Like great thinkers, who take complexities and boil them down into simple, yet profound, ideas (Adam Smith and the invisible hand, Darwin and evolution), leaders of good-to-great companies develop a Hedgehog Concept that is simple but that reflects penetrating insight and deep understanding. When you put these two complementary forces togetherâa culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurshipâyou get a magical alchemy of superior performance and sustained results. JD Vance’s Sister: Lindsay’s Shocking Appalachian Childhood. The comparison companies often tried to jump right to disciplined action. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline.” Jim Collins suggests these steps to attaining the Good to Great business model: Disciplined People, Disciplined Thought, and Disciplined Action. As a general definition, discipline in an organization means a fanatical devotion to hedgehog thinking—the use of the three circles for any action and constant referral to the Hedgehog Concept. Only one—Pitney Bowes—reacted with hedgehog thinking (but not without some hiccups). By Brian ChernettGetting from good to great is a matter of finding the right formula for the business. Smart, practical tools that you can download, put into practice and get support and accountability as you up-level your wellbeing in an amazing community of like-minded women. Good-to-great companies get the right people—i.e., disciplined people—on the bus first, and so there’s little need for tight management. What is a culture of discipline? In a good-to-great company, managers at every level employ the three circles and refer repeatedly to the Hedgehog Concept. Most importantly, you need the discipline to persist in the search for understanding until you get your Hedgehog Concept. And, most important, he stopped producing paper, switching the company’s core business over to consumer goods in accordance with his Hedgehog Concept. However, discipline in the unsustained comparisons turned out to correlate with the tenures of forceful, abrasive leaders who imposed discipline tyrannically. Shortform has the world's best summaries of books you should be reading. If you liked this blog, you will lovelovelove my Coaching Academy! Lack of planning, lack of accounting, lack of systems, and lack of hiring constraints create friction. Amanda received her Master's Degree in Education from the University of Pennsylvania. In contrast, when comparison companies had disciplined cultures, that discipline was imposed from the top-down with the executive serving as disciplinarian, rather than through a general culture permeating the whole organization. That is a real a team effort with proper (Level 5) leadership and a simple (Hedgehog) concept. Your email address will not be published. A culture of discipline a perfect example of having the right people on the bus. Even as the company lost over $1.5 billion over three years, executives refused to sell the corporate jet. Indeed, discipline by itself will not produce great results. 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 incompetence and lack of discipline, which then further drives the right people away, and so forth. The book was a bestseller, selling four million copies and going far beyond the traditional audience of business books. No, the point is to first get self-disciplined people who engage in very rigorous thinking, who then take disciplined action within the framework of a consistent system designed around the Hedgehog Concept. A culture of discipline is a workplace culture in which everyone gauges his or her actions according to the company’s common goal. Culture of Discipline is a concept developed in the book, Greatness Is A Matter of Conscious Choice and Discipline, The Role of Strategic Planning as a Mechanism for Disciplined Thought, Manager's Journal: High Returns Amid Low Expectations.