650 Best Leadership Quotes By Jim Collins (2023)
1. “Level 5 leaders display a workmanlike diligence - more plow horse than show horse.”
2. “If you want to scale your culture, if you want to make the journey from great company to enduring great company, you must invest in building a pipeline of the right unit leaders.”
3. “This brings us to a central truth about organizations: they are inherently messy. There are no panaceas, no structures that solve all problems. Any attempts to completely eliminate the mess are doomed to failure. Yes, there are costly inefficiencies in decentralization, but the fire of personal ownership—of being our own little business—elevates human motivation and stimulates innovation in powerful, albeit somewhat chaotic, ways.”
4. “Level 5 leaders are fanatically driven, infected with an incurable need to produce sustained results. They are resolved to do whatever it takes to make the company great, no matter how big or hard the decisions.”
5. “Victory awaits him who has everything in order—luck people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck.” —Roald Amundsen, The South Pole” ― James C. Collins, Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck--Why Some Thrive Despite Them All
6. “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”
7. “I’ve come to see institutional decline like a staged disease: harder to detect but easier to cure in the early stages, easier to detect but harder to cure in the later stages. An institution can look strong on the outside but already be sick on the inside,”
8. “Those who built the visionary companies wisely understood that it is better to understand who you are than where you are going—for where you are going will almost certainly change. It is a lesson as relevant to our individual lives as to aspiring visionary companies.”
9. “The envisioned future should be so exciting in its own right that it would continue to keep the organization motivated even if the leaders who set the goal disappeared.”
10. “Think of the transformation as a process of buildup followed by breakthrough, broken into three broad stages: disciplined people, disciplined thought, and disciplined action. Within each of these three stages, there are two key concepts, shown in the framework and described below. Wrapping around this entire framework is a concept we came to call the flywheel, which captures the gestalt of the entire process of going from good to great.”
11. “Good is the enemy of great. That’s why so few things become great.”
12. “The people we interviewed from the good-to-great companies clearly loved what they did, largely because they loved who they did it with.”
13. “A company should limit its growth based on its ability to attract enough of the right people.” — James C. Collins
14. “You absolutely cannot make a series of good decisions without first confronting the brutal facts. The good-to-great companies operated in accordance with this principle, and the comparison companies generally did not.”
15. “And while you must create robust new extensions to your flywheel (and given enough time, you might even create entirely new flywheels) be sure to keep building momentum with your winning strategies. Never forget, the Next Big Thing is very likely the Big Thing you already have. Make the most of your victories. Keep turning the flywheel.”
16. “In determing “the right people,” the good-to-great companies placed greater weight on character attributes than on specific educational background, practical skills, specialized knowledge, or work experience.” — James C. Collins
17. “You can’t manufacture passion or “motivate” people to feel passionate. You can only discover what ignites your passion and the passions of those around you.”
18. “innovation without discipline leads to disaster.”
19. “The only way to deliver to the people who are achieving is to not burden them with the people who are not achieving.”
20. “It occurs to me,Jim,that you spend too much time trying to be interesting. Why don't you invest more time being interested?"
21. “Genius of AND. Embrace both extremes on a number of dimensions at the same time. Instead of choosing a OR B, figure out how to have A AND B-purpose AND profit, continuity AND change, freedom AND responsibility, etc.”
22. “Good is the enemy of great. Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice and discipline.”
23. “Comfort is not the objective in a visionary company. Indeed, visionary companies install powerful mechanisms to create /dis/comfort--to obliterate complacency--and thereby stimulate change and improvement /before/ the external world demands it.”
24. “Consensus does not equal unanimity! Too many managers have interpreted consensus to mean 100% unanimity. Not every person must agree with the decision for there to be consensus; there only needs to be general agreement. General agreement is significantly higher than a 51% majority, but usually falls short of 100% unanimity. It is something that is sensed, rather than quantified. Once a consensus is reached, those who disagreed during the process must agree or get off the ship.”
25. “Overcome lack of centralized control with increased communication and informal coordination. People need to know what other decentralized sub-units are doing so that they can act in concert with them.”
26. “The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you’ve made a hiring mistake. The best people don’t need to be managed. Guided, taught, led-yes. But not tightly managed.” — James C. Collins
27. “Most men would rather die, than think. Many do.”
28. “You can’t manufacture passion or motivate people to feel passionate. You can only discover what ignites your passion and the passions of those around you.”
29. “Great vision without great people is irrelevant.”
30. “Comparison, a great teacher once told me, is the cardinal sin of modern life. It traps us in a game that we can’t win. Once we define ourselves in terms of others, we lose the freedom to shape our own lives.” — James C. Collins
31. “Look, if you had one shot, or one opportunity To seize everything you ever wanted in one moment Would you capture it? Or just let it slip?” —Marshall Bruce Mathers III, “Lose Yourself”1”
32. “accomplish the organization’s mission.”
33. “Level 5 leaders are fanatically driven, infected with an incurable need to produce sustained results.”
34. “You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
35. “To be rigorous means consistently applying exacting standards at all times and at all levels, especially in upper management. To be rigorous, not ruthless, means that the best people need not worry about their positions and can concentrate fully on their work.”
36. “Peter Drucker once observed that the drive for mergers and acquisitions comes less from sound reasoning and more from the fact that doing deals is a much more exciting way to spend your day than doing actual work.35”
37. “Larger-than-life, celebrity leaders who ride in from the outside are negatively correlated with taking a company from good to great. Ten of eleven good-to-great CEOs came from inside the company, whereas the comparison companies tried outside CEOs six times more often.”
38. “was so straightforward and obvious that it sounds almost ridiculous to talk about it.”
39. “The difference is simply this: A micro-manager doesn’t trust his people, and seeks to control every single detail and decision; he believes that ultimately only he will make the right choices. A personal-touch leader, on the other hand, trusts his people to make basically good choices; he respects their abilities.”
40. “What can we do better than any other company in the world, that fits our economic denominator and that we have passion for?”
41. “He did not understand—until it was too late—what one university president called the reality of tenured faculty: “A thousand points of no.”
42. “If you want to achieve consistent performance, you need both parts of a 20 Mile March: a lower bound and an upper bound, a hurdle that you jump over and a ceiling that you will not rise above, the ambition to achieve and the self-control to hold back.”
43. “Letting the wrong people hang around is unfair to all the right people, as they inevitably find themselves compensating for the inadequacies of the wrong people. Worse, it can drive away the best people. Strong performers are intrinsically motivated by performance, and when they see their efforts impeded by carrying extra weight, they eventually become frustrated. Waiting”
44. “Reichardt kept people relentlessly focused on the simple hedgehog idea,”
45. “Do first things first—and second things not at all. The alternative is to get nothing done. Peter F. Drucker”
46. “Compared to high-profile leaders with big personalities who make headlines and become celebrities, the good-to-great leaders seem to have come from Mars. Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy—these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. They”
47. “Consider the idea that charisma can be as much a liability as an asset. Your strength of personality can sow the seeds of problems
48. “As people decide among themselves to turn the fact of potential into the fact of results, the goal almost sets itself.”
49. “Genuine confidence is what launches you out of bed in the morning, and through your day with a spring in your step.”
50. “Building a visionary company requires 1% vision and 99% alignment. When you have superb alignment, a visitor could drop in from outer space and infer your vision from the operations and activities of the company without ever reading it on paper or meeting a single senior executive.”
51. “You can accomplish anything in life, provided that you do not mind who gets the credit”
52. “while you can buy your way to growth, you absolutely cannot buy your way to greatness.” ― James C. Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
53. “The “yes-men” problem is mentioned here. The author says that even though “yes-people” can be pleasing to a leader, they will be disastrous in the long term because they serve to obscure the real problems. The”
54. “2. Core purpose is an organization’s most fundamental reason for being. It should not be confused with the company’s current product lines or customer segments. Rather, it reflects people’s idealistic motivations for doing the company’s work. Disney’s core purpose is to make people happy—not to build theme parks and make cartoons. An”
55. “Resiliency, not perfection, is the signature of greatness.”
56. “Yes, compensation and incentives are important, but for very different reasons in good-to-great companies. 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.”
57. “I am not failing – I am growing! Do you have the ability to reframe failure as growth in order to achieve your goals?”
58. “The difference between a good leader and a great leader is humility.”
59. “A company should limit its growth based on its ability to attract enough of the right people.) 2.”
60. “If you have more than three priorities then you don’t have any.”
61. “We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats - and then they figured out where to drive it.”
62. “As the influential management thinker Peter Drucker taught, the best—perhaps even the only—way to predict the future is to create it.10”
63. “Not one of the good-to-great companies focused obsessively on growth.”
