ASTD Session From good to great by Jim Collins

This morning I attended Jim Collins ASTD session, based on his famous book "From good to great". I was a great experience to hear Jim bring the story.
In this blogpost I give you a resume of the session and a little extra.

What did Jim Collins say ?  
The key question in his book is "What makes the difference between a good and a great company, what makes the difference between a good and a great leader ? "
Great leadership is more than personality and charism. Offcourse, many great leaders have these abilities, but they are not great just because of that. There are quite a lot of leaders who have these skills and how fail constantly.

An important key characteristic of great leaders is modesty. Modesty in combination with an enormous will to serve and to achieve goals. Today's crisis is a first crisis. If we don't start to act, another crisis will come. And that crisis will be caused because of a lack of level 5 leaders (see below).

But what makes leaders GREAT leaders ? Modesty and an enormous will are not enough. We need more that this.

There are 3 important elements that all level 5 leaders (great leaders) have :

1. fanatic discipline : they work every day to reach their goals. They do - what Jim Collins calls - their 20 miles march every day. They don't make 40 miles marches when conditions are good, but the work constantly and build their dreams. 
2. empirical creativity : they try new things and look for better ways, but they do this based on empirical study. They don't guess, they don't put all their chips on one number on the roulette table. They investigate and look for empirical data before they decide. 
3. productive paranoia : Productive paranoiacs understand that the only mistakes we can learn from are the mistakes we survive. Therefore, they build cash reserves and buffers for worse time. 

How comes there are so few great leaders ? As a little kid, we were creative and later on we were trained to be fanatically disciplined. But while we were trained to become fanatically disciplined, they stopped our creativity. To be great, you need both !

What is the role of luck in all of this ? Isn't success and greatness at least partly because of luck ? NO ! It is a result of WHAT YOU DO WITH YOUR LUCK !

A little extra 

A while ago I saw a movie on youtube about the best sushi maker in the world. It is an old Japanese man who owns a restaurant in a metro station. His restaurant has 3 michelin stars and the man must be 80 years old. Look at the movie. To me, this man has all the characteristics Jim Collins talked about. He is modest, walks his 20 mile march every day and is a pure empirical creative person. WOW !