Quotes About Success

It all starts with disciplined people. The transition begins not by trying to discipline the wrong people into the right behaviors, but by getting self-disciplined people on the bus in the first place.

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.

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.

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.

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

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 . . .

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.

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.

James C. Collins

Entrenched myth: Successful leaders in a turbulent world are bold, risk-seeking visionaries. Contrary finding: The best leaders we studied did not have a visionary ability to predict the future. They observed what worked, figured out why it worked, and built upon proven foundations. They were not more risk taking, more bold, more visionary, and more creative than the comparisons. They were more disciplined, more empirical, and more paranoid.

Searching for a single great idea upon which to build success is time telling. Building an organization that can generate many great ideas is clock building. Our research showed that leaders who build enduring great companies make the shift from time telling to clock building. Clock builders create highly replicable recipes, extensive training programs, leadership-development pipelines, and tangible mechanisms to reinforce core values.

Everyone gets luck, good and bad, but 10X winners make more of the luck they get.

What's the role of luck? Our research showed that the great companies were not generally luckier than the comparisons—they didn't get more good luck, less bad luck, bigger spikes of luck, or better timing of luck. Instead, they got a higher return on luck, making more of their luck than others.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Put your best people on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems. In

The executives who ignited the transformations from good to great did not first figure out where to drive the bus and then get people to take it there. No, they first got the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it.