The Language of Excellence is body of work I created as a teaching aid. It takes the most fundamental elements of management theory and practice and distills the content into simple and readily teachable images and phrases for aligning an entire organization from top to bottom. It has the capacity to start a conversation that can lead an organization to greatness. In writing about The Language of Excellence, the CEO of LIVESTRONG Foundation said “…teaches you how to equip your team to deal with almost anything business or life will throw at them.” Ed Rosenberg, CEO of Spectore Corporation wrote, “Collins defines the essential ingredients in a business with masterful simplicity and clarity.” The Language of Excellence series includes:
- The Language of Excellence Book (hardcover, paperback and as an e-book)
- The Language of Excellence Newsletter
- The Language of Excellence Blog
- The Language of Excellence Lecture Series
I have been called one of the pioneers of the information technology service industry. It is more accurate to say I have lived several business lives in the course of my career. I started my journey as a CPA with Price Waterhouse & Co., now PricewaterhouseCoopers. Since then I participated in the boom-and-bust of the franchise movement, the conglomerate age, and a dozen iterations of the technology industry—from service bureaus, to remote processing computer utilities, to online services, to turnkey minicomputers, and then the democratizational impact of the personal computer.
I have been hired, fired, gone public, gone private, and been both acquirer and acquired. By the mid-1980s, I thought I was retiring early to enjoy the good life. An associate, however, asked me to help narrow their business focus by selling off some of their smaller product lines. One of those was a small turnkey minicomputer group specializing in law firm business systems. Rather than selling it, I bought it. Just about that time, IBM introduced the PC, Novell figured out how to connect them into a network, and WordPerfect introduced word processing software for the PC. While the entrenched market leaders at the time were laughing off the PC as a toy, my new company, Juris, Inc., was taking over market leadership by capitalizing on the convergence of those three events.
Juris, Inc. was quite different from all my other business ventures. It came late in my career at a time when I did not have to worry about meeting the next payroll. There were no public shareholders, investment houses, or outside directors who had to be appeased. And I was smarter. I had learned that teaching people was more effective than directing them.
I discovered that when all members of an organization understand the implications of important management and leadership concepts, magic happens within that enterprise. It is as if someone pulls back the curtain and turns up the lights. Suspicions disappear, replaced by unity. To learn about the behavior of change, to gain an understanding of the rule of the fewest, to be able to put a name to observed phenomena such as the life cycle and suboptimization tears down the iron curtain between “management” and “employees.” A team arises—a competent team, one that shares a core set of beliefs and a common sense of direction—eager to help write their own playbook.
The Language of Excellence applies to life as well as business. It can be invaluable to the entrepreneur starting a new business or seasoned executives frustrated by the difficulty of steering an unresponsive corporate ship. The gift of the book or an introduction to the bog is the best gift one can give to a young professional.
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