What Makes a Company Great?

Jim Collins: 13 Questions to Take You from Good to Great (Part I). Jim Collins is the author of both: Good to Great and Built to Last. In this article Collins asks, “What makes a company great?”

He also descants on a concept called Level 5 Leader, which is “someone who embodies a “paradoxical mix of personal humility and professional will.””

Collins mostly writes about leadership, which he breaks down into different strategies like culture, vision, hedge hog and clock building.

“The Hedgehog Concept: Three overlapping circles [see image here]: What lights your fire (“passion”)? What could you be best in the world at (“best at”)? What makes you money (“driving resource”)?”

The following paragraph is from an article on building companies:

“Make the company itself the ultimate product — be a clock builder, not a time teller.”

“I then told him how David Packard, when asked to name the most important product decisions contributing to Hewlett-Packard’s remarkable growth rate, answered entirely in terms of the attributes of the Hewlett-Packard organization—the importance of granting immense operating freedom within well-defined objectives, the pay-as-you-go policy that enforces entrepreneurial discipline, the critical decision to enable all employees to share in the company’s financial success. David Packard was clearly a clock-building leader.”

“By making the shift from time telling (being a great product visionary) to clock building (creating a great organization), he has taken perhaps the single most important step in transforming his hot-growth company into a visionary company that’s built to last.”

“In a world of constant change, the fundamentals are more important than ever.”