Average doesn't cut it in the real world today
Gary Evans, Senior editor -- Furniture Today, August 11, 2003
I know a divorced mother working three jobs to raise four kids. She exploded when her 14-year-old brought home a C on his report card. A C is OK for some folks, she told me, but her son was an all-A kid and had just gotten lazy.
"I have to work three jobs to support him and the other kids, and that ain't average," she told me. "Why should he be average? Average just doesn't cut it in the real world today."
A few weeks earlier, I had listened to management guru Jim Collins tell gallery dealers at a La-Z-Boy conference in Las Vegas that "good" doesn't cut it in today's business environment.
Average and satisfactory are on the same step as good, and "good is the enemy of great," said the author of "Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... and Others Don't."
"There are a lot of kids' schools that are good," Collins said. "There are a lot of governments that are good. But wouldn't you rather have a great school or a great government? Most stores never become great because they're good. And a lot of people are willing to trade a great life for a good life."
Collins and his research group studied nearly 1,500 companies in a five-year project and found 11 that made the leap from good to great. The companies that met his criteria and made the cut — Walgreen's, Kimberly-Clark, Wells Fargo, Kroger, Circuit City and others — sustained their greatness for decades and averaged returns 6.9% better than the stock market average, twice the rate of General Electric under superstar manager Jack Welch.
"Great persistence and neurotic discipline is what gets you there," said Collins, who stressed throughout his talk that knowing where a company needs to go, and having the discipline to get there without being sidetracked, are key elements of greatness. Companies that made his list were likely to be quiet, straightforward companies, with non-celebrity leaders who promoted the greatness of the company and not themselves. A common characteristic: the "flywheel effect," where leaders keep pushing, moving a company forward, all the while gaining momentum.
Collins said leaders typically set a company's direction, then hire people to help achieve it. The reverse was true for many of his great companies, where leaders assembled a great group of people, then asked, "What can we be the best in the world at?" and "Where do we suck?" Once those hard questions were answered, the group set the direction. The group was more passionate about its work, more flexible, and quicker and smarter in responding to challenges, he said.
He believes his good-to-great principles can be applied on many levels. You could start in your department, your family, your church, your community and, instead of going for good, you could go for great. That's pretty much what the mother was saying: Average just doesn't cut it in the real world today.
