Jim Collins Quotes

“Perhaps your quest to be part of building something great will not fall in your business life. But find it somewhere. If not in corporate life, then perhaps in making your church great. If not there, then perhaps a nonprofit, or a community organization, or a class you teach. Get involved in something that you care so much about that you want to make it the greatest it can possibly be, not because of what you will get, but just because it can be done.”

“Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice.”

“For, in the end, it is impossible to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work.”

“The real question is not, ‘Why greatness?’ but ‘What work makes you feel compelled to try to create greatness?’ If you have to ask the question, ‘Why should we try to make it great? Isn’t success enough?’ then you’re probably engaged in the wrong line of work.”

“A culture of discipline is not a principle of business, it is a principle of greatness.”

“All companies have a culture, some companies have discipline, but few companies have a culture of discipline. When you have disciplined people, you don’t need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don’t need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don’t need excessive controls. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great performance.”

“It is more important to know who you are than where you are going, for where you are going will change as the world around you changes.”

“You absolutely cannot make a series of good decisions without first confronting the brutal facts.”

“Comparison, a great teacher once told me, is the cardinal sin of modern life. It traps us in a game that we can’t win. Once we define ourselves in terms of others, we lose the freedom to shape our own lives.”

“Good is the enemy of great.”

“The only truly reliable source of stability is a strong inner core and the willingness to change and adapt everything except that core.”

“True leadership only exists if people follow when they have the freedom not to.”

“The critical question is not whether you’ll have luck, but what you do with the luck that you get.”

“Whether you prevail or fail, endure or die, depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you.”

“We are not imprisoned by our circumstances, our setbacks, our history, our mistakes, or even staggering defeats along the way. We are freed by our choices.”

“The moment a leader allows himself to become the primary reality people worry about, rather than reality being the primary reality, you have a recipe for mediocrity, or worse. This is one of the key reasons why less charismatic leaders often produce better long-term results than their more charismatic counterparts.”

“Charisma can be as much a liability as an asset. Your strength of personality can sow the seeds of problems, when people filter the brutal facts from you.”

“For leaders to make something great, their ambition has to be for the greatness of the work and the company, rather than for themselves.”

“You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, AND at the same time, have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

“Managing your problems can only make you good, whereas building your opportunities is the only way to become great.”

“Faith in the endgame helps you live through the months or years of buildup.”

“The essence of profound insight is simplicity.”

“Bad decisions made with good intentions are still bad decisions.”

“The only mistakes you can learn from are the ones you survive.”

“When in doubt, vary, change, solve the problem, seize the opportunity, experiment, try something new (consistent, of course, with the core ideology)-even if you can’t predict precisely how things will turn out. Do something. If one thing fails, try another. Fix. Try. Do. Adjust. Move. Act. No matter what, don’t sit still.”

“Building a visionary company requires one percent vision and 99 percent alignment.”

“If you have more than three priorities, you have none.”

“Discipline, in essence, is consistency of action.”

“The signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change. The signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency.”

“Each turn builds upon previous work as you make a series of good decisions, supremely well executed, that compound one upon another. This is how you build greatness.”

“Companies that change best over time know first and foremost what should not change.”

“There is a sense of exhilaration that comes in facing head-on the hard truths and saying, ‘We will never give up. We will never capitulate. It might take a long time, but we will find a way to prevail.’”

“Visionary companies make some of their best moves by experimentation, trial and error, opportunism, and, quite literally, accident. What looks in retrospect like brilliant foresight and preplanning was often the result of let's just try a lot of stuff and keep what works.”

“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.”

“Profit is like oxygen, food, water, and blood for the body; they are not the point of life, but without them, there is no life.”

“Get the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people in the right seats.”

“Great vision without great people is irrelevant.”

“Letting the wrong people hang around is unfair to all the right people, as they inevitably find themselves compensating for the inadequacies of the wrong people. Worse, it can drive away the best people. Strong performers are intrinsically motivated by performance, and when they see their efforts impeded by carrying extra weight, they eventually become frustrated.”

“The moment you feel the need to tightly manage someone, you’ve made a hiring mistake. The best people don’t need to be managed. Guided, taught, led-yes. But not tightly managed.”

“People are not your most important asset. The right people are.”

“Those who build great companies understand that the ultimate throttle on growth for any great company is not markets, or technology, or competition, or products. It is one thing above all others: the ability to get and keep enough of the right people.”

“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.”

“When in doubt, don’t hire-keep looking.”

“Expending energy trying to motivate people is largely a waste of time… if you have the right people on the bus, they will be self-motivated.”

“While you can buy your way to growth, you absolutely cannot buy your way to greatness.”