Category Archives: Book Review

Who first and then decide what……

Book Review, Business Book

The second lesson from Good to Great by Jim Collins  is that it’s all about the people!  Get the right people on board in your company or organisation first.   He uses the analogy of a bus.  Get the right people on board the bus first and then decide where to go with the bus.  You would imagine that this would be done the other way round.  Decide where to go in the bus (your vision/mission) and then recruit the right people, but that was not the case as was discovered through the research.  The right people don’t need to be closely managed as they are already highly motivated to produce the best results and be part of something great.  The corollary to getting the right people on the bus is to get the wrong people off the bus.

When it came to the issue of compensation of staff, compensation is important to keep the right people on the bus but should not be used to get the right behaviours from the wrong people.  This applies at all levels of an organisation.

People are not your most important asset.  The right people are.

It just goes to show the importance of getting the right people, no matter what,  and getting rid of the wrong ones (disruptive people).  The question of course is what are the characteristics of the right people and how do you or I make sure we are one of the right people?  This is an issue which I will explore further in the coming weeks.

Best Wishes,

Tom

PS More lessons from the book next week.  In the meantime have a look at Jim Collins’s website for further information and resources.

Grab your copy of Good to Great from Amazon:

Good to Great Leadership

Book Review, Leadership

What I find fascinating in Good to Great by Jim Collins is the issue of leadership. Through research conducted on companies in the USA, Collins found that good companies which became great companies had leaders who were ‘self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy‘. They were more like ‘Lincoln and Socrates rather than Patton or Caesar’.

This finding flies in the face of popular culture where successful corporate CEOs are perceived as being brash, egocentric, high profile leaders with big personalities.  In today’s world Donald Trump comes to mind as someone regarded in the eyes of the public as being a highly successful CEO type.

Collins found that great leaders are incredibly ambitious but their ambition is for their institution and not themselves.  Great leaders were also no pushovers.  They may have been humble but they had an absolute focus and stoic determination to do whatever needed to be done to make the company great.  Great leaders took personal responsibility for their actions.  When things went well they gave credit to factors outside themselves, while when things went badly they blamed themselves.

So what can we learn for our own lives?  We can learn that we need to be humble.  We need to praise and give credit to the people around us – give credit where credit is due.  We need focus on building the institution we work with rather than focusing on building our own ego  and we need a ‘ferocious resolve’ to do what needs to be done.   We also need to question the popular perception of leadership and realise that larger than life, egocentric type CEOs may not be as good as they seem.

Perhaps you are a potential ‘Good to Great’ leader but may have thought of yourself as too shy or humble to be a great leader?  In that case you need to think again – you may be just the type of leader your institution and the world needs.

Best Wishes,

Tom

PS More lessons from the book next week.  In the meantime have a look at Jim Collins’s website for further information and resources.

Grab your copy of Good to Great from Amazon: