After a million recommendations by every entrepreneur and their grandmother, I finally read Jim Collins’ Good to Great. I’m not going to lie, it’s pretty good BUT… I say but because I felt like I personally couldn’t apply any of his preachings in any environment as a co-founder of a startup.
The issue I had with the book is Collins writes mostly about massive companies with thousands of employees and decades of history. I’ve got a team of 20 with a cashflow burn rate that makes me sweat at night, and an intern who thinks we needs $400 in adobe software, $300 Wacom, and $2500 iMac to do his touch up graphics work. Here’s a few thoughts I had on the book’s key points:
Level 5 Leadership
Collins talks about “Level 5 Leaders” who combine humility with ferocious will. Meaning stop being a hero founde rwho thinks charisma alone will carry the day. Sometimes leadership is not about bold vision, it’s about making sure payroll clears, nobody rage-quits on a Tuesday, and your head of engineering isn’t secretly applying to Google. I’ll admit, I had this problem in my early days but this was pretty obvious to me at this stage. Good advice nonetheless.
Get in and decide later
Collins says you should get the right people on the bus before figuring out where it’s going. I don’t know about this one. It sounds inspirational but doesn’t apply to us because our bus is a 15-seat van and I have 20 people in it. I’m the driver, and “the right people” means whoever I can afford without giving away my entire cap table. Still, the principle holds: with 20 people, every single hire matters. One bad fit doesn’t just sit quietly in the back of the bus, they grab the wheel and drive it into a ditch.
The Hedgehog Concept
Collins mentions great companies find their “hedgehog concept” which is the one thing they can be the best at in the world. For us, it’s definitely our customer service. We know we’re not the best priced or best technical providers. So his point of finding one thing customers will actually pay for, and do that really well before you die. As crazy as “good service” is our core competency, it’s boring, repeatable thing that keeps people coming back. Turns out “boring but working” beats “sexy but broken” every time.
Technology Accelerators
So I am very guilty of this. I pull team members off of projects or when there’s downtime to build our own shiny products. Collins says tech should accelerate momentum, not create it. Which I interpreted as: stop pivoting every time you see a new trend on Angelist. Your 20-person team doesn’t need a new app that can track your breathing pattern. It needs focus. Use technology to speed up what’s working and not to distract everyone with another side quest. Very good point from him.
Final Thoughts
I casually read a few business books I never finish most of them. The fact that I finished Good to Great is a good sign it has some really useful material to remind or provide some new perspective. At my scale, the insight seems messier. Leadership is about humility, but also about fixing bugs at midnight. Getting the right people is critical, but sometimes you’re stuck with “the right person you could actually afford.” Facing brutal facts means balancing honesty with keeping the lights on.
So yeah, great book if you’re a bigger company.