relevance, while below me, the technology is constantly rising. I need to do that. I will tell you this funny story. I remember vividly when word processors were invented. Even in those days, I was a writer. I remember people saying, “This is the end of great writing, or soon to be the end of great writing,” because you have a machine fixing your spelling errors, adjusting your grammar, or whatever the early processors were able to do.

I remember vividly people in my writing group saying, “This is the end. This is the end of great writing.” It certainly wasn’t the end of great writing, but we’d like to hope writing may have gotten better because the routine part of it can be automated, leaving me free, in theory, to deal with the more esoteric parts of it, the actual gift part of it. That’s my hope, anyway. I could be accused of being a half-full-glass person. I am a half-full-glass person, but I still think the possibility of good is as great as the danger. I still feel it. Until further evidence is in, I’m holding firm to that perspective. It can go either way. I’m going to try to be on this side of it.

Going Forward Together, Not Individually

Last question. If you could give your younger self one piece of advice, what would it be?

I have to love this question. I’m at an age where I think about this all the time. There’s an old African proverb that I treasure and think about every single day of my life. You probably know it. It says, “If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.” What I’m desperately hoping about the world is that we never forget. We always go farther together than we can separately.

That becomes an impetus for our survival, but our evolution, too, and our own rise to greatness, and doing good work in the world. It’s to realize we can only do that together. We can’t do that individually. I would like that. I’d like to tell my younger self to hold firm to this idea and build a community of people around you that you want to go far with, as opposed to being all by yourself trying to sprint alone.

That proverb is one of the all-time greats. It may be the one African proverb that some of us in the Western world know. There’s so much truth in the fact that civilization, as we know it, has risen on the collective efforts of people and the individual efforts, and the collective efforts. Nobody does anything alone. There’s no self-made or anything in our world. How you interact with the people around you and win together as opposed to win alone is certainly a very important lesson. Thank you for sharing that, Jim.

Maybe in the end, it’ll be the thing that saves us. Who knows?

Let’s hope so.

With people like you, keep having podcasts and getting good messages out. Thank you for letting me be part of it.

Episode Wrap-Up And Closing Words

Thank you as well. It’s been a great conversation. Certainly, it gave people a first-hand view with lots of examples in specificity into the 4DX frameworks. It’s a great supplement to the book.

Thank you.

Take care, Jim.

—

I want to again thank Jim for joining me over these past two episodes to cover the 4DX framework and his career journey. As a reminder, this episode was brought to you by PathWise.io. If you’re ready to take control of your career, join the PathWise community. Basic membership is free. You can also sign up on the website for the PathWise Newsletter. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Thanks.

Important Links

• Jim Huling on LinkedIn
• Jim Huling on Instagram
• The 4 Disciplines of Execution
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
• PathWise on LinkedIn
• PathWise on Facebook
• PathWise on YouTube
• PathWise on Instagram
• PathWise on TikTok

About Jim Huling

Jim Huling is the co-author of the #1 Global Bestseller The 4 Disciplines of Execution, a powerful framework that has transformed how leaders around the world turn strategy into real, lasting results. The book has sold millions of copies and been translated into 16 languages, becoming essential reading for leaders at every level.

Jim served for many years as FranklinCovey’s Global Managing Consultant, responsible for the quality and delivery of the 4 Disciplines methodology worldwide. In that role, he coached more than 70,000 leaders across five continents. Earlier in his career, Jim was the CEO of a company recognized four times as one of the “25 Best Companies to Work For in America.” His leadership earned him the prestigious Turknett National Leadership Character Award, honoring CEOs who lead with the highest standards of ethics and integrity.

Today, Jim privately coaches more than 16 CEOs across a wide range of industries. His newest venture, Execution Insights™, is a global platform offering weekly, high-impact video lessons on execution, leadership, and purpose to leaders around the world. He also brings a surprising mix of credentials: Jim holds degrees in business, computer science, and music; he’s a 3rd Degree Black Belt in Taekwondo; and he currently trains in CrossFit at nearly 71 years old.