🔖 Summary in 3 Sentences
It tells you what it takes for a company to go from good to great. It tells you what kind of company won't achieve greatness. Many simple yet useful concepts to follow to achieve success in the long term.
🧑🏻 Who Should Read It?
Anyone who doesn't want to just be good at something but to be great at it.
🔑 My 3 Key Takeaways
Confront the brutal facts, yet never lose faith.
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.
The Stockdale Paradox, the name refers to United States Admiral James Stockdale, a prisoner-of-war during the height of the Vietnam War. Tortured over twenty times during his eight-year imprisonment from 1965 to 1973. During the process, he didn't know when will he be released, and no certainty that he will survive to see his family again. During the interview, the author asked him who didn't make it out from the imprisonment, he replied: "The optimist." They say they're going to be out by Christmas, and the Christmas comes, and the Christmas would go. And they say they're going out by Easter, and the Easter comes, and the Easter go. And they died of a broken heart. We need to learn this lesson, we must be patient and believe we will be successful in the end, but we must confront the brutal facts of the current reality. Don't be over-optimistic and lost the battle because of discouragement.
The Hedgehog Concept.
Are you hedgehog or a fox? Fox is fast, sleek, beautiful, fleet of foot, and crafty, come up with complex strategies for sneak attacks upon the hedgehog. But the hedgehog only do one thing, rolling up into a spiky ball.
Good-to-great company is consistent with its strategy, just like a hedgehog. They know their circle of competence. They know what they are deeply passionate about, what they can be the best in the world at, and what drives their economic engine. By knowing their strength, they just need to execute according to their advantage. Whereas a company that doesn't understand their circle of competence acts like the fox. They tried different strategies and never persistent at any. In long term, the hedgehog always wins.
The flywheel and the doom loop.
Picture a huge, heavy flywheel – a massive metal disk mounted horizontally on an axle, about 30 feet in diameter, 2 feet thick, and weighing about 5,000 pounds. Pushing with great effort, you got the flywheel to inch forward. But after hours of persistent effort, its own heavy weight create a momentum that working for you.
I first read about this concept in the book "The Everything Store" by Brad Stone. Jeff Bezos asks every employee in his company to read this book to learn about the flywheel effect. The concept is simple: find out what is the flywheel for your business, then make sure everything you do, is adding momentum to this flywheel. In the Amazon example, their flywheel is: lower price > more customer > higher purchase volume > lower price. With the knowledge of their flywheel, they are very clear about what they want to achieve. They can either find ways to lower the price, get more customers, or increase purchase volume. Each of these improvements will increase the momentum of their flywheel, and the growth of their business.
💭 Afterthought
The writing of this book is very academic. Jim Collins and his team gathered a lot of information to come out with these concepts. Other than the three that I mentioned in the key takeaways, there are many other concepts that might resonate with you. This book outline a path of how to create a great company.
🛍 How to Buy?
I bought this book a long time ago, forget the price. 😅. You can click here to buy this book on Shopee for RM17.99+.
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