Good to Great

Disciplined Action: The "Stop Doing" List

Take a look at your desk. If you're like most hard-charging leaders, you've got a well-articulated to-do list. Now take another look: Where's your stop-doing list? We've all been told that leaders make things happen -- and that's true: Pushing that flywheel takes a lot of concerted effort. But it's also true that good-to-great leaders distinguish themselves by their unyielding discipline to stop doing anything and everything that doesn't fit tightly within their Hedgehog Concept.

When Darwin Smith and his management team crystallized the Hedgehog Concept for Kimberly-Clark, they faced a dilemma. On one hand, they understood that the best path to greatness lay in the consumer business, where the company had demonstrated a best-in-the-world capability in its building of the Kleenex brand. On the other hand, the vast majority of Kimberly-Clark's revenue lay in traditional coated-paper mills, turning out paper for magazines and writing pads -- which had been the core business of the company for 100 years. Even the company's namesake town -- Kimberly, Wisconsin -- was built around a Kimberly-Clark paper mill.

Yet the brutal truth remained: The consumer business was the one arena that best met the three-circle test. If Kimberly-Clark remained principally a paper-mill business, it would retain a secure position as a good company. But its only shot at becoming a great company was to become the best paper-based consumer company -- if it could take on such companies as Procter & Gamble and Scott Paper Co. and beat them. That meant it would have to "stop doing" paper mills.

So, in what one director called "the gutsiest decision I've ever seen a CEO make," Darwin Smith sold the mills. He even sold the mill in Kimberly, Wisconsin. Then he threw all the money into a war chest for an epic battle with Procter & Gamble and Scott Paper. Wall Street analysts derided the move, and the business press called it stupid. But Smith did not waver.

Twenty-five years later, Kimberly-Clark emerged from the fray as the number-one paper-based consumer-products company in the world, beating P&G in six of eight categories and owning its former archrival Scott Paper outright. For the shareholder, Kimberly-Clark under Darwin Smith beat the market by four times, easily outperforming such great companies as Coca-Cola, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, and 3M.

In deciding what not to do, Smith gave the flywheel a gigantic push -- but it was only one push. After selling the mills, Kimberly-Clark's full transformation required thousands of additional pushes, big and small, accumulated one after another. It took years to gain enough momentum for the press to herald Kimberly-Clark's shift from good to great. One magazine wrote, "When ... Kimberly-Clark decided to go head to head against P&G ... this magazine predicted disaster. What a dumb idea. As it turns out, it wasn't a dumb idea. It was a smart idea." The amount of time between the two articles: 21 years.

Now It Begins

Our study of what it takes to turn good into great required 5 years -- and 10.5 person-years -- and amounted to our own flywheel effort. Looking back on our research, what's most striking to me about our findings is the absence of a magic moment in any of the good-to-great companies -- or in our own journey to understanding. The real path to greatness, it turns out, requires simplicity and diligence. It requires clarity, not instant illumination. It demands each of us to focus on what is vital -- and to eliminate all of the extraneous distractions.

After five years of research, I'm absolutely convinced that if we just focus our attention on the right things -- and stop doing the senseless things that consume so much time and energy -- we can create a powerful Flywheel Effect without increasing the number of hours we work.

I'm also convinced that the good-to-great findings apply broadly -- not just to CEOs, but also to you and me in whatever work we're engaged in, including the work of our own lives. For many people, the first question that occurs is, "But how do I persuade my CEO to get it?" My answer: Don't worry about that. Focus instead on results -- on subverting mediocrity by creating a Flywheel Effect within your own span of responsibility. So long as we can choose the people we want to put on our own minibus, each of us can create a pocket of greatness. Each of us can take our own area of work and influence and can concentrate on moving it from good to great. It doesn't really matter whether all the CEOs get it. It only matters that you and I do. Now, it's time to get to work.

Jim Collins (jimcollins@aol.com) wrote the essay "Built to Flip" in the March 2000 issue of Fast Company. His new book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... And Others Don't, will be available in October.