“People often ask, “what motivates you to undertake these huge research projects?”
It’s a good question. The answer is “curiosity.”
There is nothing I find more exciting than picking a question that I don’t know the answer to and embarking on a quest for answers. It’s deeply satisfying to climb into the boat, like Lewis and Clark, and head west, saying,” We don’t know what we will find when we get there, but we’ll be sure to let you know when we get back.”
This undaunted curiosity is the stimulus of this work, proclaims the author, in the beginning, justifying why he got down to such a grueling task. Though this book is exclusively for the management students and for the corporate guys, I still feel, this book is very well researched and can be read by them also, who have the least interests in companies and businesses. This book is a result of the hard toil of a large research team of Jim Collins after ‘Built to Last’.If you read it, you will find the reason why millions of copies have been sold of this. Wall Street Journal’s CEO council declared it the best management book they have read.
This book is all about why some companies leap from ‘good to great’ and others don’t!
The first thing it tries to preach is that Good is the enemy of great. Few people attain greatness, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life. Next, the book talks about a kind of ‘Level 5 leadership’,
“Leaders of a paradoxical mix of personal humility and professional will. They are fanatically driven, infected with an incurable need to produce sustainable results. they display workmanlike diligence, more plow horse than show horse. they look out of a window to attribute success to factors other than themselves.“
In the subsequent chapters, comes the idea of choosing the right guys. It’s important first getting the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figure out where to drive it.
Then there is a ‘Stockdale Paradox’ in this book, which is equally applicable in any field of life.
“Retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties…..And at the same time ……Confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
There are many other concepts outlined in this book, they look technical, so much business involved in them, but they are quite handy even to the simpler minds, quite comprehensible even to those ordinary mortals like me. The research done for this book may have taken a huge amount of resources, time, and energy, but as a consequence, the major findings and learnings of this project are rather uncomplicated. The key elements of greatness are deceptively simple and straightforward. I feel this book is a wonderful exhibition of undemanding intelligence encrusted with due diligence.
In the end, Even if you think in contrast. If you think you are already gratified by the goodness around you and think after reading the title of this book…..Why greatness? I don’t need that!
Then the book has an answer for you as well. It says it’s almost a nonsense question. If you are engaged in a work that you love and care about, for whatever reason, then the question needs no answer.
The question is not why, but how!
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