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.
That good is the enemy of great is not just a business problem. It is a human problem.
An organization is not truly great, if it cannot be great without you.
How can you succeed by helping others succeed? We succeed at our very best only when we help others succeed.
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.
The x factor of a great leader is humility combined with will.
A company should limit its growth based on its ability to attract enough of the right people.
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.
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.
How can we do better tomorrow than we did today?
Good-to-great companies set their goals and strategies based on understanding; comparison companies set their goals and strategies based on bravado.
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.
Mediocrity results first and foremost from management failure, not technological failure.
Start a 'Stop Doing' list. I'll leave it as an existential dilemma on whether to put that task on your To Do list
The challenge is not just to build a company that can endure; but to build one that is worthy of enduring.
You need self-control in an out-of-control world.
"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.
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.
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.
By definition, it is not possible to everyone to be above the average.
Discipline should amplify creativity rather than stifle it.
Good is the enemy of great.. The vast majority of good companies remain just that - good, but not great.
Level 5 leaders are differentiated from other levels of leaders in that they have a wonderful blend of personal humility combined with extraordinary professional will. Understand that they are very ambitious; but their ambition, first and foremost, is for the company's success. They realize that the most important step they must make to become a Level 5 leader is to subjugate their ego to the company's performance. When asked for interviews, these leaders will agree only if it's about the company and not about them.
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.
The start of the New Year is a perfect time to start a stop doing list and to make this the cornerstone of your New Year resolutions, be it for your company, your family or yourself. It also is a perfect time to clarify your three circles, mirroring at a personal level the three questions... 1) What are you deeply passionate about? 2) What are you are genetically encoded for - what activities do you feel just "made to do"? 3) What makes economic sense - what can you make a living at?
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