KWR Celebrity: Jim Collins (Good to Great)

The KWR’s core competence is “Perfecting Precision.” In other words, the KWR knows how to help you go from good to great. The KWR has the ability to take information and help process it with precision. In fact, the book argues that the main factor for achieving greatness is the narrowing and focusing of a company’s resources on their field of competence.

(As individuals, should we not do the same? What if we focused our resources into a field of competence, or even better, synchronizing our purpose, passions and potential? That’s what MDNA is all about! But I digress.)

To write Good to Great, Collins used a large team of researchers who studied 6,000 articles, generated more than 2,000 pages of interview transcripts and created 384 megabytes of computer data in a five-year project. This is KWR at its finest. Collins was a true data scientist before big data and the profession became popular. He was ahead of his time.

Although written in 2001, and many of the companies featured in the book are arguably not so great any more, the principles remain true. These are the principles of the KWR that we can all learn. Mainly the principle of responsibility.

Collins began his research and teaching career at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. He received the Distinguished Teaching Award. He now runs a management laboratory in Colorado, where he conducts research and teaches executives from corporate and social sectors. You will find him regularly helping leaders understand what it means to be responsible to an organization and society as a whole.

KWRs are commonly found teaching. Not that they are only limited to being teachers (just as other MDNA gifts can be very accomplished teachers as well). But the KWR can, and is designed to, teach responsibility like no other. We must all learn what we are responsible for, past, present and especially the future. This responsibility is holistic and not just limited to academic achievements. This is also why the immature KWR can struggle with “selective responsibility,” which is when one feels they do not have to be responsible as a whole because of achievement and mastery in certain areas. For example, just because one boasts accolades in a profession, it does not mean we are exempt from achieving the same in family life such as marriage or parenting. Or, just because one is intellectually accomplished, it does not mean we are to ignore our physical health or emotionally connecting with others. (These are real world examples from KWRs we know.)

Looking into the life of Collins, we can see that he most likely activate the principle of responsibility during his time at Hewlett-Packard. HP is a KWR company with the Brand Culture of Perfecting Precision. Collins and HP are like two peas in a pod.

Here is a wonderful article of Collins teaching on responsibility through the lens of HP.

If you get an opportunity, allow a KWR to help you go from good to great with perfecting precision. Check out the book and keep the KWR in mind.

I’ll leave you with my favorite quote from Collins. It is something to ponder for sure:

Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the reasons that we have so little that becomes great. We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools. We don’t have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, precisely because it is easy to settle for a good life. The vast majority of companies never become great precisely because they become quite good—and that is their main problem.

Please note that these are unofficial profiles only and have not been verified. Description is only based upon public information and may represent either primary or secondary MDNA profiles. This profile is intended for educational purposes only to demonstrate the possibilities of MDNA for those that have been personally assessed.