Author of Good to Great and Built to Last, Stanford-trained researcher
Decision Making
Passionate about, best in the world at, drives your economic engine. For a person, two of the three circles change.
The Hedgehog concept is the intersection of three circles. So for a company, it's doing what you're deeply passionate about, because if you're not passionate about it you can't endure long enough to really really do something exceptional.
Leadership
Personal humility plus indomitable will, with the ambition pointed at a cause bigger than you. Collins says you can grow into it.
the power of the level 5 over the level 4 and the essence of the level 5 was this strange blend of kind of personal humility and indomitable will with ambition channeled into a cause that's bigger than you are
Decision Making
Breakthrough is cumulative, not decisive. Asking which push caused it is, in Collins's words, a nonsense question.
I had this image of pushing a giant heavy flywheel and you start pushing it in this intelligent and consistent direction
Jim Collins
says the great companies found the single intersection of what they can be best in the world at, what drives their economic engine and what they are deeply passionate about, and then said no to everything outside it for decades.
Jeff Bezos
wandered outside his circle of competence on purpose, guided by curiosity, not by a hedgehog test, which is how Amazon arrived at AWS and the Echo. Neither would have survived a best-in-the-world screen on the day it was proposed.
From The Hedgehog Concept
Jim Collins
locates the difference in the person: personal humility joined to indomitable will, with ambition pointed at a cause bigger than yourself. He argues it is a place you can grow into, and uses the last decade of Steve Jobs as the evidence.
locates it in the machine. Build an idea meritocracy where thoughtful disagreement is designed into the room and opinions are weighted by track record, not seniority, and the organisation stops depending on one person having the right character.
From Level 5 Leadership
Jim Collins
says breakthrough is cumulative, not decisive, and asking which push caused it is, in his words, a nonsense question. You keep turning the same wheel in a consistent direction until the momentum becomes visible from outside.
points out that a network product has a threshold before any of that applies. Below the atomic network, some number of people connected at the same time doing the same thing, the wheel is not slow, it is disconnected, and pushing harder changes nothing.
From The Flywheel Effect
