Strategic Discipline Blog

How do you achieve success in a rapidly changing industry and economic environment?

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Topics: Great by Choice, SMaC Recipe, SMaC, Thrive in Uncertainty & Chaos

In Great by Choice Jim Collins asks and answers: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not?

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Topics: Great by Choice, Productive Paranoia, Effective Leadership, Leadership Core Behavior, Core Behaviors, Leadership Decisions

Have you wanted to move your company from Good to Great?  Jim Collins offered 12 Questions to help you do exactly that at the recent Australian Growth Summit. 

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Topics: Good to Great, Great by Choice, 10Xers, Fire bullets then Cannonballs, Productive Paranoia, Jim Collins 12 Questions, Clock Building, Return on Luck, How the Mighty Fall,

How important do you value discipline in your organization?  How much thought if any do you give to it? 

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Topics: Discipline, Good to Great, Great by Choice, Discipline Plan, Culture of Discipline, Rockefeller Habits Checklist, Scaling Up Verne Harnish

It may be natural that two of my favorite stories from Good to Great and Great by Choice are two level five leaders who survived cancer, since overcoming Leukemia and going through a Bone Marrow Transplant have been a defining moment in my life.  Much of my esteem for Intel’s Andy Grove is written in Great by Choice 10Xer’s Empirical Creativity – Andy Grove Intel.  The blog outlines Grove’s approach to his discovery of prostate cancer.  Instead of relying on others people for cues on how to proceed, Grove looked for empirical evidence/creativity.  Empirical Evidence is one of the three Core Behaviors Collins found Great By Choice 10xers had in common.  These behaviors help balance the continuous uncertainty they face, that they cannot control, cannot accurately predict, which are coupled with the significant aspects of the world around them, versus rejecting the idea that these forces outside their control or chance events determine their results; they accept full responsibility for their own fate.

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Topics: Great by Choice, Clarity of Purpose, Level 5 Leadership, Level Five Ambition, Andy Grove, Darwin Smith, Clarity

This week I reintroduce the concept of SMaC to one of my customers in our Trimester Planning meeting.  SMaC stands for Simple, Methodical and Consistent, as presented in Great by Choice by Jim Collins.  I was struck by the irony SMaC reveals about successful companies.  Most everyone acknowledges how difficult it is to accomplish change.  Yet in Great by Choice their research discovered that poor performing companies change frequently, while great companies change less often. At a scale of 4 to 1.   

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Topics: Discipline, Great by Choice, 10Xers, change, SMaC Recipe, SMaC

The book Essentialism confronts the notion that we can have it all while supporting the idea less is more.  There is a common theme that underlies its principles. It’s a requirement for success in any endeavor.  That prerequisite is discipline.

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Topics: Business Growth, Strategic Discipline, Great by Choice, One Page Strategic Plan, less is more, strategy, Southwest Airlines

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Topics: Great by Choice, 10Xers, Best Business Practices, Level Five Ambition, Productive Paranoia

When Andy Grove, CEO of Intel, discovered in 1994 that he may have a tumor the size of a cube of sugar growing in his prostate gland he didn’t take the immediate step his doctor suggested. Visit his urologist. 

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Topics: Discipline, Great by Choice, 10Xers, leadership, Culture of Discipline, Best Business Practices, 4 Disciplines of Execution, Empirical Creativity

Are you like me wondering what Level Five Ambition looks like?  Do you wonder if you have the makeup to have it?  Is it something to aspire to? If it is, can you develop the characteristics and habits to achieve it?

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Topics: Great by Choice, fanatic discipline, Level 5 Leadership, Level Five Ambition