President’s Viewpoint
Disciplined Action from Potential to Reality
Planning is priceless, but plans are useless.
The journey from Good to Great begins with disciplined people: Level 5 Leaders imbedded throughout the organization with the entrepreneurial zeal to succeed. Breakthrough comes with disciplined thought: confronting the brutal facts that limit growth, and developing “best in the world” insight and understanding (Hedgehog Concept). Greatness is built through disciplined action.
Discipline is not about getting “the wrong people into the right behaviors.” It’s not about logically coherent strategies and plans, nor does it entail bureaucratic procedures and processes. Good-to-great requires a culture of discipline: a balance between freedom and responsibility within the framework of a highly developed system.
Cancer of Mediocrity
Collins and his team describe why few new companies become great, thereby unmasking a root cause why all companies stagnate in the face of success:
Entrepreneurial success is fueled by creativity, imagination, bold moves into uncharted waters, and visionary zeal. As a company grows and becomes more complex, it begins to trip over its own success – too many new people, too many new customers, too many new orders, too many new products. What was once great fun becomes an unwieldy ball of disorganized stuff.
In response, someone (often a board member) says it’s time to grow up and get professional management. The company hires MBAs and seasoned executives from blue-chip companies. Processes, procedures, checklists sprout up like weeds. An egalitarian environment gets replaced by a hierarchy, chains of command appear, reporting relationships become clear, an executive class emerges with special perks. A culture of “we and they” grows – just like a real company!
The cancer of mediocrity begins, and quickly metastasizes into full blown bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is about “standard behaviour,” not about discipline. In reality, the purpose of bureaucracy is “to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline.”
Most companies build their bureaucratic rules to manage the small percentage of wrong people on the bus, which in turn drives away the right people on the bus, which then increases the percentage of wrong people on the bus, which increases the need for more bureaucracy to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline, and so on…
Freedom and Responsibility.
The alternative to a bureaucratic culture is a culture of discipline, balanced with an ethic of entrepreneurship. The core value is freedom, which has two dimensions: freedom from restrictive loyalty to what had always been (so that we can face the brutal facts that limit greatness), linked integrally to freedom to lead into the unknown future (so that we can be passionate about being the best in the world).
But freedom without responsibility becomes tyranny of self-will, A fanatical egotism that becomes the unsavory mix of greed and stupidity manifested recently too many boardrooms. How can anyone really believe that building a pro-golf course for personal use with shareholder money would go unnoticed?
Responsibility to an enterprise greater than oneself underpins the egoless clarity needed to face the brutal facts, and turn potential into reality as well as sustain greatness. Level 5 Leaders are driven to be responsible.
Culture of Discipline
Discipline by itself will not produce great results. The Iacocca’s of corporate fame are disciplinarians, precise and methodical. They bring strict disciplines to the company; rigorous planning and competitor analysis, systematic market research, profit analysis, hard-nosed cost control.
But good-to-great lies in “the discipline to do whatever it takes to become the best within carefully selected arenas and then to seek continual improvements from there.” Good-to-great demands sustainability, not just accomplishments.
Collins illustrates this point with the example of Dave Scott, six-time winner of the Hawaii Ironman. Anyone familiar with tri-athletes knows they are fanatical to an extreme (crazy by any other estimation); however, the real fascination with Triathlons is the stamina needed to complete the race (26 mile run, 2.4 mile swim, 112 mile cycle).
The discipline of training is an obvious necessity. But Collins points to the small things highly disciplined tri-athletes do to develop that extra edge. Dave Scott is a man who burns 5,000 calories daily. Yet, he believed that a low-fat, high-carb diet gave him that extra edge. He was so committed to be “best in the world” that he rinsed his cottage cheese to remove the extra fat!
The point here is not fanaticism, but sustainability. Good-to-great comes from “one more small step added to all the other small steps to create a consistent program of super-discipline.” Good-to-great demands a culture of discipline, and not just a disciplinarian.
A culture of discipline begins with “self-disciplined people who engage in very rigorous thinking, who then take disciplined actions within the framework of a consistent system designed around the Hedgehog Concept (best in the world, drivers of the economic engine, and passion to succeed).”
Fanatical Consistency
Good-to-great follows a simple mantra: Anything that doesn’t fit our Hedgehog Concept, we will not do. The key is to consistently build within the three circles – best in the world, drivers of the economic engine, passion to succeed.
The real discipline is in saying “no,” we will not launch unrelated businesses; we will not make unrelated acquisitions; we will not do unrelated joint ventures. The paradox is that by saying no, the right opportunities will actually emerge, one small step at a time, leading to greatness:
The more an organization has the discipline to stay within its three circles (consistently and without deviation), the more it will have attractive opportunities for growth. Indeed, a great company is much more likely to die of indigestion from too much opportunity than starvation from too little. The challenge becomes not opportunity creation, but opportunity selection.
Once in a lifetime opportunities are irrelevant, if they don’t fit within the three circles.
Being Right
How do you know when you’re right? Well, it’s not about being right; it’s about doing the right things and being on the right course of action:
If you have Level 5 leaders who get the right people on the bus, if you confront the brutal facts of reality, if you create a climate where the truth is heard, if you have a team and work within the three circles, if you frame all decisions in the context of a crystalline Hedgehog Concept, if you act from understanding, not bravado – if you do all these things, then you are likely to be right on the big decisions. The real question is, once you know the right thing, do you have the discipline to do the right thing and, equally important, to stop doing the wrong things?
Victor Deyglio is President of The Professional Logistics Institute, based in Toronto, Ontario. vdeyglio@loginstitute.ca