W h y s o m e c o m p a n I e s m a k e t h e
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| A CULTURE, NOT AT YR ANT We almost didn't include this chapter in the book. On the one hand, the good-to-great companies became more disciplined than the direct parison companies, as with Wells in contrast to Bank of America. On the other hand, the unsustained comparisons showed themselves to be just as disciplined as the good-to-great companies, Based on my analysis, I don't think we can put discipline in the book as a finding" said Eric after he completed a special analysis unit looking at the leadership cultures across the companies. "It is absolutely clear that the unsustained comparison brought tremendous discipline to their companies, and that is why they got such great initial results. So, discipline just doesn't pass muster as a distinguishing variable" Curious, we decided to look further into the issue, and Eric undertook a more in-depth analysis. As we further examined the evidence, it became clear that-despite surface appearances-there was indeed a huge ence between the two sets of companies in their approach to discipline. Collins Consider Ray MacDonald, who took command of Burroughs in 1964. A brilliant but abrasive man, MacDonald controlled the conversations, I told all the jokes, and criticized those not as smart as he (which was pretty much everyone around him. He got things done through sheer force of personality, using a form of pressure that came to be known as "The MacDonald MacDonald produced remarkable results during his reign. Every dollar invested in 1964, the year he became president, and taken out at the end of 1977, when he retired, produced returns 6.6 times better than the general However, the company had no culture of discipline to endure beyond him. After he retired, his helper minions were frozen by indecision, leaving the company, according to Business Week, "with an inability to do Burroughs then began along slide, with cumulative returns falling 93 percent below the market from the end of the MacDonald era to 2000. We found a similar story at Rubbermaid under Stanley Gault. Recall Download 3.69 Mb. Share with your friends:
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