Quotes from James C. Collins

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.

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

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.

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

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.

About 50 percent of great leadership is what you do with the unexpected.

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.

The most constrained resource in your company is your time.

Catastrophic bad luck can kill a potentially great company, but good luck cannot make a company great. Luck doesn't build great companies that last; people do.

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?

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

I... had no need for cheering dreams," he wrote. "Facts are better than dreams.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Setting priorities requires making tough choices as to what is really important. One reason so many people have such a difficult time getting focused is that they also have a difficult time making decisions: they balk at choosing which items will be left off their priority list.

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.

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.

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

If you have the right people, they will be self-motivated.

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.

the Mach3—leaving hundreds of millions of people to a more painful daily battle with stubble.19