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Hardcover
320 pages
ISBN 9780066620992 Published Oct. 2001
HarperBusiness
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Posted Sept. 13, 2004 3:11 a.m. by 800-ceo-read
In Excerpts and Essays - 800 CEO Read Blog
6. Do you routinely use hot, aspirational words-terms like Excellence and BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal, per Jim Collins) and Lets make a dent in the Universe (the Word according to Steve Jobs)? Is Reward excellent failures, punish mediocre successes your de facto or de jure motto?
Message: Hot begets Hot! (Cold begets Cold.)
And ... you heard it here first!
Dont get me started! My lifes work has been to re-paint dry and dreary management talk in Technicolor hues! I simply dont believe biz is dry and dreary. I believe its about people creating things for people. (Great Thai food at a restaurant or a pacemaker from Medtronics.) People serving people. People growing and achieving beyond their dreamsone Wow Project at a time.
Yes, I am the Guru of Hot, the (Business) Maestro of Technicolor, the Evangelist of Energy, the Wizard of Wild & Weirdand damned proud of it!
Im still in love with excellence. Exceeds expectations is catching a bus from point A to point B and arriving roughly on time and without anything untoward happening. Excellence is an ... Absolutely, Positively Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious evening partaking of a Cirque du Soleil performance in Las Vegas. So: Why cant a business process re-engineering project measure up to the CSPS? (Cirque du Soleil Performance Standard.) Answer: If the biz project fails on the CSPS score ... it is because of the shriveled imagination of the leader. Period. Call me corny. Call me nave. (At age 61, please!) But I am unequivocally convinced that any activity, no matter how apparently humble, can be turned into a Work of Magnificent Art. (Okay, Im drafting this during the Athens Olympics. One can understand Gymnastics as pure art, but Table Tennis? Give me a break. Well, Olympic table tennis is, literally, breathtaking ... eh?)
Jim Collins (most recently Good to Great) calls for BHAGs ... Big, Hairy Audacious Goals. Nice! Apples Steve Jobs exhorts a new product team, Lets make a dent in the universe. Nice! The late adman David Ogilvy charges a creative staffer with making an ad for kids clothing thats immortal. (Nice again.) Well, you get the drift. Great Aspirations (CSPS) dont ensure great results. But you can be sure that the absence of Great Aspirations will ensure non-great results.
You never hear a Swiss say, I want to change the world. We need to take more risks.Xavier Comtesse, on the establishment of Swiss House for Advanced Research & Education in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Theres a corollary to all this thats of the utmost importance. If reaching for the moon is routine, then falling short will also occur more than infrequently. Consider Phil Daniels, a successful Australian businessman. At a seminar I gave in Sydney, he felt compelled to rise from the audience and share his wisdom with us. Im eternally grateful that he did. My success, he told us, is due in large measure to a simple philosophy, Reward excellent failures, punish mediocre successes.
Wow!
While Daniels advice, I think, is fit for the ages, its todays nutty times that are my bailiwick. And in nutty times, with the playing fields morphing by the moment, time devoted to a mediocre success is a tragic waste. No less. (Yes ... tragic waste.) I once heard legendary GE boss Jack Welch say about the same thing. Nobody at GE during his watch, he told us, got in trouble for swinging for the fences and missing. The mortal sin was, instead, spending two years on a project which, even if it worked, wouldnt make the earth wobble a bit on its axis.
Some like it hot! I happen to be among them. Along with Jobs, Ogilvy, Daniels, Welch, et al. As Fast Company put it when reviewing Re-imagine!: In Toms world, its always better to try a swan dive and deliver a colossal belly flop than to step timidly off the board while holding your nose. Thanks!
DEMOLetter Summer Reading
Posted June 28, 2004 9:50 a.m. by todd-sattersten
In Lists - 800 CEO Read Blog
Chris Shipley's recent DEMOletter listed a set of titles that polled tech executives were reading.
- A Short History of Everything by Bill Bryson
- Managing by Harold Geneen
- Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis
- Beyond the Core: Expand Your Market Without Abandoning Your Roots by Chris Zook
- Getting to Great: Principles of Health Care Organization Goverance by Dennis Pointer and James Orlikoff
- Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done by Larry Bossidy and Ram Charam
- Built to Last and Good to Great by Jim Collins
[via Dana and Wisconsin Technology Network]
Dearborn Trade - Wishing
Posted June 22, 2004 9:36 a.m. by todd-sattersten
In Business Imprints - 800 CEO Read Blog
Q: Is there one non-Dearborn Trade book you wish you had?
Zigmund: Who wouldn't have wanted to be the publisher of a bestseller like Built
to Last or Good to Great? Dearborn is focused on leading by being first to market, and finding that next big business bestseller.
Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan newest effort
Posted May 17, 2004 9:18 a.m. by jack
In General Management - 800 CEO Read Blog
One of the best books of this decade, along with Good to Great, was Bossidy's and Charan's Execution. I just got word today that I will be getting the manuscript to their next book called Confronting Reality : Master the New Model for Success. The book is due in mid Fall of this year. I'll let you know what I think.
Jack Covert Selects - Good to Great
Posted Oct. 22, 2001 8:50 a.m. by katie
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the LeapAnd Others Dont by Jim Collins, HarperBusiness, 400 Pages, $30.00 Hardcover, October 2001, ISBN 0066620996
Seven years ago, Jerry Porras and Jim Collins published the bestselling classic, Built to Last, which demolished a couple of deeply entrenched myths like this one: great companies start with a great product and/or a great leader. After completing that book, Jim Collins was nagged by the lingering question that he had been pondering since before Built to Last: are there any mediocre companies that became great? Once he had established his delimiters, he set out to collect data. Jim and his research team spent over five years and studied every company that made the Fortune 500 from 1965 until nowover 1400 companiesand found only eleven companies had truly gone from mediocre to being a long-term star. Then, they looked at why. Heres where it gets really interesting.
From studying these organizations, Collins and crew came up with some really mind-stretching conclusions. One of the most interesting: every good-to-great company has a Level 5 leader during the transitional years. However, a Level 5 leader is unlike strong leaders of our imaginings. All Level 5 leaders have a mix of personal humility and professional will. Fanatically driven to produce results, they are ambitious, first and foremost, for the companynot for themselves. Ultimately, they do whatever it takes to make the company great. A few of the other most useful findings include something called The Hedgehog Concept, which advocates breaking out of mediocrity with a single terrific product or service; and Technology Accelerators, which encourages a fundamentally diverse attitude and approach to technology.
Simply put: this book is going to be talked about for yearsit is so solid in its findings, but written so superbly that you will practically learn just by holding it in your hand. But dont stop there: I guarantee that your copy will be as marked up with notes as mine.
