What You Should Know About Building a Pocket of Greatness in 21st Century Real Estate
Do you know which company attained the number one-spot in terms of return to investors on a dollar-for-dollar basis, of all U. S. publicly traded companies from 1972 to 2002?
It wasn’t GE. Nor Microsoft. Not even Wal-Mart.
Who came out number one? According to a 30 year analysis in Money Magazine, the winner was Southwest Airlines.
Think about that for a minute.
There’s Something Wrong with This Picture
You cannot imagine a worse industry than airlines over this 30-year period: fuel shocks, deregulation, brutal competition, labor strife, 9/11, huge fixed costs, bankruptcy after bankruptcy after bankruptcy.
And yet, according to Money Magazine calculations, a $10,000 investment in Southwest in 1972 would have returned more than $10 million by 2002.
Meanwhile, United fell into bankruptcy, American limped along and the airline industry remained one of the worst imaginable. Not only that, airlines that had the same model as Southwest got killed along the way.
Airline executives have habitually blamed industry circumstances, ignoring the fact that the number one best performing investment in the universe of American public companies over a 30 year period–is just like them–an airline.
Now consider a question: what if the people at Southwest had said, “Hey, we can’t do anything great until we fix the systems constraints facing the airline industry?”
Jim Collins notes that he’s conducted a number of Socratic teaching sessions in the social sectors, and in that time says that he’s encountered an interesting dynamic: people often obsess on obstacles in the system.
At one gathering of nonprofit health care leaders he asked the question “What needs to happen for you to build great hospitals?”
The group poured out a litany of excuses.
Confront the Brutal Facts
Next Collins sorted the people into discussion groups and gave them the task of finding one health care organization that made the leap to sustained superior results, and most came up with at least one solid example.
After that, he made them go back into their groups and find one organization that faced comparable circumstances, but did not make the leap.
The groups went to work and for the most part came up with solid candidates.
He finally asked the groups to identify why some organizations made breakthroughs while others facing similar [if not identical] constraints did not.
His point was this: what if these organizations that went from good to great had all given up hope, thrown up their hands and waited for the system to get fixed?
It might take decades to change the entire context, and you might be retired or dead by the time those changes come. In the meantime, what are you going to do now?
This is where the Stockdale Paradox comes into play: You must retain faith that you can prevail to greatness in the end, while retaining the discipline to confront the brutal facts of your current reality.
A Tough But Doable Task
So the question to you is: What can you do today to create a pocket of greatness, despite the brutal facts of your environment?
In the end, greatness is not a function of circumstance. Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of conscious choice, and discipline in strategy, marketing and execution.
Leave a comment if this post was helpful or if you have anything you’d like to add.
Related Articles
How to Carve Out Your Place in Real Estate History
Guarantee Your Success with This Strategic Planning Tool
The Top 10 Miracles of Real Estate Research
Competing with Proctor & Gamble
6 Unorthodox Ways to Become a Market Shaker
SEO as a Marketing Strategy for Real Estate
If you like what you read, subscribe to the Real Estate Marketing Blog.
