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The keynote speaker for this CMIT
Conference is management thinker, author, and educator Jim
Collins. The
following biography was excerpted from his website.
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 co-authored three books, including the classic Built to
Last, a fixture on the Business Week Best Seller List for
more than five years, generating over 70 printings and translations
into 16 languages. His work has been featured in Fortune, The
Economist, USA Today, Industry Week, Inc.,
and Harvard Business Review.
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 multi-year research projects and
works with executives from the private, public, and social sectors.
Jim has served as a teacher to senior executives and CEOs at
corporations that include: Starbucks Coffee, Merck, Johnson &
Johnson, Times Mirror, Patagonia, Sears, ARCO, American General, W.L.
Gore, and hundreds more. He has also worked with the non-corporate
sector such as the Leadership Network of Churches, Johns Hopkins
Medical School, the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, The Peter F.
Drucker Foundation for Non-Profit Management, and Vice President Al
Gore's Reinventing Government Conference.
Jim invests a significant portion of his energy in large-scale
research projects -- often five or more years in duration -- to
develop fundamental insights and then translate those findings into
books, articles and lectures. He uses his management laboratory to
work directly with executives and to develop practical tools for
applying the concepts that flow from his research.
Jim is currently in the midst of completing a new research project
and writing a book on how executives can create significant and
lasting shifts in the performance and stature of their
organizations. The book, tentatively titled Good to Great,
will be available shortly.
The following is an excerpt for
Mr. Collins' soon to be released book from Harper Business
Publishers, Good to Great. This from the book's first
chapter, "Good is the Enemy of Great."
Good is the enemy of great.
And that is one key reason why we have so little that becomes great.
We don’t have great schools, principally because we have good
schools. We don’t have great government, precisely because we have
good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part
because it’s just so easy to settle for a good life. The vast
majority of companies never become great, precisely because the vast
majority become quite good – and that is their main problem.
This point became piercingly clear to me in 1996, when I was having
dinner with a group of thought leaders gathered for a wide ranging
discussion about organizational performance. Bill Meehan, the
managing director of the San Francisco office of McKinsey &
Company, leaned over and casually confided, “You know, Jim, we
love Built to Last around here. You and your co-author did a very
fine job on the research and writing. Unfortunately, it’s
useless.”
Now, people had said a lot of different things about our six-year
study into what makes enduring great companies, but “useless”
was not a comment I’d heard before. Curious, I asked him to
explain.
“If you look closely, you’ll notice that the companies you wrote
about were, for the most part, always great,” he said. “They
never had to turn themselves from good companies into great
companies. They had parents like David Packard and George Merck, who
shaped the character of greatness from early on. They grew up as
great companies – great small companies, great medium sized
companies, and then great large companies. But what about the vast
majority of companies that wake up part way through life and realize
that they’re good, but not great?”
And that planted a seed of inquiry. Not that I agreed with his
“useless” comment; I didn’t then, and I don’t now. But he
was absolutely correct in his observation that the truly great
companies, for the most part, have always been great. And the vast
majority of good companies remain just that – good, but not great.
Sitting in the San Francisco airport on my way back home to Boulder,
Colorado, I almost missed my flight as I racked my brain in an
attempt to construct a list of great companies that had once been
mediocre, companies that had turned themselves from good into great.
Now, an airport lounge is not the best place for serious thinking
and research. Yet, despite having dedicated my working life to
learning and teaching about what makes enduring great organizations,
and having co-authored three books on the subject, I drew a blank in
trying to come up with modern examples of good to great. At first
cut, it seemed that every great company I’d examined or written
about – companies like Merck, Hewlett-Packard, and General
Electric -- could trace the genetics of greatness to when it was
young or small.
Is the disease of “just being good” incurable? If you didn’t
have great parenting, are you doomed to lifelong mediocrity? Can
that which is good ever become great? Could Westinghouse become GE?
Could AT&T become Cisco Systems? Could K-Mart become Wal-Mart?
