#110 Jim Collins: Relationships vs. Transactions

Bill [Lazier] believed that people break into two buckets. There are those who kind of come at life as a series of transactions and there are people who come at life as building relationships ... The only way to have a really great life is on the relationship side.

People have such a need to resolve ambiguity and uncertainty that they often act quicker than they need to because it's dealing with their own need to make the uncertainty go away.

Writing is just hard. I think of writing as—it's like running. If you're going to run your best, it's always gonna hurt ... It never gets easier; you only get better.

When I entered my 20s, when I think about kind of choosing mentors and creating a father, I did three things. The first was I just made a simple goal: I'm going to read 100 biographies. And I figured that by reading 100 biographies, I would get a hundred lives and those lives would teach me something.

You must never confuse the need, on the one hand, for absolute unwavering faith that you can and you will prevail in the end with the need, on the other hand, for the discipline to confront the most brutal facts as they actually are right now.

A really great relationship is one where, if you ask each person independently, 'Who benefits more from the relationship?' They would each say 'Well, I do.'

There is no correlation between consensus decisions and intelligent decisions. In the history of corporate history, most great decisions are taken where there's still substantial disagreement still in the air, and they are taken without a need for consensus.

The real swing variable in being an entrepreneur is the probability that you will start, not the probability that you will succeed if you start.

Every successful company has a recipe of some things they do over and over again ... How much do those recipes change over time? One set of companies changes the recipe about 80% over, say, 30 years, and the other changes the recipe about 20%. Which group is the more successful companies? The 20% change.