Cost-Cutting? Not So Fast | Big Think

Cost-Cutting? Not So Fast

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To prepare for the next calamity, business strategist Jim Collins suggests being “fanatically disciplined” all of the time, not just during tumult.

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Jim Collins:

Jim's book, GOOD TO GREAT: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... And Others Don't, attained long-running positions on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Business Week best seller lists, has sold 3 million hardcover copies since publication and has been translated into 35 languages, including such languages as Latvian, Mongolian and Vietnamese.

His most recent book, HOW THE MIGHTY FALL: And Why Some Companies Never Give In, was published on May 19, 2009.

Jim began his research and teaching career on the faculty at Stanford Graduate School of Business. In 1995, he founded a management laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, where he now conducts research and teaches executives from the corporate and social sectors.

Jim has served as a teacher to senior executives and CEOs at over a hundred corporations. He has also worked with social sector organizations, such as: Johns Hopkins Medical School, the Girl Scouts of the USA, the Leadership Network of Churches, the American Association of K-12 School Superintendents, and the United States Marine Corps. In 2005 he published a monograph: Good to Great and the Social Sectors.

In addition, Jim is an avid rock climber and has made one-day ascents of the North Face of Half Dome and the Nose route on the South Face of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley. He continues to climb at the 5.13 grade.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question - Where should companies look to cut costs?

Jim Collins: One of the critical things to understand about cost is that truly great cost enterprises understand that cost is cultural. It is not structural. It’s not a matter of cutting out a little cost here and a little cost there. That’s a very undisciplined approach to cost. The true approach to cost is to basically when times are good, when times are robust, when time things are going well, you need to have the discipline to hold your cost in line such that when difficult times come, they’re already in line.

Take a great company like Southwest Airlines. And what’s very interesting about Southwest is they’re low cost in good times and bad times. And then that’s what gives them the advantage now. So here’s the key lesson. The question is not where do we cut cost today. That’s an easy question and financial people can figure that out.

The really question is, “How do we build a culture of discipline such that when we return to prosperity?” and we will return to prosperity that is what American business knows how to do. We will return to prosperity. When we do, will you have built a culture of discipline that is fanatic around cost when prosperity returns such that when the next calamity comes you’ve already done it, because it’s part of your DNA, not a function of circumstance?

Keep in mind, you cannot control prices except in very few circumstances. And you can control costs. So, therefore, in a world out of control you have to manage what you can control, which means that over time, cost discipline has to be an ongoing systematic discipline, not a reaction to the moment.

In Good to Great we did a systematic analysis of the question of lay offs and restructuring. And we looked at companies that had gone from good to great and we compared those to companies that failed to make that leap or who really went down the backside. And if you put a specific lens of the question of lay offs on, and cost cutting and restructuring, and we analyzed this over the course of 50 years of matched pair data. What you find is very, very interesting.

First of all, the good to great companies rarely did what we would call across the board cost cutting. That’s not what they did. The comparison companies tended to do across the board cost cutting. The mediocre companies, the companies that never became great did more across the board cost cutting and often reactionary to the times. The good to great companies looked at it and said, “No, no. We have a strategic question. Which activities should we be engaged in in the first place? And what should we not be engaged in at all?”

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