James Kilts was the first outsider to become CEO of Gillette in 70 years. He was brought in to do a turnaround. Like many great executives, Kilts possessed the ability to cut through the noise to focus on the small handful of things that truly mattered. Unlike most great executives, though, Kilts took time to explain how he did this, in his 2007 book Doing What Matters.
From this case study, I understand what potential options Jim Kilts nixed quickly. But I’m not really grasping what problems he didn’t focus on, which seems to be the point of the case. What problems did he assert were second-order? Detailed marketing analyses (was that a problem)?
The one area that’s I assume was not a focus was appeasing Wall Street analysts. And I suppose appeasing Gillette institutionalists by going slow.@cedric can you elaborate on what “others-assumed-were-burning-problems-but-probably-weren’t” problems he didn’t focus on, and how he decided those were “non-priorities”?
I agree that identifying the non-priorities is one of the important skills to master, but … it’s also an exceptionally hard skill. It’s an area I’d like to get better as a business decision maker.
Unfortunately he didn’t say in the book. I wish he did, but on the other hand I don’t think it would’ve been that useful. One of the things about such ability is that it is domain specific. You need skill to be able to tell the difference between what matters in your business, and what doesn’t. Kilts’s intuitions was for the FMCG industry. I thought that Kilts’s book was a brave attempt at communicating this skill, but I think he still ultimately fell short. I think nobody can accurately communicate how to build this skill.
I’ll give you a concrete example from my own background, which I think illustrates this.
This thread is public (because its in the ‘blog comments’ category) so I will post it in a new thread.