James C. Collins Quotes

We hire five, work them like ten, and pay them like eight."31

accomplish the organization's mission.

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.

You absolutely must have the discipline not to hire until you find the right people.

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 -

A company should limit its growth based on its ability to attract enough of the right people.

Good is the enemy of great.. The vast majority of good companies remain just that - good, but not great.

Those who build and perpetuate mediocrity ... are motivated more by the fear of being left behind.

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.

It's more important than ever to define yourself in terms of what you stand for rather than what you make, because what you make is going to become outmoded faster than it has at any time in the past ... hang on to the idea of who you are as a company, and focus not on what you do, but on what you could do. By being really clear about what you stand for and why you exist, you can see what you could do with a much more open mind. You enhance your ability to adapt to change.

If your company disappeared, would it leave a gaping hole that could not easily be filled by any other enterprise on the planet?

A visionary company doesn't simply balance between idealism and profitability: it seeks to be highly idealistic and highly profitable.

Circles and getting rid of everything else.

Most men would rather die, than think. Many do.

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.

A Culture of Discipline. All companies have a culture, some companies have discipline, but few companies have a culture of discipline. 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. Technology

When [what you are deeply passionate about, what you can be best in the world at and what drives your economic engine] come together, not only does your work move toward greatness, but so does your life. 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. Perhaps, then, you might gain that rare tranquility that comes from knowing that you've had a hand in creating something of intrinsic excellence that makes a contribution. Indeed, you might even gain that deepest of all satisfactions: knowing that your short time here on this earth has been well spent, and that it mattered.

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.

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.

In an ironic twist, I now see Good to Great not as a sequel to Built to Last, but more of a prequel. Good to Great is about how to turn a good organization into one that produces sustained great results. Built to Last is about how you take a company with great results and turn it into an enduring great company of iconic stature.

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

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.

1. Build a culture around the idea of freedom and responsibility, within a framework.

The difference between a good leader and a great leader is humility.

The best CEOs in our research display tremendous ambition for their company combined with the stoic will to do whatever it takes, no matter how brutal (within the bounds of the company's core values), to make the company great. Yet at the same time they display a remarkable humility about themselves, ascribing much of their own success to luck, discipline and preparation rather than personal genius.

Just because a company falls doesn't invalidate what we can learn by studying that company when it was at its historical best.

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.

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

Discipline is the greatest thing in the world. Where there is no discipline, there is no character. And without character, there is no progress ...

What separates people is not the presence or absence of difficulty, but how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of life.

Creative leadership impact increases in your 50's. When I turn 50 I want to say, "Nice start!"

The inner experience of fallure is totally different than failure. Going to fallure means 100% commitment - you leave nothing in reserve, no mental or physical resource untapped, you never give yourself a psychological out. Failure means making a decision to let go, to be less than 100% committed, when confronted by fear, pain and uncertainty.

If you have a charismatic cause you don't need to be a charismatic leader.

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.

That good is the enemy of great is not just a business problem. It is a human problem.

"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.

Those fortunate enough to find or create a practical intersection of the three circles have the basis for a great work life.

Level 5 leaders embody a paradoxical mix of personal humility and professional will. They are ambitious, to be sure, but ambitious first and foremost for the company, not themselves.

Good-to-great companies set their goals and strategies based on understanding; comparison companies set their goals and strategies based on bravado.

Greatest danger is not failure, but be successful and not know why.

By definition, it is not possible to everyone to be above the average.

Level 5 leaders display a workmanlike diligence - more plow horse than show horse.

Then it began to dawn on us: There was no miracle moment. Although it may have looked like a single-stroke breakthrough to those peering in from the outside, it was anything but that to people experiencing transformation from within. Rather, it was a quiet, deliberate process of figuring out what needed to be done to create the best future results and then simply taking those steps, one after the other, turn by turn of the flywheel. After pushing on that flywheel in a consistent direction over an extended period of time, they'd inevitably hit a point of breakthrough.

Discipline is consistency of action.

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.

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.

I see the Baldrige process as a powerful set of mechanisms for disciplined people engaged in disciplined thought and taking disciplined action to create great organizations that produce exceptional results.

