Let’s talk about the first finding of Jim Collins, the Level 5 leaders.

Level 1: Highly Capable Individual

Makes productive contributions through talent, knowledge, skills and good work habits.

Level 2: Contributing Team Member

Contributes individual capabilities to the achievement of group objectives and works effectively with others in a group setting.

Level 3: Competent Manager

Organizes people and resources towards the effective and efficient pursuit of predetermined objectives.

Level 4: Effective Leader

Catalyzes commitment to and vigorous pursuit of a clear and compelling vision, stimulating higher perfomance standards.

Level 5 Executive

Builds enduring greatness through a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will.

• The term Level 5 referes to the highest level in hierarchy of executive capabilities. While you don’t need to move in sequence from Level 1 to Level 5 – it might be possible to fill in some of the lower levels later – fully developed Level 5 leaders embody all five layers of the pyramid.
• Level 5 leaders channel their ego needs away from themselves and into a larger goal of building a great company.
• It’s not that level 5 leaders have no ego or self-interest. Indeed, they are incredibly ambitious – but their ambition is first and foremost for the institution, not themselves.
• Level 5 managers are a study in duality: modest and willful, humble and fearless.

This duality looks like a mix between professional will and personal humility.

Professional Will

• Creates superb results, a clear catalyst in the translation from good to great.
• Demonstrates an unwavering resolve to whatever must be done to produce the best longterm results, no matter how difficult.
• Sets the standard of building an enduring great company; will settle for nothing less.
• Looks in the mirror not out of the window, to apportion responsibility for poor results, never blaming other people, external factors, or bad luck.

Personal Humility

• Demonstrates a compelling modesty, shunning public adulation; never boastful.
• Acts with quiet, calm determination; relies principally on inspired standards, not inspiring charisma, to motivate.
• Channels ambition into the company, not the self; sets up successors for even greater success in the next generation.
• Looks out the window, not in the mirror, to apportion credit for the success of the company – to other people, external factors, and good luck.

So, let me summarize what we already discussed in the last posts (from 29th April to 9th Mai) concerning Corporate Entrepreneurship:

I would like now to share some very nice and interesting thoughts of Jim Collins concerning key success factors of great companies on the long run. Jim Collins wrote (among others) two central books:

The first book was published in 1994. Enclosed an extract from the amazon.com’s review:

This analysis of what makes great companies great has been hailed everywhere as an instant classic and one of the best business titles since In Search of Excellence. The authors, James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras, spent six years in research, and they freely admit that their own preconceptions about business success were devastated by their actual findings–along with the preconceptions of virtually everyone else. […] The core myth, according to the authors, is that visionary companies must start with a great product and be pushed into the future by charismatic leaders. There are examples of that pattern, they admit: Johnson & Johnson, for one. But there are also just too many counterexamples–in fact, the majority of the “visionary” companies, including giants like 3M, Sony, and TI, don’t fit the model. They were characterized by total lack of an initial business plan or key idea and by remarkably self-effacing leaders. Collins and Porras are much more impressed with something else they shared: an almost cult-like devotion to a “core ideology” or identity, and active indoctrination of employees into “ideologically commitment” to the company.

I definitely like these ideas :-)

The second book was written in 2001. Enclosed an extract of the book description:

The Challenge

Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?

The Findings

The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice.

I would like to invest some time in the coming posts to discuss some of the innovative and disturbing findings of Jim Collins:

Hey, Google started on last Monday 10 Mai its blog :-)

So, what’s my current situation concerning the blogging tools?

Blogger and comments

I’m still using Blogger, but without the new comments functionality. I will surely continue to use the Holker’s blogkomm tool. Why?

• No possibility to customize deeply your comments’ part (for the writing of comments).
  
• The posting of non-anonymous comments requires a (free) registration in Blogger linked with the definition of your profile (too long!), which is to my mind a KO-criterion.
  
• More on the technical side, I don’t like the idea of having the comments stored by Blogger, although the rest of my weblog is saved by another ISP.
  
• It’s not important for me but you cannot have a comments interface in another language as English.

All in all, as I said, I will stay on blogkomm. One comment as a conclusion: in the past version of Blogger, there was a section dedicated to comments in the Blogger’s FAQ. I found blogkomm thanks to this input. This section (with all the other comments’ possibilities) disappeared in the new version, although Blogger is not covering the minimum requirements (to my mind!) in the field of comment. A strange thanx from Blogger to all the people who contributed to fill its comment functionalities’ gap…..

