Built to be great: T+D talks with Jim Collins about what it takes to go from good to great - Interview

T+D, August, 2002 by John Cone

Jim Collins, opening keynote speaker at the 2002 ASTD International Conference and Exposition in June, followed up his 1994 book with Jerry Porras, Built to Last, with the 2001 sequel Good to Great:

Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't, the result of a five-year research project on whether good companies can become great. Collins is interviewed by John Cone, chairman of the ASTD Board of Directors.

Collins: I feel as if I have been in a cave for years and I'm stumbling out and blinking my eyes in the sunlight.

Cone: Well, the new book has been well received.

Collins: More so than I could have imagined. I think we're about five months into its life now [at press time], and it's already past where Built to Last was two years into its life. We're at about 18 printings and 250,000 copies in print in North America. I never would have imagined that.

Cone: Do you attribute that to the strength or nature of the message, or is this just a time when people are incredibly hungry for help?

Collins: I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that the approach in our research is so different- starting with a big question and then letting the evidence lead us ultimately to the answers. Three things really help us.

One is that we start with a great question. In this case, Can good become great, and how would you take something good and make it great? That's an intrinsically human question that grabs all of us at some reasonably deep level. The question itself is much bigger than a business question, and I think that's its strength.

Two is the integrity of our approach. We never set out to prove an existing point of view. What generally passes as "management research" is that somebody has a particular point of view or lens on the world and he or she tries to assemble examples that prove that point of view. We take a very different approach, which is that we don't know what the answers are and if they end up being something we didn't expect, all the better. And if the answers turn out to be something we don't like, so it goes. In this study, several of the answers were unexpected, and a subset of those were ones I really don't like.

Three is just sheer luck of timing. Large chunks of the American society and economy are waking up to the fact that for 10 years, we lived under a national delusion that we had widespread greatness when, in fact, we had widespread mediocrity buoyed by a great market.

Cone: Regarding all of the answers you didn't like, which did you like the least?

Collins: Number 1, I consider the whole Level 5 leadership finding (see page 26) to be very challenging. When I look at it, I feel overwhelmed. It's such a [high] standard and so contrary to what I've been brought up in culturally. I know it's going to be a long, hard road in my own case to try to evolve towards anything resembling Level 5. So, that finding-which is true, and I believe in it deeply-is disturbing because it's a challenge to think about becoming a Level 5.

Another finding that I think is particularly challenging is the idea of "first who and then what." I've always loved the idea of coming up with really neat "whats" and then figuring out who can get those done. What's challenging is to invert that. It's a complete change in almost my entire lifestyle, and yet it's clearly supported by the evidence.

Cone: I can resonate with that. I had the same reaction to the book--thinking about myself and the organizations I've been in--that I'm not sure I could be a Level 5. I'm interested in how what you learned has affected the way you run your own organization. Have you decided there are things you're not going to attempt and other things you can do?

Collins: First, we never want to build anything large. I haven't really tried to build a business, so in that sense, the ideas aren't directly applicable. That said, what was really interesting was how as we uncovered the findings, they began to change the way we ran the team that was uncovering the findings. The short answer is that this study had a more profound effect on me and the way we operate than the Built to Last study did.

For example, as the project unfolded, there's no question that I shifted away from a "what" perspective to a "who" perspective. I worried less about people's backgrounds and much more about assembling the right "whos." Then, we figured it out from there.

In the middle of the project, the whole notion of a culture of discipline began to affect my own thinking about how to operate a team. For example, the idea behind a culture of discipline is that you have people who understand they have a responsibility, nor a job, and they have freedom within the context of that responsibility. My research team consisted of graduate students working for me for the summers. About halfway through each summer, I'd turn to my research assistants and say, "Here's the deal: You can leave and take the whole second half of the summer off, and I'll pay you. Only you don't get to come to any more team meetings or finish your piece of the project."