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26 of 33 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Flip that Company, September 17, 2007
What really matters to Kilts is the P&L. Interesting watching Flip this House, where they find neglected, undervalued properties then rip out sections, cut down trees, paint, touch up, add cosmetic touches and then sell for a profit. Reading Kilts Kilt's book, somehow reminded me of the show. "Let me tell you how I flipped two distressed properties", Nabisco and Gillette. "The prior management screwed up, but I saved them. Let me tell you how".
At the same time, I have also started reading "What Really Matters - Service, Leadership, People & Values", by John Pepper from P&G. These two books seem to provide a very interesting contrast between Kilts the Manager and Pepper the Leader. I'll come back to this contrast later.
Overall, I find Kilts book a tough read, drab, bouncing topics and oft repeating. At times it drifts into irrelevant details, not tightly linked to the point of the chapter. For example while discussing the need for intellectual integrity; he drifts to telling us about his invention of Country Time Lemonade and Crystal Light. It could have benefited from better editing for readability and flow. I find it hard to guess what Lorber and Manfredi added, other than writing and maybe analogies like boiling frogs?
Content:
Kilts' is a proven excellent manager of the P&L and in his book reminds us of a number of very valid business basics, which amazingly some CEOs forget. Kilts' book discusses the fundamental that the P&L needs to be controlled and highlights the disasters of companies (Nabisco and Gillette) who lost sight of a disciplined P&L and focus on building brands. Using examples from Kraft, Nabisco and Gillette, he highlights fundamentals:
* Consumer products are about building brands
* Benchmark the best in class for a couple key measures
* Accountability - hold yourself and others to achieve those measures.
* Market share on key brands matters
* Control overhead
* Control capital spending
* Control working capital and capital spending
* Control cash flow
* The need for growth to survive
* The need for major innovations to survive long term
He also reminds us of deadly business sins:
* Ballooning overhead
* Building siloed kingdoms. My function does its job great, if only everyone was as good as my function, we would not have problems
* Trade loading to hit quarter and annual numbers
* Trade promotions out of control - trade push vs. consumer pull
* Cut advertising spending to hit quarter and annual numbers
* Keep adding meaningless SKU's to push volume
* Assign innovation to be only the realm of a few, instead of all
* Managing & deciding based on opinions instead of business facts
Kilts also emphasizes the basic control principals:
* Hold people accountable to know and meet their numbers
* Analyze your numbers, know the details. Data based decisions
* Institute controlled processes for your key business activities, in all functions
* Corporate wide, integrated strategic planning with 3 year horizons
* Annual plans
* Quarterly plans, with updates and revisions
* Weekly staff meetings to review the results and measures in detail.
Contrasting vs. John Pepper's book
Things I find missing in Kilts What Matters, as contrasted to John Pepper discussions in his book on "What Really Matters". Pepper makes very valid leadership points on the importance of:
* People are key
* Stakeholders other than top shareholders
* Value of and respect for diversity
* Family
* Community
* Really wanting to serve consumers and seeing the value in that service
* Importance of Quality
* A balanced life - Kilts often notes with pride, his Sunday staff meetings
* Change is a fact. The adaptability is key.
* A passionate sense of ownership
* Company ownership by employees
I find reading Pepper refreshing and inspiring. Reading Kilts makes me tired and leaves me feeling empty - there must be more to life than this?
Other notes on Kilts book:
A specific contrast example of the Manager, comes in Kilts Kilts chapter 4 on Enthusiasm. Reading Kilt's Chapter 4, I understand his view that enthusiasm consists of:
* Cutting costs
* Create acronyms for cutting costs "ZOG"
* Spend enormous time preparing Power Point presentations
The book leaves an overall impression of, "I saved the day from the incompetents who ran it into the ground before me". It comes across often as "look at what I created (red razor)", "what I did"
Chapter 13 is used by Kilts a chance to vent some frustration against William Galvin, Secretary of State for Mass. ("that self serving political hack") and the local papers. They try to fit this in a discussion of political and media relations, but it is forced and comes across as sour gapes.
Net
What really matters to Kilts is managing the P&L. You can flip a neglected, undervalued property by fixing the P&L. Maybe good for a short term investment, but I would not want my kids to work there? Reading Kilts made me tired and left me empty - is that all there is to life? I couldn't get through it fast enough and definitely won't pick it up again. I look forward to spending more time on John Peppers book.
