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Promise-Based Management: The Essence of Execution
by Donald N. Sull and Charles Spinosa (continued)

Execution fails for a variety of depressingly familiar reasons: Employees disengage because they don’t buy in to the company’s priorities; they become dissatisfied and unproductive. Functional silos hinder the coordination necessary for companies to seize new business opportunities. Matrix organizational structures obscure accountability for projects and initiatives. Indeed, execution becomes especially difficult when executives are charged with managing the activities not only of their direct reports but also of a far-flung network of suppliers, partners, knowledge workers, and colleagues in different time zones around the world.

Managers cannot overcome these and other obstacles to execution by doing more of the same; instead, they must fundamentally rethink how work gets done. Specifically, they must acknowledge that a company is more than a bundle of processes or a set of boxes and lines on an org chart. At its heart, every company is a dynamic network of promises. Employees up and down the corporate hierarchy make pledges to one another—the typical management by objectives. Employees also make commitments to colleagues in other divisions and to customers, outsourcing partners, and other stakeholders. Promises are the strands that weave together coordinated activity in organizations.

Most of the vexing challenges leaders face—improperly executed strategy, lack of organizational agility, disengaged employees, and so on—stem from broken or poorly crafted commitments. Executives can overcome some of their thorniest problems in the short term and foster productive, reliable workforces for the long term by practicing what we call “promise-based management”: cultivating and coordinating commitments in a systematic way.

Why Promises, and Why Now?

Promise-based management builds on a tradition that extends back at least to the emergence of contract law in the Roman Empire. It draws on the tenets of speech act theory, a branch of linguistic philosophy that explores how people commit themselves to action through assertions, questions, requests, promises, declarations, and other speech acts. (See the sidebar “A Primer on Speech Act Theory.”) Promise-based management is particularly relevant to today’s executives as they increasingly specialize in their core businesses, divest noncore units, and outsource peripheral activities. It also helps executives to capitalize on business opportunities outside their core competencies and to engage and retain employees within a highly mobile workforce. Let’s examine each of these business challenges in turn.

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