Download Doing What Matters: How to Get Results That Make a Difference AudioBook Free
When Warren Buffett was asked why the Gillette board of directors chose Jim Kilts to be CEO, he said, “Jim made all the sense in conditions of talking about business as anybody I’ve ever talked to. In the event that you pay attention to Jim analyze an enterprise situation you get zero baloney. And, frankly, finding someone like that is a rarity.”
There is only one CEO recently that has faced—and succeeded at—the extraordinary challenges of leading three major companies—Gillette, Nabisco, and Kraft—into prosperous futures by doing what counts on the fundamentals.
That CEO is Jim Kilts. With 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 in fact the dependence on 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 in early stages at Gillette, it was in the beginning shelved because “everyone knew you couldn’t sell a red razor,” but continued to become one of Gillette’s biggest marketing successes ever.
Jim Kilts’s concentrate on both business fundamentals and personal attributes provides the “complete package,” showing ways to get results that produce a difference through:
• Intellectual integrity: The capability to face the unvarnished truth about yourself as well as your business and using what you observe as the basis for action.
• Generating emotional engagement and enthusiasm: While 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 problem 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 can be an astonishing exemplory case of getting the rubber to meet the road—with enormous advantages 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 found in the buyer products industry for obtaining better, faster, and more complete results than the competition.
Whether you’re CEO of an multibillion-dollar global company, the brand manager for something, a business owner starting a small business, or just beginning a profession, Doing What Matters provides the practical ideas that get results—ranging from every day one action plan for starting a new job to a chorus of cheers and support to an application of total innovation which involves everyone in changes from small to “big bang.”
