BSBAALJR on leadership for management; his favorite management leadership guru

Errors of BSBAAL's favorite leadership for management guru JC Collins

BSBAALSR, the incarnation of quantity and alleged-quality in business schools, pays a little less attention to leadership for managers that he does to the the three fields of global competitive strategy, marketing, and operations management which he pays the most attention to.

BSBAALJR is the incarnation of business schools in general regardless of quality. BSBAALJR's leading text for the teaching of leadership, is "Good to Great" by JC Collins ( http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0066620996/ref=sib_dp_bod_ex/002-6320582-2337641?%5Fencoding=UTF8&p=S00M#reader-link ). It is used by divinity schools or seminaries more than it is used by even the B-skools of BSBAALJR. It is used by graduate schools that are not business schools almost as much as it used by business schools.

BSBALLJR's preaching on leadership is truly inter-disciplinary, it is his venture into areas outside of business, it is BSBAALJR requiring or recommending that his students read most of the books on leadership that are in the top ten in popularity with the general public. What sets BSBAALJR's approach to leadership aside from his approach to strategy, marketing, and operations, is that when it comes to leadership studies, BSBAALJR's reading lists mirror the lists of the books on leadership that are most popular with the general public, whereas with the other subjects such is not the case. When it comes to leadership, BSBAALJR is truly becoming one of us, rubbing shoulders with the common folk and the seminarians. The study of leadership is an area where you find three classes of people are all reading the same sacred texts: the B-skoolers of BSBAALJR, the general public, and the Divinity-Skool/Seminary students. When BSBAALJR's students are feeling religious, they do things like go mountain climbing in the Himalayas while reading "Good to Great" by Collins.

Here are some links to web pages favoring this sacred text:

http://www.okstate.edu/ceat/msetm/books.htm
Requires it in strategic quality management

http://www.seminary.edu/syllabus/summer%202004-dm7653%20June%2021-25.pdf
requires it for a Seminary course.

http://www.bus.umich.edu/Positive/Teaching/2003Spring/OBHRM501/obhrm501_syllabus.doc
requires it for a course "human behaviour and organizations: managing for excellence in work
organizations

http://www.agts.edu/syllabi/dmin/2005/pth905ming_spring05_dmin.pdf
requires it for a divinity school course.

http://www.stanford.edu/class/msande271/onlinetools/bestbooks.PDF
Tom Kosnik who teaches Global Entrepreneurial Marketing at Stanford Ach Engineering lists it as one of the best books and one of his favorites.

http://www.gmu.edu/departments/icar/CONF731SP05.pdf
Institute for Conflict Analysis and Resolution at George Mason University, here it is a suggested reading for the organizations and conflict course

northwest graduate school, a divinity school, lists it as recommended reading for their overture seminar.
http://www.nwgs.edu/web/nwgs/documents/Feb2004_Overture%20syllabus

Leadership and Character Development, course required reading, fuller theological seminary...
http://www.fuller.edu/cll/fco/ecds/043/GM550_Hayner043.html


A course at the wharton center for leadership and change management recommends good to great as reading. This course takes the form of a trek in the himalayas.
http://leadership.wharton.upenn.edu/welcome/index.shtml

the college of business at the university of illinois urbana, required good to great as reading for an honors seminar in the technology management program, about managing uncertainty.
http://www.business.uiuc.edu/publications/ANN/ANN.2003Fall.pdf

http://www.studentlife.ucr.edu/
U Cal Riverside has it in their student life leadership library

Idie Kesner MBA program chair at is using good to great in recruiting mba program candidates at the Indiana U Biz Skool.
http://www.kelley.iu.edu/kelleymagazine/issues/Winter%202004.pdf

At Luther seminary Good to Great is required reading for the "strategies for congregational vitalization" course.
http://www.luthersem.edu/KFRYER/

Errors in the gospel of Collins, BSBAALJR's favorite leadership evangelist

BSBAALJR's favorite evangelist Collins looked at 11 "great" companies whose cumulative earnings transformed from merely "good" to "great". He ignored the "great" companies in industry groups where the entire group improved. He found that companies that introduce radical change and restructuring almost never become "great".

Collins concluded that "good" is the "enemy" of "great", yet, the companies in his sample of "good" companies that became "great", were all relatively good relative to the market, in terms of cumulative return on stocks, before they became great.

His control sample, was ahead of the market, came to a transition point, where it was average compared to the market, and then stayed average compared to the market. His focused sample, was good compared to the market, came to a transition point, where it was average compared to the market, and then became great compared to the market.

Such does not, scientifically speaking, make alot of sense to me. Why should the control sample consist of companies that were ahead of the market at first, came to a transition where they were average, and then continued being average?

Why should the select sample, consist of companies that were good, and then became average, and then stayed average? What about companies that were average all along, and did not before their "transition point" have a past history that in terms of cumulative stock returns was above average? Are no lessons to be learned from them? What about companies that were below average, and then came to a transition point, and then became "great"?

