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The eleven good-to-great CEOs are some of the most remarkable CEOs of the century, given that only eleven companies from the Fortune 500 met the exacting standards for entry into this study. Yet, despite their remarkable results, almost no one ever remarked about them! George Cain, Alan Wurtzel, David Maxwell, Colman Mockler, Darwin Smith, Jim Herring, Lyle Everingham, Joe Cullman, Fred Allen, Cork Walgreen, Carl Reichardt—how many of these extraordinary executives had you heard of?
Where women
“We hire five, work them like ten, and pay them like eight.”31
One of the dominant themes that runs throughout this book is that if you successfully implement its findings, you will not need to spend time and energy “motivating” people. If you have the right people on the bus, they will be self-motivated. The real question then becomes: How do you manage in such a way as not to de-motivate people? And one of the single most de-motivating actions you can take is to hold out false hopes, soon to be swept away by events.
you could pick one and only one ratio—profit per x (or, in the social sector, cash flow per x)—to systematically increase over time, what x would have the greatest and most sustainable impact on your economic engine?
Avoid bureaucracy and hierarchy and instead create a culture of discipline. When you put these two complementary forces together—a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship—you get a magical alchemy of superior performance and sustained results.
a great company is much more likely to die of indigestion from too much opportunity than starvation from too little. The challenge becomes not opportunity creation, but opportunity selection.
We entered a remarkable moment in history when the whole idea of trying to build a great company seemed quaint and outdated. “Built to Flip” became the mantra of the day. Just tell people you were doing something, anything, connected to the Internet, and—presto!—you became rich by flipping shares to the public, even if you had no profits (or even a real company). Why take all the hard steps to go from buildup to breakthrough, creating a model that actually works, when you could yell, “New technology!” or “New economy!” and convince people to give you hundreds of millions of dollars?
To make technology productive in a transformation from good to great means asking the following questions. Does the technology fit directly with your Hedgehog Concept? If yes, then you need to become a pioneer in the application of that technology. If no, then ask, do you need this technology at all? If yes, then all you need is parity. (You don’t necessarily need the world’s most advanced phone system to be a great company.) If no, then the technology is irrelevant,
thoughtless reliance on technology is a liability, not an asset.
Good-to-great organizations avoid technology fads and bandwagons, yet they become pioneers in the application of carefully selected technologies. The key question about any technology is, Does the technology fit directly with your Hedgehog Concept? If yes, then you need to become a pioneer in the application of that technology. If no, then you can settle for parity or ignore it entirely.
good-to-great companies used technology as an accelerator of momentum, not a creator of it.
When people begin to feel the magic of momentum—when they begin to see tangible results, when they can feel the flywheel beginning to build speed—that’s when the bulk of people line up to throw their shoulders against the wheel and push.
