You are looking at posts that were written in the month of February in the year 2009.
Posted on February 17th, 2009 by Brian Sparks.
Categories: Book Notes, Good to Great, Leadership.
“Clock Building, Not Time Telling. Build an organization that can endure and adapt through multiple generations of leaders and multiple product life cycles; the exact opposite of being built around a single great leader or a single great idea” (page 197).
Posted on February 17th, 2009 by Brian Sparks.
Categories: Book Notes, Good to Great, Leadership.
Unexpected Results
Posted on February 17th, 2009 by Brian Sparks.
Categories: Book Notes, Good to Great, Leadership.
“No matter how dramatic the end result, the good-to-great transformations never happened to one fell swoop. There was no single defining action, no grand program, no one killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no wrenching revolution. Good to great comes about by a cumulative process – step by step, action by action, decision by decision, turn by turn of the flywheel – that adds up to sustained and spectacular results” (page 165).
“we kept thinking that we’d find ‘the one big thing,’ the miracle moment that defined breakthough. we even pushed for it in our interviews. But the good-to-great executives simply could not pinpoint a single key event or moment in time that exemplified the transition. Frequently, they chafed against the whole idea of allocating points and prioritizing factors. In every good-to-great complany, at least one of the interviewees gave an unprompted admonishment, saying something along the lines of, ‘Look, you can’t dissect this thing into a series of nice little boxes and factors, or identify the moment of ‘Aha!’ or the ‘one big thing.’ It was a whole bunch of interlocking pieces that built one upon another.’ (page 168)”
“The good-to-great companies had no name for their transformations. There was no launch event, no tag line, no programmatic feel whatsoever. Some executives said that they weren’t even aware that a major transformation was under way until they were well into it. It was often more obvious to them after the fact than at the time” (page 169).
“Then it began to dawn on us: There was no miracle moment” (page 169).
“It’s important to understand that following the buildup-breakthrough flywheel model is not just a luxury of circumstance” (page 172).
“The good-to-great companies understood a simple truth: tremendous power exists in the fact of continued improvement and the delivery of results. Point to tangible accomplishments – however incremental at first – and show how these steps fit into the context of an overall concept that will work. When you do this in such a way that people see and feel the buildup of momentum, they will line up with enthusiasm” (page 174-175).
“Clearly, the good-to-great companies did get incredible commitment and alignment – they artfully managed change – but they never really spent much time thinking about it. It was utterly transparent to them. We learned that under the right conditions, the problems of commitment, alignment, motivation, and change just melt away. They largely take care of themselves” (page 176).
“The good-to-great companies tended not to publicly proclaim big goals at the outset. Rather, they began to spin the flywheel – understanding to action, step after step, turn after turn. After the flywheel built up momentum, they’d look up and say, ‘Hey, if we just keep pushing on this thing, there’s no reason we can’t accomplish X.’ ” (page 176-177).
“When you let the flywheel do the talking, you don’t need to fervently communicate your goals. People can just extrapolate from the momentum of the flywheel for themselves: ‘Hey, if we just keep doing this, look at where we can go!” (page 177).
“Instead of 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” (page 178).
Signs that You’re In the Doom Loop
“It all starts with Level 5 leaders, who naturally gravitate toward the flywheel model. They’re less interested in flashy programs that make it look like they are Leading! with a capital L. They’re more interested in the quiet, deliberate process of pushing on the flywheel to produce Results! with a capital R.
“Getting the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats-these are all crucial steps in the early stages of buildup.
“Next, when you attain deep understanding about the three circles of your Hedgehog Concept and begin to push in a direction consistent with that understanding, you hit breakthrough momentum and accelerate with key accelerators, chief among them pioneering the application of technology tied directly back to your three circles. Ultimately, to reach breakthrough means having the discipline to make a series of good decisions consistent with your Hedghog Concept-disciplined action, following from disciplined people who exercise disciplined thought. That’s it” (page 184).
Posted on February 14th, 2009 by Brian Sparks.
Categories: Book Notes, Good to Great, Leadership.
“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” (page 156).
“Mediocrity results first and foremost from management failure, not technological failure” (page 156).
“Those who turn good into great are motivated by a deep creative urge and an inner compulsion for sheer unadulterated excellence for its own sake. Those who build and perpetuate mediocrity, in contrast, are motivated more by the fear of being left behind” (page 160).
Posted on February 14th, 2009 by Brian Sparks.
Categories: Book Notes, Good to Great, Leadership.
Unexpected Findings
Posted on February 14th, 2009 by Brian Sparks.
Categories: Good to Great, Leadership.
“Freedom is only part of the story and half the truth…That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplanted by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast.” – Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (page 120).
“Most companies build their bureaucratic rules to manage the small percentage of wrong people on the bus, which in turn drives away the right people on the bus, which then increases the percentage of wrong people on the bus, which increases the need for more bureaucracy to compensate for the incompetence and lack of discipline, which then further drives the right people away, and so forth” (page 121).
“Avoid bureaucracy and hierarchy and instead create a culture of discipline. When you put these two complementary forces together – a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship – you get a magical alchemy of superior performance and sustained results” (page 122).
responsibility accounting (page 123).
Build a culture full of people who take disciplined action within the three circles, fanactically consistent with the Hedgehog Concept.
“The good-to-great companies built a consistent system with clear constraints, but they also gave people freedom and responsibility within the framework of that system. They hired self-disciplined people who didn’t need to be managed, and then managed the system, not the people” (page 125).
“In a sense, much of this book is about creating a culture of discipline. It all starts with disciplined people. The transition begins not by trying to discipline the wrong people into the right behaviors, but by getting self-disciplined people on the bus in the first place. Next we have disciplined thought. You need the discipline to confront the brutal facts of reality, while retaining resolute faith that you can and will create a patyh to greatness. Most importantly, you need the discipline to persist in the search for understanding until you get your Hedgehog Concept. Finally, we have disciplined action, the primary subject of the chapter. This order is important. The comparison companies often tried to jump right to disciplined action. But disciplined action without self-disciplined people is impossible to sustain, and disciplined action without disciplined thought is a recipe for disaster.
“Indeed, discipline by itself will not produce great results. We find plenty of organizations in history that had tremendous discipline and that marhed right into disaster, with precision and in nicely formed lines. No, the point is to first get self-disciplined people who engage in very regorous thinking, who then take disciplined action within the framework of a consistent system designed around the Hedgehog Concept” (page 126).
“People in the good-to-great companies became somewhate extreme in the fulfillment of their responsibilties, bordering en some cases on fanaticism” (page 127).
“Much of the answer to the question of ‘good to great’ lies in the discipline to do whatever it takes to become the best within carefully selected arenas and then to seek continual improvement from there” (page 128).
“Everyone whould like to be the best, but most organizations lack the discipline to figure out with egoless clarity what they can be the best at and the will to do whatever it takes to turn that potential into reality. They lack the discipline to rinse their cottage cheese” (page 128).
“It takes discipline to say ‘No, thank you’ to big opportunities. The fact that something is a ‘once-in-a-lifetime opportunity’ is irrelevant if it doesn’t fit within the three circles” (page 136).
“Most of us lead busy but undisciplined lives. We have ever-expanding ‘todo’ lists, thrying to build momentum by doing, doing, doing – and doing more. And it rarely works. Those who built the good-to-great companies, however, made as much use of ’stop doing’ lists as ‘to do’ lists. They displayed a remarkable discipline to unplug all sorts of extraneous junk” (page 139).
“In a good-to-great transformation, budgeting is a discipline to decide which arenas should be fully funded and which should not be funded at all. In other words, the budget process is no about figuring out how much each activity gets, but about determining which activities best support the Hedgehog Concept and should be fully strengthened and which should be eliminated entirely” (page 140).
Posted on February 14th, 2009 by Brian Sparks.
Categories: Book Notes, Christian Living, Do the Right Thing.
“Freedom can’t exist in a moral vacuum. It mighyt make some on the left uncomforable to admin it, but without clear boundaries of right and wrong, the very concept of liberty breaks down” (page 30).
“Character has been defined as ‘what we are when no one but God is watching.’ Character is believing that even if I don’t ‘get caught,’ the rightness or wrongness of an action is more about the action itself and not just the discovery of it by others.
“As I govern myself and restrain from behavior that hurts others, whether the hurt is physical, emotional, or financial, it will be unnecessary to have outside forms of government monitoring, judging, and, if necessary, correcting my behavior. Without my own conscience-driven ‘internal government’ forming my adherence to a principled and precise moral code, an external government will be required to not only create those definitions of what is right and wrong (legistlative), but to enforce them upon me (executive) and to make sure that those who do the governing are doing so according to rigid principles itself (judicial)” (page 30-31).
“Washington and the Founders believed that America should have, as Thomas Jefferson said in his first inaugural address, ‘a wise and frugal Government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.
“That is, a government that is lean but not mean. In the Founders’ view, public servants would not get paid much and would not stay long. They would have to go home, to live under the taxes and rules that they created while in Washington. Now, that was a check and balance!” (page 64).
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