The Wisdom Wall

“Another big thing we learned is, near as I can tell, there is no correlation between consensus decisions and intelligent decisions. In the history of corporate history, most great decisions are taken where there's still substantial disagreement still in the air, and they are taken without a need for consensus.”

“What's a job? It's all your eggs in one basket. You basically have made a highly undiversified portfolio bet. Oh, and by the way, you have very little control over it. You're exposed to, if it turns out that the people running the company are idiots, or they make really bad decisions, you've made a bad bet that other…”

“One set of companies changes the recipe about 80% over, say, 30 years, and the other changes the recipe about 20%. Which group is the more successful companies? The 20% change. Which surprised us. We thought that what you would find is that the companies that are the most successful are going to change the most in a…”

“They, they, that myth that there's an entrepreneur and there's a company builder and they're different animals is simply wrong. It's the, it's a simply a matter of choice and do you decide to become that?”

“one of the key things we learned in Good to Great was this notion of you don't start with a vision. You start with confronting the brutal facts. And this ability, this very stoic ability to just simply say, let's begin with the very best accounting of the brutal facts that we can, that enhances your ability to see more…”

“The answer is we can find no evidence that they had that, or that they even necessarily had better analysis. So then you have to step back and say, well, it's not necessarily that they have better information. It's not necessarily that they had better data. It's not necessarily that they saw things in the industry that…”

“But I don't think you want to find a flywheel at only 10 turns. If it's a great flywheel, So maybe we'll talk in a minute about the Amazon flywheel, because that's what stimulated me further thinking about Amazon. Would it be so bad to pick up a flywheel when it's already at a million turns, but you can understand it…”

“Luck is asymmetric as a cause. We cannot make the case of luck as the cause of a great company in any of our research. It's more of the flywheel effect over time, and return on luck, capitalizing on things, and cumulative, right? So good luck cannot cause a great company. But bad luck can be the cause of the death of a…”

“the more turbulent the environment, the greater the results accrue to those that have a twenty-mile march and stay consecutively with consistency on the their 20 mile march.”

“Almost none of our, the companies we studied that were great companies that fell, fell because of complacency. They fell because of overreaching.”

“I don't know if you can teach leadership, but I'm pretty sure you can learn it. And I think that distinction is key. I think it's very arrogant to say that you or I or anyone else could take someone and I'm going to teach you leadership. But I've watched people learn it.”

“there is far more upside in an opening bid of trust than And there is far more downside in an opening bid of mistrust. It all goes to the question of people. If you really basically want to have your life, whether they be people in your company, whether they people in your life, whether they be your friends, whether…”

“So what that really means is the real swing variable in being an entrepreneur is the probability that you will start, not the probability that you will succeed if you start.”

“And one of the things that I think is a great message of Steve Jobs' life, if you watch the arc, is there was a Steve Jobs, one point O and a Steve Jobs, two point O. And most people only know the one point O because all the sort of immature behavior from when he was a young entrepreneur is sort of Steve Jobs, one…”

“one of the key insights from good to great was that the power of the level five over the level four, and the essence of the level five was this strange blend of kind of personal humility and indomitable will with ambition channeled into a cause that's bigger than you are”

“People do not operate first and foremost at the level of thoughts. They operate at the level of feelings. And you go into a discussion, or a negotiation, or a classroom, or, and you go at intellectual level, but that, the real level people are at is feelings.”

“A flywheel is not a [4037] Jim Collins: A set of aspirations or action steps simply drawn as a circle so that you can say you have a flywheel. [4045] Jim Collins: A flywheel is an understanding of the inexorable underlying logic that drives that momentum machine. [4054] Jim Collins: You have to be able to say, for each…”

“The thing that will stop a flywheel is if you fail on any component, because on the one hand, while it is a compounding machine, each piece driving the next piece round and round and round. [4132] Jim Collins: The other side of the coin, though, is that if you fail at any one piece, the entire flywheel slows or stops.”

“to build the last means at some point you have to stop being the time telling entrepreneur and become the one who can build the clock that doesn't depend on you anymore. That's what Steve Jobs did.”

“the power of the march isn't about just this year. It's the commitment to the consecutive performance that will force you to innovate ahead of disruptions.”

“If you're going to fire a bullet, do it excellent. That way you know that if it doesn't hit, it's just not going to work. As opposed to, maybe it would have worked if you would have done it well. So if it's a bullet, you still have to bring the kind of excellence to it to get a clean test.”

“what history shows is usually the second cannonball from a bullet to cannonball process on top of an existing flywheel becomes the biggest part of the company. Marriott started in restaurants, bullet to cannonball, hotels, right? Apple started in personal computers, bullet to cannonball, smart handhelds. Intel started…”

“The second is stop taking care of your career. Start taking care of your people, and if you do that, then they won't let you fail.”

“a really great relationship is one where if you ask each person independently who benefits more from the relationship, they would each say, well, I do.”

