Core Message from "Good to Great", by Jim Collins

 

"Good to Great", by Jim Collins

Three concepts:

1. The Hedgehog mentality

"Fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing. " Good to Great companies think like a hedgehog. A simplified strategy, a core concept, an unified vision. Good to Great companies develop a hedgehog mentality by focusing on three circles:

a. What they can be best at and what can't be best at?

b. How can we generate more profit per X?

c. Passion - only invest in products and services they love 

The interaction of the above three things is called: "A hedgehog concept"

G2G companies simply their business around their hedgehog concept.

2. The bus

How does the company manage their bus? Who gets on the bus? When do they get off the bus? Where do people sit on the bus?

Not so great company: Genius with a thousand helpers

G2G companies: hire people with entrepreneurial spirit - people that don't need to be managed or motivated. People with strong character, strong values, leadership potential .

G2G companies rarely laid people off during tough times. CEOs moved people to find the right fit.

Where do people sit: front of the bus - best performers, business development, growth opportunities

Back of the bus: people who can solve problems for the company

3. The level 5 leader

Does the company have level 5 leaders:

1. skilled worker

2. reliable teammate

3. organized manager

4. visionary with a compelling message that people buying into

5. leaders with extreme humility and extreme resolve

All G2G leaders are level 5 leaders.

"Level 5 leaders have stoic determination to do whatever needs to be done to make the company great."

Core Message from "The E-Myth Revisited", by Michael Gerber

 

"The E-Myth Revisited", by Michael Gerber

"If your business depends on you, you don't own a business - you have a job. And it's the worst job in the world..." - Michael Gerber

An entrepreneur does not create a product or a service. An entrepreneur creates a system to produce great products or services., and remove themselves from the process.

"Build a system that allows ordinary people to produce extraordinary results."

How to Achieve Your Most Ambitious Goals

 

Understanding Your Customer

Understanding Your Customer and Defining Progress - Interview with Bob Moesta
Excerpts:
"One of the basic premises I came up with is that when you ask people what they want, when you try to design a new product, they actually had no clue what they want. They know the outcome they want, or the desired outcome they are looking for.  But given the context they are in, things are different. ...So I came up with this framework called "Jobs To Be Done" that people don't buy products or services. They hire them to do a job in their life. So there are different candidates, there is hiring criteria, there is firing criteria. For the last 30 years, I've been crafting and  honing it as one of the 25 methods I have. I am literally: "How the market really work?" Clay Christensen and I have been friends for about 25 years and he wrote this book on the method that I have been working on forever and primarily because at some point, he thought it was powerful enough. I am a practitioner and Clay is a theorist. That book is called: " competing against luck". The basic premise is that we try to find what causes people to basically make progress? What is the situations people are in? What are the pathways they seek to be better? What are the hiring and firing criteria that they make for the products and  services they choose. that frame enables you to see what's next and allows you not to be biased by what the product is or the services is, but more where are they struggling? My key phrase is always "the struggling moment is the seed for all of the innovation because the moment the consumer or the customer struggles, they care about something, they want something better. The more you find struggling moments, you start to understand the progress they want to make, then I can design better products. But if there is no struggling moment, I've never been successful doing it that way, so it's really using that frame around how I look at the market.

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