Greatness is a Conscious Choice

by Harvey Schachter

Good To Great And The Social Sectors
By Jim Collins, 35 pages, $14.95


We hear it over and over again: Government and social service agencies should be more like business. If they want to be well run – if they want to be great – they have to import the practices of business.

But Jim Collins, the fellow who wrote the book on great businesses, doesn’t agree. “Most businesses – like most of anything in life – fall somewhere between mediocre and good. Few are great. When you compare great companies with good ones, many widely practised business norms turn out to correlate with mediocrity, not greatness,” he declares.

Collins should know. A management researcher, based in Colorado, his last book Good To Great has been such a hit that like the Da Vinci Code it delayed going into paperback because people were still willing to pay full price. For it, he studied 11 companies that made the transition from good stock market returns to great stock market returns, comparing them to 11 similar companies that remained mediocre. Before that, he co-authored another classic business book, Built To Last, which in similar fashion studied historic, visionary companies and why they made the grade.

In recent years, he has been surprised by how many people in government, hospitals, universities, social services agencies, and police forces have been turning to his business book for a blueprint to success in their own field. If his e-mail is any indication, about 30% to 50% of Good To Great’s readers are from outside business.

That convinced him the book’s lessons apply to government and other social sectors. In a new monograph, Good To Great And The Social Sectors, available from online bookstores, he offers some thoughts on how best to transfer his ideas.

He starts with the issue of applying business notions to socially oriented ventures. “We need a new language. The critical distinction is not between business and social, but between great and good. We need to reject the naive imposition of the ‘language of business’ on the social sectors, and instead jointly embrace a language of greatness,” he writes.

In seeking greatness, he urges you to tackle five issues.

1. Defining Great
The first step is to define what you consider great in your field, which involves calibrating success without the advantage of business metrics like revenues or profit. He points to the Cleveland Orchestra, which measures standing ovations, whether it’s expanding the range of what it plays with perfection, whether it is invited to the most prestigious festivals in Europe, and whether tickets are in greater demand.

He says it doesn’t really matter whether you can quantify your results. It’s just important that you rigorously assemble evidence – quantitative or qualitative – that allows you to track progress towards your mission.

Your indicators will have flaws. But all indicators are flawed, from test scores to mammography results to crime data. “What matters is not finding the perfect indicator, but settling upon a consistent and intelligent method of assessing your output results, and then tracking your trajectory with rigour. What do you mean by great performance? Have you established a baseline? Are you improving? If not, why not? How can you improve faster towards your audacious goals?” he says.

2. Leadership
In the original book, Collins revealed that the leaders of his turnaround companies were not the bold, bombastic leaders that are celebrated in magazine profiles but actually quite modest and understated souls. They all had an unwavering resolve, however, and were incredibly ambitious for their organization. “Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy – these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. They are more like Lincoln and Socrates than Patton or Caesar,” he noted.

In the monograph, he expands that to suggest great leadership today involves a blend of executive and legislative skills, a concept that of course will be familiar to civil servants. In executive leadership, the individual leader has enough concentrated power to simply make the right decisions. In legislative leadership, the person must rely instead on persuasion, political currency, and shared interest to create the conditions for the right decisions to happen.

True leadership only exists if people follow you when they have the freedom not to. So legislative skills are crucial. And that gives people outside business a leg up as they are more familiar with that approach. “Social sector organizations increasingly look to business for leadership models and talent, yet I suspect we will find more true leadership in the social sectors than the business sector,” he argues.

3. Getting The Right People On The Bus
Collins’ original research was also surprising when he discovered that turnaround companies didn’t initially devote themselves to developing a new strategy as was assumed but instead concentrate on finding the right people for the organization – “getting the right people on the bus,” as he called it – and then together they develop a new direction. It’s harder in government to clean house, so he says the focus has to be on recruitment, to make sure every new person on the bus is the best fit.

That means devoting more attention to early assessment mechanisms and, where possible, trying individuals out first in short-term stints since “you can only know for certain about a person by working with that person.” You want people who he calls “productively neurotic,” self-motivated and self-disciplined, waking up each day to do the best they can because it’s part of their DNA.

4. The Hedgehog Complex
His research celebrates The Hedgehog Complex, based on the old story of the fox doing many things but the hedgehog knowing how to do one thing well. Successful organizations need a piercing clarity about how to produce the best long-term results, and then the relentless discipline to say no to opportunities that don’t fit.

That’s obviously harder in government, given the diverse interests, but still valuable to consider. The focus for your Hedgehog Complex must come at the intersection of three elements:
·     What you (or your political masters, or the Canadian people) are deeply passionate about
·     What you can be best in the world at
·     What drives your resource engine.

The second element, of course, will be less applicable for government departments that must provide certain services even if they aren’t the best in the world, unlike corporations that seek to differentiate themselves from competitors to succeed. The third element requires considering the various resources that keep you operating – funding, time, your brand image – and figuring out what, at the core, might augment them. While developing the Hedgehog Complex is more difficult in government than business, Collins says that’s precisely why it is important in such a complex undertaking to develop a deep insight and rigorous clarity of what your operation is about – how passion, excellence and resources intersect.

5. Turning The Flywheel
Collins found that success in the spectacular turnarounds he chronicled never came from fancy change programs with flamboyant monikers. Instead, success was like turning a giant, heavy flywheel: “Pushing with great effort – days, weeks and months of work, with almost imperceptible progress – you finally get the flywheel to inch forward.” Initial success brings more support and commitment, and the flywheel picks up speed.

“Whereas in business, the key driver in the flywheel is the link between financial success and capital resources, I’d like to suggest that a key link in the social sectors is brand reputation – built upon tangible results and emotional share of heart – so that potential supporters believe not only in your mission, but in your capacity to deliver on that mission,” he says.

Collins believes greatness can be built in any field. Airlines are a lousy industry, but Southwest Airlines remains a stunning success. Pockets of greatness can be instituted in any area of business, any social agency, or government department. “Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline,” he concludes.


Harvey Schachter, who writes The Globe and Mail’s Managing Books and Monday Morning Manager columns, is a freelance writer specializing in management issues.