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Jim collins good to great in 10 steps inc
1. 5/16/12 Jim Collins: Good to Great in 10 Steps | Inc.com
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May 7, 2012Kimberly Weisul | Inc.com staff
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Topics > Leadership and Managing > Leadership > Leadership Forum >
Jim Collins: Good to Great in 10
Steps
Management guru Jim Collins asks entrepreneurs to do 10 things that will
dramatically improve their companies. What are you waiting for?
HSM Brasil/Flickr
Researcher and management guru Jim Collins has
authored or coauthored six books, including Good to
Great and Built to Last. On his web site there are 48
articles written or cowritten by him. But speaking at the
Womens Presidents Organization’s annual conference last
week in Atlanta, Collins boiled it all down. Do these 10
things, he said, to dramatically improve your company.
1. Download the diagnostic tool at
jimcollins.com, and do the exercises with your
team. Yes, I thought this was selfserving at first. Then I
looked it, considered that it’s free and doesn't require you
to sign up for anything, and immediately saw his point.
2. Get the right people in the key seats. This comes from Collins’ famous
observation that building a company is like driving a bus. You need a driver, but you
also need the right people in all the key seats. So, says Collins, figure out how many key
seats you have, and make a plan that will make sure you get all the key seats filled by
the end of the year.
3. Once a quarter, have a brutal facts meeting. Be careful about who you
include in this meeting. You will be discussing just the brutal facts. This is not the time
to express opinions or strategize. Repeat: Only discuss the brutal facts.
4. Set a 15 to 25year big, hairy audacious goal (BHAG). This is a goal that is
concrete enough, and ambitious enough, to guide your company’s progress for years.
Collins writes that “With his very first dime store in 1945, Sam Walton set the BHAG to
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2. 5/16/12 Jim Collins: Good to Great in 10 Steps | Inc.com
2/3www.inc.com/kimberly‑weisul/jim‑collins‑good‑to‑great‑in‑ten‑steps.html?nav=linkedin
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‘make my little Newport store the best, most profitable in Arkansas within five years.’
He continued to set BHAGs, which continued to get larger and more audacious, as his
company grew.
5. Commit to a “20mile march” that you will bring you to your big hairy
audacious goal. Collins makes the analogy to someone who is trying to walk across
the county. The best approach, says Collins, is to attempt to travel the same distance
every day. If you’re on a 2mile march, says Collins, you don’t bolt 30 miles ahead
when the weather is good. You go 20 miles. When the weather is bad, you can’t sit
inside and complain – you still have make 20 miles.
What does this have to do with entrepreneurship? In his research, Collins found that
companies that perform consistently do much better than those that do spectacularly
one year and are feeble the next. That’s because if you overextend in good years, when
opportunity appears to be everywhere, you may not have the resources to get through
the lousy years. The 20mile march is a metaphor for the milestone that you can reach
dayin and dayout.
6. Place at least one really big bet in the next three years, based on having
fired bullets first. No entrepreneur has unlimited resources, just as no small army has
unlimited gunpowder (this metaphor may be dated, but you get the point). The best
use of limited gunpowder, or resources, says Collins, is to fire bullets to ensure that
your aim is calibrated properly and that you can indeed hit your target. Only when
you’re sure of your ability to hit your target should you load lots of gunpowder into a
cannonball and fire away. “Fire bullets to calibrate. Fire cannonballs to go big,” says
Collins.
7. Practice productive paranoia. Collins says he fondly refers to his
entrepreneurial subjects as PNFs, or paranoid neurotic freaks. “Successful companies
have three to ten times the cash on their balance sheets as their peers even when they
are very small,” says Collins. Or as one of the CEOs he studied said to him, “We’re very
proud of the fact that we’ve predicted 11 of the past three recessions.”
How exactly can one practice productive paranoia? Collins recommends making a
plan that will allow you to go for an entire year with no revenues, and still survive.
8. Get a high return on your next luck event. Collins says that both great and
mediocre companies encounter the same amount of luck, good and bad. What
matters, he says, is how well they’re able to capitalize on it. Collins refers to this as
‘return on luck.’ “How are you doing on luck?” he asks. “Have you turned your bad
luck events into a big part of what makes your company great? Are you squandering
your goodluck events?”
9. Make a todo list. “If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any,”
says Collins. For every major ‘todo’ on your list, you should have a corresponding item
that you will stop doing. The 'stopdoing' list.
10. Commit to a set of core values that you will want to build your
enterprise on, without changing them, for 100 years.
Read more:
Jim Collins: How to Thrive in 2009
Three Things on Jim Collins' Stop Doing List
6 Habits of True Strategic Thinkers
Kimberly Weisul is EditoratLarge for Inc. Before joining Inc, she was a senior editor
at BusinessWeek, where she spearheaded all coverage of entrepreneurship and small
Business
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