Narcissistic Leadership Assignment

Overview

Some say that narcissistic leaders and narcissistic leadership, albeit annoying to subordinates, gets the work of the organization done. Others say that the damage done by narcissistic leaders and leadership creates an unethical environment that is virtually irreparable. Here are some things to consider. What is narcissistic leadership? What are a narcissistic leader’s traits? What are the organizational benefits and pitfalls of a narcissistic leader? Study covenant leadership. What is covenant leadership? What are the traits of a covenant leader?

Instructions

For this research paper, compare and contrast the traits of a narcissistic leader with that of a covenant leader.

· What is the organizational impact of a narcissistic leader and a covenant leader?

· Imagine that you were a recently appointed chief of police in a large local police organization where the former police chief was not only a narcissistic leader but also promulgated narcissistic leadership qualities throughout all levels of leadership within the department.

· Develop a change plan in order to develop your organization with covenant leadership principles.

· Specifically, how would you do this in a police organization? Detail changes in the organization’s mission, small changes you may make, large changes you may make, and the potential pitfalls and successes you may realize.

Write a research paper on this subject that is not less than 8–10 pages in current APA format. The page count does not include the title page, abstract, reference section, or any extra material. In order to incorporate a solid Christian worldview, you must use 10–15 sources with at least 1 source being the Holy Bible.

Acceptable sources include course textbooks and scholarly articles published within the last five years from the Jerry Falwell Library.

Note: Your assignment will be checked for originality via the Turnitin plagiarism tool.

Chapter 5

The Hedgehog Concept

(Simplicity within the Three Circles)

Are you a hedgehog or a fox?

In his famous essay “The Hedgehog and the Fox,” Isaiah Berlin divided the world into hedgehogs and foxes, based upon an ancient Greek parable: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”2 The fox is a cunning creature, able to devise a myriad of complex strategies for sneak attacks upon the hedgehog. Day in and day out, the fox circles around the hedgehog’s den, waiting for the perfect moment to pounce. Fast, sleek, beautiful, fleet of foot, and crafty—the fox looks like the sure winner. The hedgehog, on the other hand, is a dowdier creature, looking like a genetic mix-up between a porcupine and a small armadillo. He waddles along, going about his simple day, searching for lunch and taking care of his home.

The fox waits in cunning silence at the juncture in the trail. The hedgehog, minding his own business, wanders right into the path of the fox. “Aha, I’ve got you now!” thinks the fox. He leaps out, bounding across the ground, lightning fast. The little hedgehog, sensing danger, looks up and thinks, “Here we go again. Will he ever learn?” Rolling up into a perfect little ball, the hedgehog becomes a sphere of sharp spikes, pointing outward in all directions. The fox, bounding toward his prey, sees the hedgehog defense and calls off the attack. Retreating back to the forest, the fox begins to calculate a new line of attack. Each day, some version of this battle between the hedgehog and the fox takes place, and despite the greater cunning of the fox, the hedgehog always wins.

Berlin extrapolated from this little parable to divide people into two basic groups: foxes and hedgehogs. Foxes pursue many ends at the same time and see the world in all its complexity. They are “scattered or diffused, moving on many levels,” says Berlin, never integrating their thinking into one overall concept or unifying vision. Hedgehogs, on the other hand, simplify a complex world into a single organizing idea, a basic principle or concept that unifies and guides everything. It doesn’t matter how complex the world, a hedgehog reduces all challenges and dilemmas to simple— indeed almost simplistic—hedgehog ideas. For a hedgehog, anything that does not somehow relate to the hedgehog idea holds no relevance.

Princeton professor Marvin Bressler pointed out the power of the hedgehog during one of our long conversations: “You want to know what separates those who make the biggest impact from all the others who are just as smart? They’re hedgehogs.” Freud and the unconscious, Darwin and natural selection, Marx and class struggle, Einstein and relativity, Adam Smith and division of labor—they were all hedgehogs. They took a complex world and simplified it. “Those who leave the biggest footprints,” said Bressler, “have thousands calling after them, ‘Good idea, but you went too far!’”3

To be clear, hedgehogs are not stupid. Quite the contrary. They understand that the essence of profound insight is simplicity. What could be more simple than e = mc2? What could be simpler than the idea of the unconscious, organized into an id, ego, and superego? What could be more elegant than Adam Smith’s pin factory and “invisible hand”? No, the hedgehogs aren’t simpletons; they have a piercing insight that allows them to see through complexity and discern underlying patterns. Hedgehogs see what is essential, and ignore the rest.

What does all this talk of hedgehogs and foxes have to do with good to great? Everything.

Those who built the good-to-great companies were, to one degree or another, hedgehogs. They used their hedgehog nature to drive toward what we came to call a Hedgehog Concept for their companies. Those who led the comparison companies tended to be foxes, never gaining the clarifying advantage of a Hedgehog Concept, being instead scattered, diffused, and inconsistent.

Consider the case of Walgreens versus Eckerd. Recall how Walgreens generated cumulative stock returns from the end of 1975 to 2000 that exceeded the market by over fifteen times, handily beating such great companies as GE, Merck, Coca-Cola, and Intel. It was a remarkable performance for such an anonymous—some might even say boring—company. When interviewing Cork Walgreen, I kept asking him to go deeper, to help us understand these extraordinary results. Finally, in exasperation, he said, “Look, it just wasn’t that complicated! Once we understood the concept, we just moved straight ahead.”4

What was the concept? Simply this: the best, most convenient drugstores, with high profit per customer visit. That’s it. That’s the breakthrough strategy that Walgreens used to beat Intel, GE, Coca-Cola, and Merck.

In classic hedgehog style, Walgreens took this simple concept and implemented it with fanatical consistency. It embarked on a systematic program to replace all inconvenient locations with more convenient ones, preferably corner lots where customers could easily enter and exit from multiple directions. If a great corner location would open up just half a block away from a profitable Walgreens store in a good location, the company would close the good store (even at a cost of $1 million to get out of the lease) to open a great new store on the corner.5 Walgreens pioneered drive-through pharmacies, found customers liked the idea, and built hundreds of them. In urban areas, the company clustered its stores tightly together, on the precept that no one should have to walk more than a few blocks to reach a Walgreens.6 In downtown San Francisco, for example, Walgreens clustered nine stores within a one-mile radius. Nine stores!7 If you look closely, you will see Walgreens stores as densely packed in some cities as Starbucks coffee shops in Seattle.

Walgreens then linked its convenience concept to a simple economic idea, profit per customer visit. Tight clustering (nine stores per mile!) leads to local economies of scale, which provides the cash for more clustering, which in turn draws more customers. By adding high-margin services, like one-hour photo developing, Walgreens increased its profit per customer visit. More convenience led to more customer visits, which, when multiplied times increased profit per customer visit, threw cash back into the system to build even more convenient stores. Store by store, block by block, city by city, region by region, Walgreens became more and more of a hedgehog with this incredibly simple idea.

In a world overrun by management faddists, brilliant visionaries, ranting futurists, fearmongers, motivational gurus, and all the rest, it’s refreshing to see a company succeed so brilliantly by taking one simple concept and just doing it with excellence and imagination. Becoming the best in the world at convenient drugstores, steadily increasing profit per customer visit—what could be more obvious and straightforward?

Yet, if it was so obvious and straightforward, why didn’t Eckerd see it? While Walgreens stuck only to cities where it could implement the convenience/clustering concept, we found no evidence of a similarly coherent concept for growth at Eckerd. Deal makers to the core, Eckerd’s executives compulsively leapt at opportunities to acquire clumps of stores—forty-two units here, thirty-six units there—in hodgepodge fashion, with no obvious unifying theme.

While Walgreens executives understood that profitable growth would come by pruning away all that did not fit with the Hedgehog Concept, Eckerd executives lurched after growth for growth’s sake. In the early 1980s, just as Walgreens became religious about carrying out its convenient drugstore concept, Eckerd threw itself into the home video market with its purchase of American Home Video Corporation. Eckerd’s CEO told Forbes magazine in 1981, “Some feel the purer we are the better we’ll be. But I want growth, and the home video industry is only emerging— unlike, say, drugstore chains.”8 Eckerd’s home video foray produced $31 million in losses before Eckerd sold it to Tandy, which crowed that it got the deal for $72 million below book value.9

In the precise year of Eckerd’s American Home Video acquisition, Walgreens and Eckerd had virtually identical revenues ($1.7 billion). Ten years later, Walgreens had grown to over twice the revenues of Eckerd, accumulating net profits $1 billion greater than Eckerd over the decade. Twenty years later, Walgreens was going strong, as one of the most sustained transformations in our study. Meanwhile, Eckerd ceased to exist as an independent company.10

The Three Circles

The notion of a Hedgehog Concept originated in our research team meetings when we were trying to make sense of Walgreens’ spectacular returns.

“Aren’t we just talking about strategy?” I asked. “Convenient drugstores, profit per customer visit—isn’t that just basic strategy? What’s so interesting about that?”

“But Eckerd also had strategy,” said Jenni Cooper, who analyzed the contrast between the two companies. “We can’t say that it’s just about having strategy. They both had strategy.” Jenni was correct in her observation. Strategy per se did not distinguish the good-to-great companies from the comparison companies. Both sets of companies had strategic plans, and there is absolutely no evidence that the good-to-great companies invested more time and energy in strategy development and long-range planning.

“Okay, so are we just talking about good strategy versus bad strategy?”

The team sat there for a minute, thinking. Then Leigh Wilbanks observed, “But what I find so striking is their incredible simplicity. I mean, look at Kroger with the superstore concept, or Kimberly-Clark with the move to paper-based consumer products, or Walgreens with convenient drugstores. These were simple, simple, simple ideas.”

The research-team members all jumped into the fray, bantering about the companies they were studying. It soon became abundantly clear that all the good-to-great companies attained a very simple concept that they used as a frame of reference for all their decisions, and this understanding coincided with breakthrough results. Meanwhile, the comparison companies like Eckerd got all tripped up by their snazzy strategies for growth. “Okay,” I pushed back, “but is simplicity enough? Just because it’s simple doesn’t mean it’s right. The world is filled with failed companies that had simple but wrong ideas.”

Then we decided to undertake a systematic look at the concepts that guided the good-to-great companies in contrast to the comparison companies. After a few months of sifting and sorting, considering possibilities and tossing them out, we finally came to see that the Hedgehog Concept in each good-to-great company wasn’t just any random simple idea.

The essential strategic difference between the good-to-great and comparison companies lay in two fundamental distinctions. First, the good-to-great companies founded their strategies on deep understanding along three key dimensions—what we came to call the three circles. Second, the good-to-great companies translated that understanding into a simple, crystalline concept that guided all their efforts—hence the term Hedgehog Concept.

