Good to Great quotes

During the course of my Master's work, I had the opportunity to read Jim Collins' Built to Last. I enjoyed it, but when I heard about his second book, Good to Great, I assumed it was merely a sequel. Were it not for Daryl Leisey, my assumption would never have been tested. At his prompting I read it and see a lot of ways it can position Grace for future greatness. Here are a few quotes that caught my eye.

You get the best people, you build them into the best managers in the industry, and you accept the fact that some of them will be recruited to become CEOs of other companies. p43

If you have the right executives on the bus, they will do everything within their power to build a great company; not because what they will "get" for it, but because they simply cannot imagine settling for anything less. p50

The purpose of a compensation system should not be to get the right behaviors from the wrong people, but to get the right people on the bus in the first place, and to keep them there. p50

The only way to deliver to the people who are achieving is to not burden them with the people who are not achieving. p53

When in doubt, don't hire - keep looking
When you know you need to make a people change, act
Put your best people on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems
p54-60

Lead with questions, not answers
What's on your mind?
Can you tell me about that?
Can you help me understand?
What should we be worried about?
p75



Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion
Conduct autopsies, without blame
Build red-flag mechanisms

What can we potentially do better than any other company, and, equally important, what can we not do better than any other company? And if we can't be the best at it, then why are we doing it at all?
p97

Not a goal to be the best, a strategy to be the best, an intention to be the best or a plan to be the best. It is an understanding of what you can be best at. The distinction is absolutely critical.
p98

A hedgehog requires a severe standard of excellence. p100

consensus decisions are often at odds with intelligent decisions p116

Most companies build their bureacratic rules to manage the small percentage of wrong people on the bus, which in turn drives away the right people on the bus, which then increases the percentage of wrong people on the bus, which increases the need for more bureacracy to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline, which then further drives the right people away, ad so forth... Avoicd bureacracy and hierarchy and instead create a culture of discipline. p121

1. Build the culture around the idea of freedom and responsibility, within a framework
2. Fill that culture with self-disciplined people who are willing to go to extreme lengths to fulfill their responsibilities. They will rinse their cottage cheese.
3. Don't confuse a culture of discipline with a tyrannical disciplinarian.
4. Adhere with great consistency to the Hegehod Concept, exercising an almost religious focus on the intersection of the three circles. Equally important, create a stop doing list and systematically unplug anything extraneous.
p 124

They hired self-disciplined people who didn't need to be managed, and then managed the system, not the people. p125

...budgeting is a discipline to decide which arenas should be fully funded and which should not be funded at all. p140

Mediocrity results first and foremost from management failure, not technological failure.
p156

thoughtless reliance on technology is a liability... p159

...when grasped as an easy solution, without deep understanding of how it links to a clear and coherent concept - technology simply accelerates your own self-created demise. p159

...they talked in terms of what they were trying to create and how they were trying to improve relative to an absolute standard of excellence. p160

Enduring great companies preserve their core values and purpose while their business strategies and operating practices endlessly adapt to changing world. This is the magical combination of "preserve the core and stimulate progress". p195






NEXT TIME: I look at the monograph Collins wrote specifically for non-profits specifically applying G-to-G principles in the non-profit/social sector