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

James C. Collins

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
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
First figure out your partners, then figure out what ideas to pursue. The most important thing isn’t the market you target, the product you develop or the financing, but the founding team.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Ideas Important Product Team
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
The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you’ve made a hiring mistake. The best people don’t need to be managed. Guided, taught, led-yes. But not tightly managed.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Business Mistake People
Get involved in something that you care so much about that you want to make it the greatest it can possibly be, not because of what you will get, but just because it can be done.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Done Involved Involves Possibly Something
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
People are not your most important asset….the right people are.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Good Great Important People
The only way to deliver to the people who are achieving is to not burden them with the people who are not achieving.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Achieve People Way
Whether you prevail or fail depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Failing Prevail World
Profit is like oxygen, food, water, and blood for the body; they are not the point of life, but without them, there is no life.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Blood Oxygen Water
Creativity dies in an indisciplined environment.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Creativity Dies Environment
We must reject the idea… Well-intentioned, but dead wrong… That the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become “more like a business.” Most businesses… Like most of anything else in life… Fall somewhere between mediocre and good.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Business Fall Greatness
If I were running a company today, I would have one priority above all others: to acquire as many of the best people as I could. I’d put off everything else to fill my bus. Because things are going to come back. My flywheel is going to start to turn.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Business Everything Many Organization Running
I can just let my curiosity wander unleashed.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Curiosity Unleashed Wander
A great company will have many once-in-a-liftetime opportunities.
JAMES C. COLLINS

Business Company Great Opportunity

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

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

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