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024 - How to Take a Company from Good to Great!

Hey there. Kevin here, with another episode of the Feel Good English podcast for you and your friends and colleagues and classmates and neighbors and, mom, if you mom is learning English.

Anyway, today I have an episode on a book called good to great by Jim Colons. This is an extremely popular business book and what Jim Colons did, who actually lives in the same state that I do, he lives in Bolder, Colorado, I live in Denver, Colorado.

Anyway, he studied three US companies over a five year period.

And these companies were companies that went from good, meaning they were good companies, to great companies. They outperformed all of the other companies in their market.

The reason someone would read this book is to take the ideas and the concepts of how a company goes from being decent to outstanding, and you can use the same concepts here from a small business as you could for a large corporation. I will talk about a couple of concepts from this book, if you are interested in the book, you should look it up online. You can find a link to How to Bring the book on my website and read it more deeply, or listen to the audio book which I always like to do, and also if you want to transcript to this episode, go to feelgoodenglish.com and you will see all the information on this episode as well as how to get a transcript for this.

After I talk about the concepts, I will talk about some of the vocabulary I have used in this lesson. To be honest, I don’t know which vocabulary that will be. So after I record this, I go back and I listen and I pick out words that you might not know, and I explain them, pretty smart. So let’s get going.

So the first concept I am going to talk about from this book is called the hedgehog concept. H-E-D-G-E-H-O-G is an animal. It’s a little small animal that has spikes on it, and when it is in danger, it rolls up in a ball. So other animals like a fox, can’t attack it. You ever played that video game? Sonic the hedgehog? That’s a hedgehog. Anyway the idea why they call this the hedgehog, the hedgehog has a very simple strategy to survive. And the simple strategy is to simply roll up in a ball where its exterior made of spikes prevents other animals from eating it. In the book, they call the hedgehog concept this because it creates a survival strategy for a company, and how a company can continue to proper and grow based on a very simple strategy. And the hedgehog concept as they call it, is made of up three circles, or three factors.

One is what can a company be best in the world at.

The other is what can the company be passionate about.

And the other one is what derives the economic engine of the company meaning where is the profits going to come from.

So combining passion plus what they can be best in the world at, plus what are the economic factors they need to follow creates this little area in the middle called the hedgehog concept where these strategies come together.

And his example it was a company called WalGreens and WalGreens is a popular drug store in the US. You see it everywhere. Their example of what they found as a hedgehog would be they decided to be the best most convenient drug store with a high customer profit per visit. So they wanted to be the best drug store. What they would be the best in the world at, getting the most profit from each customer, that’s their economic indicator. That’s what drives their economic engine and their passion about this. Passionate about being the most convenient, profitable drug store in the US. So simplifying what your companies hedgehog concept is and sticking to that and not getting off that path can help.

The next concept in the book is interesting and this is about level five leadership-. What Jim Colons found through his research doing this book is the best leaders, the leaders of the biggest and most successful companies were not the type of leader you would think of. They were not overly outgoing. They were not super outgoing. They were not … They didn’t have big egos and thought they were the best and arrogant. You probably have known a boss or CEO like this. They just … They always go around showing off their power and what Jim Colons found was that these are not the type of leaders that are truly successful.

A level five leader has humility. They are humble. They are able to connect with their employees at a deeper emotional level.

They know that arrogance is destructive and success is based on them taking responsibility for problems and also giving credit to employees when good things happen. So a leader of this level really keeps the company moving forward also by helping the employees feel important. See the benefits that they bring to the company and also the leader themselves being humble, having humility is able to see things from employees perspective where the real problems are to get over these problems and to continue growing.

So level five leader, other than being fully capable of their job and competent and contributing to the team and being an effective leader, they are also humble and able to connect on a deeper emotional level of employees.

In the book, he used an example of a company called Kimberly Clark and the CEO of that company Darwin Smith, who refused to be looked at as a hero or celebrity. He literally dressed like a farm boy, spent his holidays on the farm and connected with the service people in the offices that maybe were plumbers or electricians and so. He really connected with the all different types of people. Low level people at the company. High level people at the company and he looked just like a regular person.

