H WF’s Reviews > Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't > Status Update

Non business example of a coach and building up the high school XC team.

The story of Walt Disney… he decided that Disney could build something much better perhaps even the best in the world… the whole idea is to bring a smile to a child’s face. 🥹

Those who turn good to 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.

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… everyone would like to be the best, but organizations lack the discipline to figure out with egoless clarity… they lack disciple to rinse their cottage cheese

To let people languish in uncertainty for months or years, stealing precious time in their lives that tenth could use to move on to something else, when in the end they aren’t going to make it anyway - that would be ruthless. To deal with it right up front and let people get on with their lives - that is rigorous.

The best hiring decisions often came from people with no industry or business experience. In one case, he hired a manager who’d been captured twice during WWII and escaped both times. “I thought that anyone who could do that shouldn’t have trouble with business.”

Level 5 leaders look out the window to apportion credit to factors outside themselves when things go well (and if they cannot find a specific person or event to give credit to, they credit good luck). At the same time, they look in the mirror to apportion responsibility, never blaming bad luck when things go poorly.

Level 5 leaders are fanatically driven, infected with an incurable need to produce results. They will sell the mills or fire their brother, if that’s what it takes to make the company great.

Darwin smith, CEO of Kimberly-Clark, when asked by a journalist how he described his management styles he said “eccentric.” He was a man who carried no airs of self-importance. He found his favorite companionship among plumbers and electricians and spent his vacations rumbling around his Wisconsin farm in the can of a backhoe digging holes and moving rocks. He was not meek or soft. He was Fierce.

As one of my favorite professors once said, “The best students those who never quite believe their professors.” He also said, “one ought not to reject the data merely because one does not like what the data implies.” I offer everything herein for your thoughtful consideration, not blind acceptance. You’re the judge and jury. Let the evidence speak.