Built To Last
By Jim Collins and Jerry Porras

Build to Last is a book written by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, both professors at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. After conducting a study of “visionary” companies that have lasted more than 50 years, wrote this book on their findings detailing the properties that these companies share that made them so extraordinary.

Some, but not all, of the visionary companies that they studied include 3M, American Express, Boeing, Citicorp, Ford, General Electric, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Johnson & Johnson, Marriot, Merck, Motorola, Nordstrom, Phillip Morris, Proctor & Gamble, Sony, Wal-Mart and Disney.

In this book review, we will outline key principles the book describes in detail. In reading this post and the book itself, one can derive huge amounts of value for themselves in their business, sport, organization or even their personal life.

1) Truly great business leaders mainly put their focus on building the company, including having great systems, ideology and people development. The idea here is that the companies that have enjoyed decades of success are not driven by one leader who causes the success of the company, but the visionary companies are built so it is the company, not the leader of the company, that is the main driver of the organization’s success.

2) The visionary companies are not driven by money and profits. Their main focus is beyond money and profits and are propelled by making a serious, lasting and impactful contributions to the world. The visionary companies exist for a reason beyond profits and have profits be a by-product of the fulfilling this purpose. Profits allow them to keep contributing to the world. This view, in the end, makes more money away.

3) The authors of the book are very much for keeping very few things in an organization the same for long periods of time due to their findings. They assert that only one thing in a company should never change at all, which is its core ideology. They further break core ideology down to a company’s mission or purpose, and its core values. Everything beyond this, is malleable.
Core Purpose – the big thing that the company is up to, what it is fulfilling in the world.
Core Values – the guiding principles of a company, what it stands for.

4) Visionary companies have what the authors call Big Hairy Audacious Goals (BHAGs for short). A BHAG is an enormous goal that many of the visionary companies had in common. These goals are not just one or two years out, but more like 25 years out. They serve as a future for everyone in the company to be working towards that inspires people and creates cohesion within the company. Examples include become number one or two in all of your market areas, or take over the market share of commercial jets. Collins and Porras stress that one danger of a BHAG is that once it is reached, a new one must be created.

5) Visionary companies have extremely strong cultures. These cultures are so strong that the authors refer to them as “cult-like.” Each and every employee buys into the culture, and those who do not quickly find themselves not fitting in at the company, like all of a sudden adding vinegar into a cup of water. The example used for such a culture is Nordstrom, with its strong culture of customer service.

6) Another commonality among the companies studied was they have “home-grown management.” This means that managers and leaders of the company are promoted from within the company, opposed to hired from the outside. For a company to be able to provide this for itself, it must have a strong internal management development program. The authors use Jack Welch of General Electric as an example, who started working at GE straight out of college and worked his way up the company to CEO.

7) The last quality of a visionary company the book presents is that “good is never enough.” What this means is that there is never an end or a place that is good enough for a visionary company. They never allow themselves to sit back and get comfortable, rather they keep working and moving forward.

Built to Last is an excellent book, and well worth reading to implement in ones own company as an access to produce extraordinary results.

The best-selling book, Three Laws of Performance was written by Steve Zaffron of The Vanto Group and Dave Logan of the Marshall School of Business at the University of Southern California.

One of the authors, Steve Zaffron, is the CEO of the Vanto Group, which utilizes the game cutting edge methodology and approach as Gemini Executive Coaching.

In this blog, we will be discussing the third law of performance from the book and how it applies to you and your organization.

The first law of performance states, “How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.”

The second law of performance states, “How a situation occurs arises in language.”

The third law of performance states, “Future-based language transforms how situations occur to people.”

What does this mean?

From our previous blog, you can see the importance of our occurring world, which is distinct from the facts. The second law of performance explains the origin of the different occurring worlds form person to person.

