1. The agenda to be executed should make sense to those who must execute it — people should be persuaded that the agenda is worth following.

2. Someone needs to be held accountable for getting itdone — explicit, as opposed to diffuse responsibility.

3. The person who is accountable for getting it done needs to be a person who can get things done. The best estimate is that well over half of the managers in any organization “can’t get anything done.”

4. There needs to be some possibility that by the time it gets done, someone senior in the organization will still care — as opposed to the attention of the senior people having shifted on to the next problem du jour.

5. There should be a payoff for the person responsible for getting it done, as opposed to finishing the project and having it ignored.