They sound different from the Level 5 leaders you discuss in Good to Great, with their blend of personal humility and professional will. I don't associate humility with people like Steve Jobs.
My concept of humility is somewhat broader now than it was when I wrote Good to Great. I think of it as being in service to something much bigger than yourself. The humility comes from realizing how much bigger that something is.
Humility aside, it seems as though the recurring themes in your books are discipline, preparedness, and persistence. Are those the essential qualities that tie all the companies and their leaders together?
There's also the theme of BHAGs, Big Hairy Audacious Goals, as well as the creativity piece. Discipline stands out in our work because it's so much rarer than creativity, but creativity and discipline go hand in hand. Years ago, I had the privilege of teaching the Creativity and Innovation course at Stanford, developed by Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers. The basic premise of the course was that creativity is the natural state of being human. If you breathe, you're creative. My wife and I are working our way through A History of the World in 100 Objects, by the director of the British Museum. One of the first objects is a piece of art from 13,000 years ago, and some jade hand axes from early civilization were shaped for sheer beauty. The author notes that our creative, artistic urge seems to show up 50,000 years ago.
What do humans do? We create. We don't have to learn to be creative. We have to unlearn what gets in the way of our creativity. Discipline, on the other hand, is not the natural human state. So it's a differentiating factor. What is superrare is the ability to blend creative thinking with discipline and to do it in such a way that the discipline helps rather than hurts the creativity. It's a special group of leaders who can do that.
Do you think every business owner should strive to build a great company? Is that the only good reason to be in business?
No, not at all. I admit it can sometimes sound that way, because I'm so passionate about the subject. I do believe that building a great company is a noble quest. But I view it as a giant "if/then" question. Yes, if you're inspired by the idea of building an enduring great company, if you want to have an impact on the world through business, if that would make you feel great about what you've done with your life, then the stuff I've written will help. But I'm not trying to impose the "if" upon anyone. If people aren't inspired by that idea, I'm not trying to convince them they should be. I would hope there are founders, Inc. readers, who've never really thought about it and—when presented with the possibility—find that it ignites something within them. But I'm not trying to convert anybody. It may not be your hedgehog.
Just to be clear, for those who haven't read Good to Great, a "hedgehog" has to do with the intersection of what you are deeply passionate about, what you can be best at, and what drives your economic engine.
And I should note that building a great, enduring, 10,000-person company is not my hedgehog, either. What drives me is curiosity, questions, teaching. I'm inspired by the subject of building great companies, but I am very unlikely to build one myself.
So it's strictly a matter of choice.
It is. I've been very influenced by our research on that score—not just the research for Great by Choice, but also for Built to Last, Good to Great, and How the Mighty Fall. Altogether, we've looked at 6,500 years of combined corporate history using match-pair comparison. What we see are people who've made different choices and different decisions. This study really nailed it for me. Maybe other people didn't make the same choices because they didn't know any better. That's irrelevant. What's relevant is the differentiator, namely, what people did. Everybody has luck. Clearly some unlucky things can kill you. But I keep coming back to the conclusion that it's mainly about choices. Is it what happens to you, or is it what you do? These leaders come down squarely on the side of, it's what you do. Our luck analysis in Great by Choice bears that out.
You are talking about the last chapter, in which you show that the highest performers—the 10Xers—were no luckier than the comparison companies, but that they differed markedly in the benefit they got from the luck they had. I particularly liked the way you define a luck event—as good or bad. That made it possible to quantify the number of such events experienced by each company during the period you studied. That was pretty cool.
Morten Hansen and I spent months figuring out how to do it. We thought it was important, because you have to wonder: Were the companies we hold up as role models just luckier? When you look at the numbers, the answer is no. What's important is what people did with their luck, how they did it, how they thought about it. The 10Xers achieved a higher "return on luck" by using the leadership concepts we write about. Of all the pieces of analysis we've done in almost 25 years, that, for me, hands down, is the most exciting and the most interesting.
