Book Review: Great by Choice

In his highly acclaimed followup to Good to Great, How the Mighty Fall, and Built to Last, Jim Collins has done it again with Great By Choice.  The purpose of Great by Choice was to study why some companies thrive in the midst of uncertainty, chaos, and luck.  In the current economic situation our country seems mired in, this is a great read for leaders that desire to lead well despite the circumstances.  Collins addresses what it means to make a plan to be successful in the good times so that you will know what to do when the bad times come…because they will.  As a Christian, reading this book reminds me of the urgency to seek God’s perfect plan for our lives and those we lead.  We can be Great by Choice, but if we are great at something that doesn’t matter for the glory of God…then it isn’t worth anything in the end.  This book is a great read and I would recommend it for anyone that desires to lead with excellence.

I’ve posted below several things that I highlighted while reading…

• We simply do not know what the future holds.  Peter Berstein
• Life is uncertain, the future unknown.
• Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not?
• We believe the future will remain unpredictable and the world unstable for the rest of our lives, and we wanted to understand the factors that distinguish great organizations, those that prevail against extreme odds, in such environments.
• By looking at the best companies and their leaders in extreme environments, we gain insights that might otherwise remain hidden when studying leaders in more tranquil settings.
• The crucial question is, “What did the great companies share in common that distinguished them from their direct comparisons?”
• Victory awaits him who has everything in order–luck people call it.  Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck.  Roald Amundsen
• You don’t wait until you’re in an unexpected storm to discover that you need more strength and endurance.
• You prepare with intensity, all the time, so that when conditions turn against you, you can draw from a deep reservoir of strength.  And equally, you prepare so that when conditions turn in your favor, you can strike hard.
• Social psychology research indicates that at times of uncertainty, most people look to other people–authority figures, peers, group norms–for their primary cues about how to proceed.  10Xers, in contract, do not look to conventional wisdom to set their course during times of uncertainty, nor do they primarily look to what other people do, or to what pundits and experts say they should do.  They look primarily to empirical evidence.
• The critical question is, “What are you in it for?”  10X leaders can be bland or colorful, uncharismatic or magnetic, understated or flamboyant, normal to the point of dull, or just flat-out weird–none of this really matters, as long as they’re passionately driven for a cause beyond themselves.
• 10Xers display three core behaviors that, in combination, distinguish them from the leaders of the less successful comparison companies: fanatic discipline, empirical creativity, productive paranoia.
• Freely chosen, discipline is absolute freedom.  Ron Serino
• The 20 Mile March is more than a philosophy.  It’s about having concrete, clear, intelligent, and rigorously pursued performance mechanisms that keep you on track.  The 20 Mile March creates two types of self-imposed discomfort: (1) the discomfort of unwavering commitment to high performance in difficult conditions, and (2) the discomfort of holding back in good conditions.
• Elements of a good 20 Mile March:
  uses performance markers that delineate a lower bound of acceptable achievement.
  has self-imposed constraints.
  is tailored to the enterprise and its environment.
  lies largely within your control to achieve.
  has a Goldilocks time frame.
  is designed and self-imposted by the enterprise, not imposed from the outside or blindly copied from others.
  must be achieved with great consistency.
• Accomplishing a 20 Mile March, consistently, in good times and bad, builds confidence.  Tangible achievement in the face of adversity reinforces the 10X perspective; we are ultimately responsible for improving performance.  We never blame circumstance; we never blame the environment.
• If you deplete your resources, run yourself to exhaustion, and then get caught at the wrong moment by an external shock, you can be in serious trouble.
• We live in a  culture that reveres the Next Big Thing.  It’s exciting, fun to read about, fun to talk about, fun to write about, fun to learn about, and fun to join.  Yet the pursuit of the Next Big Thing can be quite dangerous if it becomes an excuse for daily to 20 Mile March.
• 10X winners set their own 20 Mile March, appropriate to their own enterprise; they don’t let outside pressures define it for them.
• You may not find what you were looking for, but you find something else equally important.  Robert Noyce
• We concluded that each environment has a level of “threshold innovation” that you need to meet to be a contender in the game; some industries, such as airlines, have a low threshold, whereas other industries, such as biotechnology, command a high threshold.  Companies that fail even to meet the innovation threshold cannot win.  But–and this surprised us–once you’re above the threshold, especially in a highly turbulent environment, being more innovative doesn’t seem to matter very much.
• It is not discipline alone that makes greatness, but the combination of discipline and creativity.
• The great task, rarely achieved, is to blend creative intensity with relentless discipline so as to amplify the creativity rather than destroy it.  When you marry operating excellence with innovation, you multiply the value of your creativity.
• View mistakes as expensive tuition: better get something out of it, learning everything you can, apply the learning, and don’t repeat.
• A bullet is a low-cost, low-risk, and low-distraction test or experiment.  10Xers use bullets to empirically validate what will actually work.  Based on that empirical validation, they then concentrate their resources to fire a cannonball, enabling large returns from concentrated bets.
• As soon as there is life there is danger.  Ralph Waldo Emerson
• The only mistake you can learn from are the ones you survive.
• If you come at the world with the practices of building a great enterprise and you apply them with rigor all the time–good times and bad, stable times and unstable–you’ll have an enterprise that can pull ahead of others when turbulent times hit.  When a calamitous event clobbers an industry or the overall economy, companies fall into one of three categories; those that pull ahead, those that fall behind, and those that die.  The disruption itself does not determine your category.  You do.
• Sometimes acting too fast increases risk.  Sometimes acting too slow increases risk.  The critical question is, “How much time before your risk profile changes?”
• Not all time in life is equal.  Life serves up some moments that count much more than other moments.
• We will all face moments when the quality of our performance matters much more than other moments, moments that we can seize or squander.
• Rapid change does not call for abandoning disciplined thought and disciplined action.  Rather, it calls for upping the intensity to zoom out for fast yet rigorous decision making and zoom in for fast yet superb execution.
• Most men die of their remedies, and not of their illnesses.  Moliere
• A SMaC recipe is a set of durable operating practices that create a replicable and consistent success formula.  The word SMac stands for Specific, Methodical, and Consistent.
• In selecting teammates, choose people to get stranded with.
• The signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change; the signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency.
• Changes to a solid and proven SMaC recipe are like amendments to the Constitution: if you get the recipe right, based on practical insight and empirical validation, it should serve you well for a very long time; equally important, fundamental changes must be possible.  Continually question and challenge your recipe, but change it rarely.
• One should…be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.  F. Scott Fitzgerald
• The greatest leaders we’ve studied throughout all our research cared as much about values as victory, as much about purpose as profit, as much about being useful as being successful.  Their drive and standards are ultimately internal, rising from somewhere deep inside.
• We are not imprisoned by our circumstances.  We are not imprisoned by the luck we get or the inherent unfairness of life.  We are not imprisoned by crushing setbacks, self-inflicted mistakes or our past success.  We are not imprisoned by the times in which we live, but the number of hours in a day or even the number of hours we’re granted in our very short lives. In the end, we can control only a tiny sliver of what happens to us.  But even so, we are free to choose, free to become great by choice.