Duan Yongping
Do the right thing, then do the thing right
The two halves have an order
Collected public interviews and written answers
He has repeated one sentence for decades. Why its halves cannot be swapped, and what the stop-doing list is for.
What actually happened?
He compresses running a business into one line: do the right thing, and do the thing right. The order is the part he insists on. The first matters far more, because doing a thing right is a question of skill and can be learned slowly, while doing the right thing is a question of choice, and once that is wrong, effort makes it worse. The discipline that goes with it: the moment you find it is wrong, stop and change, and whatever that costs is the smallest cost available. To find the right things he keeps a stop-doing list.
An error of sign cannot be rescued by magnitude
The order is arithmetic. Direction is the sign and execution is the magnitude. With the sign negative, stronger execution only drives the number further down. So review whether a thing should be done before reviewing whether it can be done well.
A team polishing the wrong product to a superb finish has built a motorway to the wrong destination. The better the road, the larger the loss.
Count the whole bill on stopping now
Money already spent, face, promises made in public: all of it makes stopping look enormously expensive. His arithmetic stretches the timeline instead. Today's cost is fixed and known; the cost of dragging on compounds and is unknown. That is why any cost today is the smallest one.
Every quarter a wrong direction survives pulls in another cohort, another budget round and a few more public promises. The cut in three months is twice as thick.
A stop-doing list is more reliable than a to-do list
What you should do is full of uncertainty. What you should not do can be derived from your principles and stays stable for years. The list also saves judgement: when something on it arrives there is nothing to argue and no meeting to call.
Write down your three no matter how profitable, never rules. Half your future opportunity reviews will end in ten seconds, and the hours saved cover looking properly at the other half.
How do I use it today?
Where you are: something you are deep into, and you half suspect the direction is wrong.
Ask first: if I were starting from zero today, would I still do this? If not, which costs less — stopping today, or stopping in three months?
Where it goes wrong: turning do the right thing into a slogan and never writing down how you judge right from wrong. Or using stop at once as a licence for three-minute enthusiasms, in which case nothing ever gets deep.
Lines to keep
Do the right thing, and then do the thing right.
Find it is wrong, stop at once; any cost is the smallest.
What you should not do is stable. What you should do is not.
Same situation, other people are asking
Is switching tracks now too big a risk?Everyone's chasing the new thing. Do we have to?Two years in and I think it's the wrong thing.I know this is not it. Can I not just finish the year first?Do I change direction now · all 5 questions →If this one named what you are going through,
send it to someone who needs it, or keep it somewhere you will find it again.