Interview: Jim Collins

Jim Collins

Collins is a student of enduring great companies — how they grow, how they attain superior performance, and how good companies can become great companies. Driven by a relentless curiosity, he began his research and teaching career on the faculty of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. After seven years at Stanford, he returned to his hometown of Boulder, Colorado, to found his management research laboratory. He is fond of saying, “I am a self-employed professor who endowed his own chair and granted himself tenure.” He has authored or co-authored several books, including Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies with Jerry Porras, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don’t and most recently, How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In.

Here is a brief excerpt from my interview of Collins.

Morris: In Good to Great, you and your associates committed more than 15,000 hours of research to answering two questions: “Is it possible for a good, mediocre or even terrible organization to become great? If so, what are the underlying variables that enable it to do so?” Of all that you learned, what surprised you most?

Collins: We learned that companies in the most unlikely of circumstances can become great. Who would have thought that Walgreens could reach a point of beating the general stock market by fifteen times? Or that Nucor — a steel company — could beat the market nine times? We were surprised largely by what it did not take to make a great company. For example:

• Charismatic leaders are negatively correlated with greatness over time.

• Executive compensation has little bearing on whether or not a company becomes great.

• You should first get the right people on the bus and then figure out where to drive it — not the other way around.

• Better to confront the brutal facts than to set grand and lofty visions, at least at the start.

• Technology has virtually nothing to do with making a company great; it can only accelerate pre-existing greatness.

If you wish to read the entire Collins interview, please contact me at interllect@mindspring.com.