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Saturday, December 31, 2016

Good to Great by Jim Collins

Good to Great by Jim Collins

My friend the Monicat pushed this one on me, complete with all of her little notes, handwritten in the most precise script, never giving answers, just asking probing, sphinxlike questions in the effort to make me a better leader. Her timing of this gift was prescient; there are major changes coming in the structure of the company where I work which will push me to expand and extend my responsibilities. This will be great, but will force me to learn a lot quickly. And since I received this a few days before disappearing on a two week (relative) break in which I intended to try to be a little more reflective, particularly on my goals, leadership, and the traits that I wanted to continue and those I wanted to shed… Well, this particular prescription couldn’t have come at a better time.

Collins and team looked at a bunch of companies who dramatically outperformed their competitors over a sustained period of time, and tried to ask WHY they did. Then they attempted to distill the commonalities from these stories into a guide for how companies went from average performers in their market (Good) to market leaders (Great.)

I ended up with a deeply marked up book and two or three pages of useful notes from this book. Wish that I could spend two days discussing the lessons here with my fellow leaders at Kabam. But not today.

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