Jim Collins Quotes

What makes for a key seat? Any seat meeting any one of the following three conditions qualifies as key: The person in that seat has the power to make significant people decisions. Failure in the seat could expose the entire enterprise to significant risk or potential catastrophe. Success in the seat would have a significantly outsized impact on the company’s success.

For a truly great company, the Big Thing is never any specific line of business or product or idea or invention. The Big Thing is your underlying flywheel architecture, properly conceived

Each turn builds upon previous work as you make a series of good decisions, supremely well executed, that compound one upon another. This is how you build greatness.

...it is better to understand who you are than where you are going — for where you are going will almost certainly change.

One ought not to reject the data merely because one does not like what the data implies.

It must capture the sequence that ignites and accelerates momentum.

It is no harder to build something great than to build something good. It might be statistically more rare to reach greatness, but it does not require more suffering than perpetuating mediocrity.

Most great leaders do not start out as great leaders, they grow into great leaders.

Create a list of significant replicable successes your enterprise has achieved. This should include new initiatives and offerings that have far exceeded expectations.

Good-to-great management teams consist of people who debate vigorously in search of the best answers, yet who unify behind decisions, regardless of parochial interests.

But what truly set the big winners apart was their ability to turn initial success into a sustained flywheel, even if they started out behind the pioneers.9

a quiet, deliberate process of figuring out what needed to be done and then simply doing it, the comparison companies frequently launched new programs — often with great fanfare and hoopla aimed at “motivating the troops” — only to see the programs fail to produce sustained results. They sought the single defining action, the grand program, the one killer innovation, the miracle moment that would allow them to skip the arduous buildup stage and jump right to breakthrough. They would push the flywheel in one direction, then stop, change course, and throw it in a new direction — and then they would stop, change course, and throw it into yet another direction. After years of lurching back and forth, the comparison companies failed to build sustained momentum and fell instead into what we came to call the doom loop.

if it were a hiring decision (rather than a “should this person get off the bus?” decision), would you hire the person again? Second, if the person came to tell you that he or she is leaving to pursue an exciting new opportunity, would you feel terribly disappointed or secretly relieved?

It is the lesson from the mistake that makes it valuable, not the mistake itself.

Encourage; Don’t Nitpick. Keep in mind that there’s no shortage of good, workable ideas, but that there’s a tremendous shortage of receptivity to ideas. Don’t be like one of those “wet blankets” that shot down the radio, the telephone, Federal Express, the personal computer, and NIKE shoes as “dumb ideas.