The Leap to Greatness
This week I’d like to introduce a guest to the blog. Freddie Baird, Executive Vice President, COO, shares insights on how to move your company from good to great.
For the last few weeks, the leadership development group at QuantumDigital has been reading and discussing (sometimes debating) the Jim Collins’ book Good to Great. This book evolved from a study of successful companies that had made the leap to greatness — not overnight mind you, but over an extended period of time, sometimes two decades. These good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite of the world’s greatest companies.
In Good to Great, Collins explains that successful organizations do several things right, but what separates them from the competition is the very disciplined fashion in which they do them. First, they understand that having the right people on the bus is critical to seeing any growth in the future. This is the principle of “First Who, Then What.” Many business leaders do the exact opposite. They attempt to articulate grand vision and strategy first and then hope everyone will follow. The smart leaders realize good people create great vision, and then they consistently execute it because they strive for excellence. Basically, you don’t need to have a perfect plan if you have superior talent.
Beyond the concept of getting the best talent, the second important step on the long road to being great is “Confronting the Brutal Facts.” For any company or leadership group this is a challenging, but essential, step. There are numerous examples of companies being caught up in their own hype and then quickly dropping off the cliff into failure. Smart leaders provide honest feedback to their workforce, regularly. At our company, good feedback is typically provided in a low-hype fashion. And when the news turns negative, we provide it to our workforce in a similar way. However, it is always delivered with the underlying belief that success will come if we continue moving as a group toward our goals.
In a world of snazzy strategies and quick return visionaries, great companies often exist just below the radar, moving ahead quietly and relentlessly toward their objectives. They aren’t typically sexy and don’t often make noise on Wall Street during their climb, but their leaders and workforce really couldn’t care less about generating hype. Instead, they focus only on what they are the best at. They measure their progress continuously in an almost singular, laser-beam fashion. They use their passion for their business to keep them pushing ahead, day after day, year after year, decade after decade—until the whole world knows they are there.
The book gives the best illustration of this. Picture an egg just sitting there. No one pays it much attention until one day, the egg cracks and out jumps a chicken! All the major press jumps on the event as the defining moment in the history of the egg. They herald this remarkable and amazing achievement as if the egg transformed overnight. But from the chicken’s point of view it’s a completely different story. While the world paid no attention to the rather ordinary looking egg, the chicken was there evolving, growing, developing and incubating. The cracking of the egg was just one more step in a long chain of consistently focused events leading up to that moment.
As a company, we believe the true miracle is in the daily grind that eventually, through hard-work and focused effort, leads to real-lasting greatness.
- Freddie
Mark Favreau - April 11th, 2008 at 6:56 am
The question to ask ourselves here is: Are you relentless?