Quotes About Leadership

The good-to-great companies made a habit of putting their best people on their best opportunities, not their biggest problems. The comparison companies had a penchant for doing just the opposite, failing to grasp the fact that managing your problems can only make you good, whereas building your opportunities is the only way to become great.

The best people don't need to be managed. Guided, taught, led—yes. But not tightly managed. We

3M didn't sell raw materials, so there was no business to transact. But McKnight—curiosity piqued and on the prowl for interesting new ideas that might move the company forward—asked a simple question: "Why does Mr. Okie want these samples?"35

Twenty percent of our success is the new technology that we embrace ... [but] eighty percent of our success is in the culture of our company."24 Indeed

James C. Collins

It is simply a manifestation of the "first who" principle: It's not how you compensate your executives, it's which executives you have to compensate in the first place.

The right people will do the right things and deliver the best results they're capable of, regardless of the incentive system.

First Who … Then What. We expected that good-to-great leaders would begin by setting a new vision and strategy. We found instead that they first got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats—and then they figured out where to drive it.

In a good-to-great transformation, people are not your most important asset. The right people are.

Even though many people think that being a great leader means being ambitious and having a certain reputation, this is not true at all.

The only way to deliver to the people who are achieving is to not burden them with the people who are not achieving.

If you have the wrong people, it doesn't matter whether you discover the right direction; you still won't have a great company. Great vision without great people is irrelevant.

the single most important skill for building a great company is making superb people decisions. Without the right people, you simply cannot build a great company, period.

No company can grow revenues consistently faster than its ability to get enough of the right people to implement that growth and still become a great company.

Peter Drucker once observed that the drive for mergers and acquisitions comes less from sound reasoning and more from the fact that doing deals is a much more exciting way to spend your day than doing actual work.

Look, I don't really know where we should take this bus. But I know this much: If we get the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus, then we'll figure out how to take it someplace great.

Sustained great results depend upon building a culture full of self-disciplined people who take disciplined action, fanatically consistent with the three circles.

part, always great," he said. "They never had to turn themselves from good companies into great companies. They had parents like David

Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy—these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. They are more like Lincoln and Socrates than Patton or Caesar.

If you have Level 5 leaders who get the right people on the bus, if you confront the brutal facts of reality, if you create a climate where the truth is heard, if you have a Council and work within the three circles, if you frame all decisions in the context of a crystalline Hedgehog Concept, if you act from understanding, not bravado—if you do all these things, then you are likely to be right on the big decisions.

Bureaucratic cultures arise to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline, which arise from having the wrong people on the bus in the first place.

True leadership only exists if people follow when they would otherwise have the freedom to not follow

Purpose is a motivating factor, not a differentiating factor. It's entirely possible for two companies to have the same purpose. Your mission, on the other hand, will certainly differentiate you from everyone else.

Those who built the visionary companies wisely understood that it is better to understand who you are than where you are going—for where you are going will almost certainly change. It is a lesson as relevant to our individual lives as to aspiring visionary companies.