James C. Collins Quotes

Not all time in life is equal. How many opportunities do you get to talk about what your life is going to add up to with people thinking about the same question?

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

Most people will look back and realize they did not have a great life because it's just so easy to settle for a good life.

The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline.

If you have more than three priorities then you don't have any.

How can we do better tomorrow than we did today?

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.

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.

If we only have great companies, we will merely have a prosperous society, not a great one. Economic growth and power are the means, not the definition, of a great nation.

How can you succeed by helping others succeed? We succeed at our very best only when we help others succeed.

Creative leadership impact increases in your 50's. When I turn 50 I want to say, "Nice start!"

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

Great vision without great people is irrelevant.

If I were running a company today, I would have one priority above all others: to acquire as many of the best people as I could. I'd put off everything else to fill my bus. Because things are going to come back. My flywheel is going to start to turn. And the single biggest constraint on the success of my organization is the ability to get and to hang on to enough of the right people.

Great companies foster a productive tension between continuity and change.

People are not your most important asset....the right people are.

True leadership has people who follow when they have the freedom not to.

Good is the enemy of great. And that's one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great.

Level 5 leaders are fanatically driven, infected with an incurable need to produce sustained results. They are resolved to do whatever it takes to make the company great, no matter how big or hard the decisions.

Smart people instinctively understand the dangers of entrusting our future to self-serving leaders who use our institutions, whether in the corporate or social sectors, to advance their own interests.

We learned that a former prisoner of war had more to teach us about what it takes to find a path to greatness than most books on corporate strategy.

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.

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.

I can just let my curiosity wander unleashed.

We must reject the idea... Well-intentioned, but dead wrong... That the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become "more like a business." Most businesses... Like most of anything else in life... Fall somewhere between mediocre and good.

Just because a company falls doesn't invalidate what we can learn by studying that company when it was at its historical best.

I am completely Socratic.

Good is the enemy of great.. The vast majority of good companies remain just that - good, but not great.

Throw leaders into an extreme environment, and it will separate the stark differences between greatness and mediocrity.

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

It occurs to me,Jim,that you spend too much time trying to be interesting. Why don't you invest more time being interested?" Collin's advice from John Gardner that he took to heart.

Discipline should amplify creativity rather than stifle it.

The most effective leaders of companies in transition are the quiet, unassuming people whose inner wiring is such that the worst circumstances bring out their best. They're unflappable, they're ready to die if they have to. But you can trust that, when bad things are happening, they will become clearheaded and focused.

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 x factor of a great leader is humility combined with will.

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.

Whether you prevail or fail depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you.

The essence of profound insight is simplicity.

It's more important than ever to define yourself in terms of what you stand for rather than what you make, because what you make is going to become outmoded faster than it has at any time in the past. ...hang on to the idea of who you are as a company, and focus not on what you do, but on what you could do. By being really clear about what you stand for and why you exist, you can see what you could do with a much more open mind. You enhance your ability to adapt to change.

The best CEOs in our research display tremendous ambition for their company combined with the stoic will to do whatever it takes, no matter how brutal (within the bounds of the company's core values), to make the company great. Yet at the same time they display a remarkable humility about themselves, ascribing much of their own success to luck, discipline and preparation rather than personal genius.

If you have a charismatic cause you don't need to be a charismatic leader.

In a truly great company profits and cash flow become like blood and water to a healthy body: They are absolutely essential for life but they are not the very point of life

Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company. It's not that Level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious-but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves.

Not one of the good-to-great companies focused obsessively on growth.

I see the Baldrige process as a powerful set of mechanisms for disciplined people engaged in disciplined thought and taking disciplined action to create great organizations that produce exceptional results.

It took Einstein ten years of groping through the fog to get the theory of special relativity, and he was a bright guy.

Get keep right people.

Focusing solely on what you can potentially do better than any other organization is the only path to greatness.