Jim Collins is a student and teacher of enduring great companies — how they grow, how they attain superior performance, and how good companies can become great companies. Having invested over a decade of research into the topic, Jim has authored or co-authored five books, including the classic BUILT TO LAST, a fixture on the BusinessWeek best seller list for more than six years, and has been translated into 29 languages. His work has been featured in Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, BusinessWeek, Harvard Business Review, and Fast Company.
Jim’s book, GOOD TO GREAT: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … And Others Don’t attained long-running positions on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and BusinessWeek best seller lists. It has sold 3.5 million hardcover copies since publication and has been translated into 35 languages, including such languages as Latvian, Mongolian and Vietnamese.
His most recent book, HOW THE MIGHTY FALL: And Why Some Companies Never Give In was published in May, 2009.
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 social sectors. 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.
Jim has served as a teacher to senior executives and CEOs at over a hundred corporations. He has also worked with social sector organizations, such as: Johns Hopkins Medical School, the Girl Scouts of the USA, the Leadership Network of Churches, the American Association of K-12 School Superintendents, and the United States Marine Corps. In 2005 he published a monograph: Good to Great and the Social Sectors.
In addition, Jim is an avid rock climber and has made one-day ascents of the North Face of Half Dome and the Nose route on the South Face of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley. He continues to climb at the 5.13 grade.
- Good is the enemy of great.
- Greatness is not primarily a function of circumstance.
- Greatness is a matter of conscious choice and discipline.
- Why do some companies, organizations and their leaders truly thrive in the face of immense uncertainty and chaos?
- When you are buffeted by distraction, what distinguishes those from those who perform exceptionally well?
- We are great by choice.
- The answer is not what happens to you, it’s the choices, decisions, actions, and disciplines that you make that separate the good from the great.
- Life is people.
- What distinguishes the good leaders from the great leaders is the ability to get the right people in the right seats on the bus.
- If you get the right people on the bus you will get the best outcomes.
- When you are facing a challenge, uncertainty, or a question, change every “what” question into a “who” question.
- It’s not about your strategy as you climb the mountain, its who you have climbing with you.
- Who will get you where you need to go?
- There is still leadership in all of this.
- We have to ask the question what distinguishes those exceptional leaders?
- It’s not personality.
- Our culture reveres personality and charismatic forces.
- Personality is not the same as leadership.
- Most of the great leaders of our time don’t have great personalities.
- “When the going gets weird, the weird becomes the CEO.”
- Leaders are qualified because they have the courage to respond to the call to do something.
- It’s not about personality, it’s about humility.
- Leadership begins with humility.
- It’s a humility that is reflected in an unrelenting will to see something done.
- The great fall in series of stages.
- Failure starts with arrogance.
- The arrogance to think we can neglect our calling, our people, and to believe.
- Just because our intentions are good and our purpose is noble, all of our decisions won’t be wise ones.
- Bad decisions taken with good intentions are still bad decisions.
- Over-reaching and an undisciplined desire for more is what leads the mighty to fall.
- The more uncertain and chaotic your environment, you need a “20 mile march.”
- You need self-control in an out-of-control world.
- At times of uncertainty, we often look to other people for clues and cues.
- Great leaders use their creativity married to empirical data to make decisions.
- They don’t try to overly-innovate, they figure out what actually works.
- Fire bullets, then fire cannonballs.
- True innovation happens with empirical creativity.
- You need to be prepared for what you can’t predict.
- Channel anxiety about the future into productive paranoia.
- The only mistakes you learn from are the ones you survive.
- The signature of mediocrity is not an unwillingness to change, innovate, or grow; it’s chronic inconsistency.
- What can we be consistent with for a long period of time?
- Our values.
- Preserve the core and stimulate progress.
- Hold onto your values.
- There’s a difference between values and practices.
- Change your practices but keep your values.
- Change how you do it but don’t change why.
- What are your core values?
- We face dark, uncertain times.
- We don’t know what’s coming next.
- “How do you make yourself useful?”
- The path out of darkness begins with people who will decide how to make themselves useful.
- Evidence comes in many forms.
- Test inspired ideas first.
- Input can come from many places.
- When you fire a cannonball, you want to make sure it will hit the ship.
- We need a lot of innovation but most people aren’t signing up to be the innovators.
- Innovation is important but just more and more innovation without discipline only carries you so far.
- Creativity is human; to be human is to be creative.
- The great challenge is how to marry creativity with discipline so that discipline amplifies creativity without destroying it.
