Question for Sal

[Naperville]

Hi Al,

When we hire a new person to be part of the Spyderco crew, we give them an engraved plaque of "Desiderata".

sal

There’s a lot of good sense and humility in those lines. It reminds me a bit of Tecumseh’s ‘Live Your Life’ but geared more for comporting yourself in business.

@Naperville have you ever read or listened to Jim Collin’s ‘Good to Great’? If you have then you might want to gloss over the rest of this or it’ll be an exercise in sucking eggs . It’s basically a research project on businesses that fulfilled a rigorous set of criteria that identified them as ‘great’. The research team managed to identify out of tens of thousands of publicly listed companies over a few decades of sampling that only about 15 achieved their metric of Great. Within the book there is a chapter on Hedgehog Concepts that from the outside looking in I’d put money on Spyderco having refined their own. I also quietly reckon there might be more of what Collins refers to as Level 5 Leaders distributed throughout Spyderco’s employees at all levels than in your average company.

Being critical I don’t necessarily agree with all of Collin’s metrics of success (fiscal growth for growth’s sake being placed on a pedestal as the primary driver of a business for example), but their research findings are an interesting lens to look at things through.

Al

I checked Amazon and will order ther trillogy next month. I need a good management book to read.

[JoviAl]

Hi Al,

When we hire a new person to be part of the Spyderco crew, we give them an engraved plaque of "Desiderata".

sal

There’s a lot of good sense and humility in those lines. It reminds me a bit of Tecumseh’s ‘Live Your Life’ but geared more for comporting yourself in business.

@Naperville have you ever read or listened to Jim Collin’s ‘Good to Great’? If you have then you might want to gloss over the rest of this or it’ll be an exercise in sucking eggs . It’s basically a research project on businesses that fulfilled a rigorous set of criteria that identified them as ‘great’. The research team managed to identify out of tens of thousands of publicly listed companies over a few decades of sampling that only about 15 achieved their metric of Great. Within the book there is a chapter on Hedgehog Concepts that from the outside looking in I’d put money on Spyderco having refined their own. I also quietly reckon there might be more of what Collins refers to as Level 5 Leaders distributed throughout Spyderco’s employees at all levels than in your average company.

Being critical I don’t necessarily agree with all of Collin’s metrics of success (fiscal growth for growth’s sake being placed on a pedestal as the primary driver of a business for example), but their research findings are an interesting lens to look at things through.

Al

I checked Amazon and will order ther trillogy next month. I need a good management book to read.

I found a great deal on them on Audible as audiobooks (I like to listen while I’m doing the more repetitive aspects of arboriculture work). As management books go I found them quite approachable and easy to digest