Tommy > Tommy's Quotes

“A person who knows how may always have a job, but the person who knows why will always be his boss.”
― John C. Maxwell, How Successful People Think: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life

“Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness.”
― C.S. Lewis

“Creativity dies in an indisciplined environment.”
― Jim Collins

“Perfect is the enemy of good.”
― Voltaire

“Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline.”
― Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't

“Great vision without great people is irrelevant.”
― Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't

“By definition, it is not possible to everyone to be above the average.”
― Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't

“A culture of discipline is not a principle of business, it is a principle of greatness.”
― Jim Collins

“Faith in the endgame helps you live through the months or years of buildup.”
― Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't

“It occurs to me,Jim,that you spend too much time trying to be interesting. Why don't you invest more time being interested?"

Collin's advice from John Gardner that he took to heart.”
― Jim Collins

“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.”
― Jim Collins

“What separates people is not the presence or absence of difficulty, but how they deal with the inevitable difficulties of life.”
― Jim Collins

“Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice.”
― Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don't

“The good-to-great leaders never wanted to become larger-than-life heroes. They never aspired to be put on a pedestal or become unreachable icons. They were seemingly ordinary people quietly producing extraordinary results.”
― Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don't

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”
― Jim Collins, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies

“Mediocrity results first and foremost from management failure, not technological failure.”
― Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don't

“Visionary companies are so clear about what they stand for and what they’re trying to achieve that they simply don’t have room for those unwilling or unable to fit their exacting standards.”
― Jim Collins, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies

“Visionary companies make some of their best moves by experimentation, trial and error, opportunism, and—quite literally—accident. What looks in retrospect like brilliant foresight and preplanning was often the result of “Let’s just try a lot of stuff and keep what works.”
― Jim Collins, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies

“Visionary companies pursue a cluster of objectives, of which making money is only one—and not necessarily the primary one.”
― Jim Collins, Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies

“Whether someone is the ‘right person’ has more to do with character traits and innate capabilities than with specific knowledge, background or skills.”
― Must Read Summaries, Summary: Good to Great Jim Collins

“They didn’t use discussion as a sham process to let people “have their say” so that they could “buy in” to a predetermined decision. The process was more like a heated scientific debate, with people engaged in a search for the best answers.”
― Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don't

“if you want to achieve consistent performance, you need both parts of a 20 Mile March: a lower bound and an upper bound, a hurdle that you jump over and a ceiling that you will not rise above, the ambition to achieve and the self-control to hold back.  ”
― Jim Collins, Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck—Why Some Thrive Despite Them All

“The leaders of good-to-great companies did not first focus on creating a vision or over-arching goal. Instead, they made sure to first get the best, brightest, and hardest-working people on board, while removing those that don’t perform. Once they had the right people, they then determined where to lead their companies. In other words, their guiding principle is to first determine the “who” before figuring out the “what”. The elite companies practiced three principles in hiring:”
― Eighty Twenty Publishing, Summary of Good To Great by Jim Collins

“A culture of discipline is not a principle of business; it is a principle of greatness.”
― Jim Collins, Good To Great And The Social Sectors: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great

“The function of leadership – the number-one responsibility of a leader – is to catalyze a clear and shared vision for the organization and to secure commitment to and vigorous pursuit of that vision.  This is a universal requirement of leadership.”[11] Jim Collins”
― Ted Kallman, The Nehemiah Effect: Ancient Wisdom from the World’s First Agile Projects

“If everyone is speaking the same language, then it becomes easier to create a team where everyone is of the same mind.”
― Ted Kallman, The Nehemiah Effect: Ancient Wisdom from the World’s First Agile Projects

“The most important element of leadership effectiveness is authentically living the Vision of the company.  The values and ambitions of a company are not instilled entirely by what leaders say; they’re instilled primarily by what leaders do.  In a healthy company, there are no inconsistencies between what is said and what is believed deep down – the values come from within the leaders and imprint themselves on the organization through day-to-day activity.”
― Ted Kallman, The Nehemiah Effect: Ancient Wisdom from the World’s First Agile Projects

“Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly drive it to completion.”
― Ted Kallman, The Nehemiah Effect: Ancient Wisdom from the World’s First Agile Projects

“Jim Collins, the author of the business classic Good to Great, was once told by Peter Drucker that he could either build a great company or build great ideas but not both. Jim chose ideas. As a result of this trade-off there are still only three full-time employees in his company, yet his ideas have reached tens of millions of people through his writing.8”
― Greg McKeown, Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

“If you have more than 3 priorities then you don’t have any.” —Jim Collins”
― Tony Hsieh, Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose