Too many teams have bold strategies but fall short in execution. In this episode, Jim Huling executive coach and co-author of The 4 Disciplines of Execution, dives into the power of focus, discipline, and simplicity in leadership. Jim shares how Fortune 500 companies transformed performance using the 4DX methodology, what makes execution harder than strategy, and why clarity around wildly important goals and lead measures drives real results.

From Marriott’s hospitality breakthrough to the surprising metric that boosted Payless Shoes’ sales, this conversation is packed with insights on how to move from intention to achievement with heart and consistency.

Check out the full series of Career Sessions, Career Lessons podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/.

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The Four Disciplines Of Execution (Part 1), With Jim Huling

Co-Creator Of The 4DX Methodology And Former Global Managing Consultant At FranklinCovey

I have the privilege of welcoming someone whose name you may already know, Jim Huling. Jim is the co-author of the number one 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 sixteen languages, becoming essential reading for leaders at every level.

In this conversation, we’ll cover Jim’s career journey, and we’ll dive into the four disciplines of execution, also called 4 DX, what it is, why it works, and how leaders can use it to move from intention to achievement. We’ll cover the first two disciplines in this episode, and then we’ll cover the remainder and some broader aspects of implementing the 4 DX methodology in our next episode. Let’s get to it.

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Jim Huling’s Journey: From IT To Global Leadership

Jim, welcome, and thank you so much. It’s a real pleasure to have you on the show.

Thank you. It’s great to have a new friendship with you and also to have a chance to share ideas with somebody who thinks about these things like I do almost all the time. Thank you.

I think about these things a lot. I’m not sure that I think about them as much as you do, but we will certainly have an engaged conversation. You are known for The 4 Disciplines of Execution that you co-wrote with some of your colleagues from FranklinCovey. Before we dive into 4 DX, as you guys call it, why don’t you help our audience get to know you? Where’d you grow up, and what did you do in the early part of your career?

Thank you. You may have done a little homework to start me in that particular place. I was born and raised in Birmingham, Alabama, which is the southeastern quadrant of the United States. Many years ago, I moved to Atlanta, Georgia, which has been my home ever since then. I love it. I love Atlanta, Georgia. It’s in the Southeast of the United States. It’s a beautiful place to live. That’s the happy part for all of that story.

If you talk about how I ended up here, I often ask myself the same question. I’ve had quite a long life, and an interesting one, at least from my perspective. I started in IT long before there were even personal computers. It was punch cards and big mainframes. I started in that world. I spent twenty years in IT, and I ended up being the CIO at a very large multibillion-dollar global company.

I got to the place where I thought, “This is as far as technology is going to take me. Now what do I do?” A wonderful opportunity was offered to me to be CEO of a technology company. It was an easy bridge, or at least it looked easy from the outside. I found quite quickly that the job of CEO is very different from the job of CIO. I had to learn a lot of things like marketing, sales, cashflow, and things I had not had to deal with much as a CIO. Still, I spent eleven years as a CEO. It was a wonderful time in my life.

Right about at the edge of burnout in being a CEO, FranklinCovey offered me the opportunity to join them and teach leadership around the world. That’s the best thing that ever happened to me, other than meeting the love of my life. I spent fourteen wonderful years at FranklinCovey as the global managing consultant. I wrote a couple of books, which you were kind enough to mention, and learned a lot. I also had a chance to stand in front of 70,000 leaders in 21 countries. I was on airplanes a lot. It was a wonderful time.

I can imagine.

At the end of that story, which I hope is mercifully short for all of your readers, a few years ago, I decided I did not want to ever be on an airplane again as long as I live. You can’t be a consultant if you’re not willing to do that, so I pivoted to being an executive coach. I don’t mean this to sound like a platitude, but I will tell you that at this point in my life, I finally found the job I was born to have. This is the best time of my life.

I have 19 CEOs and senior executives and 2 Fortune 500 CEOs that I’m coaching. I live in their world every single day. Here’s the beautiful part, and I don’t mean this to be snarky, but I get to be part of their whole process, the challenges, and the drama. At the end of our coaching call, I can close the screen and go have dinner.

It’s like being a grandparent.

That’s exactly the second greatest job in the world. I’ve said often that I love being a grandparent because you have all the fun and none of the responsibility. You can give them chocolate milk at 10:00 at night and send them home to their parents. It doesn’t matter. You’re the grandparent. It was a long and wonderful journey. FranklinCovey certainly was a beautiful part of that. I owe so much to Dr. Covey, Chris McChesney, and other people who made such a difference in my life. I hope that wasn’t too long.

The Genesis Of 4DX: Solving Execution’s Toughest Challenges

It’s a great overview. Let’s shift into talking about 4 DX. What was the spark that created the desire to create this process and ultimately to codify it in a book?

I love this question. I’m older than you, but the older I get, the more I love origin points. If you know how something started, you understand it in a whole different way. The origin point of 4 DX is quite simple. All the wonderful, talented people I was working with and I at FranklinCovey in those days had a common observation. Client after client, they would make a beautiful strategy. It was elegant, profound, and thought-provoking. It would be in a PowerPoint slide deck that was Steven Spielberg worthy. It would be this incredible thing of beauty.

They would roll it out to their team, and the whole team would be like, “This is the answer. We’re going to do all of this.” You think it was this penultimate moment, like, “How could it get any better than this?” The truth is, that’s your best moment right there because after that, you have this formidable task of executing on everything that you designed in your strategy.

It turns out that execution is so much harder than strategy. They’re both valuable. I don’t want to be part of an organization that does only one and not the other. To translate beautiful strategy into day-to-day actions and to do it with consistency, discipline, and maybe even with heart is hard. The observation of that challenge and, more painfully, client after client failing at that challenge led us to say, “If we could solve one big problem in the world, and we’re not going to do cancer, then maybe this would be it.”

It turned out that 300,000 organizations later used The 4 Disciplines of Execution. The book itself was translated into sixteen languages. It was a global bestseller for a number of years. We think we’ve brought a solution to that dilemma to a lot of people, and we certainly hear back from them a lot of love and appreciation for it. I hope that wasn’t too long, but isn’t that quite a story to tell from that origin point to where we are with all this?

I’m curious to get a little bit more into that. You hear this consistent need with beautiful strategy and fantastic PowerPoint slides. Everybody’s excited. They get into execution. How did you guys go from there to 4 DX specifically?

It was a non-linear, jagged series of 4 steps forward, 2 back. I don’t want to glamorize it at all. It was terribly hard because there was a lot of trial and error. Imagine if you’re trying to answer this question. The moment I remember the most vividly was once we had begun to get a feel for what it takes to execute, or at least execute with excellence, we then had this realization that nobody we knew could apply that level of focus and discipline to more than one outcome at a time. Our typical client would have 12 or 14 outcomes in the year. I had one client in those days who had 97 goals. Can you imagine?

Yeah.

I remember asking this gentleman quite innocently. I said, “97 goals. How do you achieve them all?” This is a true story. He said, “We don’t achieve them. We just talk about them.” I thought, “That’s why we need to write this book.”

Having 97 goals is having no goals.

There’s nothing. In fact, it’s chaos. It’s anti-execution. When you start there and say, “No one in the world could do this for more than one thing, not with excellence,” we had a starting point. That, in and of itself, is how the four disciplines first began to be known around the world for this radical idea that you can have a lot of secondary initiatives, but if you’re going for a breakthrough outcome, you can only do one of those at a time. In other words, if you have 2, you immediately only have 50% of your capacity going to each. If you have three, and even I can do that math, you end up with almost no energy. That gave us a beautiful starting point.

Everybody said this. We all thought we were so smart when we would say it, but we’re not. It’s the utmost obvious thing in the world. We say, “We’ve got one wildly important goal. This is the penultimate goal. This is what we’re going to do.” We then would say, “How do we do it? In other words, what does it take?” The immediate answer is it takes about 1,000 things, so we’re right back where we started. We have one goal, but nobody can do 1,000 things. Who has the energy to do that? If you try to do that many, how would you even do it with excellence?

