» Doing What Matters: How to Get Results That Make a Difference - The Revolutionary Old-School Approach

Doing What Matters: How to Get Results That Make a Difference - The Revolutionary Old-School Approach Reviews

Customer Rating:
Summary: What Matters? This Book.
Comment: I remain grateful to have worked, somewhat closely, with Mr. Kilts for twelve months at Kraft. DOING WHAT MATTERS succinctly describes Jim's management style.

What Matters, in this case, is how to make an enterprise more valuable for ALL -- customers, employees, vendors, shareholders, and community. (If only Jim had been ensconced at General Motors, I am sure that the whole Detroit area would be much better off today.)

Jim's approach is to sort through "all the clutter", find the heart of the business, prepare the best plans, and execute those plans timely. So far, that's Strategy 301.

Jim's genius, however, is in doing what many execs forget to do: get rid of "all the clutter".

That is, circle back around on company "initiatives" that, in the annual budget process or similar, didn't seem to jibe with What Matters, and just eliminate them... freeing money, time and attention for only What Matters.

This is an entertaining read, and a valuable tool to challenge C-level managers to find and work on What Matters in their businesses. Highly recommended.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Excellent resource from a highly respected CEO
Comment: The book is full of wisdom from one of the most respected CEOs today. Aside from mentioning Gilette's core products (Mach 3 and Duracell) of what seems like 150 times in a 300 page book, the book delievers on what it takes to be a good manager/executive.

He flatout says that persistent growth in the teens for consumer products industry is unsustainable. He thinks growth projections of around 5% is much more realisitic.

Here are some other excerpts:

1)Focus on increasing revenue, but just as importantly, on continually cutting costs. Use the extra cash flow for R&D and Marketing (developing consumer Brand).

2)First 100 days as a Executive/manager is crucial. Set few basic rules early such as intellectual integrity, cost cutting, and ablity to make good decisions will be rewarded.

3)People deal with unpleasant reality in phases (supported by Psychology). They are denial, resistence, acceptance, and action.

3)"Action must always be a top priority because one of the biggest issues at large corporations...is their proclivity for inaction". Status quo is rarely the answer.

4)Performance is what matters. Effort without performance is useless.

5)Leadership matters. Never hire jerks, especially for managers. Leaders must have intelligence and energy. Additionally, thy must have intellectual integrity, results, ability to make decisions, leadership (communication, team players, good listeners, ability to sell a cause), and ability to think conceptually.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: What goes on in a successful CEO's head
Comment: Many years ago, Patrick Rivett described his efforts to teach problem solving model building to his students as showing them "what goes on in an analyst's head when he is taken round a soap factory." You can describe Jim Kilts' Doing What Matters as "what goes on in an experienced CEO's head when he takes over a company that needs to turn around."

Hardly anyone has better credentials to write a book like this one. Kilts had an exemplary career in packaged goods. He was a successful CEO at Kraft and led turnarounds at Nabisco and Gillette.

When he took over at Gillette, the company had missed estimates for years. The stock had tanked, shedding 60 percent of its value. Even so, 65 percent of the executives received "exceeds expectations" evaluations. Every one of them thought their department or division was performing above average.

What would you do in a situation like that? This book is about what Jim Kilts did. The subtitle is really better than the title: "How to get results that make a difference--the revolutionary old-school approach."

The book is divided into four sections. The first is "Fundamentals, Attitudes, and People Matter." It's worth the price of the book all by itself.

Kilts starts, appropriately enough, with advice to focus on fundamentals. Unlike most management writers, though, he tells you what he thinks fundamentals are and how he focused on them when he approached the challenge at Gillette.

Throughout this section and the book there are dozens of bits of wisdom. Here are some.

"Key metrics will vary, but they always exist."

"The time that really matters is the work I do before the clock starts ticking on the first one hundred days."

"Most companies get into trouble not because they make world-class blunders, but due to a succession of well-intentioned yet flawed decisions that build on one another."

"If a company's cost structure is high, winning is almost impossible."

There are also valuable insights into concepts like cost-cutting. In most companies, cost cutting is something you do when you're in trouble, after which it's back to business as usual. For Kilts, Zero Overhead Growth (ZOG) is a way of life.

Throughout the other sections of the book, on Leadership, the Future, and doing the Right Thing, Kilts pounds away on certain critical principles.

Get the facts. Figure out what matters and concentrate on it. Face the truth.

Maintain momentum. Enthusiasm is for every day.

Act with discipline. Execute strategy. Control costs.

Only performance matters. Do not reward effort, only results.

There's wisdom and good advice all the way through this book, but, fortunately for you if you don't read books from cover to cover, most of the really good stuff is front-loaded. The first section is excellent.

The second and third are OK. But by the time you're wheeling into the chapter on "The Right Road Map," you'll find yourself getting weary of "strat plans" and "FE" and other klunky jargon. I found myself starting to scan about half way though. I hunted out the pearls of wisdom, but I didn't read every word.

You can skip section four. It's about the sale of Gillette to Proctor and Gamble. This section is Kilts turned whiner. He may have a case about how awful and unfair the Boston media were to him, but whatever lessons there are in this section simply get lost.

If you leave section four out, though, the book is extremely well done. I liked the bits of practical wisdom that I found throughout. I loved the use of examples from Kilts' entire career, not just the Gillette years. And I loved the fact that Kilts shares the spotlight and the credit with his team, advisors and mentors.

Buy and read this book if you're headed into a turnaround situation, if you're coming in from the outside to take over a company, or if you just want solid advice and well-told and well-chosen stories from someone who's got management street cred.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: interesting read
Comment: I liked the overall aspects of this book which describe certain business scenarios, the decisions made and why they were made, and then the outcomes. Interesting though that he did not cover any particular failures, or that he was light on details in some areas. Since it was such a quick read, I did not mind these shortcomings.

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Customer Rating:
Summary: Listening to a Leader
Comment: Writing as if speaking to MBA students, the former Gillette turnaround CEO, James Kilts, tells the story of his very successful consumer products career and passes along his experience-based marketing and leadership wisdom. From his introduction on quick screening options to his Zero Overhead Growth (ZOG) philosophy, he tells about events which shaped his successes, lavishes praise on the scores of executives and consultants he has worked with, and ends each chapter with a listing of what to do or not do. The book ends with Kilts' summary of things that matter:
* Growth matters
* Relationships matter
* Loyalty matters
* Small moments matter
* Timely decisions matter
* Doing what you enjoy matters
* Life's early lessons matter
* The right team matters
* Confronting reality matters

While the book is not an in-depth analysis of how-to succeed at any business, it presents many marketing lessons and a leadership process for a consumer products business from the perspective of a highly successful executive. In offering up his advice, Kilts comes across as decisive, competitively driven, demanding high performance standards, and very human - a good combination of traits for someone you would like to work for and learn from. Take the opportunity and learn from this book.

Dennis DeWilde, author of
"The Performance Connection"

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