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Kindle Notes & Highlights
The 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.
Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice.
You can accomplish anything in life, provided that you do not mind who gets the credit.
“I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job.”13
Level 5 leaders want to see the company even more successful in the next generation, comfortable with the idea that most people won’t even know that the roots of that success trace back to their efforts.
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.
Level 5 leaders look out the window to apportion credit to factors outside themselves when things go well (and if they cannot find a specific person or event to give credit to, they credit good luck). At the same time, they look in the mirror to apportion responsibility, never blaming bad luck when things go poorly.
The people we interviewed from the good-to-great companies clearly loved what they did, largely because they loved who they did it with.
the good-to-great companies continually refined the path to greatness with the brutal facts of reality.
The key, then, lies not in better information, but in turning information into information that cannot be ignored.
“I never lost faith in the end of the story,” he said, when I asked him. “I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”
Another long pause, and more walking. Then he turned to me and said, “This is a very important lesson. You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
What separates people, Stockdale taught me, is not the presence or absence of difficulty, but how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of life.
Retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties. AND at the same time Confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
What you can be the best in the world at (and, equally important, what you cannot be the best in the world at). This discerning standard goes far beyond core competence. Just because you possess a core competence doesn’t necessarily mean you can be the best in the world at
Freedom is only part of the story and half the truth. . . . That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplanted by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.
Most companies build their bureaucratic rules to manage the small percentage of wrong people on the bus, which in turn drives away the right people on the bus, which then increases the percentage of wrong people on the bus, which increases the need for more bureaucracy to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline, which then further drives the right people away, and so forth.
The real question is, once you know the right thing, do you have the discipline to do the right thing and, equally important, to stop doing the wrong things?
“Stop doing” lists are more important than “to do” lists.
Most men would rather die, than think. Many do. —BERTRAND RUSSELL1
those who turn good into great are motivated by a deep creative urge and an inner compulsion for sheer unadulterated excellence for its own sake.
“Crawl, walk, run” can be a very effective approach, even during times of rapid and radical technological change.
but any single heave—no matter how large—reflects a small fraction of the entire cumulative effect upon the flywheel.
Tremendous power exists in the fact of continued improvement and the delivery of results.
The point is not what core values you have, but that you have core values at all, that you know what they are, that you build them explicitly into the organization, and that you preserve them over time.
Genius of AND. Embrace both extremes on a number of dimensions at the same time. Instead of choosing A OR B, figure out how to have A AND B—purpose AND profit, continuity AND change, freedom AND responsibility, etc.
