Amateur Radio Clubs:

Good to Great; Good to Gone; Lost in Mediocracy

“Good is the enemey of Great.

And that is one of the key reasons why we have so little that becomes great.  We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good schools.  We don’t have great government, principally becase we have good government. 

Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life.  The vast majority of companies never become great, percisely because the vast majority become quite good – and the is their main problem.

Can a good company become a great company and, if so, how? 

Or is the disease of “just being good” incurable?” — Good to Great – Jim Collins

This quote is in the opening chapter to Jim Collins book Good to Great.  Collins says that curiosity set him off along with 20 other researchers on a 5 year research effort to disoverthe answer to this fundamental question – How does a company or organization go from good to great?

Good to Great is a follow-on book to another book written by Collins -  Built to last : successful habits of visionary companies.  Built to Last is about how to take a company with great results and turn it into an enduring great company.  Built to Last was published before Good to Great.  But, in the order of things. Good to Great should preceed Built to Last.  You need to know how to make a great company first, and then ensure it is built to last – a sort of prescriptive architecure for building great companies or organizations.  This set of Collins books – Good to Great and Built to Last have nearly iconic status by management consultants and those who study organizational behavior. 

Folks who read these books started asking how these ideas that Collins et al discovered during their research would apply to non-profits and the public sector.  Collins followed up with a short monograph: Good to Great and the Social Sectors.

The Search

How did Collins go about finding companies that went from good to great?  Briefly, he looked at financial results of companies from the Fortune 500 over a 30 year period from 1965 to 1995. 

What Collins was looking for are companies that had a clear transition point from below market performance for 15 years to above market performance by at least three times the market performance sustained for at least 15 years.  Such a longitudinalstudy over 30 years would ferret out those companies that fit the model “Good to Great” adjusting for short term “one hit wonders”, sheer luck, and the average tenure of a particular CEO.  As you can see these companies also would be interesting subjects for “Built to Last”.

The Mission of this web site

If you read our mission statement of this web site you will see that it really has two missions – two basic reasons for this site to exist.  This type of bifurcation of mission is not recommended – it lacks focus.  But there is a reason for this.  First, this site is primarily a site for Amateur Radio folks – that is the segment we carved out as the audience for this site.  Second, we think we found a niche for sort of our own reseach projectinthe style of Collins books that we just mentioned and the whole corpus of books under the general rubric of Leadership, Management, and Organizational behavior.  We think that there is much to learn from non-profits such as Amateur Radio clubs for reasons we will write about in later postings.

So, bottom line on the strategy on this site.  First, you will find a lot of original content technical articles on this site.  This should attract the Amateur Radio folks.  Second, we will be writing about organizational behavior.  It is unlikely that Amateur Radio folks would come to a site focused exclusively on organizational behavior.  But, we want Amateur Radio folks to come here and tell us their stories about their clubs – good to great, good to gone, or lost in enduring and endless mediocrity. 

The intentional intended “unintended consequence” is that we expect to ferrtout other Amateur Radio folks that are also interested in our mission of “good to great” as applied to non-profits in general and Amateur Radio clubs “good to great” in particular.  The segment most likely to respond to this are those folks in Amateur Radio clubs that are on Boards of Directors, served in a leadership role such as President or Vice President, or perhaps folks who lead committees in these organizations.  More precisely, we are looking for people who have an interest in architecting organizations beyond their tenure in these leadership roles – “Built to Last”.

You never know who you might snag.  Just like looking through the stacks in a library for a particular book you come across books that may be more interesting than the book you went there for in the first place. We hope that this happens and folks coming here reading our technical articles find our postings on organizational behavior of Amateur Radio clubs interesting to the point that they can make a contribution of a story of take something back to their Amateur Radio club and get on the road of good to great.  Amateur Radio folks may not think they are interested in architecting great organizations.  But they might be after reading this site and finding that there are folks with similar goals.

Engaging the ARRL

Of course there is another expectation.  The expectation is that we can entice the ARRL (American Radio Relay League) to widen its scope as to how it engages ARRLaffiliated clubs at the local level.  At least in the Chicagoland area some Amateur Radio clubs have gone from “good to gone “or “good to ‘life support’”.  This should not happen.  The ARRL should help these clubs out as part of thie overall mission of ensuring the sustainment and growth of the Amateur Radio Service.

Casting a wide net

So how do we find folks that might be interested in our mission?  The ARRL (American Radio Relay League) makes that easy.  They maintain an affiliated clubs search.  With a little bit of hard work we now have a direct mailing list of slightlyover 2,000 clubs.  We will promote our site on a regular basis to this target segment.  If we pick up non Amateur Radio folks via google searches on our keywords – all the better.

Good to Great; Good to Gone; Lost in mediocracy

We have watched the Amateur Radio Clubs in the Chicagoland area for the past 15 years.  This is the place we will start telling stories on how these clubs work against published research of those folks like Collins that study real companies and find out why organizations are great, fail, or fall into endless meritocracy.

Kaizen

There is a word in Japanese “Kaizen”. Kaizen means “continuous improvement” and is a foundational element underlying the management and leadership philosophy the Toyota Corporation and the Toyota Production System.  Toyota is a much studied company and many believe that part of Toyotas underlying success is its leadership philosophy which includes, as one of the five original precepts, “Kaizen”.

So what about organizations in general andAmateurRadio clubs in particular – do they contain a fundamental  element of “Kaizen” or do they just flounder?

“Everyone should tackle some great project at least once in life”

- Sakichi Toyoda (1867-1920), father of Kiichiro Toyota, the founder of Toyota.

To be Great you first need to want to be great.  How many of the 2,000 ARRL affiliated clubs have committed to such a goal? – or would commit to such a goal if they could get engaged with like-minded people on the same mission?

This is what we intend to find out as part of the mission and goal of our mini-research project that you can read about on this site – along with the technical articles.

How many Amateur Radio folks think like Sakichi Toyoda and want to tackle such a project for their club – Good to Great?

Or is the disease of “just being good” incurable?

Resources

Books mentioned in this article

Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t

Good to Great and the Social Sectors

Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies

How Toyota Became #1; Leadership Lessons from the Worlds Greatest Car Company

Extreme Toyota: Radical Contraditions that Drive Sucess at the Worlds Best Manufacturer

Who is Jim Collins?

“Driven by a relentless curiosity, Jim began his research and teaching career on the faculty at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992. In 1995, he founded a management laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, where he now conducts research and teaches executives from the corporate and socialsectors. Jim holds degrees in business administration and mathematical sciences from Stanford University, and honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Colorado and the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University.”