With this law, the authors create a distinction between two types of language use. The first they discuss is called descriptive language. This is the ordinary way of speaking, which describes the occurring world for a person. The second type of language is called future based or generative language. This is using language as a declaration to say how things will be in the future, which is powerful. This is the type of language one uses to write the future and displace the future that is predictable.

People act according to the future that they see in front of them. Imagine next week you were going to Hawaii. How would your thoughts, actions and feeling be? Now imagine next week you were going to prison. Your thoughts, actions and feeling would be a little different, right? This is because the future that you are living into is giving you your current mindset and actions.

This is what makes generative language powerful. It is used to create a future in which you and those in your company, organization or on your team live into. If you use your language to create a big, bright and inspiring future, people will be inspired as well, and work to have this future become real.

Learn more about The Three Laws of Performance

Purchase the book from Amazon

One of the authors, Steve Zaffron, is the CEO of the Vanto Group, which utilizes the game cutting edge methodology and approach as Gemini Executive Coaching.

In this blog, we will be discussing the second law of performance from the book and how it applies to you and your organization.

The first law of performance states, “How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.”

The second law of performance states, “How a situation occurs arises in language.”

What does this mean?

From our post on The First Law of Performance, you can see the importance of our occurring world, which is distinct from the facts. The second law of performance explains the origin of the different occurring worlds form person to person.

The occurring world is given by what we say, to ourselves and to others. Each person says, using language, different things, causing different situations to occur differently to different people.

Here is an example. Two members of the same sales team with equal amounts of training are selling the same product and have the same sales goals to reach. The task of selling their product is greatly influenced by how the task occurs to them. How the task occurs to them is shaped by their language, and more specifically, what they say about the task to themselves or others.

Making sales and reaching sales goals could occur as hard work and very difficult to one salesman. This is because he may say to himself or others, “nobody really wants this product.” This certainly would cause this task to occur as hard and difficult.

On the other hand, the same task could occur as easy and fun for the other salesperson. This could be because the language he uses that creates the way the job occurs to him could be something like, “people cannot do without this product!” It is very likely that this salesperson will sell more and outperform the other.

One salesperson is more effective than the other because their performance is shaped by how the task occurs to them, which was created by their language/speaking.

The way to impact performance is to first distinguish the language already there and used regarding a certain situation. The next is to generate different language to create a new occurring regarding the task or situation.

Learn More about the book Here

Purchase the book from Amazon Here

One of the authors, Steve Zaffron is the CEO of the Vanto Group, which utilizes the game cutting edge methodology and approach as Gemini Executive Coaching.

In this blog, we will be discussing the first law of performance from the book and how it applies to you and your organization.

The first law of performance states, “How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them.”
Another way of stating this is how people act or behave correlates to how people, things or situations occur to them.

What does this mean? Our action always make complete sense to us, however, we are often confused, frustrated or annoyed by the actions of others. But the people taking these actions are somehow not confused, frustrated or annoyed like we are. How is that? The circumstances in which they are acting occur to them differently than they do to you and they are acting accordingly to how the circumstances occur to them. We as humans confuse the actual facts of a situation with how the situation occurs to us. There is a distinction between the facts and how the facts occur to us. This is how there can be a car accident with 20 witnesses and 18 different stories of what happened. It occurred to each person differently. A fact is that one car involved in the accident was going 40 miles per hour. To one observer, the car could have occurred as going very fast, while that same car could have been going rather slow to another because one observer was a five year old and the other was a race car driver.

This applies to people as well. The same situations occur differently to different people, giving different actions.

Lets take a party for example. One person could be sitting in a corner and another could be in the center of the room talking with everyone. Why the different behavior?
The easy answer is because one likes parties and the other does not, or one is shy and the other is not. However, it is the different occurring for each person that gives liking or not liking parties, or being or not being shy. The occurring for the person in the corner could be that, “big groups are uncomfortable and risky” while the occurring for the socialite could be that, “new people are great!” After seeing the distinct ways the same situation occurs for two different people, it is simple to understand the distinct sets of actions.

