Good to Great

Why some companies make the leap and others don't?
‍
Jim Collins and his team of researchers used strict benchmarks to identify a group of eleven elite companies that made the leap from good to great and sustained that greatness for at least fifteen years.

Based on their findings, we must keep taking care of following areas:

1. Keep only disciplined, passionate and humble people
2. Make truth, simplicity and clear focus priority
3. Maintain a culture of discipline
   

Let me explain shortly what it means

‍

1. Keep only disciplined people

‍
Discipline people are outcome of a passion, a framework and a personal humility

• Passion helps with discipline because don't need to push yourself.
• Good framework helps to set up responsibilities and deadlines without losing freedom.
• Personal humility helps with becoming great as a team:
• Set up successors for success. You work for getting replaced.
• Act compellingly modest. Prefer to direct attention to others or results of the company.
• Be unwaveringly determined to do whatever needs to be done to make the company great.

Right people on the bus (and wrong off)

• When in doubt, don’t hire — keep looking.
• When you know you need to make a people change, act.
• Put your best people on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems.

2. Make truth, simplicity and clear focus priority

‍

Confront brutal facts

• Lead with questions, not answers. Make sure it's safe to tell the brutal truth.
• Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion.
• Conduct autopsies, without blame.
• Build red flag mechanisms that turn information into information that cannot be ignored.

Principles for focus

1. You can be best in the world.
2. You are deeply passionate about it.
3. It drives the single most important KPI ratio (like GMV per x).

3. Create a culture of discipline

‍

Build a framework enabling us freedom with clear responsibilities

• Build a culture around the idea of freedom and responsibility, within a framework.
• When the team is disciplined, hierarchy and bureaucracy become irrelevant.
• Fill your culture with self-disciplined people who are willing to go to extreme lengths to fulfill their responsibilities.
• Don’t confuse a culture of discipline with a tyrannical disciplinarian.

‍

Evaluate fanatically consistently your actions and opportunities based on principles for focus:

1. Can we be the best in the world?
2. Are we passionated to solve this problem?
3. Is this driving your most important KPI ratio?

‍

Dos and don'ts for maintaining a culture of discipline

‍
Dos

Do evaluate fanatically consistently your actions and opportunities based on principles for focus:

1. Can we be the best in the world?
2. Are we passionated to solve this problem?
3. Is this driving your most important KPI ratio?

Don'ts

• Don't expect overnight success instead of incremental change.
• Don't skip buildup phase (keep wrong people and brutal facts).
• Don't try to use technology as a creator of momentum. Tech should be just an accelerator.
• Don't overreact to new technology.
• Don't implement big programs, radical change efforts, dramatic revolutions and chronic restructuring.
• Don't embrace fads and engage in management hoopla, rather than confront the brutal facts
• Don't demonstrate chronic inconsistency, lurching back and forth and straying outside the three circles.
• Don't jump right into action, without disciplined thought, or first getting the right people on the bus.
• Don't spend a lot of energy trying to align and motivate people, rallying them around new visions.
• Don't sell always the future to compensate for lack of results in the present.