Jim Collins, author of “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t,” came to Delaware for the first time on June 15, and more than 900 people turned out to hear him talk about better nonprofit management at the annual conference of the Delaware Alliance for Nonprofit Management.
The nut of Collins message to the crowd of nonprofit leaders was, “Building something great is not primary a matter of circumstance. It is, first and foremost, a matter of conscious choices and discipline.”
Here are some of the tips he gave his audience:
“¢ Choose a cause you are deeply passionate about, do the one thing you can be best at, and choose a goal you know others will support.
“¢ A manager should think of the nonprofit as a bus and decide who should be on the bus, who should be off the bus and who should be in a different seat. Before booting anyone off the bus, Collins said he would consider whether the person had a skill problem, a will problem or a values problems. A person who comes to work without the proper skills can be taught skills if he has the will to learn. Collins said sometimes people who don’t belong “on the bus” will get off as the group evolves and intensifies its culture because they don’t want to expend the effort required to be part of the new culture.
“¢ There are many things you can’t control, but you can control yourself and push yourself toward consistent self-discipline. “The true signature of mediocrity is chronic inconsistency,” Collins said.
“¢ A great leader builds a staff that can operate without him or her. “I want to build a clock that can tell the time when I’m not here,” Collins said. “If your organization cannot be great without you, it is not yet a great organization.”
“¢ One way to attract the best people is to have what Collins dubs a big, hairy audacious goal. “How do you get the best climbers to join your team? You climb the highest mountains.”
Collins told the story of Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale, a prisoner of war in Vietnam for more than seven years. Collins named a business concept after him ““ the Stockdale Paradox.
He said Stockdale never lost faith that he would get out and that he would turn the experience into the defining event of his life but he never ignored the facts, never let himself believe he’d be home by a certain date.
“You must never ever confuse the need for unwavering faith with the need on the other hand to confront the most brutal facts,” he said.
During the question and answer period, Kendall Massett, executive director of the Delaware Charter Schools Network asked Collins how you advance your core values when “the masses disagree with you?”
Collins first answer: “I think there’s great power in saying, before we get to our own opinions, let’s talk about what the facts are-the brutal facts. Facts have a way of just sitting there on the table.”
Collins’ second answer: “Not everyone will always agree with you, but, when you deliver results, people who care about results tend to come to your side because they care about results.”
