As CEO of Donatos, my primary role is to fuel our company’s mission through our performance. To help teams stay results focused, I emphasize three concepts — APE, GOST and big rocks.
What I love about these ideas is that they take complex planning systems and make them simple to understand and implement.
Align, plan and execute
Take APE for example, which stands for align, plan and execute. I’m constantly observing, in meetings or hallway conversations, the balance of these three elements.
Sometimes, I see people charging furiously ahead on an initiative before making sure we’re fully aligned to its priority or objective. In this case, someone or something is sure to throw up a roadblock that stops the effort in its tracks.
Or, we may have been aligned on an issue for years. Yep, we have a huge issue, and we LOVE to talk about it. But the associate who puts a plan together and executes is able to turn all that talk into results.
Each element of APE must be addressed if you want results that matter.
Goal, objective, strategy, tactics and timeline
GOST is another acronym I use to get a plan on a single sheet of paper. GOST stands for: goal, objective, strategy, tactics and timeline.
Every initiative (big or small) is laid out on a “GOST sheet” that links all activities back to what we’re trying to accomplish. If it doesn’t link, it’s probably not important and shouldn’t be done.
Big rocks
That brings me to our final concept, big rocks. You’ve probably heard the metaphor. You have a barrel, large rocks, medium-sized rocks and sand. If you pour the sand in first and then put in the medium-sized rocks, you can never fit the big rocks.
The big rocks are what you must accomplish as an organization if you’re going to achieve your vision. They are almost always the more difficult initiatives, which is why people tend to work on “sand” first.
But in work, as in life, you never get to the big rocks if you spend your time in the sand. Yet when you put the bigger rocks in first, the small rocks and sand seem to magically fit.
We have a handful of big rocks as an organization, and around our offices you’ll see our big rocks displayed on posters in every department. We also conduct big rocks meetings where the progress on each goal is reviewed in-depth, problems are discussed and, if needed, corrective actions identified.
Through this, I’ve seen our big rocks become aligned with our principles and owned, not only by leadership but also by each associate in every department.
The strategic and analytical side of business is too complex to smother on top of an organization. It’s our job as leaders to take complex ideas and make them understandable and easy to use.
This creates an organization that has the energy and capacity to execute at the highest level, while having fun doing it — like apes throwing rocks at ghosts!
Tom Krouse is the president and CEO of Donatos Pizza. Tom has over three decades of restaurant industry experience, countless civic contributions and an award-winning career in marketing and management.