64. “thoughtless reliance on technology is a liability,” ― James C. Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
65. “You don’t get a chance to adjust and finagle, and decide that you really didn’t intend to do that anyway, and readjust your objectives to make yourself look better. You never just focus on what you’ve accomplished for the year; you focus on what you’ve accomplished relative to exactly what you said you were going to accomplish—no matter how tough the measure. That was a discipline learned at Abbott, and that we carried into Amgen.3”
66. “SMaC” is the essence of consistent tactical excellence. SMaC (pronounced “smack,” with a very hard “k” sound at the end . . . SmmaacK!) stands for “Specific, Methodical, and Consistent.”
67. “Those who build great companies understand that the ultimate throttle on growth for any great company is not markets, or technology, or competition, or products. It is one thing above all others: the ability to get and keep enough of the right people. The management team” ― James C. Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
68. “Great companies foster a productive tension between continuity and change.”
69. “We are not imprisoned by circumstances, setbacks, mistakes or staggering defeats, we are freed by our choices.”
70. “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
71. “If you’re involved in building and managing a company, we’re asking you to think less in terms of being a brilliant product visionary or seeking the personality characteristics of charismatic leadership, and to think more in terms of being an organizational visionary and building the characteristics of a visionary company.”
72. “A great company will have many once-in-a-liftetime opportunities.”
73. “In general, the most effective leaders tend to make extensive use of participative decision making. The best decisions are made with some degree of participation—no one is brilliant or experienced enough to have all the answers. No one.”
74. “the single most important skill for building a great company is making superb people decisions. Without the right people, you simply cannot build a great company, period.”
75. “You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, AND at the same time, have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
76. “We’ve seen a number of companies, such as the one above, encounter difficulty soon after moving into beautiful new buildings and offices. It’s not that the new offices are in themselves bad. But they send a signal: “We’ve arrived. We’re successful. We’ve made it.”
77. “In no case do we have a company that just happened to be sitting on the nose cone of a rocket when it took off.”
78. “Far more difficult than implementing change is figuring out what works, understanding why it works, grasping when to change, and knowing when not to.”
79. “First Who ... Then What. We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats—and then they figured out where to drive it. The old adage “People are your most important asset” turns out to be wrong. People are not your most important asset. The right people are.”
80. “You can accomplish anything in life, provided that you do not mind who gets the credit.”
81. “A key psychology for leading from good to great is the Stockdale Paradox: Retain absolute faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, AND at the same time confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be. UNEXPECTED”
82. “Level 5 leaders are differentiated from other levels of leaders in that they have a wonderful blend of personal humility combined with an extraordinary professional will. Understand that they are very ambitious; but their ambition, first and foremost, is for the company’s success.”
83. “It occurs to me, Jim, that you spend too much time trying to be interesting. Why don’t you invest more time being interested?”
84. “In another, drawn directly from his own comments on leading change, the word I appears forty-four times (“I could lead the charge”; “I wrote the twelve objectives”; “I presented and explained the objectives”), whereas the word we appears just sixteen times.”
85. “The difficult task is to marry relentless discipline with creativity, neither letting discipline inhibit creativity nor letting creativity erode discipline.”
86. “But isn’t setting such an audacious mission risky? Yes. A good mission should be difficult to achieve. There should be a chance you’ll fail, combined with an off-setting belief that you’ll make it anyway. That’s part of what makes it a real mission.”
87. “The good-to-great leaders understood three simple truths. First, if you begin with “who,” rather than “what,” you can more easily adapt to a changing world.”
88. “The good-to-great companies made a habit of putting their best people on their best opportunities, not their biggest problems. The comparison companies had a penchant for doing just the opposite, failing to grasp the fact that managing your problems can only make you good, whereas building your opportunities is the only way to become great.”
89. “In contrast, two thirds of the comparison companies had leaders with gargantuan personal egos that contributed to the demise or continued mediocrity of the company.”
90. “Leading as a charismatic visionary—a “genius with a thousand helpers” upon whom everything depends—is time telling. Shaping a culture that can thrive far beyond any single leader is clock building.”
91. “It occurs to me,Jim,that you spend too much time trying to be interesting. Why don't you invest more time being interested?" Collin's advice from John Gardner that he took to heart.”
92. “The good-to-great companies made a habit of putting their best people on their best opportunities, not their biggest problems. The comparison companies had a penchant for doing just the opposite, failing to grasp the fact that managing your problems can only make you good, whereas building your opportunities is the only way to become great. There is an important” ― James C. Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
93. “In classic hedgehog style, Walgreens took this simple concept and implemented it with fanatical consistency.”
94. “Your status and authority in Nucor come from your leadership capabilities, not your position”
95. “if I start with the right people, ask them the right questions, and engage them in vigorous debate, we will find a way to make this company great.”
96. “Asked to paint a picture of the company in 20 years, the executives mentioned such things as “on the cover of Business Week as a model success story . . . the Fortune most admired top-ten list . . . the best science and business graduates want to work here . . . people on airplanes rave about one of our products to seatmates . . . 20 consecutive years of profitable growth . . . an entrepreneurial culture that has spawned half a dozen new divisions from within . . .”
97. “The moment a leader allows himself to become the primary reality people worry about, rather than reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or worse. This is one of the key reasons why less charismatic leaders often produce better long-term results than their more charismatic counterparts. Indeed,” ― James C. Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
98. “if you want to achieve consistent performance, you need both parts of a 20 Mile March: a lower bound and an upper bound, a hurdle that you jump over and a ceiling that you will not rise above, the ambition to achieve and the self-control to hold back. ”
99. “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.”
100. “Managing your problems can only make you good, whereas building your opportunities is the only way to become great.” — James C. Collins
101. “Write! Write! Write! Never underestimate the power of the written word. Few company leaders make good use of the most powerful human tool—the pen. Use it. People will read what you write because you’re the leader, and they’ll be influenced by it. Think of how much weaker the United States would be if the Constitution had never been written down.”
102. “WHY 20 MILE MARCHERS WIN 20 Mile Marching helps turn the odds in your favor for three reasons: 1. It builds confidence in your ability to perform well in adverse circumstances. 2. It reduces the likelihood of catastrophe when you’re hit by turbulent disruption. 3. It helps you exert self-control in an out-of-control environment.” ― James C. Collins, Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck--Why Some Thrive Despite Them All
103. “THE “FLYWHEEL EFFECT” The good-to-great companies understood a simple truth: Tremendous power exists in the fact of continued improvement and the delivery of results.”
104. “People need BHAGs – big hairy audacious goals.” — James C. Collins
105. “Put your best people on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems. In”
106. “In the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work.”
107. “I’ve come to believe that about 50 percent of great leadership is what you do with the unexpected.”
108. “The We’ve Arrived Syndrome is particularly common in early stage or turnaround companies that are galvanized by the challenge of reaching a point where survival is no longer in question.”
109. “You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, AND at the same time, have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.” — James C. Collins
110. “Gente boa precisa ter coisas grandes para fazer, senão leva sua energia criativa para outro lugar.”
111. “Consider the idea that charisma can be as much a liability as an asset. Your strength of personality can sow the seeds of problems when people filter the brutal facts from you.”
112. “We find out who they are by asking them why they made decisions in their life. The answers to these questions give us insight into their core values.33”
113. “Hedgehog Concept—disciplined action, following from disciplined people who exercise disciplined thought.”
114. “we also found comparable amounts of luck in the control set of comparison cases we studied! The big winners did not generally get more good luck, less bad luck, bigger spikes of luck, or better-timed luck than their comparisons. What the best achieved, instead, was a higher return on luck.”
115. “Leadership is not personality.”
116. “If you have the wrong people, it doesn’t matter whether you discover the right direction; you still won’t have a great company great vision without great people is irrelevant”
117. “Building a visionary company requires one percent vision and 99 percent alignment.”
118. “The idea that leading in a “fast world” always requires “fast decisions” and “fast action”—and that we should embrace an overall ethos of “Fast! Fast! Fast!”—is a good way to get killed. 10X leaders figure out when to go fast, and when not to.”
119. “Leaders die, products become obsolete, markets change, new technologies emerge, and management fads come and go, but core ideology in a great company endures as a source of guidance and inspiration.”
120. “Good is the enemy of great. That's why so few things become great.”
121. “The good-to-great companies displayed two distinctive forms of disciplined thought. The first, and the topic of this chapter, is that they infused the entire process with the brutal facts of reality. (The second, which we will discuss in the next chapter, is that they developed a simple, yet deeply insightful, frame of reference for all decisions.) When,” ― James C. Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
122. “Technology and technology-driven change has virtually nothing to do with igniting a transformation from good to great”
123. “shareholder wealth” is the standard “off-the-shelf” purpose for those organizations that have not yet identified their true core purpose. It is a substitute ideology, and a weak substitute at that. Listen to people in great organizations talk about their achievements and you’ll hear very little about earnings per share.”
