A 2-hour listen that made me realize I don’t need to read or listen to “Good to Great.”

This monograph by Jim Collins is worth listening to because it’s not a big-time investment and will let you know if “Good to great” is worth your time - for me, it wasn’t. The monograph is full of interesting examples, but it feels a bit outdated and very few people are in the position of leading companies that are doing “Good” and having trouble how to make them “Great.”

The tl;dr is that the flywheel is inevitable and you have to go with the flow. The next step in the evolution of any company has to be so obvious that it’s inevitable.

Jim talks a lot about what leads to success and outlines different methodologies to get there that I won’t reiterate here. It includes sketching out the flywheel, using the “hedgehog” concepts, but at the end of the day it boils down to: passion, hard work, identifying what you’re best at and determining if that fuels the economic engine.

Some other topics that really resonated with me is how vision with grit is irrelevant. Ultimately this boils down to needing to have a team full of disciplined people, and disciplined people don’t need hierarchy, they need direction and lack of distractions.

Some other ideas/concepts that stood out to me:

  • Achieving success without understanding why is worse than failure

  • Ask yourself what you would do if you were an outside CEO coming in with a whipped out memory

  • Always reevaluate your success and understand why they worked. We have post-mortems but not post-successes.

  • Make a company go from good to great is one thing, but make it build to last is a whole different story.

  • If you’re organization disappears, would people miss it? That’s how you know you’ve succeeded.

  • Nothing listed above matters if you’re not at least a little bit lucky.