Jim Collins published Good to Great in 2001. Two decades later, I still refer back to it regularly because it’s built on solid principles that still apply. The whole book is great (get it?) but there are three things that influence my thinking nearly every day because they sank so deeply into my skull:

1. Get the right people on the bus
2. The Hedgehog Principle
3. Suffer well/leading people in hard times: the Stockdale Paradox

Get the right people on the bus

The bus is your life. Are the right people in it? The right people inspire us, keep us on track, and put wind in our sails. They speak harsh truths to us when they need to be spoken, but without malice. In business, when we get the right team on the bus it’s less about what problem we’re solving as how we’re pitching in together to solve it.

When we let the wrong people sit on the bus for too long, no matter our good intentions for doing so, we prevent them from being on a bus with a better fit for them, and for ourselves. It’s not a matter of a better or worse person. It’s a matter of good fit.

For Product Managers, this applies especially to our scrum teams and ceremonies. Do we have the right people on this cross-functional team? X developer might be an absolute whiz on the back end, but hates CSS. Is that bad? Doesn’t matter. What matters is “should they be on this bus/product.” If there’s someone on the team who loves CSS but isn’t so great with the back end, they compliment each other and this may indeed be a great busload of people! But if there isn’t, and X developer (who doesn’t like talking about it) gets stuck doing too much CSS, they will stall out. They will not find joy on this bus because they’re stuck doing something they don’t love. This doesn’t mean X developer is a bad developer! They belong on a bus! But is it this bus right now? Do you have any alternatives? If not, sometimes all you can do is make the ride less arduous until you can create a more optimal solution.

Leading a team is delicate, especially when you’re leading through influence rather than authority. You must be hyper-aware of the people on your bus and you must have the people skills to have a radically candid conversation (see Radical Candor by Kim Scott) in such a way that is is crystal clear you come from a place of concern for the person and a desire to listen with honesty. They must know you support them. And then you will be able to manage your bus. The right people will board and de-board at the right times, and you’ll spend less time spinning your wheels and more time delivering.

The Hedgehog Principle

Find what you love to do more than anything else, that you do better than anyone else, that people are willing to pay you for. That’s the Hedgehog Principle. Why? Because as the Greek poet Archilochus wrote, “the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” The sly business fox does many things, but the savvy hedgehog does one thing, and he does it really well. When you’ve found the right combination, you know…especially when the right people are on the bus.

I think this is the essence of my CROP (Concept, Runway, Operations, Profit or Pivot) business model. You have a thing you love to do; on your runway you get it launched. You do it better than anyone by refining your operations. People pay you to do it, and you profit. And it all really comes together in the center with the Hedgehog Principle as your concept.

The Stockdale Paradox

Admiral Jim Stockdale was a prisoner of war for eight years during the Vietnam War. Eight years of torture, starvation, and sickness. Dark days indeed. How do you lead through dark times like this? How do you hold yourself together, let alone those around you? For eight years. Hope and optimism? Nope. Admiral Stockdale teaches us that it’s not the optimists who survive, because the optimists let fantasy get in the way of the reality of now. Rather, survival comes from the ability to keep faith in the knowledge that in the end you will prevail (no matter what that end may be and no matter when it may come) and not lose sight of the facts of now.

This insight gets teams through tough times together. Especially when the right people are on a bus that stalls out despite doing the thing you love and do better than anyone in the world, which people are paying you to do. These things happen. Our hypothesis fail sometimes. Markets fail. Life fails sometimes. But when we are able to hold in our hearts the faith that in the end we will prevail and not let it prevent us from addressing the grizzly facts of now, and when we’re able to have radically candid conversations with our team we’ll get through it.

And that takes us from good to great!