Those who turn good organizations into great organizations are motivated by a deep creative urge and an inner compulsion for sheer unadulterated excellence for its own sake.
Interpretation
Great organizations are built by individuals driven by a passion for excellence, not just for external rewards.
In this quote, James C. Collins emphasizes that the distinction between good organizations and great ones lies in the mindset of their leaders and contributors. Those who drive the transformation are not merely seeking success or recognition; instead, they are fueled by an intrinsic desire for creativity and excellence, pursuing their ambitions for the fulfillment and joy it brings rather than for external validation or profit.
In practice
In a leadership seminar, one might quote Collins to inspire aspiring leaders about the importance of having a passion for excellence.
The kind of commitment I find among the best performers across virtually every field is a single-minded passion for what they do, an unwavering desire for excellence in the way they think and the way they work. Genuine confidence is what launches you out of bed in the morning, and through your day with a spring in your step.
If we allow the celebrity rock-star model of leadership to triumph, we will see the decline of corporations and institutions of all types. The twentieth century was a century of greatness, but we face the very real prospect that the next century will see very few enduring great institutions.
...the question, Why try for greatness? would seem almost tautological. If you're doing something you care that much about, and you believe in its purpose deeply enough, then it is impossible to imagine not trying to make it great. It's just a given.
Get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats...
It may seem odd to talk about something as soft and fuzzy as "passion" as an integral part of a strategic framework. But throughout the good-to-great companies, passion became a key part of the Hedgehog Concept.
A visionary company doesn't simply balance between idealism and profitability: it seeks to be highly idealistic and highly profitable. A visionary company doesn't simply balance between preserving a tightly held core ideology and stimulating vigorous change and movement; it does both to an extreme.
Just because I made it look easy doesn't mean that it was and you don't work hard and become a Hall of Famer without working day in and day out.
If you spend too much time learning the 'tricks' of the trade, you may not learn the trade. There are no shortcuts. If you're working on finding a short cut, the easy way, you're not working hard enough on the fundamentals. You may get away with it for a spell, but there is no substitute for the basics. And the first basic is good, old fashioned hard work.
I was a baseball player, I taught baseball, and all of a sudden I was in the business world. Now I used the baseball world to talk about their product. Not too much, just enough to keep going. Just be yourself and you'll never have a problem. That's what I did.
Beside every great success are the seeds of enormous failure. In every failure, there's the opportunity seeds of great success. They're not miles apart. So if they're that close together, and if you're really working, you're always gonna have that likelihood that something's not going to work.
Integrity is the essence of everything successful.
When I was playing before I retired, I never really understood the appreciation and the respect that people gave me. People had treated me like a god or something, and that was very embarrassing.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.