You can find more information / other inputs and views on the following two posts:

Feed reader with posting functionality

Based on an advice from Nathan (Synop), I am now testing Sauce Reader, which is quite cool (first impression!). This post is actually coming from the publishing component of Sauce Reader. First feedback:

• you have to be first online to be able to define your account. and without account, no possibility to save your posts…
  
• some strange side effects when you navigate between the design-code-preview sections (version in the three section is not correctly synchronized => possible bug, I will check)
  
• on the other side, the interface is great, very easy-to-use
  
• the most important posting functionalities are present (also for offline writing)
  
• no bullshit annoying style/font/… added in the code, good point
  
• i will test the posting of images later (which is always the Achille’s heel of such tools)

I am testing different panoramic stitching tools and I find one of them – The Panorama Factory v3.2 from Smoky City Design – particularly good:

Two examples I generated with the shareware version (30-days trial), the first one with 6 JPEGs (2048×1536), the second one with 7 JPEGs (2048×1536). The original “usable” output sizes are 8851×1265 and 10338×1368 :-)

The full product costs $59.95 and I think I will buy it :-)

I am back from Milano. It was really a nice stay, a kind of “first-class hospitality” of our Italian colleagues :-)
And yes, I was by Peck, one of the oldest food shop in Milano. A paradise, excepted for your credit card….

I will be “out of office” till the end of this week. I will be in Milano – Italy from tomorrow on :-)

Large number of pizza and pasta is planned!

I will also visit the Peck’s office, wahou, great perspective.

In spite of the very bad weather the last days, we were very happy to see that “our” swallows are back at home :-) These birds are really very nice and quite extraordinary. We have the chance to have some barn swallows (Hirundo Rustica) each year, coming back in spring from their very long migration journey. They are strongly protected and very useful because they are eating a very large number of insects as flies, aphids, beetles, bees, moths, mayflies, dragonflies, grasshoppers and caterpillars. Nearly all their food is captured on the wing. They can flight very fast – till 100 km/h!

These birds are special because they migrate each year from Europe to Africa (Cameroon, Gabon, the Congo) in September, which means a trip of more than 7’000 km!

Three weeks ago, I started to use Newsgator, the news and RSS aggregator and blog publishing tool. I must say that the results are quite negative: I really like the central idea to integrate the tool within Outlook. This integration is a success but, on the other (dark) side, the aggregator’s interface could be improved. Another negative issue is the plug-in for the publishing part (I am using blogger): the title is not transferred well, lot of problems with the composing, etc.

Conclusion: to my mind, a real good idea but not worth yet ($29). I will follow the coming releases.

I am now using the following tools for blogging:

Via Philippe Laferrière and via Paul Allen, Joe Ollivier – an entrepreneur with 30 years experience – gives us some thoughts about what it takes to be an entrepreneur:

I specially like the numbers 1, 5, 19, 22, 23 and 29.

1. It has to be a business that gives you an emotional high.

2. Avoid any business that is labor or inventory intensive.

3. Have independent market research done on the feasibility of your idea, then do test markets.

4. Don’t think someone is waiting to steal your idea, it’s paranoia.

5. Don’t get started on a real business until you have someone (wife, husband, family member) who will listen to your dreams, sympathize with your failures and applaud your successes.

6. Never involve yourself in any service or product that requires a consumer attitude change.

7. Don’t invest on home run schemes – invest in what you like and know.

8. Find a lifelong mentor as soon as possible. Have him continually play devil’s advocate.

9. Have an exit point or harvest plan to cash out of each business you start.

10. Do a self awareness training. You are not your business, your background or your personal financial statement.

11. Pick a charity (other than a religious one) or a charitable activity where you have nothing to gain, and work at it every year.

12. Do some charitable acts each year in secret.

13. Keep a notepad next to your bed at night – some of your best thoughts will come during the night.

14. Get a week-at-a-glance planner. Each weekend make our a 3×5 notecard of activities you want to accomplish.

15. You don’t need to keep 51% to control your company.

16. Find an aggressive banker and CPA, send them referrals and Christmas presents.

17. Be willing to take major risks, but be aware of risk versus reward. Don’t ever even think about taking out Bankruptcy.

18. Have someone else do all your serious negotiating for you.

19. Have the attitude that everything that happens to you in your life is your own personal responsibility; you are never a victim.

20. Remember that you will learn much more from your mistakes and failures than your successes.

21. Trust everyone, but be aware that most people shade the facts and lie part of the time.

22. Live in the nicest, most expensive house you can. It will alter your view of yourself and the way others view you.

23. Remember that with each successful venture there was a time when the entrepreneur wished he was not involved.

24. Expect to be sued – it’s normal – have the attitude that it’s the person who’s suing that has the problem.

25. Never sue unless there is real estate that can be attached.

26. Expect to become wealthy – do a financial statement on yourself each quarter.

27. Realize that money is power and can be used for great good.

28. Being an Entrepreneur means more than buying yourself a job. You need a salary to live, a return on your investment and a monetary reward for your risk.

29. In every entrepreneurial activity you enter make sure it’s: 1. Fun and Interesting, 2. You are going to learn something, and 3. You add value.

30. Realize that business is really just a monetary game, and the things that mean the most -your character, your family, your own values, and your beliefs- are unaffected regardless of the outcome.