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 Some UsefulIdeas I've obtained from the book Good to Great by Jim Collins. Some of these are direct quotes, some are paraphrased. "We have the hardest working steel workers in the world," said one Nucor executive. "We hire five, work them like ten, and pay them like eight." "The only way to deliver to the people who are achieving is to not burden them with the people who are not achieving." Practical Disciplines for hiring:
Packard's Law: No company can grow revenues consistently faster than its ability to get enough of the right people to implement that growth and still become a great company. If your growth rate in revenues consistently outpaces your growth rate in people, you simply will not -- indeed cannot -- build a great company. Managing your problems can only make you good, whereas building your opportunities is the only way to become great. If you have the right people on the bus, they will be self-motivated. The real question then becomes: How do you manage in such a way as to not de-motivate people? The key lies not in better information, but in turning information into information that cannot be ignored. A Hedgehog Concept:
If you could pick one and only one ratio -- profit per x -- to systematically increase over time, what x would have the greatest and most sustainable impact on your economic engine? You can't manufacture passion or "motivate" people to feel passionate. You can only discover what ignites your passion and the passions of those around you. ...the purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline--a problem that largely goes away if you have the right people in the first place. A great company requires a culture of discipline, not merely a leader who is personally disciplined. Disciplined action comes from disciplined people who work within a framework of disciplined thought that confronts brutal facts of reality while retaining resolute faith in the ultimate path to greatness. Create a "stop doing" list of things you should no longer do. If it doesn't support the Hedgehog Concept, don't do it. If you cannot justify to your peers the need for at least fifteen people reporting to you to fulfill your responsibilities, then you would have zero people reporting to you (method for removing layers of bureaucracy at Kimberly-Clark). When used right, technology becomes an accelerator of momentum, not a creator of it. ... you cannot make good use of technology until you know which technologies are relevant. And which are those? Only those that link directly to the Hedgehog Concept. When technology is used wrong -- when grasped as an easy solution, without deep understanding of how it links to a clear and coherent concept -- technology simply accelerates your own self-created demise. |