Good to Great
Nucor "We did not make a decision that this was what we stood for at any specific moment. It evolved through many agonizing arguments and fights. I am not sure that we knew exactly what we were fighting for until we looked back and said that we were fighting to establish who we were going to Philip Morris "Its impossible to think of one big thing that would exemplify a shift from good to great because our success was evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary, building success upon success. I don't know that there was any single event"
Pitney Bowes "We didn't talk so much of change. We recognized early on not so
much that we needed to change, but that we needed to evolve, which recognizes that we've got to do things differently. We realized that evolution
Walgreens "There was no seminal meeting or epiphany moment, no one big bright light that came on like a lightbulb. It was sort of an evolution Wells "It wasn't a single switch that was thrown atone time. Little by little, the themes became more apparent and stronger.
When Carl became CEO, there wasn't any great wrenching. Dick led one stage of evolution and Carl the next, and it just proceeded smoothly, rather than an abrupt When teaching this point, I sometimes use an example from outside my research that perfectly illustrates the idea the Bruins basketball dynasty of the sand early s. Most basketball fans know that the Bruins won ten NCAA
Championships in twelve years, atone point assembling a sixty-one-game winning streak, under the legendary coach John But do you know how many years Wooden coached the Bruins before his first NCAA Championship Fifteen. From 1948 to 1963, Wooden worked in relative obscurity before winning his first championship in
1964. Year by year, Coach Wooden built
the underlying foundations,
172 Collins veloping a recruiting system, implementing a consistent philosophy, and refining the full-court-press style of play. No one paid too much attention to the quiet, soft-spoken coach and his team hit breakthrough and systematically crushed every serious competitor for more than a decade.
Like the Wooden dynasty, lasting transformations from good to great follow a general pattern of buildup followed by breakthrough. In some cases, the buildup-to-breakthrough stage takes along time, in other cases, a shorter time.
At Circuit City, the buildup stage lasted nine years, at
Nucor ten years, whereas at Gillette it took only five years,
at Fannie Mae three years, and at Pitney Bowes about two years. But, no matter how short or long it took, every good-to-great transformation followed the same basic pattern- accumulating momentum, turn by turn of the until buildup transformed into breakthrough.
Share with your friends: