Global Leadership Summit 2010 Day 1:Jim Collins

From the conference notes:

A nationally acclaimed business thinker, Jim Collins serves as a teacher to leaders throughout the corporate and social sectors.

Author of the best-selling books Good to Great and Built to Last, he is a student of companies – how they grow, how they attain superior performance, and how good companies can become great companies.

His writings, based on groundbreaking research, have been featured in Fortune, Business Week, The Economist, USA Today, and Harvard Business Review.

His latest volume, How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In, looks at the common mistakes of organizations in a state of decline and what leaders can do to reverse negative patterns and flourish anew.

From my personal notes:

• "Good is the enemy of great."
• "Greatness is not a matter of circumstance, but largely of conscious choice."
• Enterprises, people, organizations, and governments fall all the time – if it can happen to them, it can happen to us.
• Great becomes good, then mediocre, then bad, then irrelevant, and then gone.
• There are 5 stages of decline.
• The first stage of decline is "Hubris Born of Success".
• It shows outrageous arrogance if you think decisions have been good just because circumstances have been good. Bad decisions are still bad regardless of circumstance.
• Leaders "never give up".
• Humility is what distinguishes the best leaders.
• This humility is not soft, but has burning passion.
• The second stage of decline is "Undisciplined Pursuit of More".
• Companies become complacent – stuck in a rut.
• "Packard's Law" says that you will fail if you don't execute growth brilliantly.
• Resist growth until we have fantastic people – remember the 4 C's. (Bill Hybels presented the 4 C's in the keynote address: character, competence, culture, and chemistry.)
• Get the right people first, and then decide where to go.
• The third stage of decline is "Denial of Risk and Peril".
• From the outside, you look really great – this makes it difficult to admit otherwise.
• The "Stockdale Paradox" was named after Admiral Stockdale.
• Stockdale had been asked how he resisted depression not knowing the end (of imprisonment at the Hanoi Hilton), to which he responded "Never confuse faith and facts" – you need to confront brutal facts. Optimistic fellow prisoners who kept telling themselves they would be released soon died the quickest, while Stockdale's realization that he would probably be imprisoned a long time helped sustain him.
• The fourth stage of decline is "Grasping for Salvation".
• "The peril you deny throws you on the edge."
• Greatness is never a single event. It is a process – the "Flywheel".
• The fifth stage of decline is "Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death".
• There needs to be a reason to endure the struggle.
• If you always measure your success by financial gain, you will always lose.
• You need to be "driven by purpose beyond money and success".
• Purpose is rooted in core values – values that are not compromised.
• There is a paradox, however – values are not open to change.
• "If we lose our own soul we lose it all."
• The signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency.
• You have to be willing to change.
• You need to both "preserve the core" AND "stimulate progress".
• Do your diagnostics. Use the "Good to Great Diagnostic Tool".
• Count your blessings. When we begin to account for all the good, all the successes that we did not cause, it is humbling.
• What is your question to statement ratio? Can you double it by next year? Invest more time in being interested, not interesting.
• Have the discipline to stop doing.
• Preserve the core, stimulate progress.
• "Be willing to change tactics, but not give up on core values."