1/11/15

In the next segment of Good to Great, Collins talks about another factor he noticed in his studies that differentiates good companies from ones that are truly great. This factor is the “culture of discipline”. Initially, I was surprised to see that a culture of discipline is another thing that helps companies go from being good to being great, because I thought that a culture of discipline means a culture where everything is extremely strict and there is no tolerance to deviating from the assigned task. For example, this would mean penalizing an employee for spending working hours organizing a messy filing cabinet that he wasn’t assigned to clean. Collins, however, clearly states that this is not what he means by a culture of discipline. His meaning of a culture of discipline is a culture where every employee and manager has determination and motivation to succeed. This means that each employee functions as an entrepreneur, in the sense that he/she has a role that at least feels vital to the success of the company, and has results that speak for themselves. Each employee has a lot of personal interest in making the company succeed, thus leading to more motivation and better work. To me, this concept seems like an excellent thing to strive for, but I wouldn’t know how corporations would be able to foster such an environment. Especially in large companies, where there are thousands of employees, how could such a culture be fostered? I feel like it would be very difficult to create such intense motivation in a large number of workers. That said, I would definitely create company mottos that foster these levels of engagement and discipline, as the results clearly speak for themselves. This is the first section of the book where I really feel the concept is absolutely essential to the success of a corporation. In our group projects at the moment, a lot of things are going on, and we are picking up the pace. For the $200 project, we are starting to sell our bottles to the population at BHS, so far without the success we were hoping for. Initially, we relied on flyers in homeroom boxes to spread the word about the bottles. We were hoping that these flyers would drive people to contact us, and we would sell bottles. However, people didn’t really seem to take interest in the flyers, and we weren’t able to sell many bottles that way. Our next selling plan will involve setting up a table in highly populated areas and actively selling to passersby. We hope that the human interactions while selling will get people more motivated to purchase our bottles. For the storefront project, we have our big presentation for our investors coming up. I personally am devoting most of my time to working on the presentation for this project, since I want it to really look professional and be impressive to our potential investors. I will attempt to make digitalized diagrams of the store, and put it in the presentation to give the potential investors a visual look to complement the numbers. It is very important to me that each person in our group brings his/her best work to this presentation, so that all of our hard work will be evident from our presentation. I believe that a good company (i.e. our storefront) with a bad presentation wouldn’t get an investment, since people will overlook the potential and instead focus on the terrible quality of the presentation. That is why I really want to make sure our presentation is as good as it can be.