Issue No. 235 of Your Weekly Staff Meeting features a hot-off-the-press book by Jim Collins. It’s a no-brainer addition to your staff resource shelf. (You do have a resource shelf, right?) And this reminder: check out my Management Buckets website with dozens of resources and downloadable worksheets for your staff meetings.
Jim Collins Lexicon 2.0
True or false? An author’s first book is his or her best. The second, third or (horrors) fourth book will aptly document the slippery slope into mediocrity.
Usually true. But if the book is by Jim Collins, the myth is false. And all of us are grateful.
His latest, Great by Choice, keeps his reputation intact for high quality, fascinating, page-turning story/research/label/principle serious management thinking. If you learned from Built to Last, Good to Great, Good to Great and the Social Sectors and How the Mighty Fall, your life-long learning will continue with what I’m calling the “Jim Collins Lexicon 2.0.”
Using his classic comparison company methodology, this book delivers memorable stories to answer the question, “Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not?”
“What’s coming next?” Collins asks, building the case for his “10X” companies (his first memorable label). “All we know is that no one knows.” He adds, “Yet some companies and leaders navigate this type of world exceptionally well.
--They don’t merely react; they create.
--They don’t merely survive; they prevail.
--They don’t merely succeed, they thrive.
They build great enterprises that can endure.”
Here’s the new lexicon:
--10Xers (comparison companies that beat its industry index by at least 10 times). “If you invested $10,000 in a portfolio of the 10X companies at the end of 1972…your investment would have grown to be worth more than $6 million by the end of our study era (through 2002), a performance 32 times better than the general stock market.”
--10X leadership (the comparison story of the quest to reach the South Pole by two teams of adventurers in 1911). Roald Amundsen, the winner, and Robert Scott, the loser, had comparable opportunities, but it was Amundsen who demonstrated Collins’ triple hallmark of 10X leaders:
--Fanatic Discipline
--Empirical Creativity
--Productive Paranoia
The stories are fabulous, often very funny. Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer had the moniker DOCTOR DOOM and Commissar of Concern, taught to him by the “Grand Master of Productive Paranoia himself, Bill Gates.” Yet it was Gates who put his foot down when Ballmer wanted to boost the head count to—get this—17 people!”
--20 Mile March (a self-imposed restraint to keep growth under control). “A good 20 Mile March has a Goldilocks time frame, not too short and not too long but just right.”
--First Bullets, Then Cannonballs (discipline and creativity will push you to test, test, test—with low risk bullets, then re-calibrate, another low risk bullet, more re-calibration—then when the empirical side of creativity has honed in on the target—let the cannonball rip!) One CEO’s mantra: Be “one fad behind,” never first to market, but never last. Collins has six bullet points (sorry) on “The Dangerous Lure of Uncalibrated Cannonballs.” Brilliant.
There’s a lot more in the lexicon:
--Leading Above the Death Line
--SMaC (Specific, Methodical, and Consistent)
--ROL (Return on Luck)
Each chapter has a helpful two-page summary of big ideas, plus discussion questions. The bulk of the book runs 200 pages, plus a few more for FAQs, then another hundred pages of research notes for the unconvinced or Collins zealots.
This is a Top-10 book for 2011.
To order from Amazon, click on the graphic below for Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck—Why Some Thrive Despite Them All, by Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen.
Your Weekly Staff Meeting Questions:
1) If we were to compare our organization’s work and results against a comparable company/organization. What might we learn? Should we launch a study?
2) Collins says that Fanatic Discipline, Empirical Creativity and Productive Paranoia separate 10Xers from the pack. On a scale of one to five (five is high), how good are we at these three keys to thriving?
Delegation Bucket Pop Quiz! - Insights from Mastering the Management Buckets: 20 Critical Competencies for Leading Your Business or Nonprofit
One of the big ideas in the Delegation Bucket, Chapter 16, in Mastering the Management Buckets is to conduct a self-assessment on your delegation diseases.
The Delegation Bucket core competency reads: “We are experts at appropriate delegation. We invite team members to accept assignments based on their strengths. We value organized delegation and believe in the Point Person Principle. We track our to-do lists and we add to our don’t-do lists.”
So…what level are you at in the Delegation Bucket core competency?
--Level 1: I don’t know what I don’t know.
--Level 2: I know what I don’t know.
--Level 3: I have an action plan to address what I know I don’t know.
--Level 4: I am knowledgeable and effective in this core competency and can mentor others.
For more resources, visit the Delegation Bucket webpage and download Worksheet #16.1: "Dysfunctional Delegation Diseases." Take this Delegation Gut-Check Assessment and diagnose the severity of your delegation diseases. Are you a Code Green, Code Yellow or Code Red?
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