Lead Worship

Good to Great – Chapter 4: Confront the Brutal Facts

Posted on August 29th, 2008 by Brian Sparks.
Categories: Book Notes, Good to Great, Leadership.

“There is no worse mistake in public leadership than to hold out false hopes soon to be swept away” (page 65, taken from Winston S. Churchill).

“The good-to-great companies displayed two distinctive forms of disciplined thought. The first, and the topic of this chapter, is that they infused the entire process with the brutal facts of reality. (The second is that they developed a simple, yet deeply insightful, frame of reference for all decisions.) When you start with an honest and diligent effort to determine the truth of the situation, the right decisions often become self-evident” (page 70).

“You absolutely cannot make a series of good decisions without first confronting the brutal facts” (page 70).

“The moment a leader allows himself to become the primary reality people worry about, rather than reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or worse. This is one of the key reasons why less charismatic leaders often produce better lang-term results than their more charismatic counterparts” (page 72).

“Indeed, for those of you with a strong, charismatic personality, it is worthwhile to consider the idea that charisma can be as much a liability as an asset. Your strength of personality can sow the seeds of problems, when people filter the brutal facts from you. You can overcome the liabilities of having charisma, but it does require conscious attention” (page 73).

A Climate Where the Truth is Heard

1. Lead with questions, not answers”The good-to-great leaders made particularly good use of informal meetings where they’d meet with groups of managers and employees with no script, agenda, or set of action items to discuss. Instead, they would start with questions like: “So, what’s on your mind?” “Can you tell me about that?” “Can you help me understand?” “What should we be worried about?’”

   “Leading from good to great does not mean coming up with the answers and then motivating everyone to follow your messianic vision. It means having the humility to grasp the fact that you do not yet understand enough to have the answers and then to ask the questions that will lead to the best possible insights.

2. Engage in dialogue and debate, not coercion.
3. Conduct autopsies, without blame.
4. Build “red flag” mechanisms. (page 74-78)

“Life is unfair – sometimes to our advantage, sometimes to our disadvantage. We will all experience disappointments and crushing events somewhere along the way, setbacks for which there is no “reason,” no one to blame. It might be disease; it might be injury; it might be an accident; it might be losing a loved one; it might be getting swept away in a political shake-up; it might be getting shot down over Vietnam and thrown into a POW camp for eight years. What separates people, Stockdale taught me, is not the presence or absence of difficulty, but how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of life. In wrestling with life’s challenges, the Stockdale Paradox (you must retain faith that you will prevail in the end and you must also confront the most brutal facts of your current reality) has proved powerful for coming back from difficultites not weakened, but stronger – not just for me, but for all those who’ve learned the lesson and tried to apply it” (page 86).

“The good-to-great leaders were able to strip away so much noise and clutter and just focus on the few things that would hae the greatest impact. They were able to do so in large part because they operated from both sides of the Stockdale Paradox, never letting one side overshadow the other. If you are able to adopt this dual pattern, you will dramatically increase the odds of making a series of good decisions and ultimately discovering a simple, yet deeply insightful, concept for making the really big choices. And once you have that simple, unifying concept, you will be very close to making a sustained transition to breakthrough results” (page 87).

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