Once again, this idea of narrowing comes in. We said, well, “Let’s impose a limitation. Let’s say that for each team, or for each unique role, you can only have 2 driving force activities, which is what we like to call leading measures, against that 1 goal.” It was like Bill Murray in Groundhog Day. It’s the same, “Here we are again.” We’re convincing all of our clients, “You’ve only got 1 goal. You can’t have 300 actions to do it. Yeah. You have to pick two for each unique team or role.” That was hard. Nobody wanted to do that. When they did, the power of that became enormous, and then it became easier.

The 2nd half of 4 DX was so much easier because once you had those two things in place, it’s quite natural to say, “I want to keep score in a way that makes people want to win. I want to have a type of scorekeeping, not a seven-layer spreadsheet with macros built in and all, but something clear and easy. Last of all, we won’t do anything if we don’t hold ourselves accountable.” Those four ideas are a little bit of a good story, I hope, for how 4 DX unfolded over a period of several years.

Conquering The Whirlwind: The Power Of Focus In 4DX

It sounds like focus was the core idea. The seed, the kernel.

No question.

Almost every organization out there struggles with focus. Why is it so hard? Is there some trick that you guys used in your time with FranklinCovey to get your clients to overcome this desire to pile on?

I would want to be very forthright with you, as my new friend, and all of your readers to say that we found no magic formula for any of that, but we did get to understand what the problem was. The problem was that there are so many other things that seem urgent that the human tendency is, “I’ve got 50 urgent things. They’re on fire. My boss is asking about them. People are questioning them. Things are going to happen if we don’t get them done. I’ve also got this one super important thing every human being in the world says. “Let me clear my desk of all the urgent things. Let me get all that under control, and then I’ll come back and focus on the most important thing.”

Except you know how this story is enough from your own experiences. We never come back to that thing. The real enemy of execution is the distraction of urgent and less important priorities. That’s what threatens the ability of any team to execute. That’s what we had to help people a lot to understand that if you don’t do it, the price is that you may do some good things, work hard, and cross the finish line exhausted, but you’ll never do anything extraordinary unless you marshal the ability to stay focused.

One of the things I’m taking away is that you describe all of the stuff, the day-to-day pressures, as the whirlwind. In some ways, by naming it, you give it some legitimacy. You can’t completely ignore the fact that there are all of these day-to-day pressures that you have to deal with. At the same time, you’re also saying, “That’s the whirlwind. The whirlwind can’t take away from the wildly important goal.”

It creates a hierarchy or a prioritization of sorts that a lot of people struggle with. To your point, for most organizations, 1 of 2 things happens. They get so wrapped up in the day-to-day, and they never get to the stuff that’s going to drive them forward, or they get so focused on what’s going to drive them forward that they drop the ball on the core business. You do have to balance them.

I love what you said. I think it’s Socrates who said the beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms. If it wasn’t Socrates, it was another Stoic, but it’s one in that era. That’s what you offered me back. By giving it a name, we had a vocabulary. Without the name whirlwind, we were saying receivables, payroll, and customer sales. We had all the thousand names, and you couldn’t speak about it as a thing. When we called it something, and then, unapologetically, characterized it as a fight, like, “You’re fighting the whirlwind,” that language leader said, “Now I get what the problem is. Now I know at least what I’m fighting.”

People say to name your inner critic. You name your inner critic Bob, and you’re like, “That’s Bob again. I got to tune Bob out. I hear Bob. I know he’s there, but I’ve got to tune him out because I’ve got bigger things that I need to be focused on than listening to the nonsense that’s coming out of my inner critic named Bob.” It’s a little bit of the same thing.

Even labeling it lets you isolate it. I don’t know if we’re being too much as psychologists, but even in a sense, depersonalize it. A leader might say, “We’re not paying enough attention to sales. We’re not paying enough attention to cashflow.” If that becomes part of this adversary thing, then having a name makes you think about it in a different way.

You’ve worked with thousands of leaders and organizations. Give us an example where a company zeroed in on one of those wildly important goals and it transformed their future success.

Jim Huling: A lead measure is the measurement of an activity or behavior that leads to the goal. A lag measure is the measurement of the goal itself.

