If shearing layers is about how organisations work then skippiness is my hope for their potential.

In my head, this whole debate started with Jim Collins’ Good to Great (which you can find here). Last time I looked, actually the only time I looked, just now, Good to Great was ranked number one on Amazon’s Small Business and Entrepreneurship, Strategy & Competition and Systems & Planning lists and number seventy-one in all books. There’s obviously an appetite for great, but what is great?

There’s nothing wrong with Collins’ definition, nothing wrong indeed with averaging cumulative stock returns 6.9 times the general market over fifteen years, and nothing wrong at all with level five leadership, with hedgehogs or with flywheels. Love the book, love the stories, love the levers. But it left me hanging. I know great is out there, I’m just not sure what it is.

Skippiness, which is definitely a made up word, is my working definition of what great means to me – and it’s not about beating the market, it’s about companies with:

Skippy Staff

who skip in to work, ready, willing and able to take on the challenges of the day whilst working toward worthwhile long term goals

Skippy Customers

with products and services so good, customers quietly appoint themselves as guerilla evangelists

Skippy Owners

who get what they want from their investments, in abundance.

So the debate about definitions started with Collins, he forced me to get specific, but the desire for skippiness goes much further back – right around the time when I had my first experience of the Gallup classic,

“people join organisations but leave their boss.”

Why do so many organisations fail to live up to their promise? Why can’t more companies offer great jobs, great products and services, and be fantastic investments?

They’re the ones we all love, companies that skip.

What have they got? How does it happen?

Put skippiness together with shearing layers. How to build the slow so everyone skips?