Quotes from James C. Collins

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?

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.

True leadership only exists if people follow when they would otherwise have the freedom to not follow

to create great results requires a nearly fanatical dedication to the idea of consistency within the Hedgehog Concept.

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.

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.

For BHAG-driven people, the extended discomfort, the enduring quest, can itself be a form of bliss. When you commit to a BHAG, it lives with you.

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

Leadership is the art of getting people to want to do what must be done.

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.

The ultimate definition of success in life is that your spouse likes and respects you ever more as the years go by. By that measure, more than any other, I hope to be as successful as she is.

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.

Unlike purpose, which is never achieved, a mission should be achievable. It translates values and purpose into an energizing, highly focused goal—like the moon mission. It is crisp, clear, bold, exhilarating. It reaches out and grabs people in the gut. It requires little or no explanation; people "get it" right away. Once a mission is fulfilled, you return to purpose to set a new mission.

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.

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.

Practical Discipline #3: Put your best people on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems.

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.

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

Finally—and this is important—a good mission has a specific time frame for its achievement.

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.

Such is the nature of how people respond to authority figures. Inevitably, people will begin to emulate you. Even if you have a non-hierarchical environment, you'll still be perceived as an authority figure, and people will respond to you as such. Therefore, you've got to be a role model of the culture you want to create.

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.

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.

What we did was so simple, and we kept it simple. It