In terms of number of followers, here’s the list.
More Than Profit
In Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, Jim Collins points out that the most successful companies do not exist first and foremost to maximize profits. He writes:
Contrary to business school doctrine, “maximizing shareholder wealth” or “profit maximization” has not been the dominant driving force or primary objective through the history of the visionary companies.
Visionary companies pursue a cluster of objectives, of which making money is only one — and not necessarily the primary one.
Yes, they seek profits, but they’re equally guided by a core ideology — core values and sense of purpose beyond just making money.
Yet, paradoxically, the visionary companies make more money than the more purely profit-driven companies.
The Purpose of Budgeting
From Good to Great on the purpose of budgeting in an organization — with implications for your personal budgeting as well:
What is the purpose of budgeting? Most answer that budgeting exists to decide how much to apportion to each activity, or to manage costs, or both. From a good-to-great perspective, both of these answers are wrong.
In a good-to-great transformation, budgeting is a discipline to decide which arenas should be fully funded and which should not be funded at all.
In other words, the budget process is not about figuring out how much each activity gets, but about determining which activities best support the Hedgehog Concept and should be fully strengthened and which should be eliminated entirely.
The point is: we shouldn’t have a mentality of doing “some of everything.” This will distract from doing what is most important. You need to do the right things, and the corollary of that is to stop doing the wrong things. Budgeting is a discipline for making those determinations.
Don’t skimp on what is most important because you need to make room for all sorts of other things, spreading yourself thin. Don’t think that there is virtue in only partially funding things, as though it makes you look more frugal. Instead, fully fund the right things, and in order to make room for that don’t fund at all the wrong things.
And this requires the disciplined thought to identify what the right things are, and what the wrong things are.
On Eliminating Artificial Motivation
I’m jumping into the middle of a story here from Good to Great (p. 206), but I think you’ll get the point. This has far-reaching implications for many things (including — and perhaps especially — churches):
Of equal importance is what they don’t waste energy on. For example, when the head coach took over the [cross country] program, she found herself burdened with expectations to do “fun programs” and “rah-rah stuff” to motivate the kids and keep them interested — parties, and special trips, and shopping adventures to Nike outlets, and inspirational speeches.
She quickly put an end to nearly all that distracting (and time consuming) activity.
“Look,” she said,”this program will be built on the idea that running is fun, racing is fun, improving is fun, and winning is fun. If you’re not passionate about what we do here, then go find something else to do.”
The result: The number of kids in the program nearly tripled in five years, from thirty to eighty-two.
What's Not Best: Charging a Fee to Get a Discount
AT&T has a plan where you can save something like $5 per month on your cell bill if enough people in your company have AT&T for their wireless and enroll in the savings program. Something like that.
So I went on to sign up for the savings the other day, and AT&T charged me $36. They charged me $36 to enroll in a program designed to save money. They charged me a fee in order to get the discount.
???
A discount program should, at the very least, produce good-will in the customer. This program does the opposite. Now, AT&T is very close to earning a place on my list of things that should not exist.