Quotes from James C. Collins

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.

Courage, it's said, is not the absence of fear, but the ability to act in its presence.

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.

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.

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.

Yes, leadership is about vision. But leadership is equally about creating a climate where the truth is heard and the brutal facts confronted. There's a huge difference between the opportunity to "have your say" and the opportunity to be heard. The good-to-great leaders understood this distinction, creating a culture wherein people had a tremendous opportunity to be heard and, ultimately, for the truth to be heard.

A vitória aguarda aquele que tem tudo em ordem – ou sorte, como as pessoas costumam dizer. A derrota é certa para aquele que deixa de tomar as precauções necessárias a tempo; a isso as pessoas chamam má sorte." Roald Amundsen, Polo sula

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.

The problem is not the statistical odds; the problem is that people are squandering their time and resources on the wrong things.

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.

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 tranquillity 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.

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

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.

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 . . .

Edward Tufte shows in his book Visual Explanations

Encourage disagreement during the process.

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.

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.

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.

A company should limit its growth based on its ability to attract enough of the right people.) 2.

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

As the Chinese philosopher Lao-tzu pointed out 2,500 years ago, "True leaders inspire people to do great things and, when the work is done, their people proudly say, 'We did this ourselves.

The function of leadership—the number one responsibility of a leader—is to catalyze a clear and shared vision for the company and to secure commitment to and vigorous pursuit of that vision. As we discussed earlier, this is a universal requirement of leadership, and no matter what your style, you must perform this function.

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.