Accountability is incredibly important to execution. Without it great ideas remain ideas. Plans remain plans. Nothing gets checked off the list. No progress is made. Accountability may just be the secret sauce of achievement. On teams where accountability is taken for granted people follow through on their assignments, they show up on time for meetings and their reports are turned in on deadline. Accountable teams will challenge one another. They will call people out. And their relationships will get deeper because of this brashness, not in spite of it. This all sounds pretty good. The hard part is making it happen.

I have been a reader and writer of business plans since my undergraduate days. During that span of nearly 20 years I have become clearer about what a plan should do. I have also come to understand the secret sauce of effective plans. The one page business plan has been around a long time. I have not been able to find out who came up with the concept or coined the phrase. I personally didn't start using it until 4 or 5 years ago. But I have come to rely on it as an important tool in helping businesses realize their vision.

In their book The McKinsey Mind, Ethan Rasel and Paul Friga breakdown the methodologies used by one of the world's most well-known consulting firms. One of the basic building blocks of the McKinsey method is to begin with a hypothesis. Consultants are trained to use a hypothesis to focus their research and analysis early in the engagement.