124. “When you turn over rocks and look at all the squiggly things underneath, you can either put the rock down, or you can say, ‘My job is to turn over rocks and look at the squiggly things,’ even if what you see can scare the hell out of you.”25 That quote, from Pitney Bowes executive Fred Purdue, could have come from any of the Pitney Bowes”
125. “Consider the idea that charisma can be as much a liability as an asset. Your strength of personality can sow the seeds of problems, when people filter the brutal facts from you.”
126. “As the influential management thinker Peter Drucker taught, the best—perhaps even the only—way to predict the future is to create it.10” ― James C. Collins, Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck--Why Some Thrive Despite Them All
127. “If I were running a company today, I would have one priority above all others: to acquire as many of the best people as I could. I’d put off everything else to fill my bus. Because things are going to come back. My flywheel is going to start to turn. And the single biggest constraint on the success of my organization is the ability to get and to hang on to enough of the right people.”
128. “they cannot learn the essential character traits that make them right for your organization.”
129. “It may seem odd to talk about something as soft and fuzzy as "passion" as an integral part of a strategic framework. But throughout the good-to-great companies, passion became a key part of the Hedgehog Concept.”
130. “Indeed, the real question is not, ‘Why greatness?’ but ‘What work makes you feel compelled to try to create greatness?’ If you have to ask the question, ‘Why should we try to make it great? Isn’t success enough?’ then you’re probably engaged in the wrong line of work.”
131. “Victory awaits him who has everything in order—luck people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck.” —Roald Amundsen, The South Pole”
132. “vision is composed of three basic parts: core values and beliefs, purpose, and mission.”
133. “Great companies foster a productive tension between continuity and change.” — James C. Collins
134. “A dream is a feeling that sticks, and propels.”
135. “It is very important to grasp that Level 5 leadership is not just about humility and modesty. It is equally about ferocious resolve, an almost stoic determination to do whatever needs to be done to make the company great. Indeed, we debated for a long time on the”
136. “The good-to-great companies did not focus principally on what to do to become great; they focused equally on what not to do and what to stop doing.”
137. “Good-to-great companies set their goals and strategies based on understanding; comparison companies set their goals and strategies based on bravado.”
138. “Searching for a single great idea upon which to build success is time telling. Building an organization that can generate many great ideas is clock building. Our research showed that leaders who build enduring great companies make the shift from time telling to clock building. Clock builders create highly replicable recipes, extensive training programs, leadership-development pipelines, and tangible mechanisms to reinforce core values.”
139. “Your status and authority in Nucor come from your leadership capabilities, not your position.”
140. “You can’t manufacture passion or motivate people to feel passionate, you can only discover what ignites your passion and the passions of those around you”
141. “Washington cultivated a culture of open dialogue, practicing his famous self-discipline of silence, encouraging arguments to compete, listening and probing, until he made up his mind to act.”
142. “the world is changing, and will continue to do so. But that does not mean we should stop the search for timeless principles.”
143. “That’s what makes death so hard—unsatisfied curiosity. —BERYL MARKHAM, West with the Night1”
144. “And if you cannot be the best in the world at your core business, then your core business cannot form the basis of your Hedgehog Concept.”
145. “The x factor of a great leader is humility combined with will.” — James C. Collins
146. “To create an effective envisioned future requires a certain level of unreasonable confidence and commitment. Keep in mind that a BHAG is not just a goal; it is a Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal.”
147. “If you have more than 3 priorities, you don’t have any.”
148. “Look, I don’t really know where we should take this bus. But I know this much: If we get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then we’ll figure out how to take it someplace great.” — James C. Collins
149. “Victory awaits him who has everything in order—luck people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck.” —Roald Amundsen, The South Pole1”
150. “The same thing happens in business. When people become fat with conventional wisdom, they’re dangerous. A lot of being innovative in business is being willing to give something a try because you don’t know it flies in the face of conventional wisdom. As Debi Colman, Apple VP of information systems and technology, puts it: “The single biggest roadblock to creativity and innovation I’ve encountered in business is conventional wisdom.”
151. “companies more than ever need to have a clear understanding of their purpose in order to make work meaningful and thereby attract, motivate, and retain outstanding people. Discovering”
152. “Take advantage of difficult economic times to hire great people, even if you don’t have a specific job in mind.”
153. “Good to Great” is about how to turn a good organization into one that produces sustained great results. Collins’ book “Built to Last” is about how to take a company with great results and turn it into an enduring great company of iconic stature.”
154. “Great vision without great people is irrelevant.” — James C. Collins
155. “Change your practices without abandoning your core values.” — James C. Collins
156. “In a world of constant change, the fundamentals are more important than ever.” — James C. Collins
157. “The best BHAGs make you think big. They force you to engage in both long-term building and short-term intensity. The only way to achieve a BHAG is with a relentless sense of urgency, day after day, week after week, month after month, for years. What do you need to do today, with monomaniacal focus, and tomorrow and the next day and the day after that to defy the probabilities and ultimately achieve your BHAG?”
158. “Bureaucratic cultures arise to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline, which arise from having the wrong people on the bus in the first place.”
159. “Vision provides guidance about what core to preserve and what future to stimulate progress toward.”
160. “That good is the enemy of great is not just a business problem. It is a human problem.”
161. “Visionary companies are so clear about what they stand for and what they’re trying to achieve that they simply don’t have room for those unwilling or unable to fit their exacting standards.”
162. “Finally—and this is important—a good mission has a specific time frame for its achievement.”
163. “We did not begin this project with a theory to test or prove. We sought to build a theory from the ground up, derived directly from the evidence.”
164. “"Growth!" is not a Hedgehog Concept. Rather, if you have the right Hedgehog Concept and make decisions relentlessly consistent with it, you will create such momentum that your main problem will not be how to grow, but how not to grow too fast.”
165. “What separates people is not the presence or absence of difficulty, but how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of life.”
166. “As melhores pessoas anseiam pela meritocracia, enquanto as pessoas medíocres tem medo dela.”
167. “Discipline is the greatest thing in the world. Where there is no discipline, there is no character. And without character, there is no progress. . . .”
168. “There is a sense of exhilaration that comes from facing head-on the hard truths and saying, “We will never give up. We will never capitulate. It might take a long time, but we will find a way to prevail.”” — James C. Collins
169. “Good is the enemy of great. That’s why so few things become great.” — James C. Collins
170. “What separates people, Stockdale taught me, is not the presence or absence of difficulty, but how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of life.”
171. “If we spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect – people we really enjoy being on the bus with and who will never disappoint us – then we will almost certainly have a great life, no matter where the bus goes.”
172. “thoughtless reliance on technology is a liability,”
173. “When you have disciplined people, you don’t”
174. “Kenneth Atchity, president of Atchity Entertainment International, observed that there is a vital difference between managing time and managing work: work is infinite; time is finite. Work expands to fill whatever time is allotted to it. To be productive, therefore, you must manage your time, not your work. The key question to ask yourself is not “What am I going to do?” but “How am I going to spend my time?”
175. “Core values are essential for enduring greatness, but it doesn’t seem to matter what those core values are.”
176. “Sustained great results depend upon building a culture full of self-disciplined people who take disciplined action, fanatically consistent with the three circles.”
177. “Look, I don’t really know where we should take this bus. But I know this much: If we get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then we’ll figure out how to take it someplace great.”
178. “A company should limit its growth based on its ability to attract enough of the right people”
179. “Turning Goals into Results: The Power of Catalytic Mechanisms,” Harvard Business Review, July–August, 1999.”
180. “turning good into great takes energy, but the building of momentum adds more energy back into the pool than it takes out.”
181. “No’ matter what we achieve if we don’t spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect, we cannot possibly have a great life”
182. “To be effective, a vision must fulfill two key criteria: it must be clear (well understood) and shared by all the key people in the organization.”
183. “We live in a world rich in success but impoverished in meaning. A life of relentless work without meaning is brutal and dark. Most of us will never have the depth of love in our daily work that Manchester had with his fellow Marines. But we can move closer to it by building a culture where people depend on people. And in so doing, you will give people something of immeasurable value—work that matters. And that is truly great.”
184. “The right people will do the right things and deliver the best results they’re capable of, regardless of the incentive system.”
185. “Granted, the Scott Paper story is one of the more dramatic in our study, but it’s not an isolated case. In over two thirds of the comparison cases, we noted the presence of a gargantuan personal ego that contributed to the demise or continued mediocrity of the company.33”
186. “Enduring great companies don’t exist merely to deliver returns to shareholders. Indeed, in a truly great company, profits and cash flow become like blood and water to a healthy body: They are absolutely essential for life, but they are not the very point of life.”
187. “The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline.” — James C. Collins
188. “Another great coach, Bill Walsh (who oversaw three Super Bowl Championship teams at the San Francisco 49ers), emphasized the importance of personal and positive encouragement. Walsh would shake hands and say a positive personal word of encouragement to every player just before each game. He also asked his assistant coaches to acknowledge each player, shake his hand, and offer supportive thoughts.”