“He said, I've come to the conclusion when I think across the iterative relationships and interactions and aspects of life, that there is far more upside in an opening bid of trust. And there is far more downside in an opening bid of mistrust.”

“One of the things that Bill always emphasized was that sometimes you don't know the whole story. He said sometimes it may not be ill intent. It could just simply be a misunderstanding, or it could be just incompetence, right? Somebody might not actually be untrustworthy. They might just be incompetent, or they made a…”

“the only reason writing becomes, ah, easy to read is because it's hard to write. And writing is just hard. I, I think of writing as, um, it's like running. If you're going to run your best, it's always gonna hurt. And so if you can run a five minute mile and then you get it down to four 30, well, if you run a four 30…”

“What really Morton and I found in our research is the question is not fast decision or slow decision, you know, as sort of proxies for decisive or not. It's how much time before your risk changes, and then make your decision within that time frame.”

“The moment that you introduce autopsies with blame, as opposed to autopsies without blame, the more you are going to begin to create an environment where it's like, man, the upside downside here of making a decision is, you know, you've got upside downside for the company. It's an agency problem, right? If everybody…”

“And if you really study the best flywheels, they have a different role. On the right-hand side of the flywheel, the 12 o'clock to six, Is really about what you do in the world, what you do to contribute, what you do that makes people's lives better, what you do that is kind of your net ad, right, in some way.…”

“If you see that the point of the flywheel is to generate resources that get siphoned out of the flywheel, they're really the purposes to have that flywheel generate cash to other people to allow you to cash out, to sell the company to somebody else. That's siphoning fuel, and if that's really the point, then you…”

“you must never confuse the need on the one hand for absolute unwavering faith that you can and you will prevail in the end with the need on the other hand for the discipline to confront the most brutal facts as they actually are.”

“One of the things I believe in is you get not just luck in life, but who luck, And a little bit later, by the way, I hope we circle back to the question of luck, because we actually systematically studied and quantified its role in our research in one of our studies, and I think that we ought to, ought to hit that. But…”

“Even people who've been trained in statistics and probability make probabilistic errors all the time, because for whatever evolutionary reason, we don't naturally think that way. And so, you can make the right decision and still have a bad outcome.”

“bad decision process with good outcome reinforces bad process. Which then when you were talking about compounding, Ends up producing compounding in the wrong direction.”

“One of my big takeaways from our research about decision making is try to change every what decision into a who decision. Not what should we do about this cybersecurity threat, but who should we have involved in it? Not what should we do about this investment decision, but who should we have involved in it, right?…”

“what happens as a company reacts without understanding. Oh my gosh, we had disappointing results. And often what happens is they panic. They look for a new direction, or a new program, or a new leader, or a new acquisition, or a new technology, or something. And because that never really produces a great result,…”

“I think individuals have hedgehogs as well as companies. So go back to the hedgehog and the idea of like, of understanding what you're really passionate about. And in the case of the personal hedgehog, what you're truly genetically encoded for. And then third, uh, where you can contribute that the world, the society…”

“preserve the core and stimulate progress, which is kind of the secret to long-term renewal of an institution.”

“if you zoom way out and you ask which set of companies had greater endurance, now Built to Last was about Built to Last, but the Built to Last companies did. And, and I have to ask myself why. Because we're looking through different lenses, so you're, you're still just trying to build one overall framework. And I think…”

“What I can say is that the great CEOs that we ever studied managed for the quarter century, and if you are not making decisions To hit a twenty-mile march for a quarter of a century, if you are not building a company, if you are just trying to build the flip or just make money during your tenure, if you're, if you're…”

“I don't know if someone else can make someone a leader. I don't know if you can teach leadership, but I'm pretty sure you can learn it. And I think that distinction is key. I think it's very arrogant to say that you or I or anyone else could take someone and I'm going to teach you leadership. But I've watched people…”

“Stop taking care of your career. Start taking care of your people. And if you do that, then they won't let you fail.”

“a really great relationship is one where if you ask each person independently who benefits more from the relationship, They would each say, well, I do. And he said, see, the reason both people can answer that way is because both people are putting into the relationship, not for what they're going to get from it, but…”

“So I think it has to do with being genuinely interested without asking for anything in return. And shaping who you are, your character.”

“The outputs are, how would you know if you'd become a great company? And I would say there are three outputs you have to have. One is superior results. If you don't win at the game you play, you're not great at it, right? And that would mean superior return on invested capital for a business, or superior sports results…”

“What we found is that the most durable results happen as a series of good decisions that accumulate one upon another over a very long period of time that create a massive compounding effect. And just like investing, where it's buy quality assets you would presume to hold forever, then largely do and let them compound,…”

“So the way that you, you get the return on the, on the, on the luck, is you have to translate the luck event Into a flywheel at some point, as opposed to viewing it as a windfall.”