A company can have disciplined people, disciplined thought and disciplined action, yet still spend millions repeatedly solving the wrong problem.
Jim Collins’ Good to Great has endured because many of its ideas speak directly to what CEOs wrestle with: leadership, discipline, focus, people and the difficult transition from acceptable performance to exceptional performance.
But there is another challenge inside many otherwise successful organisations.
The same problems keep returning.
Customer complaints are fixed, then return. Costs are cut, then creep back. Delivery problems are addressed, then reappear. A restructure improves performance temporarily, before familiar problems emerge under different names.
This is karamawari: significant organisational effort that creates activity without enough lasting traction.
Good to Great does not provide a complete answer to karamawari. But several of Collins’ ideas become particularly powerful when applied to recurring problems.
Confront the Brutal Facts, Including the Fact That the Fix Failed
One of Collins’ strongest ideas is the Stockdale Paradox: retain faith that you will prevail while simultaneously confronting the brutal facts of your current reality.
For recurring problems, there is a brutal fact organisations frequently avoid:
If the problem returned, the previous solution did not resolve it.
That sounds obvious. Organisationally, it can be surprisingly difficult to admit.
A transformation may have been declared successful. A new system implemented. Consultants paid. Accountabilities changed. The board told that remediation was complete.
When the problem returns, acknowledging that the original intervention failed can be politically uncomfortable. So the recurrence gets treated as a new event.
The organisation fixes it again.
Karamawari begins.
Confronting reality means asking whether apparently separate incidents are actually manifestations of the same unresolved problem.
The Right People Matter, But So Do the Conditions Around Them
Collins famously argues for getting the right people on the bus.
That matters enormously.
But recurring organisational problems reveal an important limitation to a purely people-centred interpretation.
Put excellent people into conditions that repeatedly encourage poor decisions and excellent people can still produce poor outcomes.
Imagine capable executives operating within unrealistic targets, conflicting incentives, fragmented accountability, weak information flows and a culture in which challenging senior assumptions carries career risk.
Replacing those executives may change the passengers.
It does not necessarily change the road.
For CEOs confronting karamawari, the question therefore extends beyond:
Do we have the right people?
It becomes:
What is our organisation repeatedly causing good people to do?
That question can uncover problems another restructure never will.
The Hedgehog Concept Offers a Lesson in Focus
Collins’ Hedgehog Concept argues for deep clarity around what an organisation can be best at, what drives its economic engine and what it is deeply passionate about.
The underlying lesson for recurring problems is focus.
When an expensive problem returns, organisations often expand the response.
More meetings. More controls. More reporting. More technology. More consultants. More KPIs.
Yet complexity can conceal the unresolved mechanism producing the problem.
Instead of asking, “What else can we do?”, leadership teams may benefit from asking:
What is the smallest number of things that must change for this problem to stop recurring?
This shifts attention from accumulating interventions to identifying leverage.
Sometimes the most sophisticated solution is subtraction.
Build a Culture of Discipline, Not a Culture of Remediation
Collins distinguishes disciplined organisations from those dependent on bureaucracy and excessive control.
That distinction becomes especially important with recurring problems.
Every recurrence tends to leave something behind.
Another approval.
Another control.
Another committee.
Another report.
Another policy.
Each addition is individually defensible. Collectively, they can create an organisation increasingly designed around compensating for problems it has never actually eliminated.
That is expensive.
The alternative is disciplined diagnosis.
Before adding another control, ask why the existing environment made the unwanted decision reasonable in the first place.
What conditions existed?
What assumptions were made?
What behaviours followed?
What decisions resulted?
Unless that chain is understood, additional discipline can easily become additional bureaucracy.
Beware the Flywheel Running in the Wrong Direction
Perhaps the most useful Good to Great idea for karamawari is the flywheel.
Collins describes sustained success as cumulative. Consistent actions reinforce one another until momentum builds.
Recurring problems compound too.
A service failure creates remediation. Remediation consumes management capacity. Reduced capacity delays strategic work. Delays create pressure. Pressure encourages shortcuts. Shortcuts create another service failure.
That is also a flywheel.
Just one you desperately do not want spinning.
And its cost is rarely confined to the visible incident. It accumulates through rework, management attention, lost productivity, customer recovery, delayed investment, employee frustration and opportunities never pursued.
The organisation may believe it has a series of problems.
It may actually have one reinforcing system.
Greatness Requires Knowing What to Stop
The most valuable connection between Good to Great and karamawari may therefore be Collins’ emphasis on disciplined thinking before disciplined action.
Recurring problems tempt leaders toward action because action demonstrates control.
But another initiative is not necessarily progress.
The first job is to understand why previous interventions made sense, why they failed to endure and what remained unchanged underneath them.
Good to Great helps enormously here: confront reality, focus relentlessly, create discipline and recognise cumulative forces.
But karamawari demands one additional move.
You must trace the recurring outcome backwards until you understand the conditions, assumptions, behaviours and decisions that keep recreating it.
Because the real enemy is not recurrence itself.
It is the organisational machinery quietly manufacturing that recurrence.
If the same costly problem has survived several capable leaders, restructures, technologies and improvement programs, what makes you confident the next solution is addressing the cause rather than simply giving the flywheel another push?
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