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Jim Collins in conversation with Sarah Powell
In this issue of Spotlight Jim Collins speaks with Editor Sarah Powell about the findings of his book Good to Great and the characteristics of "level 5 leadership".
Jim Collins jettisoned a traditional academic career at Stanford's Graduate School of Business - where he received the Distinguished Teaching Award - to pursue his research interests, founding his own management research laboratory in his hometown of Boulder, Colorado. He combines his research activities with a busy schedule teaching executives in the private, public and social sectors.
Jim has devoted more than a decade of research to studying enduring great companies - how they grow, how they attain superior performance, and how good companies can become great companies - during which time he has authored or co-authored four books including Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, co-authored with Jerry I. Porras. Built to Last was a fixture on the Business Week bestseller list for more than six years. Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... and Others Don't was a New York Times bestseller. Jim's work has been featured in Fortune, The Economist, Fast Company, USA Today, Industry Week, Business Week, Newsweek, and Harvard Business Review.
Spotlight
Your book Good to Great proposes some unexpected answers to the following questions. What makes a company great? What do you consider to be the most important aspect of your findings?
Jim Collins
I consider the most significant contribution of our work to be less the findings than the research methods used to develop these, which sought to ensure a scientific approach enabling replicability, verification and also, if possible, predictability.
The method adopted in Good to Great is both replicable and very clinical in its application, the essentials being to: select on output variables, not input variables; use rigorous direct comparisons to analyse the changing pattern of results; look for timeless principles cutting across all industries and not simply best practices; and research over a sufficiently long period. We make no presumptions as to results and do not take as our starting point factors such as leadership or culture or technology. Most of the conclusions in Good to Great were derived from this method and as such...