Jim Collins - Great by Choice

**Mike Parsons** (0:10)
Hello and welcome to the Moonshots Podcast. It's episode 67 I'm your co-host, Mike Parsons. And as always, I'm joined by the man not from Colorado, but from Brooklyn, New York. Hello, Chad Owen.

**Chad Owen** (0:25)
Yeah, coming to you from rainy Brooklyn. But I'm a little sad, because we're closing the book here on our series on Jim Collins. But we've got a good show in store for you all.

**Mike Parsons** (0:37)
I know, and hasn't this been just a delight to dig into the work of what you have to say is one of the grand masters of understanding what makes a business great? Jim Collins, the body of work is one thing. His methodology is amazing.
We've done built to last, we've done good to great, but there remains one more book as part of this series.

**Chad Owen** (1:02)
Yeah, I don't think I've seen any author's books in more airports than Jim Collins' and I remember seeing this one. I can't remember which airport it was, but I remember seeing it on the shows. But this is Great By Choice and it's really, I think the perfect kind of capstone to the series because it just builds upon the ideas from good to great and built to last.

**Mike Parsons** (1:25)
It does, doesn't it? And I think it's a fitting book to end this series on because what's in store for our audience today, Chad, is the chance to understand what choices you can make, what we can choose to do to build a great company. And in the previous show, we've learned all about starting by asking yourself, what sort of culture do we want to create? And that was really encapsulated by that tale of how HP started. Was that not the best story ever, Chad?

**Chad Owen** (1:59)
Just the thought that a company like HP could be started by two founders. They were like, I know that we like each other and want to go into business, but I'm not really sure what we're going to build.

**Mike Parsons** (2:10)
Yeah, so they had the notes of their first company meeting and they worked out the values, the kind of people they wanted to hire, and they had a side note, and we've deferred the decision as to what we're going to build. Mind you, this is one of the greatest product companies of the last hundred years. They didn't even get around to agreeing that because they wanted to build something to last, which is just really, really inspiring. But then Collins moved on to looking at what happened in companies when they seemed to be doing pretty well, and then they catapulted to greatness.
Good to Great is perhaps his most popular book and the perfect prelude to what we're going to talk about today. But for me, Chad, Good to Great, the best story he tells in that book is this simple one of get the right people on the bus and get the wrong people off the bus before you work out where you're going.
Because if you just don't have the right people on the bus, it's just not going to work. I thought that was my biggest lesson. What was yours from Good to Great?

**Chad Owen** (3:15)
I like the idea of the hedgehog concept.
Find out what you do well and can return to time and time again, no matter what the market forces are telling you and everything else. The idea is that as a hedgehog, just curl up into a ball and none of the predators can ever get you because you're just a ball of spikes. I think it's a fun metaphor.

**Mike Parsons** (3:35)
Now, we're going to dive into a world of Great By Choice, which is another turn in this narrative of greatness. I think what's installed for us today is the chance to find out what are the sort of things that you have to do? What are the ways you have to behave? What are the ways you have to think?
If you want to build a company, if you want to make deliberate choices towards greatness. And the crazy thing is, as we're recording this, where one or two weeks after the death of Kobe Bryant, and there was this really inspiring quote and a story around his greatness, where he said, greatness is a choice.
And I think that really sets us up for a really exciting hour together to find out what is it that Jim Collins found in his book, Great By Choice? What were the companies that he discovered that had this special superpower of doing things? And I think what really sets Jim Collins apart, outside of the great work that he writes, Chad, it's how he gets there, isn't it? It's how he cracks these huge insights.