The Bell Curve V. the Double Hump

Audio Transcript

If you look at the tenure in the good-to-great versus comparison companies, the amount of time that people are on the bus is very interesting. Eric Hagen on my team ran these numbers. If you look at the good-to-great study—and I think this was borne out in the visionary companies in Built to Last, too—in the comparison companies, the average amount of time on the bus is sort of a bell curve. There’s an average. Some stay short; some stay long.

In the good-to-great companies, it’s a double hump. People are either there for a very short time, or people are there for a very long time. If you show signs of being the wrong person {snaps fingers}, you’re gone. Gone. Gone. If you show signs of being the right person—“My God, what can we do to make it such that you will never leave this bus?” That’s how they thought about it.