Jim Collins

Good is the enemy of great. And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great.

The good-to-great leaders never wanted to become larger-than-life heroes. They never aspired to be put on a pedestal or become unreachable icons. They were seemingly ordinary people quietly producing extraordinary results.

You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end — which you can never afford to lose — with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality.

Greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline.

Be a clock builder, not a time teller.

The signature of the truly great versus the merely successful is not the absence of difficulty, but the ability to come back from setbacks.

Preserve the core and stimulate progress.

Technology accelerates transformation, but technology alone never causes transformation.

The purpose of bureaucracy is to compensate for incompetence and lack of discipline.

When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results.

Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into the larger goal of building a great company.

The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.

It is what you learn after you know it all that counts.