In the last concept that I am gonna talk about here is that great companies and great CEOs and great leaders are not afraid to talk about the brutal facts and talk about the problems, the big scary problems that companies are having, they are not trying to hide these problems, they are not just having meetings about these problems behind closed doors. They are communicating about them, they are making these problems transparent to the company so they can attack these problems. So they can figure out these problems. So everybody is on the same page. Maybe you have had in your company, sometimes that you know that their problems with the managers and high level people don’t talk about these problems with you. They talk about other simpler problems. They hide these problems from the employees, but everybody knows they are going on. Sometimes the leaders’ egos in a way. They don’t want to show that they are having problems. So they ignore them, or they hide them, but this can get in the way of success. A true leader, a level five leader has to be able to encourage debates on these problems. Talk about them, even fight over them, so you could come with the best solutions to these. These problems must be studied carefully in order to do this, they must be brought out into the open. Not blaming certain people for them, but talking about them and discussing them as a team to come up with better solutions. In general, leaders must create an environment where the brutal facts are aired without hesitation.

So reviewing this, the three concepts, successful companies, stay true to the three main principles behind their company, what they can be the best at, in the world, what they are passionate about and what truly drives their economic engine. Simplifying and sticking to those. Also great companies have level five leaders, leaders that can not only be a great leader and know what to do and know what direction to bring the company in but also are able to connect with all different people at the company, to be humble, to look at the brutal facts, to look at the problems that the companies are having and be able to talk about these and to share these with everybody and not hide and not get their ego get in their way, to bring these companies to big success.

Okay?

Some of the vocab from today’s lesson. At the beginning of the episode, around 44 seconds, I used the word outperform, one word, outperform. To outperform is to simply do better than somebody else or something else. This company outperformed that company.

At around 4 minutes and 36 seconds, I used the verb stick, sticking to this. Let’s say we are going to stick to a certain idea or stick to a plan. It means to maintain.

Or another use of stick is to like stick something to the wall. Let’s say you have chewing gum and you stick it to the wall. It stays there. So kind of in the same idea is if you stick to a plan or you stick to something, it means you maintain the same plan. Got it.

At around 5 minutes, I say overly outgoing, overly is more than enough, more than necessary, exaggerated. So if you are overly outgoing, you are too outgoing, you talk too much. You are too friendly, you are too social. Outgoing is very open and confident around other people.

Big concept in this episode, humility. 5 minutes and 23 seconds, I used the word humility which is the noun form of humble.

Humility, humble means not thinking you are more important than other people. You think people are the same. So if you are big president of the company, and you are humble, means you still think you are equal to other people versus arrogant or having a big ego, means you are better than others.

6 minutes and 45 seconds I used the term plumber. Service worker is a plumber. The B is silent. A plumber is someone who works with pipes and water in a building. So somebody who would build the water system and work with the bathrooms and do things like this is a plumber.

7 minutes 30 seconds, an expression, everybody is on the same page. If you say that everybody is on the same page, it means everybody has the same information, they are coming from the same position. If you go to a meeting , you have to maybe review what happened in the last meeting, just so everybody can have the same information and everybody can be on the same page starting the meeting.

8 minute 23 seconds, blame certain people is to hold other people responsible or you think other people are responsible for something. I blame him for doing this. I blamed him for breaking the window; is to put responsibility on somebody else.

Sometimes it’s their fault and sometimes it’s not. But if you blame somebody, you say it’s their fault. So you blame certain people for the problems but a level five leader is going to take responsibility for all problems because he is a leader. He is not just going to blame certain employees.

Good to great, a great book, if this is interesting to you, if you find yourself in a leadership role out there, if you have a company of you own or you are manager of a company and you need to figure out ways to make this company better; read this book, go to my website, you’ll find a link there. Audio books like I said are a great way to learn from this and to improve your English as well, you can also download digital versions. So there is really no excuse these days to not get your hands on a book.

To get transcripts to this, again to go feelgoodEnglish.com and if you become a member, you can get transcripts to all of the episodes, I make them for. Just to go feelgoodenglish.com to get the free transcripts.

And your joke of the day. So my boss texted me and he said, “Hey, send me one of your funny jokes.” So I replied “I am working at the moment. I will send you one later. Then the boss replied, “Haha, that was fantastic. Now send me another one.” See you next time.