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14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Vision without execution is hallucination" (Thomas Edison), September 24, 2007
As I began to read this book, I was reminded of an observation by Peter Drucker in 1963: "There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all." That observation should be kept in mind by those who assign work as well as those who are then expected to do it ("to do more and better work in less time and at a lower cost," etc.) With the assistance of John Manfredi and Robert Lorber, James Kilts has written a book in which he shares what he has learned from his business career thus far, especially from his years as CEO of Kraft, Nabisco, and Gillette. The book's title would even more accurately indicate his core business principles if it were "Do Well What Really Matters" or "Do Well What Matters Most" but the subtitle is just fine: "How to Get Results That Make a Difference - The Revolutionary Old School Approach." The inclusion of the word "revolutionary" is intentional and its appropriateness best revealed within Kilts's narrative.
In the city where I live, we have a number of outdoor markets at which slices of fresh fruit are offered as samples of the produce available. In that same spirit, I frequently include brief excerpts from a book to help those who red my review to get a "taste." Here is a representative selection of Kilts's insights from his years as a CEO:
"You not only have to sort out what you should pay attention to and what you should ignore, you must do so with [begin italics] revolutionary [end italics] speed and decisiveness. Yet, even with disaster staring them in the face, people from the lowest to the highest levels in many organizations often prefer to `rearrange the deck chairs.' They'll give lip service to stepping up performance, but in practice they go about business as usual." (Page 3)
"During my tenure at Kraft, we developed something called IMI - Integrated Marketing Intelligence - which gave us state-of-the-art insights into our brands, their categories, and consumer dynamics; how responsive they were to different forms of advertising and promotion; how much spending was optimal; and much more that will be explored later [in this book]. When we spent marketing dollars at Kraft, we were truly [begin italics] investing [end italics] in brand building." (Page 94)
"A company must function like a finely tuned engine of a racecar. It must not only have all the right components - injectors, valves, pistons, and the like - but each element must also be connected with all the others, and the timing and movement of all components must be absolutely in synch. Even the slightest miss in timing will result in poor performance." (Page 149)
"Many managers fail because they have a punch list of all the individual elements and when they see check marks against them, they assume the heavy lifting is over. Actually, the opposite is true. The heaviest lifting comes when all of the individual pieces are in place and you must make them work together to drive the company toward its objectives. At this point you need the right road map." (Pages 213-214)
Note: Kilts explains how to formulate such a "road map" in Chapter 11.
"Making the tough decision to fire someone, and doing it promptly, is something that I took to heart early on. Terminating someone is tough, but it doesn't get any easier if you put it off. Once you make the decision to fire someone, you start sending out signals, consciously or unconsciously, that are difficult to ignore. The intended employee's time on the job may be prolonged, but it will not be quality time, so say the least. If you level with someone, a termination or separation can be positive. Unless you are dealing with a bad actor, people lose their jobs because their position has become redundant or unnecessary, or because the person's individual skills are a mis-match for the position." (Page 288)
In the next to last chapter, "Politicians and Media Matter," the book's narrative sags somewhat as Kilts expresses his irritation with the Boston news media's coverage of the purchase of Gillette by Procter & Gamble, notably the Boston Globe's coverage that he characterizes as "piling on" big business and its leaders. In particular, he cites an op-ed article by Jack Falvey in which he shares a number of opinions about Gillette that were "unfounded and untrue." Kilts acknowledges the importance of the news media and concludes the chapter with some sound advice as to how to conduct effective press relations.
I agree with Kilts that "continuous dissatisfaction with the status quo is the best way to keep growing as an individual and an organization, or company." (Andrew Grove expresses essentially the same idea when explaining why "only the paranoid survive.") To me, the greatest strength of this book is its focus on real-world situations, especially those that involve a serious challenge, when it is imperative to determine what really matters (i.e. what is most important) and then concentrate on doing it well, thoroughly and consistently, to achieve the desired results, whatever those results may be. If some view this approach as being "old school" and obsolete, so be it.
Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Noel M. Tichy and Warren G. Bennis' Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls, Gary Hamel's The Future of Management, Ram Charan's Know-How: The 8 Skills That Separate People Who Perform from Those Who Don't, The Knowing-Doing Gap: How Smart Companies Turn Knowledge into Action and Hard Facts Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense: Profiting From Evidence-Based Management by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton, Pfeffer's What Were They Thinking?: Unconventional Wisdom About Management, and The Leader of the Future2 co-edited by Frances Hesselbein and Marshall Goldsmith.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What goes on in a successful CEO's head, February 15, 2008
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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