The occurring is what gives the actions, being perfectly correlated with each other.
It is now easier to understand the different things people do, the ways they behave and their performances are all given by the way the situation occurs to them in a business or organizational setting as well.

If people are doing things to your disliking, that are confusing or are frustrating, it is because the situation at hand occurs for them differently that it does for you.

Learn More about The Three Laws of Performance Here

Purchase the book from Amazon.com Here

Dislike public speaking?  Hate talking to big groups? Ever give one of those talks and it was all a big blur?

Then keep reading!

Public speaking and giving an effective presentation is hard, so why get good at it?

Giving an effective presentation is a crucial skill to be successful.  To not only be comfortable but also convincing, charismatic and engaging allows:
-What you have to say actually land with the audience and is heard
-You to NOT nervous
-People are not bored while you are talking

Here are some ideas on how to have this happen:

-To make it easy for people to hear and understand what you have to say, talk loud and slow- more so that you think you need to.

-Being Related –
Look at the audience, not the ceiling, walls or a paper.   Relate to the audience as people on your side, NOT here to judge you.  Everybody wants the same thing- you want to do a good job and they want you to do a good job. You want to give a good presentation and they want to listen to a good one.

-Be Inspiring –
Before you talk, think a little about what is the overall larger purpose, vision or commitment that your talk is fulfilling?  Make sure this is about other people, not something like your bank account or me-me-focused.  Is it to prevent global warming?  To forge leaders?  Create your company as a team of one? Empower a staff?
The way to be inspiring during a talk is to think what inspires you while giving your presentation and the words you are saying are the tools to fulfill on that purpose. The key is that this has to be inspiring to you and you have to BE inspired for you to be able to inspire others.

-Be Self Expressed –
Being self expressed is going to have people pay more attention and make it more fun for you.
This means not being restrained, stiff, tight.  Be excited and alive. Have fun, and lighten up!  What is the worst that can happen? You get embarrassed? So what, by the end of the day, chances are you will be the only one who remembers.

-Be Interested –
Get interested in what you are saying. If you are not interested, nobody else will be either. The more interested in what you are saying, the more interested the audience will be, regardless of how dry the topic is to you or you think it is to others.  This is the way you be an interesting speaker.

-Physical Presentation –
Move around if can, stand up straight, speak to the people, not your paper.

-To have these happen, there are a few things to give up/let go of:
Let go of having your attention on:
1) Looking good/cool and avoiding looking silly
2) Not messing up
3) Doing it the “right” way
4) Attention on yourself or how you are doing
5) Attachment to a certain outcome, result or the way you think it should look.

Lastly, public speaking and giving effective presentations is not something you will get good at over night.  You have to practice and really employ these principles.

To help you deepen your knowledge about and ability to give great presentations, David Groemping of Gemini Executive Coaching will be giving a talk on effective public speaking in Washington DC March 26th, 2009.  This workshop is open to the public, great quality and very inexpensive.  For more information, go to: http://www.prosinthecity.com/index.cfm?cityid=1&action=events#Event7545

Gemini Executive Coaching

Our overall intention for these blog posts is to provide an enormous amount of value to you, the reader.  We plan on writing traditional articles, talk about good books, create links to good podcasts and

We will also cover a large gamut of topics and areas of coaching in our blog, from strictly business related topics, to articles intended to impact your overall quality of life, to editions geared towards athletes and even the occasional Native American tribal leader.  However, no matter who you are, our intention is that each and every blog edition contains value for everyone, regardless of your specific background or community.

And we want to be in communication with you!  So if there is some aspect you are struggling with, stuck in, looking to take to the next level or just interested in reading more about, please feel free to send us an email (David*AT*GemExeCoach.com) with your request and we will do our best to provide value for you in that area.

Thanks for stopping in and we look forward to having you back!

Gemini Executive Coaching