Jim Collins – Seven Questions: Beyond Good to Great – GLS15

Jim Collins – THE Jim Collins – asks us 7 questions that help us move from “Good to Great” and beyond great.

1-What Cause do you serve with Level 5 Ambition?

1. The essence of leadership is service – service to people/cause
2. Ambition channeled outwards to a cause/something bigger/more important than we are
3. Level 4 leaders inspire people to follow them but Level 5 leaders inspire people to follow a cause.
4. Infuse your enterprise with some greater purpose – commitment to service is not a sector choice but a life choice.
   1. To serve is to live.

2-Will you settle for being a good leader or will you grow to become a great leader?

1. Leadership is not personality, position, power.
2. Leadership is the art of getting people to want to do what must be done. – Eisenhower
   1. You need to know what must be done
   2. Its an art.
      1. Most great leaders GROW into their leadership – they don’t start that way

3-How can you reframe failure as Growth in pursuit of a BHAG?

1. “I am not failing, I’m growing…”
2. What is the other side of the coin of success? Its not failure, its growth.
3. Have you ever felt a profound sense of inadequacy? If so – how do you reframe that for growth?

4-How can you help others succeed?

1. We succeed and are at our very best when we help others succeed.
2. Three Key things
   1. Service, Success, Growth
   2. If you could build a culture that has service/cause/purpose that you are willing to sacrifice for and has challenges in the forms of BHAGS that help you grown, and communal success – that is how you build meaning.

5-Have you found your Hedgehog – your personal hedgehog?

1. Three circles: Passion, What You Are Made For, Economic Engine
2. When you lead out of your hedgehog – you lead out of the wellspring that allows you to persist.
3. True creators stay in the game. We cannot control/predict every hand we get dealt in life.
   1. Refuse to leave the game – play every hand you get to the best of your ability.
4. How many of you have in some point in life just been flat out decked? That’s when you have to stay in the game.

6-Will you build your unit – your minibus – into a pocket of greatness?

1. How did the good-to-great leaders do it? They didn’t focus on their career? They focused on their “unit” and developing their unit around them.
2. Being a “first-to” leader not a “first-what” leader. Figure out who should be in the key seats in the bus.
3. Be rigorous – not ruthless. Take care of your people.
4. Take care of your people not your career.
5. Greatest leaders – find a way to make an impact and contribution on PEOPLE

7-How will you change the lives of others?

1. How will some people’s lives be better and different because you were here on this earth?
2. Life is people…. Be useful