THREE CIRCLES OF THE HEDGEHOG CONCEPT

To quickly grasp the three circles, consider the following personal analogy. Suppose you were able to construct a work life that meets the following three tests. First, you are doing work for which you have a genetic or God-given talent, and perhaps you could become one of the best in the world in applying that talent. (“I feel that I was just born to be doing this.”) Second, you are well paid for what you do. (“I get paid to do this? Am I dreaming?”) Third, you are doing work you are passionate about and absolutely love to do, enjoying the actual process for its own sake. (“I look forward to getting up and throwing myself into my daily work, and I really believe in what I’m doing.”) If you could drive toward the intersection of these three circles and translate that intersection into a simple, crystalline concept that guided your life choices, then you’d have a Hedgehog Concept for yourself.

To have a fully developed Hedgehog Concept, you need all three circles. If you make a lot of money doing things at which you could never be the best, you’ll only build a successful company, not a great one. If you become the best at something, you’ll never remain on top if you don’t have intrinsic passion for what you are doing. Finally, you can be passionate all you want, but if you can’t be the best at it or it doesn’t make economic sense, then you might have a lot of fun, but you won’t produce great results.

Understanding What You Can

(And Can Not) Be the Best At

“They stick with what they understand and let their abilities, not their egos, determine what they attempt.”11 So wrote Warren Buffett about his $290 million investment in Wells Fargo despite his serious reservations about the banking industry.12 Prior to clarifying its Hedgehog Concept, Wells Fargo had tried to be a global bank, operating like a mini-Citicorp, and a mediocre one at that. Then, at first under Dick Cooley and then under Carl Reichardt, Wells Fargo executives began to ask themselves a piercing set of questions: What can we potentially do better than any other company, and, equally important, what can we not do better than any other company? And if we can’t be the best at it, then why are we doing it at all?

Putting aside their egos, the Wells Fargo team pulled the plug on the vast majority of its international operations, accepting the truth that it could not be better than Citicorp in global banking.13 Wells Fargo then turned its attention to what it could be the best in the world at: running a bank like a business, with a focus on the western United States. That’s it. That was the essence of the Hedgehog Concept that turned Wells Fargo from a mediocre Citicorp wanna-be to one of the best-performing banks in the world.

Carl Reichardt, CEO of Wells Fargo at the time of transition, stands as a consummate hedgehog. While his counterparts at Bank of America went into a reaction-revolution panic mode in response to deregulation, hiring change gurus who used sophisticated models and time-consuming encounter groups, Reichardt stripped everything down to its essential simplicity.14 “It’s not space science stuff,” he told us in our interview. “What we did was so simple, and we kept it simple. It was so straightforward and obvious that it sounds almost ridiculous to talk about it. The average businessman coming from a highly competitive industry with no regulations would have jumped on this like a goose on a June bug.”15

Reichardt kept people relentlessly focused on the simple hedgehog idea, continually reminding them that “there’s more money to be made in Modesto than Tokyo.”16 Those who worked with Reichardt marveled at his genius for simplicity. “If Carl were an Olympic diver,” said one of his colleagues, “he would not do a five-flip twisting thing. He would do the best swan dive in the world, and do it perfectly over and over again.”17

The Wells Fargo focus on its Hedgehog Concept was so intense that it became, in its executives’ own words, “a mantra.” Throughout our interviews, Wells Fargo people echoed the same basic theme—“It wasn’t that complicated. We just took a hard-nosed look at what we were doing and decided to focus entirely on those few things we knew we could do better than anyone else, not getting distracted into arenas that would feed our egos and at which we could not be the best.”

This brings me to one of the most crucial points of this chapter: A Hedgehog Concept is not a goal to be the best, a strategy to be the best, an intention to be the best, a plan to be the best. It is an understanding of what you can be the best at. The distinction is absolutely crucial.

Every company would like to be the best at something, but few actually understand—with piercing insight and egoless clarity—what they actually have the potential to be the best at and, just as important, what they cannot be the best at. And it is this distinction that stands as one of the primary contrasts between the good-to-great companies and the comparison companies.

Consider the contrast between Abbott Laboratories and Upjohn. In 1964, the two companies were almost identical in terms of revenues, profits, and product lines. Both companies had the bulk of their business in pharmaceuticals, principally antibiotics. Both companies had family management. Both companies lagged behind the rest of the pharmaceutical industry. But then, in 1974, Abbott had a breakthrough in performance, producing cumulative returns of 4.0 times the market and 5.5 times Upjohn over the next fifteen years. One crucial difference between the two companies is that Abbott developed a Hedgehog Concept based on what it could be the best at and Upjohn did not.

Abbott began by confronting the brutal facts. By 1964, Abbott had lost the opportunity to become the best pharmaceutical company. While Abbott had drowsily lumbered along in the 1940s and 1950s, living off its cash cow, erythromycin, companies like Merck had built research engines that rivaled Harvard and Berkeley. By 1964, George Cain and his Abbott team realized that Merck and others had such a huge research lead that trying to be the best pharmaceutical company would be like a high school football team trying to take on the Dallas Cowboys.

Even though Abbott’s entire history lay in pharmaceuticals, becoming the best pharmaceutical company was no longer a viable option. So, guided by a Level 5 leader and tapping into the faith side of the Stockdale Paradox (There must be a way for us to prevail as a great company, and we will find it!), the Abbott team sought to understand what it could be the best at. Around 1967, a key insight emerged: We’ve lost the chance to be the best pharmaceutical company, but we have an opportunity to excel at creating products that contribute to cost-effective health care. Abbott had experimented with hospital nutritional products, designed to help patients quickly regain their strength after surgery, and diagnostic devices (one of the primary ways to reduce health care costs is through proper diagnosis). Abbott eventually became the number one company in both of these arenas, which moved it far down the path of becoming the best company in the world at creating products that make health care more cost-effective.18

Upjohn never confronted the same brutal reality and continued to live with the delusion that it could beat Merck.19 Later, when it fell even further behind the pharmaceutical leaders, it diversified into arenas where it definitely could not be the best in the world, such as plastics and chemicals. As Upjohn fell even further behind, it returned to a focus on ethical drugs, yet never confronted the fact that it was just too small to win in the big-stakes pharmaceutical game.20 Despite consistently spending nearly twice the percentage of sales on R&D as Abbott, Upjohn saw its profits dwindle to less than half those of Abbott before being acquired in 1995.21

The Abbott versus Upjohn case highlights the difference between a “core business” and a Hedgehog Concept. Just because something is your core business—just because you’ve been doing it for years or perhaps even decades—does not necessarily mean that you can be the best in the world at it. And if you cannot be the best in the world at your core business, then your core business cannot form the basis of your Hedgehog Concept.

Clearly, a Hedgehog Concept is not the same as a core competence. You can have competence at something but not necessarily have the potential to be the best in the world at it. To use an analogy, consider the young person who gets straight A’s in high school calculus and scores high on the math part of the SAT, demonstrating a core competence at mathematics. Does that mean the person should become a mathematician? Not necessarily. Suppose now that this young person goes off to college, enrolls in math courses, and continues to earn A’s, yet encounters people who are genetically encoded for math. As one such student said after this experience, “It would take me three hours to finish the final. Then there were those who finished the same final in thirty minutes and earned an A+. Their brains are just wired differently. I could be a very competent mathematician, but I soon realized I could never be one of the best.” That young person might still get pressure from parents and friends to continue with math, saying, “But you’re so good at it.” Just like our young person, many people have been pulled or have fallen into careers where they can never attain complete mastery and fulfillment. Suffering from the curse of competence but lacking a clear Hedgehog Concept, they rarely become great at what they do.

The Hedgehog Concept requires a severe standard of excellence. It’s not just about building on strength and competence, but about understanding what your organization truly has the potential to be the very best at and sticking to it. Like Upjohn, the comparison companies stuck to businesses at which they were “good” but could never be the best, or worse, launched off in pursuit of easy growth and profits in arenas where they had no hope of being the best. They made money but never became great.

To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. It requires the discipline to say, “Just because we are good at it—just because we’re making money and generating growth—doesn’t necessarily mean we can become the best at it.” The good-to-great companies understood that doing what you are good at will only make you good; focusing solely on what you can potentially do better than any other organization is the only path to greatness.

Every good-to-great company eventually gained deep understanding of this principle and pinned their futures on allocating resources to those few arenas where they could potentially be the best. (See the table below.) The comparison companies rarely attained this understanding.

THE GOOD-TO-GREAT COMPANIES AND THE “BEST IN THE WORLD AT” CIRCLE OF THE HEDGEHOG CONCEPT

This table shows the understanding the good-to-great companies attained that formed the foundation of their shift from good to great. Note: This list does not show what the companies were already best in the world at when they began their transitions (most of these companies weren’t the best at anything); rather, it shows what they came to understand they could become best in the world at.

Abbott Laboratories: Could become the best at creating a product portfolio that lowers the cost of health care. Notes: Abbott confronted the reality that it could not become the best pharmaceutical company in the world, despite the fact that pharmaceuticals at the time accounted for 99 percent of its revenues.22 It shifted its focus to creating a portfolio of products that contribute to lower-cost health care, principally hospital nutritionals, diagnostics, and hospital supplies.

Circuit City: Could become the best at implementing the “4-S” model (service, selection, savings, satisfaction) applied to big-ticket consumer sales. Notes: Circuit City saw that it could become “the McDonald’s” of big-ticket retailing, able to operate a geographically dispersed system by remote control. Its distinction lay not in the “4-S” model per se—but in the consistent, superior execution of the model.

Fannie Mae: Could become the best capital markets player in anything that pertains to mortgages. Notes: The critical insight was to see (1) that it could be a full capital markets player as good as any on Wall Street and (2) that it could develop a unique capability to assess risk in mortgage-related securities.

Gillette: Could become the best at building premier global brands of daily necessities that require sophisticated manufacturing technology. Notes: Gillette saw that it had an unusual combination of two very different skills: (1) the ability to manufacture billions of low-cost, super-high-tolerance products (e.g., razor blades) and (2) the ability to build global consumer brands—the “Coke” of blades or toothbrushes.

Kimberly-Clark: Could become the best in the world at paper-based consumer products. Notes: Kimberly-Clark realized that it had a latent skill at creating “category-killer” brands—brands where the name of the product is synonymous with the name of the category (e.g., Kleenex)— in paper-based products.

Kroger: Could become the best at innovative super-combo stores. Notes: Kroger always had a strength in grocery store innovation. It took this skill and applied it to the question of how to create a combination store with many innovative, high-margin “mini-stores” under one roof.

