TEN THINGS GREAT ORGANIZATIONS DO

What makes a company GREAT

            1. Select people who have the capacity to move the organization to greatness
            2. Clearly articulate the purpose of the organization
            3. Create a shared vision that is compelling for all stakeholders
            4. Embed purpose, vision and goals holographicly into the total system and its parts
            5. Relentlessly pursue goals while remaining flexible to changes in the environment
            6. Emphasize continuous learning for all
            7. Demonstrate empathy for all stakeholders
            8. Build a culture that is both tight (directed) and loose (autonomy)
            9. Disperse leadership into all levels of the organization
            10. Commit to helping improve the world

 

Copyright by TargetSuccess, Inc 2013

Disciplined action: The “Stop Doing” list

excerpt from Jim Collins Good to GreatGood To Great

 

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

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