189. “Indeed, the big point of this chapter is not about technology per se. No technology, no matter how amazing—not computers, not telecommunications, not robotics, not the Internet—can by itself ignite a shift from good to great. No technology can make you Level 5. No technology can turn the wrong people into the right people. No technology can instill the discipline to confront brutal facts of reality, nor can it instill unwavering faith.”
190. “You can’t manufacture passion or “motivate” people to feel passionate. You can only discover what ignites your passion and the passions of those around you.” — James C. Collins
191. “Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice.”
192. “Don’t be interesting; be interested.”
193. “When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance.”
194. “The signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency.”
195. “Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline.” — James C. Collins
196. “Level 5 leaders are a study in duality: modest and willful, humble and fearless.” — James C. Collins
197. “transformations never happened in one fell swoop. There was no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment. Rather, the process resembled relentlessly pushing a giant heavy flywheel in one direction, turn upon turn, building momentum until a point of breakthrough, and beyond.”
198. “Strategy per se did not separate the good-to-great companies from the comparison companies. Both sets had strategies, and there is no evidence that the good-to-great companies spent more time on strategic planning than the comparison companies.”
199. “In combat deployment (where he earned a Silver Star for bravery and two Purple Hearts), Smith gained the central insight that would power Federal Express from an idea into a viable business, from a business into a great company. Like Manchester, he realized that people will do unreasonable things to come through—not for grand ideas or incentives or bosses or hierarchies or even recognition, but for each other.”
200. “Level 5 leaders are a study in duality: modest and willful, humble and fearless. To quickly grasp this concept, think of United States”
201. “They didn’t use discussion as a sham process to let people “have their say” so that they could “buy in” to a predetermined decision. The process was more like a heated scientific debate, with people engaged in a search for the best answers.”
202. “This rare ability to manage continuity and change—requiring a consciously practiced discipline—is closely linked to the ability to develop a vision.”
203. “The dominant pattern of history isn’t stability, but instability; the dominant pattern of business isn’t perpetuation of the incumbents, but triumph of the insurgents; the dominant pattern of capitalism isn’t equilibrium, but what Joseph Schumpeter famously described as the “perennial gale of creative destruction”
204. “Discipline is consistency of action.”
205. “Truly great companies understand the difference between what should never change and what should be open for change, between what is genuinely sacred and what is not.”
206. “Two key questions can help. First, if it were a hiring decision (rather than a “should this person get off the bus?” decision), would you hire the person again? Second, if the person came to tell you that he or she is leaving to pursue an exciting new opportunity, would you feel terribly disappointed or secretly relieved?”
207. “certain: You absolutely cannot make a series of good decisions without first confronting the brutal facts. The good-to-great companies operated”
208. “Profit is like oxygen, food, water, and blood for the body; they are not the point of life, but without them, there is no life.”
209. “The only truly reliable source of stability is a strong inner core and the willingness to change and adapt everything except that core.”
210. “One of the distinguishing characteristics of a great company is that it doesn’t stop trying to change, improve, and do new things. A great company never arrives, never believes that it is good enough.”
211. “Indeed, if there is any one “secret” to an enduring great company, it is the ability to manage continuity and change—a discipline that must be consciously practiced, even by the most visionary of companies.” ― James C. Collins, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
212. “The x factor of a great leader is humility combined with will.”
213. “The signature of mediocrity is chronic inconstancy. The signature of greatness is a disciplined and consistent focus on the right things.” — James C. Collins
214. “We defined a “luck event” as one that meets three tests: First, you didn’t cause it; second, it has a significant potential consequence, good or bad; and third, it has an element of surprise, some aspect of the event is unpredictable before it happens.”
215. “Freedom is only part of the story and half the truth.... That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplanted by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast. —VIKTOR E. FRANKL, Man’s Search for Meaning”
216. “For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work.”
217. “Smith never wavered. Twenty-five years later, Kimberly-Clark owned Scott Paper outright and beat Procter & Gamble in six of eight product categories.12 In retirement, Smith reflected on his exceptional performance, saying simply, “I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job.”13”
218. “Freely chosen, discipline is absolute freedom.”
219. “Even though many people think that being a great leader means being ambitious and having a certain reputation, this is not true at all.”
220. “It’s not only the audacity of the goal but also the level of commitment to the goal that counts.”
221. “Enduring great companies preserve their core values and purpose while their business strategies and operating practices endlessly adapt to a changing world. This is the magical combination of “preserve the core and stimulate progress.”
222. “If it’s not core, change it!
223. “while you can buy your way to growth, you absolutely cannot buy your way to greatness.”
224. “It is more important to know who you are than where you are going, for where you are going will change as the world around you changes.” — James C. Collins
225. “A great mission without great people is irrelevant”
226. “Second, if you have the right people on the bus, the problem of how to motivate and manage people largely goes away.”
227. “Darwin Smith stands as a classic example of what we came to call a Level 5 leader—an individual who blends extreme personal humility with intense professional will.”
228. “Indeed, one of the crucial elements in taking a company from good to great is somewhat paradoxical. You need executives, on the one hand, who argue and debate—sometimes violently—in pursuit of the best answers, yet, on the other hand, who unify fully behind a decision, regardless of parochial interests.”
229. “Level 5 leaders confront the brutal facts before they set vision and strategy, and they create a climate where the truth is heard. Failure to confront the brutal facts is a precursor to catastrophic decline, always.”
230. “if we don’t spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect, we cannot possibly have a great life.”
231. “Have an open system. People operating autonomously can make good decisions only if they have good information. One of the best ways to achieve this is to make lots of information available to people—even traditionally sensitive information.”
232. “For no matter what we achieve, if we don’t spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect, we cannot possibly have a great life.”
233. “If you create a place where the best people always have a seat on the bus, they’re more likely to support changes in direction. For”
234. “Discover your core values and purpose beyond just making money (core ideology) and combine this with the dynamic of preserve the core/stimulate progress.” ― James C. Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
235. “This is a culture that is very hostile to complacency," said one executive. "We have an itch that what we just accomplished, no matter how great, is never going to be good enough to sustain us," said another.”
236. “Accomplishing a 20 Mile March, consistently, in good times and bad, builds confidence. Tangible achievement in the face of adversity reinforces the 10X perspective: we are ultimately responsible for improving performance. We never blame circumstance; we never blame the environment.”
237. “It is very difficult to have a meaning life without meaningful work.”
238. “If you have more than three priorities then you don’t have any.” — James C. Collins
239. “When you marry operating excellence with innovation, you multiply the value of your creativity.”
240. “The greatest leaders build organizations that, in the end, don’t need them.”
241. “Purpose is a motivating factor, not a differentiating factor. It’s entirely possible for two companies to have the same purpose. Your mission, on the other hand, will certainly differentiate you from everyone else.”
242. “For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work.” — James C. Collins
243. “Clausewitz insisted on aggressively following up after concentrating force at the decisive point. Any strategy that doesn’t account for how to exploit victory is incomplete, inadequate. “What remains true under all imaginable conditions,” he wrote, “is that no victory will be effective without pursuit; and no matter how brief the exploitation of victory, it must always go further than an immediate follow-up.”
244. “good-to-great companies did not focus principally on what to do to become great; they focused equally on what not to do and what to stop doing.”
245. “Yes, the world is changing, and will continue to do so. But that does not mean we should stop the search for timeless principles. Think of it this way: While the practices of engineering continually evolve and change, the laws of physics remain relatively fixed. I like to think of our work as a search for timeless principles—”
246. “Spending time and energy trying to “motivate” people is a waste of effort. The real question is not, “How do we motivate our people?” If you have the right people, they will be self-motivated. The key is to not de-motivate them. One of the primary ways to de-motivate people is to ignore the brutal facts of reality.”
247. “That good is the enemy of great is not just a business problem. It is a human problem.” — James C. Collins
248. “Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. It’s not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious—but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves.”
249. “the primary challenge you face is not in increasing creativity per se, but in making your company receptive to the vast amounts of creativity that already exist. The point is not to build a company that depends on you for its innovation, but to continually work towards an organization that is as receptive to new ideas as if those ideas had come from you.”
250. “Build a culture around the idea of freedom and responsibility, within a framework.”
251. “But if we spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect—people we really enjoy being on the bus with and who will never disappoint us—then we will almost certainly have a great life, no matter where the bus goes. The people we interviewed from the good-to-great companies clearly loved what they did, largely because they loved who they did it with.”
252. “There is nothing I find more exciting than picking a question that I don’t know the answer to and embarking on a quest for answers.”
253. “It’s not how you compensate your executives, it’s which executives you have to compensate in the first place. If you have the right executives on the bus, they will do everything within their power to build a great company, not because of what they will “get” for it, but because they simply cannot imagine settling for anything less. Their”
254. “Effective leaders focus their efforts, keeping the number of priorities to a minimum and remaining resolutely fixed on them. You can’t do everything; nor can a company on the path to greatness.”
