Wednesday, October 6, 2010

Refining 'Good to Great' by Jim Collins

By: Dr^Waqipedia


Good to Great, a highly recommended corporate management book written by Jim Collins. Although it's specifically for any business managers or CEOs, it would be great for anyone to read it especially for non-profit organization, leadership or self-improvement purposes. It gives us perfect overview of how to successfully manage our life and time while at the same time, rigorously keeping up with the balance of life and strictly aiming to produce great-long lasting accomplishment

Therefore, as I'm writing this personally as 'first aid kit' for my juniors who are active in student-based program, event managing and society management, I hope it would help them gaining the knowledge and insight as well as refining them through experiences from time to time.

First, let's start with the definition of good and great. If you understand the meaning, then you would understand the gap of both words; which for certain people, they take 'good' as the enemy of 'great'. Jim Collins wants to prove that in order to achieve great things, you need to have certain qualities exceeding the 'good'. And he acquired the result (the qualities) through years of research towards great people in nothing-to-great companies in the world (mostly in USA).


The qualities are;
  1. Being a Level 5 leader
  2. Focusing first and foremost in gathering the team members; the RIGHT one as building the superior team, then figure out the best path to bring them on 
  3. Unwavering faith to prevail although confronting with difficulties and 'brutal facts'
  4. Focus on Hedgehog Concept - being the best in what your passion is as well as generating the profit from it
  5. Build a culture of discipline
  6. Carefully selected on latest technologies to move forward  
  7. Be like a rolling of giant flywheel - continuously and consistently roll until reaches the point of breakthrough
  8. Focus on sustaining great results while at the same time, enduring it till the end
To understand each qualities, it need further and more detail explanation but I'll try to simplify it and accommodate with the level of our students in the future post.

Overall, as summary, what have been stressed in this book is highly performance relative to our target or mission. So, focus on it!!