Far better to be an uncharismatic leader who gets the right people to confront the brutal facts than to be a magnetic force of personality who leads compliant followers to disaster. If you have charisma, you can still build an enduring great company. But never forget: If your company cannot be great without your personal charisma to inspire, then it is not yet a great company.

The goal is to become a shaper of culture and builder of people so that the company can be great for decades beyond your own life span. When you’ve found people who are as fanatic about getting the essential details right as you are, when you’ve taught them how to build and lead a system that delivers consistent tactical excellence, when they strive to far surpass what you yourself achieve during your own tenure, then you’ve truly set the foundation for an enduring great company.

In the early phases of an organization, a company’s vision comes directly from its early leaders; it is very much their personal vision. To become great, however, a company must progress past excessive dependence on one or a few key individuals. The vision must become shared as a community, and become identified primarily with the organization, rather than with certain individuals running the organization. The vision must actually transcend the founders.

Let’s turn first to the inputs, beginning with the role of discipline. An overarching theme across our research findings is the role of discipline in separating the great from the mediocre. True discipline requires the independence of mind to reject pressures to conform in ways incompatible with values, performance standards, and long-term aspirations. The only legitimate form of discipline is self-discipline, having the inner will to do whatever it takes to create a great outcome, no matter how difficult. When you have disciplined people, you don’t need hierarchy. When you have disciplined thought, you don’t need bureaucracy. When you have disciplined action, you don’t need excessive controls. When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you create a powerful mixture that drives great performance.

To build an enduring great organization—whether in business or the social sectors—you need disciplined people who engage in disciplined thought and take disciplined action. Then you need the discipline to sustain momentum over a long period of time. This forms the backbone of the framework, laid out in four basic stages:

Stage 1: Disciplined People

Stage 2: Disciplined Thought

Stage 3: Disciplined Action

Stage 4: Building to Last

Level 5 leaders who build the greatest and most durable companies think first about “who” and then about “what.” They first get the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figure out where to drive the bus.

When you’re facing chaos, turbulence, disruption, and uncertainty, and you cannot possibly predict what’s coming around the corner, your best “strategy” is to have a busload of disciplined people who can adapt and perform brilliantly no matter what comes next. Our research supported what we came to call “Packard’s Law” (named in admiration after HP’s co-founder): No company can consistently grow faster than its ability to get enough of the right people and still become a great company. If a company consistently grows faster than its ability to get enough of the right people, it will not simply stagnate, it will fall. The number one metric to track isn’t revenue or profit or return on capital or cash flow; the number one metric is the percentage of key seats on the bus that are filled with right people for those seats. Everything depends on having the right people. (Directed reading: Good to Great, Chapter 3; BE 2.0, Chapter 2.)