255. “The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you’ve made a hiring mistake. The best people don’t need to be managed. Guided, taught, led—yes. But not tightly managed.”
256. “In building his company and living his life, Hewlett adhered to a simple motto that he oft repeated: “Never stifle a generous impulse.”
257. “The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you've made a hiring mistake. The best people don't need to be managed. Guided, taught, led-yes. But not tightly managed.”
258. “This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. WINSTON S. CHURCHILL”
259. “An organization is not truly great, if it cannot be great without you.”
260. “A visionary company doesn't simply balance between idealism and profitability: it seeks to be highly idealistic and highly profitable. A visionary company doesn't simply balance between preserving a tightly held core ideology and stimulating vigorous change and movement; it does both to an extreme.”
261. “The essence of profound insight is simplicity.” — James C. Collins
262. “The best students are those who never quite believe their professors.”
263. “innovation without discipline leads to disaster.” ― James C. Collins, Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck--Why Some Thrive Despite Them All
264. “Look, this is going to be a very hard challenge. I want you to think about how demanding this is going to be. If you don’t think you’re going to like it, that’s fine. Nobody’s going to hate you.”
265. “first who... then what” start-up.”
266. “Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.”
267. “The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline–a problem that largely goes away if you have the right people in the first place.”
268. “SEALs routinely risk their own lives to never leave a fellow SEAL behind, not because of anything financial, but because of a sacred promise to each other. Imagine being in a culture in which you know with 100 percent certainty—not 90 percent, not 95 percent, not 99 percent, but absolutely 100 percent—that no matter what happens, you’ll never be left behind.”
269. “You need self-control in an out-of-control world.” — James C. Collins
270. “Everyone gets luck, good and bad, but 10X winners make more of the luck they get.”
271. “Focusing solely on what you can potentially do better than any other organization is the only path to greatness.” — James C. Collins
272. “Change your practices without abandoning your core values.”
273. “In our research, we found no systematic pattern linking executive compensation to the process of companies going from good to great. Financial incentives don’t—indeed cannot—cause companies to achieve greatness, for the simple reason that you cannot turn the wrong people into the right people with money. After all, if someone needs financial incentives to perform at a high level, he or she lacks the intense inner drive, the productive neurosis, required to do great things.”
274. “wouldn’t that person be even more amazing if, instead of telling the time, he or she built a clock that could tell the time forever, even after he or she was dead and gone?3”
275. “Greatest danger is not failure, but be successful and not know why.”
276. “Not only do you need to hire a few creative “misfits,” you also need to tolerate their sometimes bizarre behavior. Some of the most creative people simply don’t fit into typical well-behaved molds. They’re often rebels, irritating and somewhat out of control.”
277. “In the early phases of an organization, a company’s vision comes directly from its early leaders; it is very much their personal vision. To become great, however, a company must progress past excessive dependence on one or a few key individuals. The vision must become shared as a community, and become identified primarily with the organization, rather than with certain individuals running the organization. The vision must actually transcend the founders.”
278. “Some managers are uncomfortable expressing emotion about their dreams, but that’s what motivates others.”
279. “We are not imprisoned by circumstances, setbacks, mistakes or staggering defeats, we are freed by our choices.” — James C. Collins
280. “How can we do better tomorrow than we did today?” — James C. Collins
281. “Notice three things about this definition. First, as a leader, it’s your responsibility to figure out what must be done. You might do this by your own insight and instinct or, more likely, via dialogue and debate with the right people; but however you do it, you need to get clear. Second, it’s not about getting people to do what must be done but about getting them to want to do it. Third, it’s not a science; it’s an art.”
282. “Mediocrity results first and foremost from management failure, not technological failure.”
283. “Strategies for Influence” explores and shares the BIG IDEAS from the Leaders of Influence that can help you with your Career, Business, and Leadership. Click on any of the links below to explore the Big Ideas that have influenced our work and lives.
284. “unproductive retirees. Take care of yourself physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Get enough sleep. Stay healthy. Get some exercise. Have diversions. Read. Converse with interesting people. Expose yourself to new ideas. Spend time in solitary, renewing activities. Set new challenges for yourself. Do whatever is necessary to keep yourself vibrant, stimulated, growing, and alive as a human being.”
285. “Greatest danger is not failure, but be successful and not know why.” — James C. Collins
286. “We know some effective leaders who work only 40–50 hours a week, but who we nonetheless classify as very hard workers—their level of intensity and concentration when at work is incredibly high. Conversely, we know some workaholics who work 90 hours per week and are basically ineffective. More is not necessarily better.”
287. “We all know now that the 747 became the flagship jumbo jet of the airline industry, but the decision looks much different from the perspective of the late 1960s. Yet—and this is the key point—Boeing was willing to make the bold move in the face of the risks. As in Boeing’s case, the risks do not always come without pain.”
288. “Good is the enemy of great. And”
289. “Dreams make you click, juice you, turn you on, excite the living daylights out of you. You cannot wait to get out of bed to continue pursuing your dream. The kind of dream I'm talking about gives meaning to your life. it is the ultimate motivator.”
290. “the Mach3—leaving hundreds of millions of people to a more painful daily battle with stubble.19”
291. “What we did was so simple, and we kept it simple. It”
292. “Don’t underestimate the extent to which your actions influence those who work for you. Manners of speech, decision-making style, ways of behaving, and other attributes will rub off.”
293. “Larger-than-life, celebrity leaders who ride in from the outside are negatively correlated with taking a company from good to great. Ten of eleven good-to-great CEOs came from inside the company, whereas”
294. “...it is far more important to know who you are than where you are going, for where you are going will certainly change as the world about you changes.”
295. “The most constructive approach to critical feedback follows from the concept of leader as teacher. When you need to provide corrective or negative guidance, think not of yourself as a critic—or even a boss—but as a guide, mentor, and teacher. The process of critique should be an educational experience that contributes to the further development of the individual.”
296. “Nordstrom • Service to the customer above all else • Hard work and individual productivity • Never being satisfied • Excellence in reputation; being part of something special Philip”
297. “Indeed, the real question is not, “Why greatness?” but “What work makes you feel compelled to try to create greatness?” If you have to ask the question, “Why should we try to make it great? Isn’t success enough?” then you’re probably engaged in the wrong line of work.”
298. “In retirement, Smith reflected on his exceptional performance, saying simply, "I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job.”
299. “But there is a second answer to the question of why greatness, one that is at the very heart of what motivated us to undertake this huge project in the first place: the search for meaning, or more precisely, the search for meaningful work. I”
300. “You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of”
301. “True leadership had people who follow when they have the freedom not to”
302. “businesses. We will not make unrelated acquisitions. We will not do unrelated joint ventures. If it doesn’t fit, we don’t do it. Period.”
303. “When you turn over rocks and look at all the squiggly things underneath, you can either put the rock down, or you can say, ‘My job is to turn over rocks and look at the squiggly things,’ even if what you see can scare the hell out of you.”25”
304. “never integrating their thinking into one overall concept or unifying vision. Hedgehogs, on the other hand, simplify a complex world into a single organizing idea, a basic principle or concept that unifies and guides everything. It doesn’t matter how complex the world, a hedgehog reduces all challenges and dilemmas to simple— indeed almost simplistic—hedgehog ideas. For a hedgehog, anything that does not somehow relate to the hedgehog idea holds no relevance.”
305. “Whatever style you use, be up front about it. Pretending to be participative or consensus-oriented in an effort to get “buy-in” to a decision that you’ve already made is terribly destructive. If you practice this type of deception, people will see it, be unimpressed, and feel manipulated. Such deception creates cynicism and lack of genuine commitment. If you’re going to be autocratic, then just be honest about it.”
306. “If the company doesn’t hit its forecasts, cash is tied up in inventory. Cash is like blood or oxygen; without it, you die. And growth eats cash. This is why roughly half of all bankruptcies occur after a year of record sales.”
307. “Your mission must meet one overriding criterion: it must be compelling. The best missions have an element of genuine passion in them. Don’t set a mission like this: To make and sell athletic shoes on a worldwide basis. Set a mission like this: Crush Reebok.”
308. “By definition, it is not possible for everyone to be above the average.”
309. “Be there first, be there fast, build market share—no matter how expensive—and you win,” yelled the entrepreneurs.”
310. “serving a two-year appointment as the Class of 1951 Chair for the Study of Leadership at the United States Military Academy at West Point is the fundamental importance of unit leadership. The cellular structure of any truly great organization is the well-led unit, for this is where great things get done. Great leadership at the top doesn’t amount to very much without exceptional leadership at the unit level.”
311. “Visionary companies make some of their best moves by experimentation, trial and error, opportunism, and—quite literally—accident. What looks in retrospect like brilliant foresight and preplanning was often the result of ‘let’s just try a lot of stuff and keep what works.'”