These questions banged around in my head as I flew home, still
trying to construct a list of good to great examples, and still
largely drawing a blank. And the more I thought about it, the more I
liked the question, as it goes beyond just business and
corporations. It is a deeply human question, going to the heart of
the difference between good and great, mediocrity and excellence.
If you could understand the inner workings and timeless principles
of good to great, then you’d have something of value not only to
corporations, but also to any type of organization or society that
wanted to make a significant shift in stature and performance.
Perhaps the University of Colorado at Boulder could become the
caliber of the University of California at Berkeley. Perhaps the San
Francisco Chronicle could become as respected and influential as the
New York Times. Perhaps the United States Post Office could become
as well run as Federal Express and UPS. Good schools might become
great schools. Good government agencies might become great agencies.
Not to mention that good companies might become great companies.
By the time I’d arrived back at my research and teaching
laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, I knew the question of good to
great would be the next five years of my life, the guiding context
for the next big research project. I felt a great sense of relief,
as I’d been waiting patiently for the next question to present
itself, and living in fear that it never would. After the
publication of Built to Last in 1994, a six-year research project
looking at the question of what it takes to build enduring great
companies from the ground up, I found myself groping for what to
work on next. I love nothing more than the blissful tranquility of
complete immersion in a huge project designed to answer a worthy
question; having such a project eliminates all existential angst
about what to do with myself. I get up every morning and there is
“the project,” begging for attention like a loyal pet. But with
the book’s publication, a huge void opened in my life. The
residual momentum of the previous project pressed on me, tempting me
to dive headfirst into another one. And then, to everyone’s
surprise, we were blessed with the good luck of a bestseller. As the
book took off, the pressure from others to “get on with the next
one to capitalize on the last one” began to mount, further fueling
my angst about the need for a new question, a new project to fill
the gap.
Fortunately, my wife Joanne pulled me out of the muck. “Don’t
just do a new book to do a new book,” she offered. “Don’t rush
off looking for a new topic. Don’t pick a new question. Maybe it
would be best to wait until a question picks you.”
It was very wise advice, and I decided to follow it. I began the
long wait, hoping for a new question to pick me. Months went by,
then a year, then almost two years. And the more I waited, the more
I feared that a new question would never present itself. Oh, sure,
there were questions, but they were mainly derivative in nature, or
they didn’t ignite any deep passion. What I needed was a question
that would rise up and grab me around the throat and refuse to let
go until it had been answered, a question compelling in its own
right (not just a derivative follow-on to previous work), a question
whose answers would be worth the five years of hard work required to
get it right, a question that would inspire all the research
associates who would eventually join the effort.
Coming home from the dinner in San Francisco, I said to Joanne,
“The question has presented itself.” The very next morning, I
sat down on our back porch and sketched out the rough outline of a
diagram. On top of the diagram I put a single, elegant question:
“Can a good company become a great company and, if so, how?”
Armed with the question, we began the project. (When I say “we,”
as I will almost exclusively do throughout the rest of the book,
I’m referring to the entire research team. The team consisted of
22 research associates working together in groups of four to six at
a time from 1996 to 2000, mostly graduate students working full-time
during the summer and part-time during the academic year). In
essence, we said: “Let’s find companies that shifted from good
performance to great performance, and sustained it. Then let’s
carefully select a control set of comparison companies – companies
that had the same shot in life, sitting at the same place with the
same opportunities at the exact same time, but that failed to make a
sustained shift from good to great. And then let’s study the
contrast between the sets to discover the underlying variables that
distinguish those who go from good to great from those who could
have, but did not.”
We initially feared that good-to-great examples simply might not
exist. Perhaps the list I tried to make in the San Francisco airport
came up blank because it is just flat-out impossible to turn good
into great. We had nightmarish visions of presenting to rows of
executives from good organizations with the depressing message,
“Sorry folks. You’re all doomed to mediocrity, and there’s not
much you can do about it.”
Fortunately, we can now say, without question, that good to great
does happen, and we’ve learned much about the underlying variables
that make it happen. That’s the good news, and the rest of this
book is dedicated to teaching what we’ve learned about what it
takes to go from good to great.
