Quotes from James C. Collins

It's not only the audacity of the goal but also the level of commitment to the goal that counts.

The good-to-great leaders understood three simple truths. First, if you begin with "who," rather than "what," you can more easily adapt to a changing world.

purposeful evolution.

Third, if you have the wrong people, it doesn't matter whether you discover the right direction; you still won't have a great company. Great vision without great people is irrelevant.

The challenge becomes not opportunity creation, but opportunity selection.

It takes discipline to say "No, thank you" to big opportunities.

The good-to-great companies made a habit of putting their best people on their best opportunities, not their biggest problems. The comparison companies had a penchant for doing just the opposite, failing to grasp the fact that managing your problems can only make you good, whereas building your opportunities is the only way to become great.

The best people don't need to be managed. Guided, taught, led—yes. But not tightly managed. We

Accomplishing a 20 Mile March, consistently, in good times and bad, builds confidence. Tangible achievement in the face of adversity reinforces the 10X perspective: we are ultimately responsible for improving performance. We never blame circumstance; we never blame the environment.

3M didn't sell raw materials, so there was no business to transact. But McKnight—curiosity piqued and on the prowl for interesting new ideas that might move the company forward—asked a simple question: "Why does Mr. Okie want these samples?"35

Those who build great companies understand that the ultimate throttle on growth for any great company is not markets, or technology, or competition, or products. It is one thing above all others: the ability to get and keep enough of the right people. The

never integrating their thinking into one overall concept or unifying vision. Hedgehogs, on the other hand, simplify a complex world into a single organizing idea, a basic principle or concept that unifies and guides everything. It doesn't matter how complex the world, a hedgehog reduces all challenges and dilemmas to simple— indeed almost simplistic—hedgehog ideas. For a hedgehog, anything that does not somehow relate to the hedgehog idea holds no relevance.

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

Twenty percent of our success is the new technology that we embrace ... [but] eighty percent of our success is in the culture of our company."24 Indeed

So, the question of Why greatness? is almost a nonsense question. If you're engaged in work that you love and care about, for whatever reason, then the question needs no answer. The question is not why, but how.

In building his company and living his life, Hewlett adhered to a simple motto that he oft repeated: "Never stifle a generous impulse.

It is simply a manifestation of the "first who" principle: It's not how you compensate your executives, it's which executives you have to compensate in the first place.

You don't get a chance to adjust and finagle, and decide that you really didn't intend to do that anyway, and readjust your objectives to make yourself look better. You never just focus on what you've accomplished for the year; you focus on what you've accomplished relative to exactly what you said you were going to accomplish—no matter how tough the measure. That was a discipline learned at Abbott, and that we carried into Amgen.3

It requires the discipline to say, "Just because we are good at it—just because we're making money and generating growth—doesn't necessarily mean we can become the best at it." The good-to-great companies understood that doing what you are good at will only make you good; focusing solely on what you can potentially do better than any other organization is the only path to greatness.

The right people will do the right things and deliver the best results they're capable of, regardless of the incentive system.

If you spend your life keeping your options open, that's exactly what you'll do . . . spend your life keeping your options open.

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.

But there is a second answer to the question of why greatness, one that is at the very heart of what motivated us to undertake this huge project in the first place: the search for meaning, or more precisely, the search for meaningful work. I

In a good-to-great transformation, people are not your most important asset. The right people are.