I read Good to Great by Jim Collins during my stay in Houston. The book
is a study of publicly traded companies that met a particular set of criteria of out
performing the general market. The companies must have “turned themselves around”
to out perform the market by at X 3 and must have done so for 15 years years straight.
When Jim and his team began delving into what makes these companies work so well,
the findings were amazing. For an in depth explanation, I suggest that you read
the book. However, I had some good take-aways from this book that I believe can be
applied at the departmental level of a company, not just at the CEO level. A
good manager can get a lot from this read.
The book prompted me to at least ask the following questions of my team.
- What are 5 things that we are doing right?
- What are 5 things that we need to improve?
If you can’t recognize what works, you can’t be sure to keep it. If you don’t
have a clear idea of what you want to fix, you can’t have a plan to get there.
This is a pretty basic and obvious concept, but a team must be proactive and inclusive
in attacking the “needs improvement” items. Everyone on the team needs
to understand what the priorities are and we need to help each other get there.
This will be fun to see if we can use this simple idea to make some genuinely effective
changes to improve our work.