312. “If you have the right people on the bus, they will be self-motivated. The real question then becomes: How do you manage in such a way as not to de-motivate people? And one of the single most de-motivating actions you can take is to hold out false hopes, soon to be swept away by events.”
313. “A culture of discipline is not a principle of business, it is a principle of greatness.”
314. “The good-to-great companies paid scant attention to managing change, motivating people, or creating alignment. Under the right conditions, the problems of commitment, alignment, motivation, and change largely melt away.”
315. “The main point is to first get the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) before you figure out where to drive it. The”
316. “A crucial aspect of purpose is that it’s always worked towards, but never fully achieved, like chasing the earth’s horizon or pursuing a guiding star.”
317. “Dreams make you click, juice you, turn you on, excite the living daylights out of you. You cannot wait to get out of bed to continue pursuing your dream. The kind of dream I’m talking about gives meaning to your life. it is the ultimate motivator.”
318. “So, early in the war, he created an entirely separate department outside the normal chain of command, called the Statistical Office, with the principal function of feeding him—continuously updated and completely unfiltered—the most brutal facts of reality.”
319. “Merck • Corporate social responsibility • Unequivocal excellence in all aspects of the company • Science-based innovation • Honesty and integrity • Profit, but profit from work that benefits humanity Nordstrom”
320. “First, at the top levels of your organization, you absolutely must have the discipline not to hire until you find the right people. The single most harmful step you can take in a journey from good to great is to put the wrong people in key positions. Second, widen your definition of “right people” to focus more on the character attributes of the person and less on specialized knowledge. People can learn skills and acquire knowledge, but”
321. “You can accomplish anything in life, provided that you do not mind who gets the credit. —HARRY S. TRUMAN”
322. “The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you’ve made a hiring mistake.” ― James C. Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
323. “The executives who ignited the transformations from good to great did not first figure out where to drive the bus and then get people to take it there. No, they first got the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it.”
324. “Bad decisions made with good intentions, are still bad decisions.” — James C. Collins
325. “None of us can predict with certainty the twists and turns our lives will take.”
326. “Charisma can be as much a liability as an asset, as the strength of your leadership personality can deter people from bringing you the brutal facts.”
327. “generally to do something which is of value.1”
328. “The signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change. The signature of mediocrity is inconsistency.”
329. “Good is the enemy of great.” — James C. Collins
330. “It is not position. It is not rank. It is not power.”
331. “It all starts with disciplined people. The transition begins not by trying to discipline the wrong people into the right behaviors, but by getting self-disciplined people on the bus in the first place.”
332. “Start a ‘Stop Doing’ list. I’ll leave it as an existential dilemma on whether to put that task on your To Do list.”
333. “It’s not how you compensate your executives, it’s which executives you have to compensate in the first place. If”
334. “It occurs to me, Jim, that you spend too much time trying to be interesting. Why don't you invest more time being interested?”
335. “I am not failing, I am growing! Do you have the ability to reframe failure as growth in order to achieve your goals?”
336. “10Xers distinguish themselves by an ability to recognize defining moments that call for disrupting their plans, changing the focus of their intensity, and/or rearranging their agenda, because of opportunity or peril, or both.”
337. “Third, if you have the wrong people, it doesn’t matter whether you discover the right direction; you still won’t have a great company. Great vision without great people is irrelevant.”
338. “In a dangerous, turbulent world full of threats and disruptions, you need to “protect your flanks”—identify and protect against vulnerabilities that, if exposed or exploited, could kill or cripple you.”
339. “First Who . . . Then What. We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats—and then they figured out where to drive it. The old adage “People are your most important asset” turns out to be wrong. People are not your most important asset. The right people are.”
340. “Somehow over the years people have gotten the impression that Wal-Mart was... just this great idea that turned into an overnight success. But...it was an outgrowth of everything we’d been doing since [1945].... And like most overnight successes, it was about twenty years in the making.”
341. “A key psychology for leading from good to great is the Stockdale Paradox: Retain absolute faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, AND at the same time confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be. UNEXPECTED.”
342. “First, who… then what. We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats—and then they figured out where to drive it. The old adage ‘people are your most important asset’ turns out to be wrong. People are not your most important asset. The right people are.”
343. “If you put fences around people, you get sheep. Give people the room they need.”
344. “Encourage disagreement during the process.”
345. “If we get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then we’ll figure out how to take it someplace great.”
346. “The only mistakes you can learn from are the ones you survive.”
347. “Every good-to-great transition in our research began with a Level 5 leader who motivated people more with inspired standards than inspiring personality. Every 10x entrepreneurial success in our research had founders and leaders who, while sometimes colorful characters, never confused leadership with personality; they were utterly obsessed with making the company truly great and ensuring it endured beyond themselves.”
348. “Dreams make you click, juice you, turn you on, excite the living daylights out of you. You cannot wait to get out of bed to continue pursuing your dream. The kind of dream I’m talking about gives meaning to your life. it is the ultimate motivator.” — James C. Collins
349. “You absolutely cannot make a series of good decisions without first confronting the brutal facts. The good-to-great companies operated” ― James C. Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
350. “Discipline is consistency of action.” — James C. Collins
351. “Smart people instinctively understand the dangers of entrusting our future to self-serving leaders who use our institutions, whether in the corporate or social sectors, to advance their own interests.”
352. “If you have the wrong people, it doesn't matter whether you discover the right direction; you still won't have a great company. Great vision without great people is irrelevant.”
353. “A dream is a feeling that sticks – and propels.”
354. “What work makes you feel compelled to try to create greatness?”
355. “by breakthrough, broken into three broad stages: disciplined people, disciplined thought, and disciplined”
356. “Hewlett Packard Chairman Built Company by Design, Calculator by Chance.”
357. “Level 5 leaders: ambition first and foremost for the company and concern for its success rather than for one’s own riches and personal renown.”
358. “Beware of the influence of fear on your gut instincts. Fear creates self-deception. What passes for an intuitive decision is sometimes a fear-driven decision in disguise. A fear-driven decision is one where, because of the risks involved, you are afraid to do what you know deep down is right. Fear-driven decisions can easily get confused with intuitive decisions because there is a false sense of relief that comes with pacifying the fear.”
359. “True leadership only exists if people follow when they would otherwise have the freedom to not follow”
360. “When you turn over rocks and look at all the squiggly things underneath, you can either put the rock down, or you can say, ‘My job is to turn over rocks and look at the squiggly things,’ even if what you see can scare the hell out of you.”25 That quote, from Pitney Bowes executive Fred Purdue,”
361. “A true BHAG (Big, Hairy, Audacious Goal) is clear and compelling, serves as a unifying focal point of effort, and acts as a catalyst for team spirit. It has a clear finish line, so the organization can know when it has achieved the goal; people like to shoot for finish lines. A BHAG engages people – it reaches out and grabs them. It is tangible, energizing, highly focused. People get it right away; it takes little or no explanation.”
362. “A true BHAG (Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals) is clear and compelling, serves as a unifying focal point of effort, and acts as a catalyst for team spirit. It has a clear finish line, so the organization can know when it has achieved the goal; people like to shoot for finish lines. A BHAG engages people—it reaches out and grabs them. It is tangible, energizing, highly focused. People get it right away; it takes little or no explanation.”
363. “I am not failing – I am growing! Do you have the ability to reframe failure as growth in order to achieve your goals?” — James C. Collins
364. “but is simplicity enough?”
365. “What’s the role of luck? Our research showed that the great companies were not generally luckier than the comparisons—they didn’t get more good luck, less bad luck, bigger spikes of luck, or better timing of luck. Instead, they got a higher return on luck, making more of their luck than others.”
366. “Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great”
367. “A visionary company doesn’t simply balance between idealism and profitability: it seeks to be highly idealistic and highly profitable.” — James C. Collins
368. “These studies looked at people who had suffered serious adversity—cancer patients, prisoners of war, accident victims, and so forth—and survived. They found that people fell generally into three categories: those who were permanently dispirited by the event, those who got their life back to normal, and those who used the experience as a defining event that made them stronger.53”
369. “It is an understanding of what you can be the best at. The distinction is absolutely crucial.”
370. “To remain innovative, you’ve got to have people at all levels doing lots of experimenting, tinkering, and doing—creating the popcorn effect. How do you do this? How can you create the environment where this happens? There are three basic answers, which we shall now discuss in detail: Employ creative people Get out of their way Reward them for being innovative”
371. “If you spend your life keeping your options open, that’s exactly what you’ll do . . . spend your life keeping your options open.”
372. “Paradox: “We’re not going to hit breakthrough by Christmas, but if we keep pushing in the right direction, we will eventually hit breakthrough.”
373. “The signature of mediocrity is chronic inconstancy. The signature of greatness is a disciplined and consistent focus on the right things.”
374. “In Chapter 8, “Innovation,” we stress the importance of decentralization and autonomy. The problem, of course, is how to unleash individual creativity and, at the same time, move in a unified direction. Vision is the link. If all people in the company have a guiding star on which to sight (a common vision), they can be dispersed in hundreds of independent little boats, rowing in the same direction.”
