James C. Collins Quotes

12 Sourced Quotes

Core values = The organization's essential and enduring tenets – a small set of general guiding principles, not to be confused with specific cultural or operating practices, and not to be compromised for financial gain or short-term expediency.

James C. Collins
Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline.

James C. Collins
There is a direct relationship between the absence of celebrity and the presence of good-to-great results. Why? First, when you have a celebrity, the company turns into the one genius with 1,000 helpers. It creates a sense that the whole thing is really about the CEO. At a deeper level, we found that for leaders to make something great, their ambition has to be for the greatness of the work and the company, rather than for themselves.

James C. Collins
The good news is that one of the key elements of being a visionary company is strikingly simple: Good old-fashioned hard work, dedication to improvement, and continually building for the future will take you a long way... The bad news is that creating a visionary company requires huge quantities of good old-fashioned hard work, dedication to improvement, and continually building for the future. There are no shortcuts. There are no magic potions. There are no work-arounds. To build a visionary company, you've got to be ready for the long, hard pull. Success is never final.

James C. Collins
The most effective leaders of companies in transition are the quiet, unassuming people whose inner wiring is such that the worst circumstances bring out their best. They're unflappable, they're ready to die if they have to. But you can trust that, when bad things are happening, they will become clearheaded and focused.

James C. Collins
If we only have great companies, we will merely have a prosperous society, not a great one. Economic growth and power are the means, not the definition, of a great nation.

James C. Collins
A culture of discipline is not a principle of business, it is a principle of greatness.

James C. Collins
Good is the enemy of great. That good is the enemy of great is not just a business problem. It is a human problem

James C. Collins
For no matter what we achieve, if we don't spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect, we cannot possibly have a great life. But if we spend the vast majority of our time with people we love and respect – people we really enjoy being on the bus with and who will never disappoint us – then we will almost certainly have a great life, no matter where the bus goes. The people we interviewed from the good-to-great companies clearly loved what they did, largely because they loved who they did it with.

James C. Collins
Most businesses -— like most of anything else in life -— fall somewhere between mediocre and good. Few are great. When you compare great companies with good ones, many widely practiced business norms turn out to correlate with mediocrity, not greatness. So, then, why would we want to import the practices of mediocrity into the social sectors?

James C. Collins
It occurs to me, Jim, that you spend too much time trying to be interesting. Why don't you invest more time being interested?" Collin's advice from John Gardner that he took to heart.

James C. Collins
It is better to first get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats, and then figure out where to drive.

James C. Collins