Nucor: Could become the best at harnessing culture and technology to produce low-cost steel. Notes: Nucor came to see that it had tremendous skill in two activities: (1) creating a performance culture and (2) making farsighted bets on new manufacturing technologies. By combining these two, it was able to become the lowest-cost steel producer in the United States.

Philip Morris: Could become the best in the world at building brand loyalty in cigarettes and, later, other consumables. Notes: Early in transition, Philip Morris saw that it could become simply the best tobacco company in the world. Later, it began to diversify into non-tobacco arenas (a step taken by all tobacco companies, as a defensive measure), but stayed close to its brand-building strengths in “sinful” products (beer, tobacco, chocolate, coffee) and food products.

Pitney Bowes: Could become the best in the world at messaging that requires sophisticated back-office equipment. Notes: As Pitney wrestled with the question of how to evolve beyond postage meters, it had two key insights about its strengths: (1) that it was not a postage company, but could have a broader definition (messaging) and (2) that it had particular strength in supplying the back rooms with sophisticated machines.

Walgreens: Could become the best at convenient drugstores. Notes: Walgreens saw that it was not just a drugstore but also a convenience store. It began systematically seeking the best sites for convenience—clustering many stores within a small radius and pioneering drive-through pharmacies. It also made extensive investments in technology (including recent Web site developments), linking Walgreen stores worldwide to create one giant “corner pharmacy.”

Wells Fargo: Could become the best at running a bank like a business, with a focus on the western United States. Notes: Wells came to two essential insights. First, most banks thought of themselves as banks, acted like banks, and protected the banker culture. Wells saw itself as a business that happened to be in banking. “Run it like a business” and “Run it like you own it” became mantras. Second, Wells recognized that it could not be the best in the world as a superglobal bank, but that it could be the best in the western United States.

Table summary

A table titled, “The Good-To-Great Companies and the ‘Best in the World at’ circle of the Hedgehog Concept” is shown. The table shows what the Abbot Laboratories, Circuit City, and Fannie Mae were already best in the world at when they began their transition. Abbott Laboratories becomes best by offering a low-cost portfolio of health care. Circuit City becomes best at implementing “4-S” model. Fannie Mae becomes best as the player in capital market pertaining to mortgages.

A table shows what the Gillette, Kimberly-Clark, Kroger, Nucor, and Philip Morris were already best in the world at, when they began their transition. Gillette becomes best at offering premier global brands of daily needs. Kimberly-Clark becomes best at providing best paper-based consumer products. Kroger becomes best by building innovative super-combo stores. Nucor becomes best at producing low-cost steel. Philip Morris becomes best at building brand loyalty in cigarettes and other consumables.

A table shows what Pitney Bowes, Walgreens, and Wall Fargo were already best in the world at when they began their transition. Pitney Bowes becomes the best at providing sophisticated back office equipment. Walgreens becomes best at the convenient drug store. Wall Fargo becomes best at operating a bank like a business.

Insight Into Your Economic Engine—

What Is Your Denominator?

The good-to-great companies frequently produced spectacular returns in very unspectacular industries. The banking industry ranked in the bottom quartile of industries (in total returns) during the same period that Wells Fargo beat the market by four times. Even more impressive, both Pitney Bowes and Nucor were in bottom 5 percent industries; yet both these companies beat the market by well over five times. Only one of the good-to-great companies had the benefit of being in a great industry (defined as a top 10 percent industry); five were in good industries; five were in bad to terrible industries. (See Appendix 5.A for a summary of industry analysis.)

Our study clearly shows that a company does not need to be in a great industry to become a great company. Each good-to-great company built a fabulous economic engine, regardless of the industry. They were able to do this because they attained profound insights into their economics.

This is not a book on microeconomics. Each company and each industry had its own economic realities, and I’m not going to belabor them all here. The central point is that each good-to-great company attained a deep understanding of the key drivers in its economic engine and built its system in accordance with this understanding.

That said, however, we did notice one particularly provocative form of economic insight that every good-to-great company attained, the notion of a single “economic denominator.” Think about it in terms of the following question: If you could pick one and only one ratio—profit per x (or, in the social sector, cash flow per x)—to systematically increase over time, what x would have the greatest and most sustainable impact on your economic engine? We learned that this single question leads to profound insight into the inner workings of an organization’s economics.

Recall how Walgreens switched its focus from profit per store to profit per customer visit. Convenient locations are expensive, but by increasing profit per customer visit, Walgreens was able to increase convenience (nine stores in a mile!) and simultaneously increase profitability across its entire system. The standard metric of profit per store would have run contrary to the convenience concept. (The quickest way to increase profit per store is to decrease the number of stores and put them in less expensive locations. This would have destroyed the convenience concept.)

Or consider Wells Fargo. When the Wells team confronted the brutal fact that deregulation would transform banking into a commodity, they realized that standard banker metrics, like profit per loan and profit per deposit, would no longer be the key drivers. Instead, they grasped a new denominator: profit per employee. Following this logic, Wells Fargo became one of the first banks to change its distribution system to rely primarily on stripped-down branches and ATMs.

For example, Fannie Mae grasped the subtle denominator of profit per mortgage risk level, not per mortgage (which would be the “obvious” choice). It’s a brilliant insight. The real driver in Fannie Mae’s economics is the ability to understand risk of default in a package of mortgages better than anyone else. Then it makes money selling insurance and managing the spread on that risk. Simple, insightful, unobvious—and right.

Nucor, for example, made its mark in the ferociously price competitive steel industry with the denominator profit per ton of finished steel. At first glance, you might think that per employee or per fixed cost might be the proper denominator. But the Nucor people understood that the driving force in its economic engine was a combination of a strong-work-ethic culture and the application of advanced manufacturing technology. Profit per employee or per fixed cost would not capture this duality as well as profit per ton of finished steel.

Do you need to have a single denominator? No, but pushing for a single denominator tends to produce better insight than letting yourself off the hook with three or four denominators. The denominator question serves as a mechanism to force deeper understanding of the key drivers in your economic engine. As the denominator question emerged from the research, we tested the question on a number of executive teams. We found that the question always stimulated intense dialogue and debate. Furthermore, even in cases where the team failed (or refused) to identify a single denominator, the challenge of the question drove them to deeper insight. And that is, after all, the point—to have a denominator not for the sake of having a denominator, but for the sake of gaining insight that ultimately leads to more robust and sustainable economics.

ECONOMIC DENOMINATOR

This table shows the economic denominator insight attained by the good-to-great companies during the pivotal transition years.

Abbott: per employee Key insight: Shift from profit per product line to profit per employee fit with the idea of contributing to cost-effective health care.

Circuit City: per geographic region Key insight: Shift from profit per single store to profit per region reflected local economies of scale. While per-store performance remained vital, regional grouping was a key insight that drove Circuit City’s economics beyond Silo’s.

Fannie Mae: per mortgage risk level Key insight: Shift from profit per mortgage to profit per mortgage risk level reflected the fundamental insight that managing interest risk reduces dependence on the direction of interest rates.

Gillette: per customer Key insight: Shift from profit per division to profit per customer reflected the economic power of repeatable purchases (e.g., razor cartridges) times high profit per purchase (e.g., Mach3, not disposable razors).

Kimberly-Clark: per consumer brand Key insight: Shift from profit per fixed asset (the mills) to profit per consumer brand; would be less cyclical and more profitable in good times and bad.

Kroger: per local population Key insight: Shift from profit per store to profit per local population reflected the insight that local market share drove grocery economics. If you can’t attain number one or number two in local share, you should not play.

Nucor: per ton of finished steel Key insight: Shift from profit per division to profit per ton of finished steel reflected Nucor’s unique blend of high-productivity culture mixed with mini-mill technology, rather than just focusing on volume.

Philip Morris: per global brand category Key insight: Shift from profit per sales region to profit per global brand category reflected the understanding that the real key to greatness lay in brands that could have global power, like Coke.

Pitney Bowes: per customer Key insight: Shift from profit per postage meter to profit per customer reflected the idea that Pitney Bowes could use its postage meters as a jumping-off point to bring a range of sophisticated products into the back offices of customers.

Walgreens: per customer visit Key insight: Shift from profit per store to profit per customer visit reflected a symbiotic relationship between convenient (and expensive) store sites and sustainable economics.

Wells Fargo: per employee Key insight: Shift from profit per loan to profit per employee reflected understanding of the brutal fact of deregulation: Banking is a commodity.

Table summary

A table titled, “Economic Denominator” shows the economic denominator grasped by good-to-great companies during the crucial transition years. Abbott shifted its economic denominator from profit per production to profit per employee. Circuit City shifted from profits per single store to profits from region. Fannie Mae shifted from profit per mortgage to profit per mortgage risk level. Gillette shifted from profit per division to profit per customer. Kimberly-Clark shifted from profit per fixed asset to profit per consumer brand.

A table shows the economic denominator grasped by good-to-great companies during the crucial transition years. Kroger shifted its economic denominator from profit per store to per local population. Nucor shifted its profit from per division to per ton of finished steel. Philip Morris shifted its profit from per sales region to per global brand category. Pitney Bowes shifted its profit from per postage meters to per customer. Walgreens shifted its profit from per store to per customer. Wall Fargo shifted its profit from per loan to per employee.

All the good-to-great companies discovered a key economic denominator (see the table here), while the comparison companies usually did not. In fact, we found only one comparison case that attained a profound insight into its economics. Hasbro built its upswing on the insight that a portfolio of classic toys and games, such as G.I. Joe and Monopoly, produces more sustainable cash flow than big onetime hits.23 In fact, Hasbro is the one comparison company that understood all three circles of the Hedgehog Concept. It became the best in the world at acquiring and renewing tried-and-true toys, reintroducing and recycling them at just the right time to increase profit per classic brand. And its people had great passion for the business. Systematically building from all three circles, Hasbro became the best-performing comparison in our study, lending further credence to the power of the Hedgehog Concept.

Hasbro became an unsustained transition in part because it lost the discipline to stay within the three circles, after the unexpected death of CEO Stephen Hassenfeld. The Hasbro case reinforces a vital lesson. If you successfully apply these ideas, but then stop doing them, you will slide backward, from great to good, or worse. The only way to remain great is to keep applying the fundamental principles that made you great.

