Collins’: Culture of Discipline

This post continues our 8-part review of Jim Collins Good-to-Great research

Jim Collins describes the work he and his research team did to publish the book Good to Great Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t in an article on his web site. He wrote “Start with 1,435 good companies. Examine their performance over 40 years. Find the 11 companies that became great. Now here's how you can do it too. Lessons on eggs, flywheels, hedgehogs, buses, and other essentials of business that can help you transform your company”.

I feel that studying Good to Great will enhance your career. Understanding and applying the principles he discovered will improve your supervision, management, and leadership. I share these 8 posts to tickle your fancy to read more. I hope you take the time to do so.

Building a Culture of Discipline

Collins states on pages 123-124 “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:

1. Build a culture around the idea of freedom and responsibility, within a framework
2. 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’
3. Don’t confuse a culture of discipline with a tyrannical disciplinarian
4. 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”.

Discipline Based on Previous Good-to-Great Elements

You find the keys to building a culture of discipline in the previous good-to-great elements.

• Getting the right people in the right seats on the bus “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. “
• Establishing the Hedgehog Concept provided a foundation
• “Everyone would like to be the best, but most organizations lack the Discipline to figure out with egoless clarity what they can be best at and the will do whatever it takes to turn that potential into reality. They lack the discipline to ‘rinse their cottage cheese’” (an analogy from an Iron Man athlete who would try to gain an edge in the competition by washing excess fat from his non-fat cottage cheese diet).
• “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.’”
• “It takes discipline to say ‘No, thank you’ to big opportunities. The fact that something is a ‘once-in-lifetime opportunity’ is irrelevant if it doesn’t fit within the three circles.”

Collins concludes this chapter “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 thing?”

A very good question. One that you must ask yourself in building your career. Good luck with finding the answer. Let us know what you discover.

Join us Wednesday to explore what Jim Collins discovered about technology accelerators