Summary

When Warren Buffett was asked why the Gillette board of directors chose Jim Kilts to be CEO, he said, “Jim made as much sense in terms of talking about business as anybody I’ve ever talked to. If you listen to Jim analyze a business situation you get absolutely no baloney. And, frankly, finding someone like that is a rarity.”

There is only one CEO in recent times who has faced—and succeeded at—the extraordinary challenges of leading three major companies—Gillette, Nabisco, and Kraft—into prosperous futures by doing what matters on the fundamentals.

That CEO is Jim Kilts. In this vivid first-person account he reveals his system for success that is both cutting-edge and back-to-basics. Doing What Matters—the action plan for identifying and tackling what’s important and ignoring the rest—is the key to winning in a warp-speed world where the need for revolutionary speed and decisiveness increases by the day.

Kilts illustrates his ideas with colorful stories, such as “that little red razor.” A new product idea he proposed early on at Gillette, it was initially shelved because “everyone knew you couldn’t sell a red razor,” but went on to become one of Gillette’s biggest marketing successes ever.

Jim Kilts’s focus on both business fundamentals and personal attributes provides the “complete package,” showing how to get results that make a difference through:

• Intellectual integrity: The ability to face the unvarnished truth about yourself and your business and using what you see as the basis for action.

• Generating emotional engagement and enthusiasm: Using the force of your personality and ideas to infuse people and an entire organization with a sense of purpose and mission.

• Action: Gillette, with just five product lines, had over 20,000 SKUs. After studying the issue for over two years, there were still 20,000. How Kilts got Gillette off the dime to pare down the number to 7,000 almost overnight is an astonishing example of getting the rubber to meet the road—with enormous benefits to the business.

• Understanding the right things through an overarching concept to frame and filter issues: For Jim Kilts it was Total Brand Value, the framework he used in the consumer products industry for achieving better, faster, and more complete results than the competition.

Whether you’re CEO of a multibillion-dollar global company, the brand manager for a product, an entrepreneur starting a small business, or just beginning a career, Doing What Matters provides the practical ideas that get results—ranging from a day one action plan for starting a new job to a chorus of cheers and support to a program of total innovation that involves everyone in changes from small to “big bang.”

Author Biography

JAMES M. KILTS, a founding partner of the private equity firm Centerview Partners, previously was chairman and CEO of the Gillette Company and prior to that CEO of Nabisco and Kraft. He has been a visiting lecturer and executive-in-residence at the University of Chicago, where he established the James M. Kilts Center for Marketing at the Graduate School of Business.

JOHN F. MANFREDI, managing partner of Manloy Associates, formerly was senior vice president of investor relations and corporate affairs at the Gillette Company and prior to that executive vice president at Nabisco.

ROBERT L. LORBER is president and CEO of the Lorber Kamai Consulting Group and associate professor at the University of California at Davis.

From the Hardcover edition.

Introduction "I Think You're Going to Get Fired"	p. 1
Fundamentals, Attitudes, And People Matter
How Do You Know What Really Matters?	p. 13
Focusing on Fundamentals Matters	p. 23
Intellectual Integrity Matters	p. 43
Enthusiasm Matters	p. 61
Action Matters	p. 80
Understanding the Right Things Matters	p. 98
Leadership Matters
The Right Team Matters	p. 121
Leadership Process Matters	p. 148
The First Day Matters	p. 174
Ignoring What Matters-Enter the Circle of Doom	p. 192
The Future Matters
The Right Road Map Matters	p. 213
Thinking for the Long Term Matters	p. 231
Doing The Right Things Mutters
Politicians and Media Matter	p. 259
Learning Matters-Reflections on a Career of Being Continuously Dissatisfied	p. 279
AppendiX: Gillette Financial Metrics, 2001-2005	p. 297
Acknowledgments	p. 303
Index	p. 307
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.

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Excerpts

Chapter 1

How Do You Know What Really Matters?

One of the first phone calls I received when news broke about my becoming Gillette’s new CEO was from a Boston-based business associate. “Jim, I know a lot of Gillette executives, and my advice is go slow.” Gillette people don’t like outsiders, he said, which is why the company last had an outside CEO seventy years ago, and he failed miserably. “Give people time to get to know you before you start changing things,” my friend said. “It’s the best approach you can take.”

That call was followed by many more, along with dozens of proposals from professionals, including consultants, bankers, compensation specialists, and sales motivation experts. Each had a plan or recommendation that should receive my top priority if I wanted to succeed at Gillette.

With all that advice, how do you decide what matters?

One of the biggest impediments to success in business—for individuals and companies—is the failure to achieve that understanding.

Whether you’re the CEO of a multibillion-dollar company, the brand manager for a struggling product, a director of human resources, or an entrepreneur starting your own business, you’re always confronted with an insurmountable amount of information and a number of options, conflicting opinions, and management theories that are as endless as they are confusing.

Making these decisions isn’t a job for the timid or weak of heart. It takes guts to say these are the things that really matter; I’ll pay absolutely no attention to the rest. That’s the challenge everyone faces. This book helps you meet that challenge.

You’re always confronted with an insurmountable amount of information and possible options.

$40 Billion of LosT Value With No End In Sight

For example, I faced no bigger challenge than the decisions we made during my first months at Gillette. Early in 2001, the company had missed its earnings estimates for fifteen straight quarters. Sales and earnings had been flat for the prior four years. Market shares were declining sharply. Advertising spending, the lifeline of consumer products, had been slashed year after year. Overhead costs were high and growing. And competition was intensifying.

Wall Street had lost patience with this chronic under- performance. And Gillette’s share price reflected the disappointment. It had fallen from an all-time high of $64.25 in March of 1999 to $24.50 in 2001. That’s a 62 percent drop in two years—a loss in market capitalization of close to $40 billion, and there was no end in sight.

So it’s no surprise that analysts and investors had plenty of ideas for what had to be done. The problem was that no two suggestions were the same, and many were conflicting. It was up to me to decide which ones really mattered. Or whether it was better to put aside the advice and chart a different course.

Multiple Options, No Simple Answers

These wouldn’t be simple decisions. And they would make the difference between whether Gillette would survive and prosper, or continue its unrelenting decline. Here are some of the suggestions that were being offered. Many would result in a corporate yard sale.

• Divest the ailing Duracell business. This was a $2 billion business that Gillette had spent around $8 billion dollars to purchase just four years before. The post-acquisition performance had been miserable. Duracell had gone from one of the best-performing brands in the consumer products sector to a true basket case. Its market share had slipped by almost 15 percent—from 46 to 40 percent of the alkaline-battery market in the United States. And the competitive pressure was mounting. So on the face of it, selling the Duracell business and cutting any further losses seemed like a pretty good idea.

Excerpted from Doing What Matters: How to Get Results That Make a Difference - The Revolutionary Old-School Approach by James M. Kilts, Robert Lorber, John F. Manfredi
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.