Understanding Your Passion

When interviewing the Philip Morris executives, we encountered an intensity and passion that surprised us. Recall from chapter 3 how George Weissman described working at the company as the great love affair of his life, second only to his marriage. Even with a most sinful collection of consumer products (Marlboro cigarettes, Miller beer, 67 percent fat-filled Velveeta, Maxwell House coffee for caffeine addicts, Toblerone for chocoholics, and so forth), we found tremendous passion for the business. Most of the top executives at Philip Morris were passionate consumers of their own products. In 1979, Ross Millhiser, then vice chairman of Philip Morris and a dedicated smoker, said, “I love cigarettes. It’s one of the things that makes life really worth living.”24

The Philip Morris people clearly loved their company and had passion for what they were doing. It’s as if they viewed themselves as the lone, fiercely independent cowboy depicted in the Marlboro billboards. “We have a right to smoke, and we will protect that right!” A board member told me during my research for a previous project, “I really love being on the board of Philip Morris. It’s like being part of something really special.” She said this as she proudly puffed away.25

Now, you might say, “But that is just the defensiveness of the tobacco industry. Of course they’d feel that way. Otherwise, how could they sleep at night?” But keep in mind that R. J. Reynolds was also in the tobacco business and under siege from society. Yet, unlike Philip Morris, R. J. Reynolds executives began to diversify away from tobacco into any arena where it could get growth, regardless of whether they had passion for those acquisitions or whether the company could be the best in the world at them. The Philip Morris people stuck much closer to the tobacco business, in large part because they loved that business. In contrast, the R. J. Reynolds people saw tobacco as just a way to make money. As vividly portrayed in the book Barbarians at the Gate, R. J. Reynolds executives eventually lost passion for anything except making themselves rich through a leveraged buyout.26

It may seem odd to talk about something as soft and fuzzy as “passion” as an integral part of a strategic framework. But throughout the good-to-great companies, passion became a key part of the Hedgehog Concept. You can’t manufacture passion or “motivate” people to feel passionate. You can only discover what ignites your passion and the passions of those around you.

The good-to-great companies did not say, “Okay, folks, let’s get passionate about what we do.” Sensibly, they went the other way entirely: We should only do those things that we can get passionate about. Kimberly-Clark executives made the shift to paper-based consumer products in large part because they could get more passionate about them. As one executive put it, the traditional paper products are okay, “but they just don’t have the charisma of a diaper.”27

When Gillette executives made the choice to build sophisticated, relatively expensive shaving systems rather than fight a low-margin battle with disposables, they did so in large part because they just couldn’t get excited about cheap disposable razors. “Zeien talks about shaving systems with the sort of technical gusto one expects from a Boeing or Hughes engineer,” wrote one journalist about Gillette’s CEO in 1996.28 Gillette has always been at its best when it sticks to businesses that fit its Hedgehog Concept. “People who aren’t passionate about Gillette need not apply,” wrote a Wall Street Journal reporter, who went on to describe how a top business school graduate wasn’t hired because she didn’t show enough passion for deodorant.29

Perhaps you, too, can’t get passionate about deodorant. Perhaps you might find it hard to imagine being passionate about pharmacies, grocery stores, tobacco, or postage meters. You might wonder about what type of person gets all jazzed up about making a bank as efficient as McDonald’s, or who considers a diaper charismatic. In the end, it doesn’t really matter. The point is that they felt passionate about what they were doing and the passion was deep and genuine.

This doesn’t mean, however, that you have to be passionate about the mechanics of the business per se (although you might be). The passion circle can be focused equally on what the company stands for. For example, the Fannie Mae people were not passionate about the mechanical process of packaging mortgages into market securities. But they were terrifically motivated by the whole idea of helping people of all classes, backgrounds, and races realize the American dream of owning their home. Linda Knight, who joined Fannie Mae in 1983, just as the company faced its darkest days, told us: “This wasn’t just any old company getting into trouble; this was a company at the core of making home ownership a reality for thousands of Americans. It’s a role that is far more important than just making money, and that’s why we felt such depth of commitment to preserve, protect, and enhance the company.”30 As another Fannie Mae executive summed up, “I see us as a key mechanism for strengthening the whole social fabric of America. Whenever I drive through difficult neighborhoods that are coming back because more families own their homes, I return to work reenergized.”

The Triumph of Understanding

Over Bravado

On the research team, we frequently found ourselves talking about the difference between “prehedgehog” and “posthedgehog” states. In the prehedgehog state, it’s like groping through the fog. You’re making progress on a long march, but you can’t see all that well. At each juncture in the trail, you can only see a little bit ahead and must move at a deliberate, slow crawl. Then, with the Hedgehog Concept, you break into a clearing, the fog lifts, and you can see for miles. From then on, each juncture requires less deliberation, and you can shift from crawl to walk, and from walk to run. In the posthedgehog state, miles of trail move swiftly beneath your feet, forks in the road fly past as you quickly make decisions that you could not have seen so clearly in the fog.

What’s so striking about the comparison companies is that—for all their change programs, frantic gesticulations, and charismatic leaders—they rarely emerged from the fog. They would try to run, making bad decisions at forks in the road, and then have to reverse course later. Or they would veer off the trail entirely, banging into trees and tumbling down ravines.(Oh, but they were sure doing it with speed and panache!)

For the comparison companies, the exact same world that had become so simple and clear to the good-to-great companies remained complex and shrouded in mist. Why? For two reasons. First, the comparison companies never asked the right questions, the questions prompted by the three circles. Second, they set their goals and strategies more from bravado than from understanding.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the comparison companies’ mindless pursuit of growth: Over two thirds of the comparison companies displayed an obsession with growth without the benefit of a Hedgehog Concept.31 Statements such as “We’ve been a growth at any price company” and “Betting that size equals success” pepper the materials on the comparison companies. In contrast, not one of the good-to-great companies focused obsessively on growth. Yet they created sustained, profitable growth far greater than the comparison companies that made growth their mantra.

Consider the case of Great Western and Fannie Mae. “Great Western is a mite unwieldy,” wrote the Wall Street Transcript. “It wants to grow everyway it can.”32 The company found itself in finance, leasing, insurance, and manufactured houses, continually acquiring companies in an expansion binge.33 Bigger! More! In 1985, Great Western’s CEO told a gathering of analysts, “Don’t worry about what you call us—a bank, an S&L, or a Zebra.”34

Quite a contrast to Fannie Mae, which had a simple, crystalline understanding that it could be the best capital markets player in anything related to mortgages, better even than Goldman Sachs or Salomon Brothers in opening up the full capital markets to the mortgage process. It built a powerful economic machine by reframing its business model on risk management, rather than mortgage selling. And it drove the machine with great passion, the Fannie Mae people inspired by its vital role in democratizing home ownership.

Until 1984, the stock charts tracked each other like mirror images. Then in 1984, one year after it clarified its Hedgehog Concept, Fannie Mae exploded upward, while Great Western kept lollygagging along until just before its acquisition in 1997. By focusing on its simple, elegant conception—and not just focusing on “growth”—Fannie Mae grew revenues nearly threefold from its transition year in 1984 through 1996. Great Western, for all of its gobbling of growth steroids, grew revenues and earnings only 25 percent over the same period, then lost its independence in 1997.

The Fannie Mae versus Great Western case highlights an essential point: “Growth!” is not a Hedgehog Concept. Rather, if you have the right Hedgehog Concept and make decisions relentlessly consistent with it, you will create such momentum that your main problem will not be how to grow, but how not to grow too fast.

The Hedgehog Concept is a turning point in the journey from good to great. In most cases, the transition date follows within a few years of the Hedgehog Concept. Furthermore, everything from here on out in the book hinges upon having the Hedgehog Concept. As will become abundantly clear in the following chapters, disciplined action—the third big chunk in the framework after disciplined people and disciplined thought—only makes sense in the context of the Hedgehog Concept.

Despite its vital importance (or, rather, because of its vital importance), it would be a terrible mistake to thoughtlessly attempt to jump right to a Hedgehog Concept. You can’t just go off-site for two days, pull out a bunch of flip charts, do breakout discussions, and come up with a deep understanding. Well, you can do that, but you probably won’t get it right. It would be like Einstein saying, “I think it’s time to become a great scientist, so I’m going to go off to the Four Seasons this weekend, pull out the flip charts, and unlock the secrets of the universe.” Insight just doesn’t happen that way. It took Einstein ten years of groping through the fog to get the theory of special relativity, and he was a bright guy.35

It took about four years on average for the good-to-great companies to clarify their Hedgehog Concepts. Like scientific insight, a Hedgehog Concept simplifies a complex world and makes decisions much easier. But while it has crystalline clarity and elegant simplicity once you have it, getting the concept can be devilishly difficult and takes time. Recognize that getting a Hedgehog Concept is an inherently iterative process, not an event.

The essence of the process is to get the right people engaged in vigorous dialogue and debate, infused with the brutal facts and guided by questions formed by the three circles. Do we really understand what we can be the best in the world at, as distinct from what we can just be successful at? Do we really understand the drivers in our economic engine, including our economic denominator? Do we really understand what best ignites our passion?

One particularly useful mechanism for moving the process along is a device that we came to call the Council. The Council consists of a group of the right people who participate in dialogue and debate guided by the three circles, iteratively and over time, about vital issues and decisions facing the organization. (See “Characteristics of the Council,” below.)

GETTING THE HEDGEHOG CONCEPT AN ITERATIVE PROCESS

In response to the question, “How should we go about getting our Hedgehog Concept?” I would point to the diagram on page 114 and say: “Build the Council, and use that as a model. Ask the right questions, engage in vigorous debate, make decisions, autopsy the results, and learn—all guided within the context of the three circles. Just keep going through that cycle of understanding.”

When asked, “How do we accelerate the process of getting a Hedgehog Concept?” I would respond: “Increase the number of times you go around that full cycle in a given period of time.” If you go through this cycle enough times, guided resolutely by the three circles, you will eventually gain the depth of understanding required for a Hedgehog Concept. It will not happen overnight, but it will eventually happen.

Each Council member has the ability to argue and debate in search of understanding, not from the egoistic need to win a point or protect a parochial interest.

Each Council member retains the respect of every other Council member, without exception.

Council members come from a range of perspectives, but each member has deep knowledge about some aspect of the organization and/or the environment in which it operates.

The Council includes key members of the management team but is not limited to members of the management team, nor is every executive automatically a member.

The Council is a standing body, not an ad hoc committee assembled for a specific project.

The Council meets periodically, as much as once a week or as infrequently as once per quarter.

The Council does not seek consensus, recognizing that consensus decisions are often at odds with intelligent decisions. The responsibility for the final decision remains with the leading executive.

The Council is an informal body, not listed on any formal organization chart or in any formal documents.

The Council can have a range of possible names, usually quite innocuous. In the good-to-great companies, they had benign names like Long-Range Profit Improvement Committee, Corporate Products Committee, Strategic Thinking Group, and Executive Council.

GETTING THE HEDGEHOG CONCEPT AN ITERATIVE PROCESS

In response to the question, “How should we go about getting our Hedgehog Concept?” I would point to the diagram on page 114 and say: “Build the Council, and use that as a model. Ask the right questions, engage in vigorous debate, make decisions, autopsy the results, and learn—all guided within the context of the three circles. Just keep going through that cycle of understanding.”