I’m happy to do it. I want to say this carefully so that I honor this. One of our largest clients in the world is the Marriott Corporation, which, for many years, was one of the largest implementers of the four disciplines. It was 250,000 or so people at one time. They have always been a great company. The 4 DX can take no credit for any of that, for goodness gracious. We’re all honored to have been able to contribute to that. We take no credit for it whatsoever.

When we worked with them, they had some of the same challenges. There were financial targets. There were employee satisfaction targets. There were sales targets. There were competitive forces in the world at that time. There were a lot of choices to make on what was going to be wildly important. True to their core, they came back and said, “Wait a minute. What matters most is the experience of every guest who stays in our hotels. That’s what matters.” The moment that was said by the president of Marriott at that time was that it was like a lighthouse on a hill, and the beam shone across the water. Suddenly, we all said, “Now everything makes sense.”

I had eleven years with them, using the four disciplines. It coincidentally ended up being the same number of years in which they became the largest and the highest-rated hospitality company in the world. I’m not saying 4 DX takes credit for that in any way, but I’m saying we were part of a recipe that brought them incredible success along with hard work, talent, and their own legacy that they had.

Think about that idea. If you stay at a hotel and the single most important objective of every human being you encounter is that you have a great stay, if you can institutionalize that into a team, imagine what you could do. Every housekeeper, every chef, every front desk clerk, everybody is driving toward this one outcome.

I may be a little emotional in how I describe it, but it’s because it’s so exciting. If you don’t mind me saying, it’s also so rare. It’s a very rare thing. Most teams are split in 100 different directions all the time. 4 DX is one of those methodologies that is the reverse of that. It’s simple to understand but hard to do, but when you do it, the results are quite phenomenal.

You used the lighthouse metaphor a minute ago in the context of zeroing in on that. It’s a good metaphor for the singular wildly important goal itself. It is that beacon that you always have to have at the center to make sure that you are staying focused. It’s something a lot of companies struggle with.

You said that back to me very powerfully. That’s a good image to hold. When the light comes on, everybody sees more clearly. In this case, everybody in that example saw perhaps a little more clearly that the thing that mattered most was the experience of every guest. All the results came from there.

Lead Vs. Lag Measures: The Secret To Driving Results

The second discipline is about lead measures, which you guys go to pains to distinguish between lead measures and lag measures. For the uninitiated, give us a little bit of sense of what you mean by lead and lag measures and why you focus on the lead measures rather than lag.

Thank you for asking. Let’s do terminology first because it’s so easy. A lead measure is the measurement of an activity or behavior that leads to the goal. A lag measure is the measurement of the goal itself. A lead measure is forward-looking, and a lag measure, by virtue of its name, is backward-looking. In a sense, a lag measure is the past. It tells you what the outcome was of all the things you did.

A lead measure is all the things you are doing in order to have the outcome that you most desire. If you want to lose weight, that’s your lagging measure. Your leading measure is how many calories you consumed. You and I are both somewhat athletes. How many calories did you burn? Tracking those simple metrics tells you at every minute of every day whether you’re on path or not to reach the goal you want.

What’s interesting, though, is that for lagging measures, everybody knows what the end result of every goal is. The terminology and concept around leading measures, still to this day, I wonder, “Why is this not talked about very much? How do we get scientific and crystal clear about the fewest actions that create the greatest movement toward the goal? Why is that so complex?” I don’t know if you’ll be satisfied with this answer, but I would say it’s the same problem we’ve already discussed. It’s because there are 1,000 things to choose from

Think about calories burned and calories consumed. That’s all you need to know, although a lot of my CrossFit friends would say, “Wait a minute. What about macro balance? What about carbohydrate limiting?” The moment you get out into all that, don’t you lose heart at some point? It’s too complicated and you’re like, “Forget it.” That’s what happens to teams and businesses. We overcomplicate. The simple leading measures with a clear lag measure are the formula for high execution.

Your weight loss example is a particularly good one, in some ways, because people step on the scale and there’s a little bit of hope. They’re like, “I don’t necessarily want to change what I’m eating or drinking every day, but I hope I lost weight. I hope it magically happens for me.” It usually doesn’t, although we’ve got more weapons at our disposal with Ozempic and all the other drugs that have become quite popular.

