Lead Worship

Good to Great: Chapter 6 – A Culture of Discipline

Posted on February 14th, 2009 by Brian Sparks.
Categories: Good to Great, Leadership.

“Freedom is only part of the story and half the truth…That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplanted by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.” – Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (page 120).

“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 the incompetence and lack of discipline, which then further drives the right people away, and so forth” (page 121).

“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” (page 122).

responsibility accounting (page 123).

Build a culture full of people who take disciplined action within the three circles, fanactically consistent with the Hedgehog Concept.

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 exreme lengths to fulfill their responsibilities.
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 tree circles. Equally important, create a ’stop doing list’ and systematically unplug anything extraneous.” (page 123-124)

“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” (page 125).

“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 patyh 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 the 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 marhed right into disaster, with precision and in nicely formed lines. No, the point is to first get self-disciplined people who engage in very regorous thinking, who then take disciplined action within the framework of a consistent system designed around the Hedgehog Concept” (page 126).

“People in the good-to-great companies became somewhate extreme in the fulfillment of their responsibilties, bordering en some cases on fanaticism” (page 127).

“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” (page 128).

“Everyone whould 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” (page 128).

“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” (page 136).

“Most of us lead busy but undisciplined lives. We have ever-expanding ‘todo’ lists, thrying 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” (page 139).

“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 no 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” (page 140).

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