Introduction
- Good to great does happen
- These companies didn’t focus equally on what to do but on what not to do
- The flywheel of good to great
- Level 5 Leadership
- Right People in Right Seats
- Keeping Faith & Confronting Negative Facts
- Aiming to Becoming the Worlds Best in the Core Service and Being Open to Change
- Disciplined Culture
- Great Technology
Level 5 Leadership
- Level 5 Leaders focus on the greater good of the company and not their ego
- Good to great leaders are quiet, humble, even shy.
- Great CEOs usually come from within the company
Right People in Right Seats
- First thing that great leaders did was getting the right people in the right seats, even before they worked in vision or strategy
- Have a high standard for you team members
- Hire slow, fire fast
- Let your best people work on your best opportunities
- Having a team where people deeply like one another is part of the good to great company’s teams
Keeping Faith & Confronting Negative Facts
- Companies fail if they don’t face negative facts about their company or market
- Better have a realistic vision than one that sounds amazing but that is unrealistic
- Lead with questions not answers (accept that you don’t know anything and ask your team for solutions instead of always coming up with them)
- Create a culture of debating
The Hedgehog Concept
- Hedgehogs will always win because they focus on being very good in one thing instead of focusing on lots of different things at once.
- Simple concepts win.
- Blogtec’s hedgehog concept: Most easy to implement managed SEO solution for agencies + constant flow of affordable leads
- Great companies have a clear hedgehog concept and follow the three circles
- The three circles:
- What can you be the best at the world at?
- What drives your economic engine?
- What are you passionate about?
Culture of Discipline
- Create a culture of entrepreneurship and discipline
- Emphasize freedom and responsibility
- Hire self-disciplined people
- Create good systems and hire great people. Then don’t manage the people but manage the systems.
- Make to-do lists and stop-doing lists
Technology Accelerators
- Technology can be a great accelerator of growth/momentum
- Implement the technology to support your Hedgehog concept
The Flywheel and the Doom Loop
- There’s never one reason for a company becoming great. It’s always a collection of lots of reasons.
- There’s no overnight success.
- You can use acquisitions to support your growth when it fits to your hedgehog concept. However, an acquisition won’t fix your problems and will only do harm if done not connected to your hedgehog concept.