I have been a fan of Jim Collins since I read his book Good to Great. Since then, I’ve read his other books, Built to Last and How the Mighty Fall. Several years ago, Collins released a new book entitled Great by Choice and I would highly recommend that you get it and study its principles carefully.
The book explains why some companies thrive in uncertainty and chaos and others do not. The book is based on nine years of research with a team of more than twenty researchers who studied companies that rose to greatness beating what average companies in their industry were achieving a minimum of ten times over fifteen years. Once they discovered the companies that met this criteria, Collins and his team went about comparing what these companies did to competitors in their industry who were in a similar environment who didn’t accomplish nearly the same things.
Among their findings were that the best leaders were those who were more fanatically disciplined, empirically focused and more productively paranoid than their counterparts of being overtaken by their competitors. In fact, I think the definition Collins gives of discipline is one of the best I have ever read. He says that:
“Discipline, in essence, is consistency of action—consistency with values, consistency with long-term goals, consistency with performance standards, consistency of method, consistency over time. Discipline is not the same as regimentation. Discipline is not the same as measurement. Discipline is not the same as hierarchical obedience or adherence to bureaucratic rules. True discipline requires the independence of mind to reject pressures to conform in ways incompatible with values, performance standards, and long-term aspirations. For a 10Xer, the only legitimate form of discipline is self-discipline, having the inner will to do whatever it takes to create a great outcome, no matter how difficult.” –p. 21.
It is easier to stay in your comfort zone and succomb to the resistance that any business owner faces as they try to accomplish more. I really like this statement by Collins about this choice. He says:
“We cannot predict the future. But we can create it. Think back to…years ago, and consider what’s happened since, the destabilizing events—in the world, in your country, in the markets, in your work, in your life—that defied all expectations. We can be astonished, confounded, shocked, stunned, delighted, or terrified, but rarely prescient. None of us can predict with certainty the twists and turns our lives will take. Life is uncertain, the future unknown. It is is neither good nor bad. It just is, like gravity. Yet the task remains: how to master our own fate, even so.”—Great by Choice, p. 1.
My favorite part of the book is Collins’ summary and assessment about what this type of attitude will do for you and your business. He says: “We sense a dangerous disease infecting our modern culture and eroding hope: an increasingly prevalent view that greatness owes more to circumstance, even luck, than to action and discipline—that what happens to us matters more than what we do. In games of chance, like a lottery or roulette, this view seems plausible. But taken as an entire philosophy, applied more broadly to human endeavor, it’s a deeply debilitating life perspective, one that we can’t imagine wanting to teach young people. Do we really believe that our actions count for little, that those who create something great are merely lucky, that our circumstances imprison us? Do we want to build a society and culture that encourage us to believe that we aren’t responsible for our choices and accountable for our performance?
“Our research evidence stands firmly against this view. is work began with the premise that most of what we face lies beyond our control, that life is uncertain and the future unknown. And as we wrote in Chapter 7, luck plays a role for everyone, both good luck and bad luck. But if one company becomes great while another in similar circumstances and with comparable luck does not, the root cause of why one becomes great and the other does not simply cannot be circumstance or luck. Indeed, if there’s one overarching message arising from more than six thousand years of corporate history across all our research— studies that employ comparisons of great versus good in similar circumstances –it would be this: greatness is not primarily a matter of circumstance; greatness is first and foremost a matter of conscious choice and discipline. The factors that determine whether or not a company becomes truly great, even in chaotic and uncertain world, lie largely within the hands of its people. It is not mainly a matter of what happens to them but a matter of what they create, what they do, and how well they do it.” –pp. 181-182.
He continues:
“When the moment comes—when we’re afraid, exhausted, or tempted—what choice do we make? Do we abandon our values? Do we give in? Do we accept average performance because that’s what most everyone else accepts? Do we capitulate to the pressure of the moment? Do we give up on our dreams when we’ve been slammed by brutal facts? 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 successes. We are not imprisoned by the times in which we live, by 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.” –pp. 182-183.
Great advice. I highly recommend that you read and study Great by Choice.