Also, on the leading side, to your point, it’s a bit about thermodynamics. If you put energy into your body, it’s going to add weight. You consume it by burning it through exercise or whatever you’re doing for your daily activities. You reduce weight. The ratio of those two things is going to determine whether you’re gaining or losing.

There’s a thing you didn’t say, but I hear it in your answer. I don’t have any tattoos, but if I were ever going to get one, I think about this being the one. The greatest enemy to execution is complexity. Complexity kills execution. The moment you get complicated, even though you think it is elegant complexity, it still becomes more than people can manage.

It’s like this example. If it takes me 45 minutes to log what I had for lunch, I’m probably not doing it for more than 1 or 2 days. I quit. The same thing happens to a team. If I’ve got lots of metrics, boxes to check, rules to follow, or guidelines to adhere to, the more you layer all that on, the less execution you end up with.

I think of bringing it into a work setting as opposed to our weight loss example. In a work setting, you get paid on lag measures, such as revenue, profit, and customer satisfaction. In the case of Marriott, which we should come back to. Those are the things that you are typically rewarded for. People will focus on them. Sometimes, they don’t know how to influence them. They don’t know what lead measures to focus on.

Other times, they try to focus on too many of them, like your 97 metrics example that you mentioned earlier in the conversation. Other times, it comes down to how lead measures get more directly to activity. Using your weight loss example, you have to measure calories. You have to consume less food, or you have to burn more energy or more calories, if you want to step on the scale and lose weight. It gets more directly to if it’s going to be hard for you to get up and do this, whether it’s losing weight, driving customer satisfaction, or whatever the example is, that’s where the lead measures, in some ways, give you no place to hide. That’s what they’re intended to do.

From Calories To Sales Calls: The Nuance Of Lead Measures

It might be the best thing about them. The beautiful thing about what you said, that you don’t mind one level of granularity below that. I’ll do this very quickly, if you don’t mind. An organization wants to increase sales. In the simplest possible example that we could think of, the sales leader says, “I know how to increase sales. We’ll make more sales calls. We might add more reps as well, and maybe we do lots of other things.”

If we’re intentionally trying to keep this simple, let’s say the sales leader doesn’t get to hire anybody who wants at the moment, so he says, “Three extra calls a week for everybody. That’s how we’re going to get a 30% increase in sales.” On the surface, if you went from 6 per week to 9 per week, you would probably see some incremental movement in your overall total sales number for the week, probably.

If you wanted to say, “I want the maximum output for the investment I’m making,” you would say, “Before we run headfirst into everybody making more calls, let’s define what a great sales call is.” Bob is over here, and he’s making mediocre sales calls. Susan is over here, and she’s making world-class sales calls. She’s closing twice what he’s closing.

Sometimes, we have to go down below the surface and ask two questions that are helpful. “How often should I do this activity?” That’s the sales leader’s choice of 9 calls or 12 calls. The real art, which you impressed me so much by touching on, is how well you do. In other words, “What are the three elements of a world-class sales call? How do I teach everybody how to do that all the time?

How do I maybe even say, “If you don’t follow the three guidelines of a world-class sales call, I’m not going to count it as 1 of your 9 calls. You’ll have to do 10 to get that 1 in.” You institutionalize excellence in that way. If you want to get a team to take a lift-off, you go one level deeper and say how often and how well, not just the activity, but, “How often and how well do I do it?” You fine-tune that part of the machine, and the results are quite astounding.

You can click down a level lower. In your sales example, it could be how many sales calls you are making, how many reps you have, how big the average sale is, what’s a good win rate, and what’s a less good win rate. The art of all of this, and you know this as well as I do, but better, is picking the right measure. Back to your point, where am I going to get the most bang for the buck? Am I going to get the most bang for the buck in a driving number of calls, or am I going to get the bang for the buck in terms of hit rate or success rate? That probably comes down to your point about how good the actual sales call itself is. That may change over time.

You focus on one thing, get good at it, and get everybody busily making sales calls. You’ve worked on the quality of the sales calls, and then you say, “We’ve got to work on average ticket size. What are some of the other things we can add in?” It evolves over time. To me, that’s where the lead measures have to be thought through. You can focus on the outright wrong ones. You can also focus on ones that are going to get you less bang for the buck. That’s probably when you guys get called in again and told, “It’s not working.”