When asked, “How do we accelerate the process of getting a Hedgehog Concept?” I would respond: “Increase the number of times you go around that full cycle in a given period of time.” If you go through this cycle enough times, guided resolutely by the three circles, you will eventually gain the depth of understanding required for a Hedgehog Concept. It will not happen overnight, but it will eventually happen.

Characteristics of the Council

The council exists as a device to gain understanding about important issues facing the organization.

The Council is assembled and used by the leading executive and usually consists of five to twelve people.

Each Council member has the ability to argue and debate in search of understanding, not from the egoistic need to win a point or protect a parochial interest.
Each Council member retains the respect of every other Council member, without exception.
Council members come from a range of perspectives, but each member has deep knowledge about some aspect of the organization and/or the environment in which it operates.
The Council includes key members of the management team but is not limited to members of the management team, nor is every executive automatically a member.
The Council is a standing body, not an ad hoc committee assembled for a specific project.
The Council meets periodically, as much as once a week or as infrequently as once per quarter.
The Council does not seek consensus, recognizing that consensus decisions are often at odds with intelligent decisions. The responsibility for the final decision remains with the leading executive.
The Council is an informal body, not listed on any formal organization chart or in any formal documents.
The Council can have a range of possible names, usually quite innocuous. In the good-to-great companies, they had benign names like Long-Range Profit Improvement Committee, Corporate Products Committee, Strategic Thinking Group, and Executive Council.

Does every organization have a Hedgehog Concept to discover? What if you wake up, look around with brutal honesty, and conclude: “We’re not the best at anything, and we never have been.” Therein lies one of the most exciting aspects of the entire study. In the majority of cases, the good-to-great companies were not the best in the world at anything and showed no prospects of becoming so. Infused with the Stockdale Paradox (“There must be something we can become the best at, and we will find it! We must also confront the brutal facts of what we cannot be the best at, and we will not delude ourselves!”), every good-to-great company, no matter how awful at the start of the process, prevailed in its search for a Hedgehog Concept.

As you search for your own concept, keep in mind that when the good-to-great companies finally grasped their Hedgehog Concept, it had none of the tiresome, irritating blasts of mindless bravado typical of the comparison companies. “Yep, we could be the best at that” was stated as the recognition of a fact, no more startling than observing that the sky is blue or the grass is green. When you get your Hedgehog Concept right, it has the quiet ping of truth, like a single, clear, perfectly struck note hanging in the air in the hushed silence of a full auditorium at the end of a quiet movement of a Mozart piano concerto. There is no need to say much of anything; the quiet truth speaks for itself.

I’m reminded of a personal experience in my own family that illustrates the vital difference between bravado and understanding. My wife, Joanne, began racing marathons and triathlons in the early 1980s. As she accumulated experience—track times, swim splits, race results—she began to feel the momentum of success. One day, she entered a race with many of the best woman triathletes in the world, and—despite a weak swim where she came out of the water hundreds of places behind the top swimmers and having to push a heavy, nonaerodynamic bike up a long hill—she managed to cross the finish line in the top ten.

Then, a few weeks later while sitting at breakfast, Joanne looked up from her morning newspaper and calmly, quietly said, “I think I could win the Ironman.”

The Ironman, the world championship of triathlons, involves 2.4 miles of ocean swimming and 112 miles of cycling, capped off with a 26.2-mile marathon footrace on the hot, lava-baked Kona coast of Hawaii.

“Of course, I’d have to quit my job, turn down my offers to graduate school (she had been admitted to graduate business school at a number of the top schools), and commit to full-time training. But . . .”

Her words had no bravado in them, no hype, no agitation, no pleading. She didn’t try to convince me. She simply observed what she had come to understand was a fact, a truth no more shocking than stating that the walls were painted white. She had the passion. She had the genetics. And if she won races, she’d have the economics. The goal to win the Ironman flowed from early understanding of her Hedgehog Concept.

And, so, she decided to go for it. She quit her job. She turned down graduate schools. She sold the mills! (But she did keep me on her bus.) And three years later, on a hot October day in 1985, she crossed the finish line at the Hawaii Ironman in first place, world champion. When Joanne set out to win the Ironman, she did not know if she would become the world’s best triathlete. But she understood that she could, that it was in the realm of possibility, that she was not living in a delusion. And that distinction makes all the difference. It is a distinction that those who want to go from good to great must grasp, and one that those who fail to become great so often never do.

COLLINS Chapter 6

A Culture of Discipline

In 1980, George Rathmann cofounded the biotechnology company Amgen. Over the next twenty years, Amgen grew from a struggling entrepreneurial enterprise into a $3.2 billion company with 6,400 employees, creating blood products to improve the lives of people suffering through chemotherapy and kidney dialysis.2 Under Rathmann, Amgen became one of the few biotechnology companies that delivered consistent profitability and growth. It became so consistently profitable, in fact, that its stock price multiplied over 150 times from its public offering in June 1983 to January 2000. An investor who bought as little as $7,000 of Amgen stock would have realized a capital gain of over $1 million, thirteen times better than the same investment in the general stock market.

Few successful start-ups become great companies, in large part because they respond to growth and success in the wrong way. 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. Lack of planning, lack of accounting, lack of systems, and lack of hiring constraints create friction. Problems surface—with customers, with cash flow, with schedules.

In response, someone (often a board member) says, “It’s time to grow up. This place needs some professional management.” The company begins to hire MBAs and seasoned executives from blue-chip companies. Processes, procedures, checklists, and all the rest begin to sprout up like weeds. What was once an egalitarian environment gets replaced with a hierarchy. Chains of command appear for the first time. Reporting relationships become clear, and an executive class with special perks begins to appear. “We” and “they” segmentations appear—just like in a real company.

The professional managers finally rein in the mess. They create order out of chaos, but they also kill the entrepreneurial spirit. Members of the founding team begin to grumble, “This isn’t fun anymore. I used to be able to just get things done. Now I have to fill out these stupid forms and follow these stupid rules. Worst of all, I have to spend a horrendous amount of time in useless meetings.” The creative magic begins to wane as some of the most innovative people leave, disgusted by the burgeoning bureaucracy and hierarchy. The exciting start-up transforms into just another company, with nothing special to recommend it. The cancer of mediocrity begins to grow in earnest.

George Rathmann avoided this entrepreneurial death spiral. He understood that the purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline—a problem that largely goes away if you have the right people in the first place. 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, which then further drives the right people away, and so forth. Rathmann also understood an alternative exists: Avoid bureaucracy and hierarchy and instead create a culture of discipline. When you put these two complementary forces together—a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship—you get a magical alchemy of superior performance and sustained results.

Why start this chapter with a biotechnology entrepreneur rather than one of our good-to-great companies? Because Rathmann credits much of his entrepreneurial success to what he learned while working at Abbott Laboratories before founding Amgen:

What I got from Abbott was the idea that when you set your objectives for the year, you record them in concrete. You can change your plans through the year, but you never change what you measure yourself against. You are rigorous at the end of the year, adhering exactly to what you said was going to happen. You don’t get a chance to editorialize. You don’t get a chance to adjust and finagle, and decide that you really didn’t intend to do that anyway, and readjust your objectives to make yourself look better. You never just focus on what you’ve accomplished for the year; you focus on what you’ve accomplished relative to exactly what you said you were going to accomplish—no matter how tough the measure. That was a discipline learned at Abbott, and that we carried into Amgen.3

Many of the Abbott disciplines trace back to 1968, when it hired a remarkable financial officer named Bernard H. Semler. Semler did not see his job as a traditional financial controller or accountant. Rather, he set out to invent mechanisms that would drive cultural change. He created a whole new framework of accounting that he called Responsibility Accounting, wherein every item of cost, income, and investment would be clearly identified with a single individual responsible for that item.4 The idea, radical for the 1960s, was to create a system wherein every Abbott manager in every type of job was responsible for his or her return on investment, with the same rigor that an investor holds an entrepreneur responsible. There would be no hiding behind traditional accounting allocations, no slopping funds about to cover up ineffective management, no opportunities for finger-pointing.5

But the beauty of the Abbott system lay not just in its rigor, but in how it used rigor and discipline to enable creativity and entrepreneurship. “Abbott developed a very disciplined organization, but not in a linear way of thinking,” said George Rathmann. “[It] was exemplary at having both financial discipline and the divergent thinking of creative work. We used financial discipline as a way to provide resources for the really creative work.”6 Abbott reduced its administrative costs as a percentage of sales to the lowest in the industry (by a significant margin) and at the same time became a new product innovation machine like 3M, deriving up to 65 percent of revenues from new products introduced in the previous four years.7

This creative duality ran through every aspect of Abbott during the transition era, woven into the very fabric of the corporate culture. On the one hand, Abbott recruited entrepreneurial leaders and gave them freedom to determine the best path to achieving their objectives. On the other hand, individuals had to commit fully to the Abbott system and were held rigorously accountable for their objectives. They had freedom, but freedom within a framework. Abbott instilled the entrepreneur’s zeal for opportunistic flexibility. (“We recognized that planning is priceless, but plans are useless,” said one Abbott executive.)8 But Abbott also had the discipline to say no to opportunities that failed the three circles test. While encouraging wide-ranging innovation within its divisions, Abbott simultaneously maintained fanatical adherence to its Hedgehog Concept of contributing to cost-effective health care.

Abbott Laboratories exemplifies a key finding of our study: a culture of discipline. By its nature, “culture” is a somewhat unwieldy topic to discuss, less prone to clean frameworks like the three circles. The main points of this chapter, however, boil down to one central idea: Build a culture full of people who take disciplined action within the three circles, fanatically consistent with the Hedgehog Concept.

More precisely, this means the following:

Build a culture around the idea of freedom and responsibility, within a framework.

Fill that culture with self-disciplined people who are willing to go to extreme lengths to fulfill their responsibilities. They will “rinse their cottage cheese.”

Don’t confuse a culture of discipline with a tyrannical disciplinarian.

Adhere with great consistency to the Hedgehog Concept, exercising an almost religious focus on the intersection of the three circles. Equally important, create a “stop doing list” and systematically unplug anything extraneous.

Freedom (And Responsibility)

with in a Framework

Picture an airline pilot. She settles into the cockpit, surrounded by dozens of complicated switches and sophisticated gauges, sitting atop a massive $84 million piece of machinery. As passengers thump and stuff their bags into overhead bins and flight attendants scurry about trying to get everyone settled in, she begins her preflight checklist. Step by methodical step, she systematically moves through every required item.

