In today’s world, it’s fashionable to model leadership success after companies like Uber, Airbnb, Tesla, and Netflix. In this blog article, I’m going to reach back and draw upon the leadership lessons from companies like Philip Morris, Circuit City, and Walgreens. Why on earth would I do that? About 15 years ago, I read the quintessential leadership book of its time: Jim Collins’ Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t. Since then, and the hundreds of books I’ve read, this still rings true as my #1 leadership text.

What fascinated me about this book is the scenario of the study. Collins and his team of researchers looked across the sea of thousands of public companies to find ones that had an established history of trending with the market, then at a transition point, started exceeding the market and sustained that new trajectory over a long period of time.

12 companies fit that criteria. The rest of the book dealt with answering the hard question: How did they do that? More importantly, what qualities did these 12 companies have that no one else had?

I’m not a CEO of a major corporation, I’m a technology leader, so what does this have to do with me? Well, it just so happens that successful startups are a poor analogy for the average enterprise technology team. The thing is, enterprise technology isn’t new. My company has had an IT department since the mid-60’s, and yours probably has too. As a technology leader, I don’t get a greenfield opportunity. Instead, I have to take what has been established for a long time, and transition it to something high-performing, then sustain it. I’ll spend the rest of this article taking my favorite concepts from this book and applying them to enterprise technology

Level 5 Leadership

Collins defined Level 5 Leadership as a duality: modest and willful, humble and fearless. They don’t have huge personalities. They speak softly. They drive hard and defer credit. I’ve been intentionally developing myself as a Level 5 Leader for 15 years. I often have the feeling that it may take another 15 or 30 to get there. This is hard work, but it’s well suited for technology leaders. As I’ve written previously, technologists are often introverted and stubborn. This is an excellent temperament to start with when developing into a Level 5 Leader. It’s not obvious, but I believe technologists may have an advantage over a naturally gregarious, socialite, salesperson. Read these articles for more on this subject.

First Who, Then What

Before a team transitions to greatness, it needs to have the right people. You really cannot figure out the path to greatness with them. That’s why early in the process, leaders need to figure out if they have “the right people on the bus” and “the right people in the right seats on the bus.” Then together, we can figure out where we should drive the bus. Sometimes you have a highly talented senior engineer that hurts the team dynamic, or has a mentality that’s stuck in the past. Sometimes you have an excellent team player that’s performing poorly because they are in the wrong role. These adjustments are difficult and time consuming for leadership, but they are necessary at the front-end of any transition to greatness.

The Flywheel

Flywheels are pretty cool in the world of mechanical and electrical engineering. You can read all about them here. We even have a flywheel UPS running in one of our enterprise data centers. It’s amazing to think that the just the momentum alone of a spinning wheel could satisfy the enormous power draw of an enterprise data center during a brief utility outage.

The same concept applies to technology teams transitioning to greatness. It’s common for technology teams to be bogged down by reactive support. When that’s the pattern, it takes an extreme amount of effort to become proactive. That energy expense consists of paying down tech debt, refreshing legacy systems, implementing service management disciplines, and fixing bad architectures. That’s a ton of work, but that’s what it takes to get the flywheel spinning. The beauty is, once it starts spinning, the energy to keep it spinning is negligible. With the upfront investment made, the team can enjoy the fruits of their labor and spend the majority of their time on the proactive, growth-oriented work that’s dead-center in the Hedgehog Concept.

The Hedgehog Concept

A hedgehog has one trick, one defense. It rolls up in a ball. It’s really good at it, and when it’s in that position, it’s nearly impenetrable. Just as large companies try to be all things to all people, technology teams fall into the same trap. Enterprise technology can get spread really thin, trying to adequately support everything that has electrons flowing through it. The lesson of the hedgehog is focus. We need to find the intersection of three things:

1. What are you deeply passionate about?
2. What you can be the best in the world at?
3. What drives your economic engine?

Those are straight from the book. To contextualize these for enterprise technology might look like this:

1. What areas of technology innovation motivate you?
2. What world-class capabilities and skill-sets do you have on your team?
3. What matters most to your company?

There are multiple answers to each of those questions, but if there’s a common element among them all, then that’s your hedgehog. Focus your energy and resources there. The rest is just context. No technology team has the resources to be great at everything. Pick the most important thing and do that really really well.

Those are my key-takeaways from this time-tested leadership book. There’s a ton more to glean from this seminal text. If you haven’t read it, pick it up. If you think about Good to Great as dated, or as something just for CEOs, hopefully I’ve convinced you otherwise. If you have read this book, I’d love you hear your reflections. What were your big takeaways and lessons learned? Please share in the comments below.