Good Questions, Great Answers

By: Alan M. WebberWed Dec 19, 2007 at 8:40 AM

In a Web-exclusive interview, Jim Collins discusses the implications of his research and ideas for the economy, stock market, and the very nature of executive leadership.

In the course of our study, we actually printed out the transcripts of the CEO presentations to analysts by the good-to-great companies and the comparison companies. We read all of those. And it's striking. The good-to-great people always talk about the challenges they're facing, the programs they're building, the things they're worried about. You go to the comparison companies, they're constantly hyping themselves, they're selling the future -- but they're never delivering results.

If I'm not a CEO, how do the good-to-great lessons apply to me?

The good-to-great concepts are applicable to any situation -- as long as you can pick the people around you. That's the crucial thing. But fundamentally, we really do -- we have a lot of discretion over the people in our lives, the people we decide to let on our bus, whether it's in our department at work or in our personal lives. But the basic message is this: Build your own flywheel. You can do it. You can start to build momentum in something for which you've got responsibility. You can build a great department. You can build a great church community. You can take every one of the good-to-great ideas and apply them to your own work or your own life.

What did your study teach you about change in business in general? Is it essentially a message to go back to basics?

Very rarely do significant changes ever lead to results in a sustainable way. That's one of the really important findings of the book. We started with 1,435 companies. And 11 companies did it. Let's just look at that fact for a moment. The fact is, it doesn't happen very often. Why not? Because we don't know what the heck we're doing! And because we don't know what we're doing, we launch into all sorts of things that don't produce results. We end up like a bunch of primitives dancing around the campfire chanting at the moon.

What I feel strongly is that we need some science to understand what it really takes to change things. Is it back to basics? No, it's forward to understanding. Why is it back to basics to say that CEOs need to be ambitious for their companies and not for themselves? Why is it back to basics to do the who and the people question first and the what and where question second? Since when is it back to basics for a company to begin with a question like, Why have we sucked for 100 years, and what are the brutal facts that we have to confront? Why is it back to basics to say that stop-doing lists are more important than to-do lists? And since when has it been back to basics to say that technology is only an accelerator and not a creator of anything? I don't think those concepts are back to basics. Because if they are, we should be able to go back in time and find that people used those ideas. People didn't -- which is why there are only 11 out of 1,435. So, no, it's not back to basics. It's forward to understanding.

What's your assessment of the new economy? We've seen a lot of change, and we've seen a lot of backlash against the change. How do you make sense out of it all?

The tremendous changes that are taking place around us make it the most exciting time in history to be alive. It's really fun. All these changes -- changes in technology, globalization -- they're brutal facts that must be integrated into whatever decisions we make. The people at Walgreens didn't ignore the Internet because they were focused only on basics. They confronted the brutal fact of the Internet and then asked, How does it fit into our three circles, and how can we use it to spin our flywheel faster?

You never ignore changes -- you hit them head-on as brutal facts, or you come to them with a great sense of glee and excitement. This change, this new technology opens up a way for you to prevail, to be even better as a company. All of the good-to-great companies took changes and used them to their advantage, often with great glee.

When new pianos came along, Mozart didn't hang up his music. He didn't say, "There are these new pianos! The harpsichord is out of the way, so I'm washed up as a composer!" He thought, This is so cool! I can do it loud with piano forte! This is really neat! He kept the discipline of writing great music and, at the same time, embraced with great glee and excitement the invention of pianos.

With all the change around us, we need to be just like Mozart. We maintain a great discipline about our music, but at the same time, we embrace things that can allow us to make even greater music.

Alan M. Webber (awebber@fastcompany.com) is a Fast Company founding editor. Jim Collins (jimcollins@aol.com) wrote the essay Built to Flip in the March 2000 issue of Fast Company. His new book, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... And Others Don't, will be available in October.