375. “Do all creative innovations come from weird people? No, of course not. In fact, some of the most creative people we know come in fairly conservative packages. Yet, to have an innovative company, it’s also wise to have tolerance for a few unruly crazies. As Max De Pree of Herman Miller puts it, “If you want the best things to happen in corporate life, you have to find ways to be hospitable to the unusual person.”
376. “Consider the idea that charisma can be as much a liability as an asset. Your strength of personality can sow the seeds of problems.”
377. “We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.”
378. “Those fortunate enough to find or create a practical intersection of the three circles have the basis for a great work life.”
379. “Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.”
380. “The evidence does not support the idea that you need an outside leader to come in and shake up the place to go from good to great. In fact, going for a high-profile outside change agent is negatively correlated with a sustained transformation from good to great.”
381. “By definition, everyone can’t be above the average”
382. “The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline.”
383. “Mediocrity results first and foremost from management failure, not a technology failure”.
384. “In a world of constant change, the fundamentals are more important than ever.”
385. “A good rule of thumb is a 10- to 25-year horizon, perhaps longer if the mission is particularly challenging. Of course, some missions can be fulfilled faster than ten years, and it may be appropriate and effective to have a short time frame. Whatever time-length mission you set, be sure to recognize when you’ve fulfilled it and, most important, set a new one. Otherwise, you may fall into one of the most dangerous of traps: the “We’ve Arrived Syndrome.”
386. “Those who build great companies understand that the ultimate throttle on growth for any great company is not markets, or technology, or competition, or products. It is one thing above all others: the ability to get and keep enough of the right people.”
387. “The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you’ve made a hiring mistake. The best people don’t need to be managed. Guided, taught, led–yes. But not tightly managed.”
388. “focusing solely on what you can potentially do better than any other organization is the only path to greatness.”
389. “lasting transformations from good to great follow a general pattern of buildup followed by breakthrough.” ― James C. Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
390. “Cultivating debate, argument, dialogue, and disagreement—all this takes time, resulting in a slower decision-making process than just issuing an executive order. But it also increases the probability of choosing a wise course of action.”
391. “Visionary companies pursue a cluster of objectives, of which making money is only one—and not necessarily the primary one.”
392. “if you have the right people on the bus, the problem of how to motivate and manage people largely goes away. The right people don’t need to be tightly managed or fired up; they will be self-motivated by the inner drive to produce the best results and to be part of creating something great.”
393. “those who strive to turn good into great find the process no more painful or exhausting than those who settle for just letting things wallow along in mind-numbing mediocrity.”
394. “Those who build great companies understand that the ultimate throttle on growth for any great company is not markets, or technology, or competition, or products. It is one thing above all others: the ability to get and keep enough of the right people.” ― James C. Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
395. “Those who build great companies understand that the ultimate throttle on growth for any great company is not markets, or technology, or competition, or products. It is one thing above all others: the ability to get and keep enough of the right people. The”
396. “Discover your core values and purpose beyond just making money (core ideology) and combine this with the dynamic of preserve the core (stimulate progress).”
397. “Get the right people on the bus and in the right seat.” — James C. Collins
398. “Create the idea, You Are Never Alone.”
399. “One powerful method for getting at purpose is the five whys. Start with the descriptive statement We make X products or We deliver X services, and then ask, Why is that important? five times. After a few whys, you’ll find that you’re getting down to the fundamental purpose of the organization. We”
400. “the good-to-great companies continually refined the path to greatness with the brutal facts of reality.”
401. “True leadership is only when people follow when they would have the option not to follow.”
402. “The difference between a good leader and a great leader is humility.” — James C. Collins
403. “I... had no need for cheering dreams,” he wrote. “Facts are better than dreams.”
404. “To use an analogy, the "leadership is the answer to everything" perspective is the modern equivalent of the, 'God is the answer to everything' perspective that held back our scientific understanding of the physical world in the Dark Ages.
405. “Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. It’s not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious-but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves.” — James C. Collins
406. “Delegating decisions doesn’t mean being detached, nor does it mean standing idly by if the whole ship is going to crash into the rocks. It simply means giving people the power to make decisions that affect their area. It gives people a chance to test themselves and to build their own decision-making “muscle.”
407. “By definition, it is not possible to everyone to be above the average.” — James C. Collins
408. “12 In retirement, Smith reflected on his exceptional performance, saying simply, “I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job.”
409. “It requires the discipline to say, “Just because we are good at it—just because we’re making money and generating growth—doesn’t necessarily mean we can become the best at it.” The good-to-great companies understood that doing what you are good at will only make you good; focusing solely on what you can potentially do better than any other organization is the only path to greatness.”
410. “If you have charisma, you can still build an enduring great company. But never forget: If your company cannot be great without your personal charisma to inspire, then it is not yet a great company.”
411. “But what I find so striking is their incredible simplicity.”
412. “The signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change. The signature of mediocrity is inconsistency.” — James C. Collins
413. “Look, I don't really know where we should take this bus. But I know this much: If we get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then we'll figure out how to take it someplace great.”
414. “A good mission has a finish line—you must be able to know when you’ve done it, like the moon mission or a mountaintop. A good mission is risky, falling in the gray area where reason says, “This is unreasonable,” and intuition says, “But we believe we can do it nonetheless.”
415. “Those who build great companies understand that the ultimate throttle on growth for any great company is not markets, or technology, or competition, or products. It is one thing above all others: the ability to get and keep enough of the right people. The management team”
416. “The good-to-great leaders never wanted to become larger-than-life heroes. They never aspired to be put on a pedestal or become unreachable icons. They were seemingly ordinary people quietly producing extraordinary results.”
417. “because expending energy trying to motivate people is largely a waste of time.”
418. “In a truly great company profits and cash flow become like blood and water to a healthy body: They are absolutely essential for life but they are not the very point of life.”
419. “The Marine Corps recruits people who share the corps’ values, then provides them with the training required to”
420. “doing what you are good at will only make you good;”
421. “When you have disciplined people, you don’t need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don’t need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don’t need excessive controls. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance.”
422. “O melhor sinal da riqueza não é manter uma agenda lotada, mas ter tempo disponível para se concentrar no que é importante.”
423. “circles and getting rid of everything else.”
424. “Don’t take care of your career. Take care of your people. They will take care of your career.”
425. “Building a visionary company requires one percent vision and 99 percent alignment.” — James C. Collins
426. “My God, these guys don’t even know what the return-on-investment will be on this thing.”
427. “Goals live on the other side of obstacles and challenges,” said Bourque. “Along”
428. “We hire five, work them like ten, and pay them like eight.”31”
429. “Building a visionary company requires 1% vision and 99% alignment. When you have superb alignment, a visitor could drop in from outer space and infer your vision from the operations and activities of the company without ever reading it on paper or meeting a single senior executive.
430. “Perhaps your quest to be part of building something great will not fall in your business life. But find it somewhere. If not in corporate life, then perhaps in making your church great. If not there, then perhaps a nonprofit, or a community organization, or a class you teach. Get involved in something that you care so much about that you want to make it the greatest it can possibly be, not because of what you will get, but just because it can be done.”
431. “Recruit entrepreneurial leaders and give them freedom to determine the best path to achieving their objectives.”
432. “The critical question is not whether you’ll have luck, but what you do with the luck that you get.”
433. “Twenty percent of our success is the new technology that we embrace ... [but] eighty percent of our success is in the culture of our company.”24 Indeed,”
434. “Most companies (we believe that most organizations do indeed lack clarity of vision) let crises, firefights, and tactical decisions drive the company. We refer to this as “tactics-driving strategy.” Vision should drive strategy and strategy, in turn, should drive tactics, not the other way around.”
435. “It didn’t matter how bleak the situation or how stultifying their mediocrity, they all maintained unwavering faith that they would not just survive, but prevail as a great company. And yet, at the same time, they became relentlessly disciplined at confronting the most brutal facts of their current reality.” ― James C. Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
436. “A culture of discipline is not a principle of business, it is a principle of greatness.” — James C. Collins
437. “A great company will have many once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.”
438. “The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone you’ve made a hiring mistake”
439. “Miller’s comment leads to a very important point: Strategy is impossible without first setting a vision.”
440. “A magazine is simply a device to induce people to read advertising.”
441. “Good-to-great companies set their goals and strategies based on understanding; comparison companies set their goals and strategies based on bravado.” — James C. Collins
442. “We will never give up. We will never capitulate. It might take a long time, but we will find a way to prevail.”
443. “When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance. Technology”
444. “There are four basic types of mission to choose from: Targeting Common Enemy Role Model Internal Transformation.”
445. “people worried more about the leader—what he would say, what he would think, what he would do— than they worried about external reality and what it could”
446. “If you could pick one and only one ratio—profit per x (or, in the social sector, cash flow per x)—to systematically increase over time, what x would have the greatest and most sustainable impact on your economic engine?”
