• Level Five Leadership
  • Self effacing, quiet reserved
  • Personal humility and professional will
  • Ambition first and foremost for the good of the company
  • Ego brings about failure in two thirds of the times
  • Desire from the leader is to produce recurring, sustained positive results over time
  • Attribute success factors to the other members of the team
• First Who… Then What
  • Get the wrong people off the bus
  • Get the right people in the right seats
  • Who questions come before what questions
  • NOT a genius with a thousand helpers
  • Rigorous not ruthless, undoing the wrong decisions in HR are too much
  • Three rules
    • When in doubt keep looking, don’t hire
    • When you know you need to make a people change, act
    • Put your best people on your biggest opportunities
  • Debate vigorously, then act
  • Packard’s Law
    • No company can grow revenues consistently faster than its ability to get enough of the right people to implement that growth and still become a great company.
• Confront the brutal facts
  • Stockdale paradox – You must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties and at the same time have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they may be.
• The hedgehog concept
  • Simple is good
  • Driven by the three concepts
    • What you can be the best in the world at
      • Understand both what you can be the best at and what you cannot be the best in the world at – both sets of understanding are important
    • What drives your economic engine
      • What is the core metric that has the greatest impact on the operation of the company
        • Profit per customer?
    • What you are deeply passionate about
      • The love of toilet paper
  • The hedgehog goal is understanding – not guts
  • Should be created based on outcome of a council
• A culture of discipline
  • Discipline allows for self management
  • Execution within the three circles of the hedgehog concept
  • Discipline to not stray from execution within those circles
  • Consistent system but flexibility allowed within the system
• Technology Accelerators
  • The advance application of carefully selected technologies
• Flywheel
  • The build up of speed over time

What does that mean for me?

• Be involved in the hiring decisions for the company
• Determine what the “hedgehog concept” for the company is
• Red flag process – what is the method for ensuring that a problem is brought to the right level of attention
• Setup a long term guiding council for company strategy
• Discuss the necessary steps to determine a hedgehog concept