The Only Thing That Matters

The more good businesspeople I work with, the more I realise that the really effective folks are nearly always able to cut a business situation down into a single thing that matters.

Very rarely are there two things that matter. Usually it’s just the one.

Of course, this doesn’t sound like it should work as well as it does — but it does!

Getting better at this has been something of an obsession of mine for a few years now. This has always been a little difficult to articulate because it sounds so dumb. Thankfully, I’m not the first person to realise this.

Last week we published a members-only case taken from Jim Kilts’s Doing What Matters — a book that Kilts wrote in 2007, attempting to describe how one might be able to do this ‘reduce down to one thing that matters’ technique. He called it his ‘fast track quick screen elimination process’.

The context we were talking about was Kilts’s Gillette turnaround:

Kilts had a number of challenges across Gillette’s many product lines. At the high level, the company’s sales and earnings were flat for the prior four years. The market shares of various products were declining, some of them sharply. Advertising