The Right People

From Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… And Others Don’t (HarperBusiness, 2001), Chapter 3, “First Who…Then What.” Collins’s argument is that the good-to-great companies got the “right people on the bus” before deciding where to drive it; the chapter’s three practical disciplines (when in doubt don’t hire; act on personnel changes once one is clearly needed; put your best people on the biggest opportunities) follow from that sequence.

The line inverts the corporate cliché that people are an organization’s most important asset. Without the qualifier, every hire counts the same once it is made, which rewards seat-filling. Collins makes fit a precondition: whether someone should be on the bus at all is settled before how to deploy them.