H WF’s Reviews > Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't > Status Update

The best hiring decisions often came from people with no industry or business experience. In one case, he hired a manager who’d been captured twice during WWII and escaped both times. “I thought that anyone who could do that shouldn’t have trouble with business.”

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.

Level 5 leaders are fanatically driven, infected with an incurable need to produce results. They will sell the mills or fire their brother, if that’s what it takes to make the company great.

Darwin smith, CEO of Kimberly-Clark, when asked by a journalist how he described his management styles he said “eccentric.” He was a man who carried no airs of self-importance. He found his favorite companionship among plumbers and electricians and spent his vacations rumbling around his Wisconsin farm in the can of a backhoe digging holes and moving rocks. He was not meek or soft. He was Fierce.

As one of my favorite professors once said, “The best students those who never quite believe their professors.” He also said, “one ought not to reject the data merely because one does not like what the data implies.” I offer everything herein for your thoughtful consideration, not blind acceptance. You’re the judge and jury. Let the evidence speak.

“People are your most important asset” turns out to be wrong. People are not your most important asset. The RIGHT people are.

Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice.

Good is the enemy of great.