excerpt from Jim Collins Good To Great

Take a look at your desk. If you’re like most hard-charging leaders, you’ve got a well-articulated to-do list. Now take another look: Where’s your stop-doing list? We’ve all been told that leaders make things happen—and that’s true: Pushing that flywheel takes a lot of concerted effort. But it’s also true that good-to-great leaders distinguish themselves by their unyielding discipline to stop doing anything and everything that doesn’t fit tightly within their Hedgehog Concept.

When Darwin Smith and his management team crystallized the Hedgehog Concept for Kimberly-Clark, they faced a dilemma. On one hand, they understood that the best path to greatness lay in the consumer business, where the company had demonstrated a best-in-the-world capability in its building of the Kleenex brand. On the other hand, the vast majority of Kimberly-Clark’s revenue lay in traditional coated-paper mills, turning out paper for magazines and writing pads—which had been the core business of the company for 100 years. Even the company’s namesake town—Kimberly, Wisconsin—was built around a Kimberly-Clark paper mill.Yet the brutal truth remained: The consumer business was the one arena that best met the three-circle test. If Kimberly-Clark remained principally a paper-mill business, it would retain a secure position as a good company. But its only shot at becoming a great company was to become the best paper-based consumer company—if it could take on such companies as Procter & Gamble and Scott Paper Co. and beat them. That meant it would have to “stop doing” paper mills.

So, in what one director called “the gutsiest decision I’ve ever seen a CEO make,” Darwin Smith sold the mills. He even sold the mill in Kimberly, Wisconsin. Then he threw all the money into a war chest for an epic battle with Procter & Gamble and Scott Paper. Wall Street analysts derided the move, and the business press called it stupid. But Smith did not waver.

Twenty-five years later, Kimberly-Clark emerged from the fray as the number-one paper-based consumer-products company in the world, beating P&G in six of eight categories and owning its former archrival Scott Paper outright. For the shareholder, Kimberly-Clark under Darwin Smith beat the market by four times, easily outperforming such great companies as Coca-Cola, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, and 3M.

In deciding what not to do, Smith gave the flywheel a gigantic push—but it was only one push. After selling the mills, Kimberly-Clark’s full transformation required thousands of additional pushes, big and small, accumulated one after another. It took years to gain enough momentum for the press to herald Kimberly-Clark’s shift from good to great. One magazine wrote, “When … Kimberly-Clark decided to go head to head against P&G … this magazine predicted disaster. What a dumb idea. As it turns out, it wasn’t a dumb idea. It was a smart idea.” The amount of time between the two articles: 21 years.