Best 137 quotes of James C. Collins on MyQuotes

A company should limit its growth based on its ability to attract enough of the right people.

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

A great company will have many once-in-a-liftetime opportunities.

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.

An organization is not truly great, if it cannot be great without you.

A visionary company doesn't simply balance between idealism and profitability: it seeks to be highly idealistic and highly profitable. A visionary company doesn't simply balance between preserving a tightly held core ideology and stimulating vigorous change and movement; it does both to an extreme.

A visionary company doesn't simply balance between idealism and profitability: it seeks to be highly idealistic and highly profitable.

Bad decisions made with good intentions, are still bad decisions.

Be rigorous about your HR decisions. There is a difference between rigorous and ruthless.

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

By definition, it is not possible to everyone to be above the average.

Change your practices without abandoning your core values.

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.

Consider the idea that 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.

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

Discipline is consistency of action.

Discipline should amplify creativity rather than stifle it.

Dreams make you click, juice you, turn you on, excite the living daylights out of you. You cannot wait to get out of bed to continue pursuing your dream. The kind of dream I'm talking about gives meaning to your life. it is the ultimate motivator.

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

First figure out your partners, then figure out what ideas to pursue. The most important thing isn't the market you target, the product you develop or the financing, but the founding team.

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.

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. The people we interviewed from the good-to-great companies clearly loved what they did, largely because they loved who they did it with.

Genius of AND. Embrace both extremes on a number of dimensions at the same time. Instead of choosing a OR B, figure out how to have A AND B-purpose AND profit, continuity AND change, freedom AND responsibility, etc.

Genuine confidence is what launches you out of bed in the morning, and through your day with a spring in your step.

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

Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great. We don't have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don't have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.

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

Good is the enemy of great.

Good is the enemy of great. That's why so few things become great.

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

Good-to-great companies set their goals and strategies based on understanding; comparison companies set their goals and strategies based on bravado.

Great companies foster a productive tension between continuity and change.

Greatest danger is not failure, but be successful and not know why.

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.

"Growth!" is not a Hedgehog Concept. Rather, if you have the right Hedgehog Concept and make decisions relentlessly consistent with it, you will create such momentum that your main problem will not be how to grow, but how not to grow too fast.

How can we do better tomorrow than we did today?

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

I am not failing - I am growing! Do you have the ability to reframe failure as growth in order to achieve your goals?

I can just let my curiosity wander unleashed.

I don't know where we should take this company, but I do know that if I start with the right people, ask them the right questions, and engage them in vigorous debate, we will find a way to make this company great.

If I'm going really, really fast, I can do a page of finished text a day, on average.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

If your company disappeared, would it leave a gaping hole that could not easily be filled by any other enterprise on the planet?

In an ironic twist, I now see Good to Great not as a sequel to Built to Last, but more of a prequel. Good to Great is about how to turn a good organization into one that produces sustained great results. Built to Last is about how you take a company with great results and turn it into an enduring great company of iconic stature.

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