The Six Secrets to Business Excellence

ChangeThis has posted John Spence's essay Achieving Business Excellence . In it, Spence argues that there are six things all excellent businesses have in common (I have summed and in some cases paraphrased):

1. Vivid vision, well articulated.

2. The best people, who also collaborate well.

3. A performance-oriented culture, with no tolerance for the mediocre.

4. Robust, honest communications, both internally and externally (especially with customers).

5. A sense of urgency.

6. Extreme customer focus.

Spence himself says that "I was more than a bit disappointed that (this list) was so similar to the six key characterisics of outstanding leaders I'd outlined in my first book, "Excellence by Design: Leadership." He concludes that it is inevitable that outstanding companies will reflect similar characteristics with outstanding leaders.

Whether that means he won't write a book about excellent companies after all remains to be seen.

What do you think of his list? Wisdom, but hard to implement (in other words, please write the book)? Or truisms that don't warrant anything more than his ChangeThis manifesto?