Stop Doing Lists

From Jim Collins, “Good to Great”, Fast Company, October 2001, published in the same month as his companion book Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… And Others Don’t (HarperBusiness, 2001). Collins frames the “stop doing” list as the third leg of the good-to-great framework, after disciplined people and disciplined thought: once a company has settled its Hedgehog Concept (what it can be best at, what drives its economic engine, what its people are deeply passionate about), the operative discipline is to stop doing anything that falls outside it. Collins later carried the same discipline into personal practice in his 2003 article “Best New Year’s Resolution? A ‘Stop Doing’ List,” posing the hypothetical of $20 million in the bank and ten years to live and asking what you would stop. The line appears in Chapter 6 of the book, “A Culture of Discipline,” in a section titled “Start a ‘Stop Doing’ List.”

To-do lists expand by default; every quarter brings more. Stop-doing lists do not. Someone has to decide, against pressure, that a running line of business or a long-funded project sits outside the Hedgehog, and let it go. Collins’s central example, given at length in the Fast Company essay, is Darwin Smith at Kimberly-Clark crystallizing the Hedgehog Concept around the consumer-paper business (the Kleenex brand was already best-in-the-world by company measure) and selling off the coated-paper mills that had been the company’s core for a hundred years, including the namesake mill in Kimberly, Wisconsin. Smith put the proceeds into a war chest for the consumer fight against Procter & Gamble and Scott Paper. Twenty-five years later Kimberly-Clark was the number-one paper-based consumer-products company in the world. The strategic act was the divestment; what came after was the consequence.