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Mediocrity results first and foremost from management failure, not technological failure.

James C. Collins

People are not your most important asset….the right people are.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Good Great Important People
The best CEOs in our research display tremendous ambition for their company combined with the stoic will to do whatever it takes, no matter how brutal (within the bounds of the company’s core values), to make the company great.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Humility Leadership Success
A visionary company doesn’t simply balance between idealism and profitability: it seeks to be highly idealistic and highly profitable.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Balance Change Vision
Those who turn good organizations into great organizations are motivated by a deep creative urge and an inner compulsion for sheer unadulterated excellence for its own sake.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Leadership Motivation Organization
The challenge is not just to build a company that can endure; but to build one that is worthy of enduring.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Challenges Endure Entrepreneurs
The secret to a successful retirement is to find your retirement sweet spot. The sweet spot is where your passions, what you do best, and what people will pay you to do overlap.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Passion Retirement Sweet
It occurs to me,Jim,that you spend too much time trying to be interesting. Why don’t you invest more time being interested?” Collin’s advice from John Gardner that he took to heart.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Advice Heart Interesting
You absolutely must have the discipline not to hire until you find the right people.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Discipline People Right Until
No matter what. Wherever your mind wanders, it seems to turn up at the same Field of Dreams. It’s the vision you wake up with in the morning, and it’s the last thing you picture before you fall asleep.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Dream Morning Success
In a truly great company profits and cash flow become like blood and water to a healthy body: They are absolutely essential for life but they are not the very point of life
JAMES C. COLLINS

Blood Business Responsibility
Consider the idea that charisma can be as much a liability as an asset. Your strength of personality can sow the seeds of problems, when people filter the brutal facts from you.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Ideas Liability People Personality
A great company will have many once-in-a-liftetime opportunities.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Business Company Great Opportunity
Not one of the good-to-great companies focused obsessively on growth.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Business Good Great Growth
…the question, Why try for greatness? would seem almost tautological. If you’re doing something you care that much about, and you believe in its purpose deeply enough, then it is impossible to imagine not trying to make it great. It’s just a given.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Believe Business Greatness
It may seem odd to talk about something as soft and fuzzy as “passion” as an integral part of a strategic framework. But throughout the good-to-great companies, passion became a key part of the Hedgehog Concept.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Business Keys Passion
Genius of AND. Embrace both extremes on a number of dimensions at the same time. Instead of choosing a OR B, figure out how to have A AND B-purpose AND profit, continuity AND change, freedom AND responsibility, etc.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Business Numbers Responsibility

Mediocrity results first and foremost from management failure, not technological failure.

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Mediocrity results first and foremost from management failure, not technological failure.

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