At the same time, however, we must also say that good to great
doesn’t happen very often. We began with an initial list of 1435
companies that had appeared on the Fortune 500 from 1965 to 1995,
and set off on a six-month number crunching expedition that we came
to call the Death March of Financial Analysis, searching for
good-to-great examples. From that initial list of 1435, we found
eleven. That’s not a sample. That’s the total number that met
all our selection criteria. It’s not like we had fifty or a
hundred and picked eleven. We found only eleven, and picked them
all. Now, of course, there are other good-to-great companies out
there in the world somewhere, privately held, smaller, non-US, or
otherwise never having appeared on the Fortune 500. Still, the 11 of
1435 number is a bit shocking. Of course, that makes these eleven
cases just that much more interesting and extraordinary to learn
from.
And what extraordinary results they produced. The good-to-great
companies that made the final cut into the study averaged cumulative
stock returns 6.9 times the general stock market for the fifteen
years after the point of transition. To put that in perspective,
General Electric under Jack Welch outperformed the general stock
market by only 2.8 to 1 during his stellar last fifteen years in
office. Furthermore, if you invested $1 in a mutual fund of the
good-to-great companies in 1965 (holding each good-to-great company
at the market rate until the date of its transition), and
simultaneously invested $1 in the general stock market, your $1 in
the good-to-great fund would have grown to $470 by the year 2000,
compared to just $56 in the general stock market.
These are remarkable numbers, made all the more remarkable when you
consider the fact that they came from companies that had previously
been so utterly unremarkable. And that’s what makes this study so
exciting. It addresses the primary reality of most organizations:
“We know we’re not yet great. But what do we do to become
significantly better? What can we do to produce real and sustained
results that put us in the league of the elite performers, to turn
ourselves from good into great?” Equally exciting is the fact that
most of the good-to-great companies came from unexciting industries,
and yet managed to break free of the shackles of their industry
dynamics. They came from steel and drugstores, banking and razor
blades, paper products and grocery stores. Furthermore, they managed
to make the shift when carefully selected comparison companies that
had the same shot in life, companies that had the same (or better)
opportunities in the same industries, failed to shift from good to
great. And they managed to make the shift regardless of their
specific situation at the time. Some had the burning platform of a
dire crisis to ignite their transformation, but others were just
surfing along doing ok with absolutely no urgent need for change.
Some were in great industries, but others were in terrible
industries. Some faced radical industry upheaval, whereas others
faced mind-numbing stability.
Indeed, we discovered that it is possible to turn good into great in
the most unlikely of places and situations, and in no case do we
have a good-to-great company that just happened to be sitting on the
nosecone of a rocket when it took off. Greatness is not a function
of circumstance, or being in the right place at the right time.
Greatness, it turns out, is largely a matter of choice.
Of course, the really exciting thing is to figure out what choices
they made, and what made them so different than other companies that
could have done it, but didn’t. We came to think of our research
effort as like looking inside a black box. For the curious of mind,
it’s an intrinsically compelling process. Each step along the way
was like installing another light bulb that might shed light on the
inner workings of good to great.
I invite you to join me on an intellectual adventure to discover
what’s inside the black box. I also encourage you to question and
challenge in your own mind what you learn, and how it might (or
might not) apply to your specific situation. As one of my favorite
professors once said, “The best students are those who never quite
believe their professors.” True enough. But he also said, “One
ought not reject the data, merely because one does not like what the
data implies.” I offer everything in this book for your thoughtful
consideration, not your blind acceptance. You’re the judge and
jury. Let the evidence speak. . . .
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Collins, James C. and
William C. Lazier. Beyond Entrepreneurship: Turning
Your Business Into An Enduring Great Company. Prentice
Hall, October 1995.
Collins, James C. and
Jerry I. Porras. Built to Last: Successful Habits of
Visionary Companies. Harper Collins, October 1994.
Collins, James C. and
William C. Lazier. Managing the Small to Mid-Sized
Company: Concept and Cases. Richard D. Irwin, May
1995.
CONTACT INFO
Website:
http://www.jimcollins.com
Email: JCC512@aol.com
Mail: P.O. Box 1699, Boulder, CO 80306
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