We present a new scheme to implement an N-qubit controlled-unitary operation directly in a single step. The main advantage of our scheme is that we do not use conventional gate decomposition protocols to break an N-qubit controlled-unitary gate into one- and two-qubit gates. This greatly reduces the number of computational steps in implementing quantum algorithms and error-correcting codes, which use multi-control unitary operations. We show how to find analytic solutions to the time evolution of the system, so that system parameters can be found to realize the desired N-qubit controlled-unitary operations.