This weeks reading of Good to Great by Jim Collins introduced us to his culture of discipline. Collins’ displayed his distaste for bureaucratic cultures, saying they arise to compensate for incompetence and the lack of the desired culture of discipline, which all arises from having the wrong people in your organization. The culture of discipline necessary to take a company from good to great balances on a conceptually fragile duality. To be ultimately effective, your organization must require people to adhere to a consistent system, yet also allow them the freedom and responsibility to act to their full potential. Jim Collins tells us that to build a truly great organization we must cultivate a culture of people who take disciplined action within the three circles of the previously mentioned Hedgehog Concept, being that one knows and works in what they are deeply passionate about, what they are the best at, and are focused on driving their personal economic engine. This corollary and the previously stated connection to the concept of having the right people “on the bus” made this chapter ultimately a culmination of many previous points, forming the framework of Collins’ ultimate image of a “Good-to-Great Company.”
As in all walks and aspects of life, many mechanisms in the ideal Good-to-great company hinge on balance. This chapter’s key example of necessary balance is that of cultivating an environment in which your workers will do their best work. When managing an organization of your creation, you already know that your workers are qualified and have potential for their relative position, because that far along in the process you would have been the one to hire them. Once you have gotten these right people in the right seats on the bus, it is your job as a leader, to cultivate a setting which cultivates prime productivity by establishing standards and from there giving workers free and unhindered range to what you hired them to do. It is a true sign of your control over a situation when you know you can let go and are confident that great things will happen.