We have a running joke that everybody starts by blaming the methodology, and then we’re like, “Here’s what we could be doing.” I love what you said in that way. The average overworked leader with 1,000 things to think about every single day understands lead measures and says, “I know what the two things are. Go do those two things.” He doesn’t have time to think about the nuances below that. We can drill down a bit.

This is a lot of what we do. That’s why you hire a consultant to bring you some help on these things. You can then say, “Wait a minute. We did this kind of sales call. We always had an agenda before the call, and we always did a follow-up after the call. If we built a microsystem around being the best in the world at sales calls, then we wouldn’t have to even talk about sales. Our sales would be through the roof.” It takes a moment. It takes some thought. It takes a little patience to trial and error what those are. I don’t know if time permits. Does time permit a very fast example of this?

Jim Huling: If the goal is to truly lift a team, go one level deeper and ask: how often and how well? It’s not just about the activity—it’s about the frequency and the quality. Fine-tune that part of the machine, and the results can be astounding.

Absolutely.

Payless Shoes: The Surprising Lead Measure That Drove 300% Sales Growth

One of my favorite stories was an account that I got to work personally on. In the US, it is called Payless Shoes. It is a very large shoe company and a fine company. This is a number of years ago. At that time, it was well-run by thoughtful, skilled leaders, and everything good about this company. They wanted to take sales to a new level. They’re in a business where that’s hard. How much can you drive it?

We worked with them for a while. To make the example a short one, we found the most astonishing lead measure that I’ve ever seen in 25 years of doing 4 DX. It was measuring children’s feet. You let that sink in for a minute. You may know this story. What we did was train everybody to proactively approach any adult with children to say, “Thanks for coming to our store. You must be here to look at shoes, but the fit of the shoe is critically important to your child and their growing feet. We care about this. Could we take a minute and measure the kids’ feet before they decide they want the purple ones? Let’s get it right.”

I may not be doing it ice, but that behavior of thoughtfully and genuinely demonstrating a care for the feet of the children became the number one driver. In other words, the more children’s feet we measured, the more sales went up. I don’t mean a little bit. This is not a made-up number. In that particular year, they came in at 300% of their sales. I’m not in any way trying to say the only thing they did was measure kids’ feet, but I will say with great confidence that the thing they did differently was measuring children’s feet.

They had a scoreboard in the back of the office and kept track of who measured the most kids’ feet. They were like, “Here’s a Starbucks card for the person who had the most.” They gamified and institutionalized that. You would never think of this. If you and I were having a cup of coffee, saying, “I wonder how we could drive shoe sales,” neither one of us would say measuring children’s feet in a million years. With a little trial and error, it became clear that it was a driving force. The more we did it, the more the return came in.

When I read that story, I thought it through and was thinking, one, you take somebody who might be casually browsing. All of a sudden, you’ve pulled them a step closer into the purchase process by measuring their kids’ feet. Two, maybe the parent comes in to buy shoes for themselves, and you’ve turned one potential sale into plus 1 kid, 2 kids, or 3 kids.

What every parent worries about is how much runway they can get out of their kids’ shoes because they keep growing. By measuring them, you build credibility with them by helping them think through this problem that all parents have with their kids’ feet, which is that they grow, and they have to go and buy them shoes.

They think, “How do I make sure they’re comfortable, but also make sure that I don’t have to come back here in a month?” It made complete sense to me, having thought about it a little bit. I can certainly appreciate that it wouldn’t have been the first thing that you would’ve thought of as the game-changing lead metric.

Maybe the takeaway is that if we learned the discipline and the value of finding those right lead measures, it may seem tedious, but it’ll be worth it in the end.

It will indeed be worth it in the end. We’re going to break there and cover the rest in our next episode. Thank you for joining me to discuss your career journey and the first 2 of the 4 disciplines of the 4 DX methodology. In part two, we’ll pick up on the remainder of our discussion. 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 our newsletter. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Thanks. Have a great day.

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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.