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.

What can we do better than any other company in the world, that fits our economic denominator and that we have passion for?

When you have disciplined people, you don't

The only truly reliable source of stability is a strong inner core and the willingness to change and adapt everything except that core.

In a world of constant change, the fundamentals are more important than ever.

The signature of mediocrity is chronic inconstancy. The signature of greatness is a disciplined and consistent focus on the right things.

We are not imprisoned by circumstances, setbacks, mistakes or staggering defeats, we are freed by our choices.

Be rigorous about your HR decisions. There is a difference between rigorous and ruthless.

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.

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.

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.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.

We learned that a former prisoner of war had more to teach us about what it takes to find a path to greatness than most books on corporate strategy.

I am not failing - I am growing! Do you have the ability to reframe failure as growth in order to achieve your goals?

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

If I'm going really, really fast, I can do a page of finished text a day, on average.

Whether you prevail or fail depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you.

Don't be interesting - be interested.

Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline.

Good is the enemy of great. And that's one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great.

I can just let my curiosity wander unleashed.

No matter what. Wherever your mind wanders, it seems to turn up at the same Field of Dreams. It's the vision you wake up with in the morning, and it's the last thing you picture before you fall asleep. Everytime you think of it, the idea in your head seems to get more vivid, filled in with more detail: You not only want to win a gold medal at the Olympics, you not only can see yourself standing there on the podium, but you can also feel the goose bumps as your national anthem is played; the tears are in your eyes. (That's how real a dream can be and should be)

If you have more than three priorities then you don't have any.

The main point is first get the right people on the bus (and wrong people off the bus) before you figure out where to drive it. The second key point is the degree of sheer rigor in people decisions in order to take a company from Good to Great.

Technology and technology-driven change has virtually nothing to do with igniting a transformation from good to great

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.

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

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.

Far more difficult than implementing change is figuring out what works, understanding why it works, grasping when to change, and knowing when not to.

Stop doing" lists are more important than"to do" lists.

We must reject the idea ... Well-intentioned, but dead wrong ... That the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become "more like a business." Most businesses ... Like most of anything else in life ... Fall somewhere between mediocre and good.

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,

SMaC recipe is a set of durable operating practices that create a replicable and consistent success formula. The word "SMaC" stands for Specific, Methodical, and Consistent. You can use the term "SMaC" as a descriptor in any number of ways: as an adjective ("Let's build a SMaC system"), as a noun ("SMaC lowers risk"), and as a verb ("Let's SMaC this project"). A solid SMaC recipe is the operating code for turning strategic concepts into reality, a set of practices more enduring than mere tactics. Tactics change from situation to situation, whereas SMaC practices can last for decades and apply across a wide range of circumstances.

People need BHAGs - big hairy audacious goals.

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.

It's not how you compensate your executives, it's which executives you have to compensate in the first place. If

You must ask, "What do we mean by great results?" Your goals don't have to be quantifiable, but they do have to be describable. Some leaders try to insist, "The only acceptable goals are measurable," but that's actually an undisciplined statement. Lots of goals-beauty, quality, life change, love-are worthy but not quantifiable. But you do have to be able to tell if you're making progress.

In retirement, Smith reflected on his exceptional performance, saying simply, I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job.

A dream is a feeling that sticks - and propels.

People are not your most important asset ... the right people are.

Start a 'Stop Doing' list. I'll leave it as an existential dilemma on whether to put that task on your To Do list

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. 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.

The essence of profound insight is simplicity.

The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline.

Not all time in life is equal. How many opportunities do you get to talk about what your life is going to add up to with people thinking about the same question?

The people who don't have a great life are the ones who settle for a good one.

first who... then what" start-up.

Great vision without great people is irrelevant.

It took Einstein ten years of groping through the fog to get the theory of special relativity, and he was a bright guy.

I don't know where we should take this company, but I do know that 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.

Discipline should amplify creativity rather than stifle it.

Some managers are uncomfotable with expressing emotion about their dreams, but it's the passion and emotion that will attract and motivate others.

Reichardt kept people relentlessly focused on the simple hedgehog idea,