I received Executive Leadership today in the mail and this next passage was on page two and I thought it was something I should post for our readers. For those of you who may not have read Jim Collins book Good to Great I highly recommend it. This passage was adapted from Jim Collins book Jim Collins on Tough Calls by Jerry Useem, Fortune.
After combing through 14 years of research, here's what Good to Great author Jim Collins says about the art of making decisions:
1) Great decisions come from saying "I don't know." Collins asks: "Which is best? Saying you don't know when you've already made up your mind? Or presuming to know when you don't and, therefore, lying to yourself? Or speaking the truth, which is: "I don't yet know?"
2) The higher the questions/statements ratio, the better. The best leaders Collins studied did the best job at igniting debate using Socratic questions. As for himself: "I tried to make heroes out of those on my team who identified flaws in my thinking," Collins says. "At the next meeting, I might say: "I really want to give Leigh....credit. She really pushed my thinking, and I wasn't looking at this right."
3) Deciding is not about consensus. Debate can be "violent," but in the end, the leader makes the call. "No major decision we've studied was ever taken at a point of unanimous agreement," Collins says.
4) Great decisions come from external awareness. Fabulous organizations are internally driven but externally aware.
5) Even huge decisions decide only a tiny fraction of the outcome. "The big decisions are not like 60 of 100 points," Collins says. They're more like a six of 100 points. And there's a whole bunch of others that are like 0.6 or 0.006."
6) Think long term. Real leaders manage for the quarter-century not the quarter.
7) You can make mistakes -even big ones- and prevail. What a relief!
Do you have any points you would add to this list?
