Jim Collins Quotes

What drives your economic engine. All the good-to-great companies attained piercing insight into how to most effectively generate sustained and robust cash flow and profitability. In particular, they discovered the single denominator — profit per x — that had the greatest impact on their economics.

It is impossible for us to break the law. We can only break ourselves against the law.

When you turn over rocks and look at all the squiggly things underneath, you can either put the rock down, or you can say, 'My job is to turn over rocks and look at the squiggly things,' even if what you see can scare the hell out of you.

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

Certainly, we always need to search for new ideas and solutions — invention and discovery move humankind forward — but the biggest problems facing organizations today stem not from a dearth of new management ideas (we’re inundated with them), but primarily from a lack of understanding the basic fundamentals and, most problematic, a failure to consistently apply those fundamentals

But what about the vast majority of companies that wake up partway through life and realize that they’re good, but not great?