Jim Collins
Jim Collins studies successful companies. Why do some companies become great companies while others remain just good companies?
Jim has spent many years researching how companies grow, how they attain superior performance and how good companies become great companies. His work has been featured in Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Harvard Business Review, and Fast Company.
Jim’s most recent book, 'Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … And Others Don’t', held long standing positions on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Business Week best seller lists. It has sold over 3 million hardcover copies and has been translated into 35 languages.
'Good To Great' is the defining management study of our decade.
According to Jim Collins there are four ways you can ensure rigor in your company’s culture:
1. If you’re hesitating, don’t hire – keep looking.
Your company’s growth will not come from a new market, technology or product. It will come first and foremost from your ability to bring in and keep the right people. If you’re hesitating about hiring someone, they’re already the wrong person.
2. As soon as you know you need to change your people – act.
If one of your team members needs to be tightly managed, you’ve made a mistake in hiring them. While you should be training, guiding, teaching and leading your people, you should not feel the need to closely manage their day-to-day work. We all know what happens when you keep the wrong person on the bus: you try to build systems for their shortcomings.
Only after a mountain of valuable time and energy has been spent on this person might the problem finally conclude by a resignation or other action. Meanwhile your best people have been compensating for this person’s inadequacies. In the worst-case scenario, the wrong people might even drive your best people away from sheer frustration and exhaustion! Act quickly.
But make sure you get the wrong people off the bus, not the right ones. Sometimes the right people for your company can just be sitting in the wrong positions. Change their seats. Now.
3. Your best people should be working on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest headaches.
Star employees create value out of nothing. So when your best people want to work on an unproven concept in a part of your business with little growth or promotion prospects, let them. They realise that rectifying previous headaches can only make a business good. Creating and growing opportunities will make it great.
4. Don’t sell off your best people along with your problems.
When you have decided to change your company direction, you may need to sell or stop some areas of your business. But you still need the good people within that area to stay with your company. People will be less likely to oppose change or sell off if they know they always have a place on your bus. Make sure they know you won’t sell them off along with your problems.
CLICK HERE NOW for the complete Book Summary of 'Good to Great' by Jim Collins in printed or audio version.
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