Cleared for departure, she begins working with air traffic control, following precise instructions—which direction to take out of the gate, which way to taxi, which runway to use, which direction to take off. She doesn’t throttle up and hurtle the jet into the air until she’s cleared for takeoff. Once aloft, she communicates continually with flight-control centers and stays within the tight boundaries of the commercial air traffic system.

On approach, however, she hits a ferocious thunder-and-hail storm. Blasting winds, crossways and unpredictable, tilt the wings down to the left, then down to the right. Looking out the windows, passengers can’t see the ground, only the thinning and thickening globs of gray clouds and the spatter of rain on the windows. The flight attendants announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ve been asked to remain seated for the remainder of the flight. Please put your seats in the upright and locked position and place all your carry-on baggage under the seat in front of you. We should be on the ground shortly.”

“Not too shortly, I hope,” think the less experienced travelers, unnerved by the roiling wind and momentary flashes of lightning. But the experienced travelers just go on reading magazines, chatting with seatmates, and preparing for their meetings on the ground. “I’ve been through all this before,” they think. “She’ll only land if it’s safe.”

Sure enough, on final approach—wheels down as a quarter of a million pounds of steel glides down at 130 miles per hour—passengers suddenly hear the engines whine and feel themselves thrust back into their seats. The plane accelerates back into the sky. It banks around in a big arc back toward the airport. The pilot takes a moment to click on the intercom: “Sorry, folks. We were getting some bad crosswinds there. We’re going to give it another try.” On the next go, the winds calm just enough and she brings the plane down, safely.

Now take a step back and think about the model here. The pilot operates within a very strict system, and she does not have freedom to go outside of that system. (You don’t want airline pilots saying, “Hey, I just read in a management book about the value of being empowered—freedom to experiment, to be creative, to be entrepreneurial, to try a lot of stuff and keep what works!”) Yet at the same time, the crucial decisions—whether to take off, whether to land, whether to abort, whether to land elsewhere—rest with the pilot. Regardless of the strictures of the system, one central fact stands out above all others: The pilot has ultimate responsibility for the airplane and the lives of the people on it.

The point here is not that a company should have a system as strict and inflexible as the air traffic system. After all, if a corporate system fails, people don’t die by the hundreds in burning, twisted hunks of steel. Customer service at the airlines might be terrible, but you are almost certain to get where you are going in one piece. The point of this analogy is that when we looked inside the good-to-great companies, we were reminded of the best part of the airline pilot model: freedom and responsibility within the framework of a highly developed system.

The good-to-great companies built a consistent system with clear constraints, but they also gave people freedom and responsibility within the framework of that system. They hired self-disciplined people who didn’t need to be managed, and then managed the system, not the people.

“This was the secret to how we were able to run stores from a great distance, by remote control,” said Bill Rivas of Circuit City. “It was the combination of great store managers who had ultimate responsibility for their individual stores, operating within a great system. You’ve got to have management and people who believe in the system and who do whatever is necessary to make the system work. But within the boundaries of that system, store managers had a lot of leeway, to coincide with their responsibility.”9 In a sense, Circuit City became to consumer electronics retailing what McDonald’s became to restaurants—not the most exquisite experience, but an enormously consistent one. The system evolved over time as Circuit City experimented by adding new items like computers and video players (just like McDonald’s added breakfast Egg McMuffins). But at any given moment, everyone operated within the framework of the system. “That’s one of the major differences between us and all the others who were in this same business in the early 1980s,” said Bill Zierden. “They just couldn’t roll it out further, and we could. We could stamp these stores out all over the country, with great consistency.”10 Therein lies one of the key reasons why Circuit City took off in the early 1980s and beat the general stock market by more than eighteen times over the next fifteen years.

In a sense, much of this book is about creating a culture of discipline. It all starts with disciplined people. The transition begins not by trying to discipline the wrong people into the right behaviors, but by getting self-disciplined people on the bus in the first place. Next we have disciplined thought. You need the discipline to confront the brutal facts of reality, while retaining resolute faith that you can and will create a path to greatness. Most importantly, you need the discipline to persist in the search for understanding until you get your Hedgehog Concept. Finally, we have disciplined action, the primary subject of this chapter. This order is important. The comparison companies often tried to jump right to disciplined action. But disciplined action without self-disciplined people is impossible to sustain, and disciplined action without disciplined thought is a recipe for disaster.

Indeed, discipline by itself will not produce great results. We find plenty of organizations in history that had tremendous discipline and that marched right into disaster, with precision and in nicely formed lines. No, the point is to first get self-disciplined people who engage in very rigorous thinking, who then take disciplined action within the framework of a consistent system designed around the Hedgehog Concept.

Throughout our research, we were struck by the continual use of words like disciplined, rigorous, dogged, determined, diligent, precise, fastidious, systematic, methodical, workmanlike, demanding, consistent, focused, accountable, and responsible. They peppered articles, interviews, and source materials on the good-to-great companies, and were strikingly absent from the materials on the direct comparison companies. People in the good-to-great companies became somewhat extreme in the fulfillment of their responsibilities, bordering in some cases on fanaticism.

We came to call this the “rinsing your cottage cheese” factor. The analogy comes from a disciplined world-class athlete named Dave Scott, who won the Hawaii Ironman Triathlon six times. In training, Scott would ride his bike 75 miles, swim 20,000 meters, and run 17 miles—on average, every single day. Dave Scott did not have a weight problem! Yet he believed that a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet would give him an extra edge. So, Dave Scott—a man who burned at least 5,000 calories a day in training—would literally rinse his cottage cheese to get the extra fat off. Now, there is no evidence that he absolutely needed to rinse his cottage cheese to win the Ironman; that’s not the point of the story. The point is that rinsing his cottage cheese was simply one more small step that he believed would make him just that much better, one more small step added to all the other small steps to create a consistent program of superdiscipline. I’ve always pictured Dave Scott running the 26 miles of the marathon—hammering away in hundred-degree heat on the black, baked lava fields of the Kona coast after swimming 2.4 miles in the ocean and cycling 112 miles against ferocious crosswinds—and thinking to himself: “Compared to rinsing my cottage cheese every day, this just isn’t that bad.”

I realize that it’s a bizarre analogy. But in a sense, the good-to-great companies became like Dave Scott. Much of the answer to the question of “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 improvement from there. It’s really just that simple. And it’s really just that difficult.

Everyone would like to be the best, but most organizations lack the discipline to figure out with egoless clarity what they can be the best at and the will to do whatever it takes to turn that potential into reality. They lack the discipline to rinse their cottage cheese.

Consider Wells Fargo in contrast to Bank of America. Carl Reichardt never doubted that Wells Fargo could emerge from bank deregulation as a stronger company, not a weaker one. He saw that the key to becoming a great company rested not with brilliant new strategies but with the sheer determination to rip a hundred years of banker mentality out of the system. “There’s too much waste in banking,” said Reichardt. “Getting rid of it takes tenacity, not brilliance.”11

Reichardt set a clear tone at the top: We’re not going to ask everyone else to suffer while we sit on high. We will start by rinsing our own cottage cheese, right here in the executive suite. He froze executive salaries for two years (despite the fact that Wells Fargo was enjoying some of the most profitable years in its history).12 He shut the executive dining room and replaced it with a college dorm food-service caterer.13 He closed the executive elevator, sold the corporate jets, and banned green plants from the executive suite as too expensive to water.14 He removed free coffee from the executive suite. He eliminated Christmas trees for management.15 He threw reports back at people who’d submitted them in fancy binders, with the admonishment: “Would you spend your own money this way? What does a binder add to anything?”16 Reichardt would sit through meetings with fellow executives, in a beat-up old chair with the stuffing hanging out. Sometimes he would just sit there and pick at the stuffing while listening to proposals to spend money, said one article, “[and] a lot of must-do projects just melted away.”17

Across the street at Bank of America, executives also faced deregulation and recognized the need to eliminate waste. However, unlike Wells Fargo, B of A executives didn’t have the discipline to rinse their own cottage cheese. They preserved their posh executive kingdom in its imposing tower in downtown San Francisco, the CEO’s office described in the book Breaking the Bank as “a northeast corner suite with a large attached conference room, oriental rugs, and floor-to-ceiling windows that offered a sweeping panorama of the San Francisco Bay from the Golden Gate to the Bay Bridge.”18 (We found no evidence of executive chairs with the stuffing hanging out.) The elevator made its last stop at the executive floor and descended all the way to the ground in one quiet whoosh, unfettered by the intrusions of lesser beings. The vast open space in the executive suite made the windows look even taller than they actually were, creating a sense of floating above the fog in an elevated city of alien elites who ruled the world from above.19 Why rinse our cottage cheese when life is so good?

After losing $1.8 billion across three years in the mid-1980s, B of A eventually made the necessary changes in response to deregulation (largely by hiring ex-Wells executives).20 But even in the darkest days, B of A could not bring itself to get rid of the perks that shielded its executives from the real world. At one board meeting during Bank of America’s crisis period, one member made sensible suggestions like “Sell the corporate jet.” Other directors listened to the recommendations, then passed them by.21

A Culture, Not a Tyrant

We almost didn’t include this chapter in the book. On the one hand, the good-to-great companies became more disciplined than the direct comparison companies, as with Wells Fargo in contrast to Bank of America. On the other hand, the unsustained comparisons showed themselves to be just as disciplined as the good-to-great companies.

“Based on my analysis, I don’t think we can put discipline in the book as a finding,” said Eric Hagen, after he completed a special analysis unit looking at the leadership cultures across the companies. “It is absolutely clear that the unsustained comparison CEOs brought tremendous discipline to their companies, and that is why they got such great initial results. So, discipline just doesn’t pass muster as a distinguishing variable.”

Curious, we decided to look further into the issue, and Eric undertook a more in-depth analysis. As we further examined the evidence, it became clear that—despite surface appearances—there was indeed a huge difference between the two sets of companies in their approach to discipline.

Whereas the good-to-great companies had Level 5 leaders who built an enduring culture of discipline, the unsustained comparisons had Level 4 leaders who personally disciplined the organization through sheer force.

Consider Ray MacDonald, who took command of Burroughs in 1964. A brilliant but abrasive man, MacDonald controlled the conversations, told all the jokes, and criticized those not as smart as he (which was pretty much everyone around him). He got things done through sheer force of personality, using a form of pressure that came to be known as “The MacDonald Vise.”22 MacDonald produced remarkable results during his reign. Every dollar invested in 1964, the year he became president, and taken out at the end of 1977, when he retired, produced returns 6.6 times better than the general market.23 However, the company had no culture of discipline to endure beyond him. After he retired, his helper minions were frozen by indecision, leaving the company, according to Business Week, “with an inability to do anything.”24 Burroughs then began a long slide, with cumulative returns falling 93 percent below the market from the end of the MacDonald era to 2000.