Every time-period has a different formula for success. The "Good to Great" approach, lumps together success stories from different time periods, and attempts to extrapolate what the formula for success is now. It would be prudent to extrapolate the formulas for success in the different time periods separately, so as to be better able to guess at what the formula for success is in this era, the first decade of the third millenium.

Collins' control sample is "carefully selected". Since when are control samples "carefully selected"? Control samples should be random samples if intended to manifest the average or the typical. A control sample that focuses specifically on companies whose cumulative returns stayed approx average for year after year after a transition point, ignores what can be learned about characteristics that produce averagishness from companies that performed above average and companies that performed below average after the "transition point".

Collins' select sample and his control sample have this in common: they both had good cumulative returns, and came to a transition point where their cumulative returns were average. Such a pattern is characteristic of companies that choose to put earnings into expenditures such as R&D as opposed to into returns. Such is characteristic of companies that decline from above average to average in terms cumulative returns on stocks. What about companies that are not such types of companies? They are excluded from Collins' sample, although one would suspect there is much to be learned from them.

Aside from the manner in which the samples were chosen, looking at Collins' way of doing things, Collins' select sample, probably is in error so as not to produce lessons from companies that did better than great, or somewhere between great and good.

His select sample of eleven great companies and his control sample of seventeen not-great companies are samples that are too small in size. His samples are all from the Fortune 500. What about the many important success and failure stories amongst non-Fortune-500 companies?

Collins for his select sample of "great" companies, avoids companies that did well while their entire industry group also did well. But he does not state that for his "carefully selected" control sample, he avoided companies that did average while there entire group also did just average.

My feeling is that my understanding of sampling, excels Collins, the way a pro ball player excels a typical high schooler. Just send me the data on cumulative stock returns for companies, and percentage changes involved therein, or links to such, and in much less than a week, without assistance all by myself, I will be able to provide you an analysis that excels "Good to Great" as much as a pro ball player excels a typical high schooler.

If I want to learn in general about corporate success, I distort things if I stick to say, just those companies that beat the market by approximately 14% per year year after year for 15 years. There is something to be learned from studying the companies that beat the market by just 2 or 3%. There is something to be gained by studying companies that beat the market by 30% per year also.

Likewise, if I want to get an idea of how the average company performs, I can learn something from looking at not just companies that outperformed the market by approx 0% per year, but also by looking at companies that were "good or great" relative to the market, and also by looking at companies that were "poor" or "terrible". One of the reasons for this, is that companies are a combination of large numbers of different characteristics.

Collins looked at 22 companies in pairs. Each pair contained one great company and one not great company. For each pair he compared the winner to the loser. He added up the conclusions drawn from each pair by pair analysis into a general conclusion. This method strikes me as faulty.

For example, suppose I have some criteria, such as to what extent a company avoids dramatic change (criteria X). I rate each company from one to ten for this criteria X. I look at companies in ten pairs featuring one "great" company and one "not-great" company. I end up with basically ten baseball games each featuring a great team against a team that is not great, with how many runs they score determined by how they rank on criteria X. By this methodology, I could end up concluding that criteria X was really important, because using the criteria X rating as the score the great teams won six games tied one and lost three, whereas actually I would have no right to make such a judgment, because, overall the not-great teams scored more runs than the great teams did.

Suppose the results of ten such games were (score by great team given first) 6-4, 7-6, 5-3, 6-5, 7-4, 5-5, 6-10, 3-8, and 5-9. I could look at these results and conclude that the great teams were characterized by an avoidance of dramatic change, because the great teams won six games, twice as many games as the three games they lost. But I would not be justified in arriving at such a conclusion, because, overall, the "not-great" teams scored 54 runs whereas the "great" teams scored only 50 runs.

Collins' conclusions are of the sky is blue, grass is green, roses are red, violets are blue, here's some obvious truths for you type. They can basically be summed up as follows:

Characteristics of Great Companies:

humble unselfish leaders
not strategy but personnel
picky about hiring do more
do what you know re personnel
put best people on opportunities not problems
competence
friendly toleration of disagreements
character people who love what they do
people allowed to debate do more
facing reality
being confident
good decisions
people not bullied re opinions they express do more
not blaming folks for mistakes do more l
earning from mistakes do more
taking responsibility for mistakes
applying what is learned from mistakes.
allowing info to trigger change
Company should do what it most excels the competition at doing
company should avoid what it does not in such manner excel at
company should do what it is passionate about
compnay should avoid what it is not passionate about
company should be aware of what events produce profits for it.
company should avoid events that reduce profits for it
make decisions do more
hire reward and celebrate discipline
hire self-disciplined people
emphasize freedom and responsibility for employees
hire people who will go to extreme lengths to fulfill their responsibilities
promote the idea that everyone must contribute
picky about technology
pioneer your own technology
its lots of little things put together not one big thing
do not react without understanding
do not be enamored by new stuff simply because it is new
do not be distracted from your primary goal
keep the momentum going
do not slow down your own momentum
keep trying to figure out what made your company work.




@2005 David Virgil Hobbs
NOTE THIS BLOG-POST CONTAINS MY OPINIONS WHICH MAY NOT ALWAYS COINCIDE WITH FACT