The Execution Gap

Has it been a good day, and how do you know?

Ask that question on almost any plant floor and you will get a shrug, a story, or yesterday's report. That blank look is the execution gap: the distance between what leadership decides and what actually happens on the line.

Manufacturing transformations often fail not because the technology is bad, the strategy is wrong, or the team is incapable, but because execution breaks down in the last 100 feet, where the plan ends and daily work begins. The systems get installed. The dashboards go live. The consultants leave. And within a year, performance begins drifting back toward where it started because the execution infrastructure connecting leadership intent to floor-level behavior was never built.

Drawing on 29 years and more than 600 client engagements across food and beverage, consumer products, industrial operations, and PE-backed portfolio companies, Gerald Tice names this failure, shows how to diagnose it, and lays out a tested method for closing the gap.

Inside, you will learn:

• The Execution Maturity Index (EMI): a practical diagnostic for measuring where a plant, and each department within it, actually stands

• The Four Elements of a Clear Expectation: why so much direction fails before the work starts, and how to fix it

• The Management Operating System (MOS): the huddles, boards, gemba walks, and shift handoffs that make performance visible, actionable, and repeatable

• Technology in its proper place: when to deploy MES, AI, and automation, and when doing so will only digitize the problem

• Why the approach works beyond manufacturing: a financial-services case showing the same system closing the same gap in a completely different operation

The book includes an EMI self-assessment, a department-level heat map template, an MOS build checklist, and a pre-investment guide written specifically for PE operating partners.

For operating partners, plant leaders, and executives who are tired of transformations that look good in the boardroom and fade on the floor, The Execution Gap is a practical blueprint for building the management infrastructure that makes improvement hold.