We found a similar story at Rubbermaid under Stanley Gault. Recall from the Level 5 chapter that Gault quipped in response to the accusation of being a tyrant, “Yes, but I’m a sincere tyrant.” Gault brought strict disciplines to Rubbermaid—rigorous planning and competitor analysis, systematic market research, profit analysis, hard-nosed cost control, and so on. “This is an incredibly disciplined organization,” wrote one analyst. “There is an incredible thoroughness in Rubbermaid’s approach to life.”25 Precise and methodical, Gault arrived at work by 6:30 and routinely worked eighty-hour weeks, expecting his managers to do the same.26

As chief disciplinarian, Gault personally acted as the company’s number one quality control mechanism. Walking down the street in Manhattan, he noticed a doorman muttering and swearing as he swept dirt into a Rubber-maid dustpan. “Stan whirled around and starting grilling the man on why he was unhappy,” said Richard Gates, who told the story to Fortune. Gault, convinced that the lip of the dustpan was too thick, promptly issued a dictate to his engineers to redesign the product. “On quality, I’m a sonofabitch,” said Gault. His chief operating officer concurred: “He gets livid.”27

Rubbermaid rose dramatically under the tyranny of this singularly disciplined leader but then just as dramatically declined when he departed. Under Gault, Rubbermaid beat the market 3.6 to 1. After Gault, Rubber-maid lost 59 percent of its value relative to the market, before being bought out by Newell.

One particularly fascinating example of the disciplinarian syndrome was Chrysler under Lee Iacocca, whom Business Week described simply as, “The Man. The Dictator. Lee.”28 Iacocca became president of Chrysler in 1979 and imposed his towering personality to discipline the organization into shape. “Right away I knew the place was in a state of anarchy [and] needed a dose of order and discipline—and quick,” wrote Iacocca of his early days.29 In his first year, he entirely overhauled the management structure, instituted strict financial controls, improved quality control measures, rationalized the production schedule, and conducted mass layoffs to preserve cash.30 “I felt like an Army Surgeon. . . . We had to do radical surgery, saving what we could.”31 In dealing with the unions, he said, “If you don’t help me out, I’m going to blow your brains out. I’ll declare bankruptcy in the morning, and you’ll all be out of work.”32 Iacocca produced spectacular results and Chrysler became one of the most celebrated turnarounds in industrial history.

About midway through his tenure, however, Iacocca seemed to lose focus and the company began to decline once again. The Wall Street Journal wrote: “Mr. Iacocca headed the Statue of Liberty renovation, joined a congressional commission on budget reduction and wrote a second book. He began a syndicated newspaper column, bought an Italian villa where he started bottling his own wine and olive oil. . . . Critics contend it all distracted him, and was a root cause of Chrysler’s current problems. . . . Distracting or not, it’s clear that being a folk hero is a demanding sideline.”33

Worse than his moonlight career as a national hero, his lack of discipline to stay within the arenas in which Chrysler could be the best in the world led to a binge of highly undisciplined diversifications. In 1985, he was lured into the sexy aerospace business. Whereas most CEOs would be content with a single Gulfstream jet, Iacocca decided to buy the whole Gulfstream company!34 Also in the mid-1980s, he embarked on a costly and ultimately unsuccessful joint venture with Italian sports car maker Maserati. “Iacocca had a soft spot for Italians,” said one retired Chrysler executive. “Iacocca, who owns a modest estate in Tuscany, was so intent on an Italian alliance that commercial realities were ignored, suggest industry insiders,” wrote Business Week.35 Some estimates put the loss of the failed Maserati venture at $200 million, which, according to Forbes, was “an enormous sum to lose on a high-price, low-volume roadster. After all, no more than a few thousand will ever be built.”36

During the first half of his tenure, Iacocca produced remarkable results, taking the company from near bankruptcy to nearly three times the general market. During the second half of Iacocca’s tenure, the company slid 31 percent behind the market and faced another potential bankruptcy.37 “Like so many patients with a heart condition,” wrote a Chrysler executive, “we’d survived surgery several years before only to revert to our unhealthy lifestyle.”38

The above cases illustrate a pattern we found in every unsustained comparison: a spectacular rise under a tyrannical disciplinarian, followed by an equally spectacular decline when the disciplinarian stepped away, leaving behind no enduring culture of discipline, or when the disciplinarian himself became undisciplined and strayed wantonly outside the three circles. Yes, discipline is essential for great results, but disciplined action without disciplined understanding of the three circles cannot produce sustained great results.

Fanatical Adherence to the Hedgehog Concept

For nearly forty years, Pitney Bowes lived inside the warm and protective cocoon of a monopoly. With its close relationship to the U.S. Postal Service and its patents on postage meter machines, Pitney attained 100 percent of the metered mail market.39 By the end of the 1950s, nearly half of all U.S. mail passed through Pitney Bowes machines.40 With gross profit margins in excess of 80 percent, no competition, a huge market, and a recession-proof business, Pitney Bowes wasn’t so much a great company as it was a company with a great monopoly.

Then, as almost always happens to monopolies when the protective cocoon is ripped away, Pitney Bowes began a long slide. First came a consent decree that required Pitney Bowes to license its patents to competitors, royalty free.41 Within six years, Pitney Bowes had sixteen competitors.42 Pitney fell into a reactionary “Chicken Little/the sky is falling” diversification frenzy, throwing cash after ill-fated acquisitions and joint ventures, including a $70 million bloodbath (54 percent of net stockholders’ equity at the time) from a computer retail foray. In 1973, the company lost money for the first time in its history. It was shaping up to be just another typical case of a monopoly-protected company gradually falling apart once confronted with the harsh reality of competition.

Fortunately, a Level 5 leader named Fred Allen stepped in and asked hard questions that led to deeper understanding of Pitney’s role in the world. Instead of viewing itself as a “postage meter” company, Pitney came to see that it could be the best in the world at servicing the back rooms of businesses within the broader concept of “messaging.” It also came to see that sophisticated back-office products, like high-end faxes and specialized copiers, played right into its economic engine of profit per customer, building off its extensive sales and service network.

Allen and his successor, George Harvey, instituted a model of disciplined diversification. For example, Pitney eventually attained 45 percent of the high-end fax market for large companies, a hugely profitable cash machine.43 Harvey began a systematic process of investment in new technologies and products, such as the Paragon mail processor that seals and sends letters, and by the late 1980s, Pitney consistently derived over half its revenues from products introduced in the previous three years.44 Later, Pitney Bowes became a pioneer at linking backroom machines to the Internet, yet another opportunity for disciplined diversification. The key point is that every step of diversification and innovation stayed within the three circles.

After falling 77 percent behind the market from the consent decree to its darkest days in 1973, Pitney Bowes reversed course, eventually rising to over eleven times the market by the start of 1999. From 1973 to 2000, Pitney Bowes outperformed Coca-Cola, 3M, Johnson & Johnson, Merck, Motorola, Procter & Gamble, Hewlett-Packard, Walt Disney, and even General Electric. Can you think of any other company that emerged from the protective comfort of a monopoly cocoon to deliver this level of results? AT&T didn’t. Xerox didn’t. Even IBM didn’t.

Pitney Bowes illustrates what can happen when a company lacks the discipline to stay within the three circles and, conversely, what can happen when it regains that discipline.

The good-to-great companies at their best followed a simple mantra: “Anything that does not fit with our Hedgehog Concept, we will not do. We will not launch unrelated businesses. We will not make unrelated acquisitions. We will not do unrelated joint ventures. If it doesn’t fit, we don’t do it. Period.”

In contrast, we found a lack of discipline to stay within the three circles as a key factor in the demise of nearly all the comparison companies. Every comparison either (1) lacked the discipline to understand its three circles or (2) lacked the discipline to stay within the three circles.

R. J. Reynolds is a classic case. Until the 1960s, R. J. Reynolds had a simple and clear concept, built around being the best tobacco company in the United States—a position it had held for at least twenty-five years.45 Then in 1964, the Surgeon General’s Office issued its report that linked cigarettes with cancer, and R. J. Reynolds began to diversify away from tobacco as a defensive measure. Of course, all tobacco companies began to diversify at that time for the same reason, including Philip Morris. But R. J. Reynolds’ wanderings outside its three circles defied all logic.

R. J. Reynolds spent nearly a third of total corporate assets in 1970 to buy a shipping container company and an oil company (Sea-Land and Aminoil), the idea being to make money by shipping its own oil.46 Okay, not a terrible idea on its own. But what on earth did it have to do with R. J. Reynolds’ Hedgehog Concept? It was a wholly undisciplined acquisition that came about in part because Sea-Land’s founder was a close friend of R. J. Reynolds’ chairman.47

After pouring more than $2 billion into Sea-Land, the total investment nearly equaled the entire amount of net stockholders’ equity.48 Finally, after years of starving the tobacco business to funnel funds into the sinking ship business, RJR acknowledged failure and sold Sea-Land.49 One Reynolds grandson complained: “Look, these guys are the world’s best at making and selling tobacco products, but what do they know about ships or oil? I’m not worried about them going broke, but they look like country boys with too much cash in their pockets.”50

To be fair, Philip Morris did not have a perfect diversification record either, as evidenced by its failed purchase of 7UP. However, in stark contrast to R. J. Reynolds, Philip Morris displayed greater discipline in response to the 1964 surgeon general’s report. Instead of abandoning its Hedgehog Concept, Philip Morris redefined its Hedgehog Concept in terms of building global brands in not-so-healthy consumables (tobacco, beer, soft drinks, coffee, chocolate, processed cheese, etc.). Philip Morris’ superior discipline to stay within the three circles is one key reason why the results of the two companies diverged so dramatically after the 1964 report, despite the fact that they both faced the exact same industry opportunities and threats. From 1964 to 1989 (when R. J. Reynolds disappeared from public trading in a leveraged buyout), $1 invested in Philip Morris beat $1 invested in R. J. Reynolds by over four times.

Few companies have the discipline to discover their Hedgehog Concept, much less the discipline to build consistently within it. They fail to grasp a simple paradox: The more an organization has the discipline to stay within its three circles, 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.

It takes discipline to say “No, thank you” to big opportunities. The fact that something is a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” is irrelevant if it doesn’t fit within the three circles.

