Jim Collins

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Aug 8th 2008
From Economist.com

Jim Collins (born 1958) is a former Stanford Business School professor who found himself with a publishing sensation when he expanded his Stanford research—about what it takes to make companies endure—into a book. “Built to Last”, published in 1994, enabled Collins to retire from teaching. This and his other book, “Good to Great”, published in 2001, have become the Harry Potters of management literature, hugely popular and holding the promise of magic. “Good to Great” became the bestselling business book of all time, overtaking the long-standing holder of the title, “In Search of Excellence”, by Tom Peters.

Collins excels at the American method of empirical business research. He gathers masses of data about a group that he wishes to study (in the case of his first book, enduringly excellent companies), compares it with a “carefully selected” control group that is not enduringly excellent and then sets out to find statistically significant differences. It is a painstaking method that takes time.

He says that “Built to Last” took six years to research, and “Good to Great” took five years of work by a team of 21 assistants in Collins’s own “management laboratory” in Boulder, Colorado, near the mountains that he loves to climb. Although Collins can command enormous fees on the business lecture circuit, he moves only rarely away from Boulder.

The subtitle of “Built to Last” is “Successful Habits of Visionary Companies”, and Collins is very into the vision/mission thing. Enduringly successful companies, he says, have a clear mission. Setting that mission can be done in four different ways:

“A great company will have many once-in-a-lifetime opportunities.”• By targeting. This can be precise, as was that of the Wal-Mart supermarket chain, which in 1976 set itself the target of being a $1 billion company within four years—a goal that it achieved. Or a target can be less precise; for example, Merck’s 1979 target of becoming “the pre-eminent drug-maker worldwide in the 1980s”.

• By identifying a common enemy. This is perhaps most famously embodied in Honda’s three-word mission statement—“Yamaha wo tsubusu” (“We will crush Yamaha”)—proving that Japanese firms are as fiercely competitive among themselves as they are abroad. Nike, a sports-shoe manufacturer, also thrived on a mission to defeat the enemy, first adidas, then Reebok.

• By setting up a role model. This is less common than the first two and crops up in the form of “To be the IBM of the real-estate business” or “To be the Rolls-Royce of the shoe industry”.

• By an internal transformation. This is often used by old organisations in need of a shake-up. Procter & Gamble, for instance, determined at one time to provide its workers with steady employment following a period when it had become known for its rapid hire-and-fire policies.

Notable publications
With Porras, J.I., “Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies”, HarperBusiness, 1994; 10th edn, Random House Business Books, 2005

“Good to Great”, Random House Business Books, 2001


More management gurus
This profile is adapted from “The Economist Guide to Management Ideas and Gurus”, by Tim Hindle (Profile Books; 322 pages; £20). The guide has the low-down on more than 50 of the world’s most influential management thinkers past and present and over 100 of the most influential business-management ideas. To buy this book, please visit our online shop.