Stop Doing List

Jim Collins, author of “Good to Great”, “Built to Last” and “Beyond Entrepreneurship” to name just three of his many books has carried out one of the most comprehensive research studies into Leadership.

He calls the most effective Leaders “Level 5” and whilst they have many differences there are some similarities that are worth noting given their cumulative record. One of these is what Jim calls a “Stop Doing List”.

He highlights that Level 5 Leaders stop doing these two things:

1. They stop the projects launched with good intention that after a period become distractions from the main thing. I observe that they terminate faster than they instigate. Peter Drucker used to ask, “if it was the decision today to enter this business/hire that person/put this structure in place, given what we now know, would we do it?”

2. They regularly shrink their number of priorities to a maximum of three. I’ve previously suggested there should be only one priority, but I’ll bow to Jim’s wisdom and revise to say a maximum of three.

When it came to analysing what they did invest their time doing, number one by far was an obsession to find the very best people. Only by doing this in Jim’s opinion will a business have lasting endurance.

If you look back over the last 3-6 months, how much of your time has been spent on new “shiny” projects and managing a 20+ item To Do List compared with searching for talent?


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