The cellular structure of any truly great organization is the well-led unit, for this is where great things get done. Great leadership at the top doesn’t amount to very much without exceptional leadership at the unit level. If you want to build a truly great company or social-sector enterprise, you need to cultivate legions of unit leaders who, in turn, create unit cohesion in pursuit of audacious objectives. If you want to scale your culture, if you want to make the journey from great company to enduring great company, you must invest in building a pipeline of the right unit leaders.

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

Superior Results

In business, performance is defined by financial results—return on invested capital—and achievement of corporate purpose. In the social sectors, performance is defined by results and efficiency in delivering on the social mission. But whether you’re operating in business or the social sectors, you must achieve top-flight results. To use an analogy, if you’re a sports team, you must win championships; if you don’t find a way to win at your chosen game, you cannot be considered truly great.

Distinctive Impact

A truly great enterprise makes such a unique contribution to the communities it touches and does its work with such unadulterated excellence that, if it were to disappear, it would leave a gaping hole that couldn’t be easily filled by any other institution on the planet. If your company went away, who would miss it and why? This does not require being big; think of a small but fabulous local restaurant that would be terribly missed if it disappeared. Big does not equal great, and great does not equal big.

Lasting Endurance

A truly great organization prospers over a long period of time, beyond any great idea, market opportunity, technology cycle, or well-funded program. When clobbered by setbacks, it finds a way to bounce back stronger than before. A great enterprise transcends dependence on any single extraordinary leader; if your organization cannot be great without you, then it is not yet truly great.

But there’s also a hopeful story to tell. Companies can sustain greatness for decades, even if only a few do so. What this means is that you never get to the “end” of The Map. You’re never done with the journey. You’re never done with the need for disciplined people who engage in disciplined thought and take disciplined action. You’re never done renewing the company so that it might be built to last. You’re never done preparing for bad luck and capitalizing on good luck, getting a higher return on luck than others. Greatness is an inherently dynamic process, not an end point.

The Map doesn’t guarantee a great outcome. But those who adhere to its principles—and who do so with joyful intensity—have much better odds of building a great company that can endure than those who don’t. Along the way, perhaps as more of a by-product than a goal, they just might find the daily happiness that comes from doing meaningful work with people they truly like and deeply respect. And it’s hard to have a better life than that.

We not only lack fixed criteria of what constitutes greatness in poetry: to have such criteria would be to miss a vital component of poetic greatness. When we describe a great poem, we use words like freshness and originality. Great poets do not necessarily conform to accepted concepts of what constitutes great poetry, they do not only break the rules, they redefine them. Such obliquity is a key part of what makes poets great.