This notion of fanatical consistency relative to the Hedgehog Concept doesn’t just concern the portfolio of strategic activities. It can relate to the entire way you manage and build an organization. Nucor built its success around the Hedgehog Concept of harnessing culture and technology to produce steel. Central to the Nucor concept was the idea of aligning worker interests with management and shareholder interests through an egalitarian meritocracy largely devoid of class distinctions. Wrote Ken Iverson, in his 1998 book Plain Talk:

Inequality still runs rampant in most business corporations. I’m referring now to hierarchical inequality which legitimizes and institutionalizes the principle of “We” vs. “They.” . . . The people at the top of the corporate hierarchy grant themselves privilege after privilege, flaunt those privileges before the men and women who do the real work, then wonder why employees are unmoved by management’s invocations to cut costs and boost profitability. . . . When I think of the millions of dollars spent by people at the top of the management hierarchy on efforts to motivate people who are continually put down by that hierarchy, I can only shake my head in wonder.51

When we interviewed Ken Iverson, he told us that nearly 100 percent of the success of Nucor was due to its ability to translate its simple concept into disciplined action consistent with that concept. It grew into a $3.5 billion Fortune 500 company with only four layers of management and a corporate headquarters staff of fewer than twenty-five people—executive, financial, secretarial, the whole shebang—crammed into a rented office the size of a small dental practice.52 Cheap veneer furniture adorned the lobby, which itself was not much larger than a closet. Instead of a corporate dining room, executives hosted visiting dignitaries at Phil’s Diner, a strip mall sandwich shop across the street.53

Executives did not receive better benefits than frontline workers. In fact, executives had fewer perks. For example, all workers (but not executives) were eligible to receive $2,000 per year for each child for up to four years of post–high school education.54 In one incident, a man came to Marvin Pohlman and said, “I have nine kids. Are you telling me that you’ll pay for four years of school—college, trade school, whatever—for every single one of my kids?” Pohlman acknowledged that, yes, that’s exactly what would happen. “The man just sat there and cried,” said Pohlman. “I’ll never forget it. It just captures in one moment so much of what we were trying to do.”55

When Nucor had a highly profitable year, everyone in the company would have a very profitable year. Nucor workers became so well paid that one woman told her husband, “If you get fired from Nucor, I’ll divorce you.”56 But when Nucor faced difficult times, everyone from top to bottom suffered. But people at the top suffered more. In the 1982 recession, for example, worker pay went down 25 percent, officer pay went down 60 percent, and the CEO’s pay went down 75 percent.57

Nucor took extraordinary steps to keep at bay the class distinctions that eventually encroach on most organizations. All 7,000 employees’ names appeared in the annual report, not just officers’ and executives’.58 Everyone except safety supervisors and visitors wore the same color hard hats. The color of hard hats might sound trivial, but it caused quite a stir. Some foremen complained that special-colored hard hats identified them as higher in the chain, an important status symbol that they could put on the back shelves of their cars or trucks. Nucor responded by organizing a series of forums to address the point that your status and authority in Nucor come from your leadership capabilities, not your position. If you don’t like it—if you really feel you need that class distinction—well, then, Nucor is just not the right place for you.59

In contrast to Nucor’s dental suite–sized headquarters, Bethlehem Steel built a twenty-one-story office complex to house its executive staff. At extra expense, it designed the building more like a cross than a rectangle—a design that accommodated the large number of vice presidents who needed corner offices. “The vice presidents . . . [had to have] windows in two directions, so it was out of that desire that we came up with the design,” explained a Bethlehem executive.60 In his book Crisis in Bethlehem, John Strohmeyer details a culture as far to the other end of the continuum from Nucor as you can imagine. He describes a fleet of corporate aircraft, used even for taking executives’ children to college and flitting away to weekend hideaways. He describes a world-class eighteen-hole executive golf course, an executive country club renovated with Bethlehem corporate funds, and even how executive rank determined shower priority at the club.61

We came to the conclusion that Bethlehem executives saw the very purpose of their activities as the perpetuation of a class system that elevated them to elite status. Bethlehem did not decline in the 1970s and 1980s primarily because of imports or technology—Bethlehem declined first and foremost because it was a culture wherein people focused their efforts on negotiating the nuances of an intricate social hierarchy, not on customers, competitors, or changes in the external world.

From 1966 (at the start of its buildup) to 1999, Nucor posted thirty-four consecutive years of positive profitability, while over those same thirty-four years, Bethlehem lost money twelve times and its cumulative profitability added up to less than zero. By the 1990s, Nucor’s profitability beat Bethlehem’s every single year, and at the end of the century, Nucor—which had been less than a third the size of Bethlehem only a decade earlier— finally surpassed Bethlehem in total revenues.62 Even more astounding, Nucor’s average five-year profit per employee exceeded Bethlehem by almost ten times.63 And for the investor, $1 invested in Nucor beat $1 invested in Bethlehem Steel by over 200 times.

To be fair, Bethlehem had one giant problem not faced by Nucor: adversarial labor relations and entrenched unions. Nucor had no union and enjoyed remarkably good relations with its workers. In fact, when union organizers visited one plant, workers felt so ferociously loyal to Nucor that management had to protect the union organizers from workers who began shouting and throwing sand at them.64

But the union argument begs a crucial question: Why did Nucor have such a better relationship with its workers in the first place? Because Ken Iverson and his team had a simple, crystalline Hedgehog Concept about aligning worker interests with management interests and—most importantly—because they were willing to go to almost extreme lengths to build the entire enterprise consistent with that concept. Call them a bit fanatical if you want, but to create great results requires a nearly fanatical dedication to the idea of consistency within the Hedgehog Concept.

Start a “Stop Doing” List

Do you have a “to do” list?

Do you also have a “stop doing” list?

Most of us lead busy but undisciplined lives. We have ever-expanding “to do” lists, trying to build momentum by doing, doing, doing—and doing more. And it rarely works. Those who built the good-to-great companies, however, made as much use of “stop doing” lists as “to do” lists. They displayed a remarkable discipline to unplug all sorts of extraneous junk.

When Darwin Smith became CEO of Kimberly-Clark, he made great use of “stop doing” lists. He saw that playing the annual forecast game with Wall Street focused people too much on the short term, so he just stopped doing it. “On balance, I see no net advantage to our stockholders when we annually forecast future earnings,” said Smith. “We will not do it.”65 He saw “title creep” as a sign of class-consciousness and bureaucratic layering, so he simply unplugged titles. No one at the company would have a title, unless it was for a position where the outside world demanded a title. He saw increasing layers as the natural result of empire building. So he simply unplugged a huge stack of layers with a simple elegant mechanism: If you couldn’t justify to your peers the need for at least fifteen people reporting to you to fulfill your responsibilities, then you would have zero people reporting to you.66 (Keep in mind that he did this in the 1970s, long before it became fashionable.) To reinforce the idea that Kimberly-Clark should begin thinking of itself as a consumer company, not a paper company, he unplugged Kimberly from all paper industry trade associations.67

The good-to-great companies institutionalized the discipline of “stop doing” through the use of a unique budget mechanism. Stop and think for a moment: What is the purpose of budgeting? Most answer that budgeting exists to decide how much to apportion to each activity, or to manage costs, or both. From a good-to-great perspective, both of these answers are wrong.

In a good-to-great transformation, budgeting is a discipline to decide which arenas should be fully funded and which should not be funded at all. In other words, the budget process is not about figuring out how much each activity gets, but about determining which activities best support the Hedgehog Concept and should be fully strengthened and which should be eliminated entirely.

Kimberly-Clark didn’t just reallocate resources from the paper business to the consumer business. It completely eliminated the paper business, sold the mills, and invested all the money into the emerging consumer business.

I had an interesting conversation with some executives from a company in the paper business. It’s a good company, not yet a great one, and they had competed directly with Kimberly-Clark before Kimberly transformed itself into a consumer company. Out of curiosity, I asked them what they thought of Kimberly-Clark. “What Kimberly did is not fair,” they said.

“Not fair?” I looked quizzical.

“Oh, sure, they’ve become a much more successful company. But, you know, if we’d sold our paper business and become a powerful consumer company, we could have been great, too. But we just have too much invested in it, and we couldn’t have brought ourselves to do it.”

If you look back on the good-to-great companies, they displayed remarkable courage to channel their resources into only one or a few arenas. Once they understood their three circles, they rarely hedged their bets. Recall Kroger’s commitment to overturn its entire system to create superstores, while A&P clung to the “safety” of its older stores. Recall Abbott’s commitment to put the bulk of its resources into becoming number one in diagnostics and hospital nutritionals, while Upjohn clung to its core pharmaceutical business (where it could never be the best in the world). Recall how Walgreens exited the profitable food-service business and focused all its might into one idea: the best, most convenient drugstores. Recall Gillette and Sensor, Nucor and the mini-mills, Kimberly-Clark and selling the mills to channel all its resources into the consumer business. They all had the guts to make huge investments, once they understood their Hedgehog Concept.

The most effective investment strategy is a highly undiversified portfolio when you are right. As facetious as that sounds, that’s essentially the approach the good-to-great companies took. “Being right” means getting the Hedgehog Concept; “highly undiversified” means investing fully in those things that fit squarely within the three circles and getting rid of everything else.

Of course, the key here is the little caveat, “When you are right.” But how do you know when you’re right? In studying the companies, we learned that “being right” just isn’t that hard if you have all the pieces in place. 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 Council 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?

Chapter Summary

A Culture Of Discipline

Key Points

Sustained great results depend upon building a culture full of self-disciplined people who take disciplined action, fanatically consistent with the three circles.

Bureaucratic cultures arise to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline, which arise from having the wrong people on the bus in the first place. If you get the right people on the bus, and the wrong people off, you don’t need stultifying bureaucracy.

A culture of discipline involves a duality. On the one hand, it requires people who adhere to a consistent system; yet, on the other hand, it gives people freedom and responsibility within the framework of that system.

A culture of discipline is not just about action. It is about getting disciplined people who engage in disciplined thought and who then take disciplined action.

The good-to-great companies appear boring and pedestrian looking in from the outside, but upon closer inspection, they’re full of people who display extreme diligence and a stunning intensity (they “rinse their cottage cheese”).

Do not confuse a culture of discipline with a tyrant who disciplines—they are very different concepts, one highly functional, the other highly dysfunctional. Savior CEOs who personally discipline through sheer force of personality usually fail to produce sustained results.

The single most important form of discipline for sustained results is fanatical adherence to the Hedgehog Concept and the willingness to shun opportunities that fall outside the three circles.

Unexpected Findings

The more an organization has the discipline to stay within its three circles, with almost religious consistency, the more it will have opportunities for growth.

The fact that something is a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” is irrelevant, unless it fits within the three circles. A great company will have many once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.

The purpose of budgeting in a good-to-great company is not to decide how much each activity gets, but to decide which arenas best fit with the Hedgehog Concept and should be fully funded and which should not be funded at all.

“Stop doing” lists are more important than “to do” lists.

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