Quotes About Success

No company can grow revenues consistently faster than its ability to get enough of the right people to implement that growth and still become a great company.

Look, I don't really know where we should take this bus. But I know this much: If we get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then we'll figure out how to take it someplace great.

part, always great," he said. "They never had to turn themselves from good companies into great companies. They had parents like David

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Discipline is the greatest thing in the world. Where there is no discipline, there is no character. And without character, there is no progress. . . . Adversity gives us opportunities to grow. And we usually get what we work for. If we have problems and overcome them, we grow tall in character, and the qualities that bring success.

But isn't setting such an audacious mission risky? Yes. A good mission should be difficult to achieve. There should be a chance you'll fail, combined with an off-setting belief that you'll make it anyway. That's part of what makes it a real mission.

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.

focusing solely on what you can potentially do better than any other organization is the only path to greatness.

It is very important to grasp that Level 5 leadership is not just about humility and modesty. It is equally about ferocious resolve, an almost stoic determination to do whatever needs to be done to make the company great.

When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance. Technology

Larger-than-life, celebrity leaders who ride in from the outside are negatively correlated with taking a company from good to great. Ten of eleven good-to-great CEOs came from inside the company, whereas

Every good-to-great transition in our research began with a Level 5 leader who motivated people more with inspired standards than inspiring personality. Every 10x entrepreneurial success in our research had founders and leaders who, while sometimes colorful characters, never confused leadership with personality; they were utterly obsessed with making the company truly great and ensuring it endured beyond themselves.

Good is the enemy of great. And

We live in a world rich in success but impoverished in meaning. A life of relentless work without meaning is brutal and dark. Most of us will never have the depth of love in our daily work that Manchester had with his fellow Marines. But we can move closer to it by building a culture where people depend on people. And in so doing, you will give people something of immeasurable value—work that matters. And that is truly great.