447. “Companies that change best over time know first and foremost what should not change.”
448. “The good-to-great companies displayed two distinctive forms of disciplined thought. The first, and the topic of this chapter, is that they infused the entire process with the brutal facts of reality. (The second, which we will discuss in the next chapter, is that they developed a simple, yet deeply insightful, frame of reference for all decisions.) When,”
449. “Faith in the endgame helps you live through the months or years of buildup”
450. “1. Build a culture around the idea of freedom and responsibility, within a framework.”
451. “Greatness is an inherently dynamic process, not an end point. The moment you think of yourself as great, your slide toward mediocrity will have already begun.”
452. “The moment a leader allows himself to become the primary reality people worry about, rather than reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or worse. This is one of the key reasons why less charismatic leaders often produce better long-term results than their more charismatic counterparts. Indeed,”
453. “The purpose of compensation is not to “motivate” the right behaviors from the wrong people, but to get and keep the right people in the first place.”
454. “It is very important to grasp that Level 5 leadership is not just about humility and modesty. It is equally about ferocious resolve, an almost stoic determination to do whatever needs to be done to make the company great. Indeed, we debated for a long time on the” ― James C. Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
455. “A company should not change its core values in response to market changes; rather, it should change markets, if necessary, to remain true to its core values.”
456. “People are not your most important asset….the right people are.”
457. “The challenge becomes not opportunity creation, but opportunity selection.”
458. “Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don’t have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.”
459. “The essence of profound insight is simplicity.”
460. “tends to rivet our attention on the Icarus companies”
461. “Shared vision is the crucial link in making decentralization work.”
462. “A Hedgehog Concept is a simple, crystalline concept that flows from deeply understanding the intersection of the following three circles: (1) what you’re deeply passionate about, (2) what you can be the best in the world at, and (3) what best drives your economic engine.”
463. “So, the question of Why greatness? is almost a nonsense question. If you're engaged in work that you love and care about, for whatever reason, then the question needs no answer. The question is not why, but how.”
464. “If you must have more than one priority, then keep it to a maximum of three—any more than three priorities is an admission that you don’t really have any priorities.”
465. “The fact that something is a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity” is irrelevant, unless it fits within the three circles. A great company will have many once-in-a-lifetime opportunities”
466. “How many companies have you encountered that articulate a clear ideology at the start of the company, yet cannot articulate a clear idea of what products to make?”
467. “The good-to-great companies built a consistent system with clear constraints, but they also gave people freedom and responsibility within the framework of that system. They hired self-disciplined people who didn’t need to be managed, and then managed the system, not the people.”
468. “Peter Drucker once observed that the drive for mergers and acquisitions comes less from sound reasoning and more from the fact that doing deals is a much more exciting way to spend your day than doing actual work.”
469. “Not one of the good-to-great companies focused obsessively on growth.” — James C. Collins
470. “Practical Discipline #2: When you know you need to make a people change, act.”
471. “Level 5 leaders look out the window to apportion credit to factors outside themselves when things go well (and if they cannot find a specific person or event to give credit to, they credit good luck). At the same time, they look in the mirror to apportion responsibility, never blaming bad luck when things go poorly.”
472. “those who strive to turn good into great find the process no more painful or exhausting than those who settle for just letting things wallow along in mind-numbing mediocrity. Yes, turning good into great takes energy, but the building of momentum adds more energy back into the pool than it takes out. Conversely, perpetuating mediocrity is an inherently depressing process and drains much more energy out of the pool than it puts back in.”
473. “It is more important to know who you are than where you are going, for where you are going will change as the world around you changes.”
474. “Whether you prevail or fail depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you.” — James C. Collins
475. “Start a ‘Stop Doing’ list. I’ll leave it as an existential dilemma on whether to put that task on your To Do list.” — James C. Collins
476. “The good-to-great companies made a habit of putting their best people on their best opportunities, not their biggest problems. The comparison companies had a penchant for doing just the opposite, failing to grasp the fact that managing your problems can only make you good, whereas building your opportunities is the only way to become great. There is an important”
477. “Courage, it’s said, is not the absence of fear, but the ability to act in its presence.”
478. “Whether you prevail or fail depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you.”
479. “Far better to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory, nor defeat.”
480. “There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away. —WINSTON S. CHURCHILL,”
481. “Profit is like oxygen, food, water, and blood for the body; they are not the point of life, but without them, there is no life.” — James C. Collins
482. “years. What separates people, Stockdale taught me, is not the presence or absence of difficulty, but how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of life. In”
483. “The only way to remain great is to keep on applying the fundamental principles that made you great.”
484. “This can only be accomplished by people who live, breathe, eat and sleep what they are doing.... [I am] associated with a large group of knowledgeable, dedicated [people] who eat, breathe, and sleep the world of aeronautics.... Man’s objective should be opportunity for greater accomplishment and greater service. The greatest pleasure life has to offer is the satisfaction that flows from... participating in a difficult and constructive undertaking.50”
485. “What separates people, Stockdale taught me, is not the presence or absence of difficulty, but how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of life.” ― James C. Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't
486. “What is the purpose of budgeting? Most”
487. “Entrenched myth: Successful leaders in a turbulent world are bold, risk-seeking visionaries. Contrary finding: The best leaders we studied did not have a visionary ability to predict the future. They observed what worked, figured out why it worked, and built upon proven foundations. They were not more risk taking, more bold, more visionary, and more creative than the comparisons. They were more disciplined, more empirical, and more paranoid.”
488. “First figure out your partners, then figure out what ideas to pursue. The most important thing isn’t the market you target, the product you develop or the financing, but the founding team.”
489. “WHY 20 MILE MARCHERS WIN 20 Mile Marching helps turn the odds in your favor for three reasons: 1. It builds confidence in your ability to perform well in adverse circumstances. 2. It reduces the likelihood of catastrophe when you’re hit by turbulent disruption. 3. It helps you exert self-control in an out-of-control environment.”
490. “Letting the wrong people hang around is unfair to all the right people, as they inevitably find themselves compensating for the inadequacies of the wrong people. Worse, it can drive away the best people. Strong performers are intrinsically motivated by performance, and when they see their efforts impeded by carrying extra weight, they eventually become frustrated.”
491. “Level 5 leaders look out the window to apportion credit to factors outside themselves when things go well (and if they cannot find a specific person or event to give credit to, they credit good luck). At the same time, they look in the mirror to apportion responsibility, never blaming bad luck when things go poorly. The”
492. “Discover your core values and purpose beyond just making money (core ideology) and combine this with the dynamic of preserve the core/stimulate progress.”
493. “Core values are essential for enduring greatness, but it does seem to matter what those core values are”
494. “When you are suffering at the end of the race, you are not running for you.”
495. “Get the right people on the bus and in the right seat.”
496. “Do not ask, What core values should we hold? Ask instead, What core values do we truly and passionately hold?”
497. “It is simply a manifestation of the “first who” principle: It’s not how you compensate your executives, it’s which executives you have to compensate in the first place.”
498. “Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline.”
499. “If you are a prospective entrepreneur with the desire to start and build a visionary company but have not yet taken the plunge because you don’t have a “great idea,” we encourage you to lift from your shoulders the burden of the great-idea myth. Indeed, the evidence suggests that it might be better to not obsess on finding a great idea before launching a company. Why? Because the great-idea approach shifts your attention away from seeing the company as your ultimate creation.”
500. “Creativity dies in an undisciplined environment”
501. “It is not the content of a company’s values that correlates with performance, but the strength of conviction with which it holds those values, whatever they might be. ”
502. “It’s hard to see the difference between greatness and mediocrity in good times, when almost everyone is thriving. But when the turbulent times come, the difference becomes stark; the companies that exercised productive paranoia far in advance will pull ahead of the weak mediocrities. And even if the ill-prepared survive the disruptive shock, they will likely never close the gap. The strong and well prepared before the storm continue to pull ahead, never to look back.”
503. “Technology cannot turn a good enterprise into a great one, nor by itself prevent disaster”
504. “Faith in the endgame helps you live through the months or years of buildup.”
505. “By definition, it is not possible to everyone to be above the average.”
506. “highly undiversified” means investing fully in those things that fit squarely within the three”
507. “The most constrained resource in your company is your time.”
508. “Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. It’s not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious-but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves.”
509. “• The key point of this chapter is not just the idea of getting the right people on the team. The key point is that “who” questions come before “what” decisions—before vision, before strategy, before organization structure, before tactics. First who, then what—as a rigorous discipline, consistently applied.”
510. “The point is not to create a perfect statement but to gain a deep understanding of your organization’s core values and purpose, which can then be expressed in a multitude of ways. In fact, we often suggest that once the core has been identified, managers should generate their own statements of the core values and purpose to share with their groups.”