Jim Collins is the author of Good to Great and Built to Last. He is a guru of how companies have been and can be successful. Here are some relevant-for-entrepreneurs-and-business-owners quotes from his article in Inc. Magazine, April 2009: “In Times Like These, You Get a Chance to Show Your Strength.”
We realized that being an entrepreneur is a choice. It’s not about temperament or personality. It’s about action!
It is only in times like these that you get a chance to show your strength. In the end I think we have to have absolute faith in our ability to deal with whatever is thrown at us. And we need to have a complete, realistic paranoia that a lot can be thrown at us. We need to be prepared for what we can’t predict and, at the same time, have this total unwavering faith that we will find a way to deal with all of it.
Think about the leading entrepreneurs of the past three decades: Steve Jobs, Yvon Chouinard,… They defined success on a very big scale. For Steve Jobs, it was about much more than selling computers. For Yvon Chouniard, more than clothing. … (It is about) transforming society.
The most important decisions are always WHO decisions… Who comes first and WHAT comes second, for a very simple reason: If you cannot predict the WHAT, you have to be able to do a good job with the WHO, because the WHAT is going to be constantly shifting.
Do you have a culture of people who:
- Share a set of values?
- Have very clear responsibilities?
- and Perform?
Those who build a culture around those ideas are building on something that is largely unchangeable.
(Part II next post in two weeks.)
Dick McCormick www.BizSuccessWithLess.com
See also: www.PeakPlanningSpecialist.com
Tags: Jim Collins, WHO vs. WHAT
