Ten years ago, Jason Jennings woke one morning to find himself in the throes of a severe midlife crisis. Jennings had spent his life as a successful radio entrepreneur and media consultant, starting at 13 years old -- when he drummed up $1,500 a week from local businesses to sponsor a radio show he'd hatched, "Teen Time With Jason Jennings," in his hometown of Marquette, Michigan.

"Then, all of a sudden, I woke up and I felt like my soul wasn't being fed," says Jennings, now 50. "So I sold the radio stations. I sold the consulting practice. And I decided to go to the seminary and become a Lutheran minister." The only kink in his plan was that Jennings far preferred to sermonize on what he saw as the sorry state of business leadership. Finally, the president of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, where Jennings had planned to enroll, suggested that perhaps Jennings would be happier proselytizing on topics outside the divine.

Jennings took up his newfound purpose with a vengeance, preaching the values of corporate humility over hubris, real profits over false promises, and long-term feasibility over short-term flippability. Lying somewhere between Jim Collins's pair of hits, Built to Last and Good to Great, and the pretension-averse ideas in Thomas Stanley's Millionaire Next Door series, Jennings has -- through two best-selling books of his own -- come up with an outline of the ideal leader: a strong, silent type who places the good of a company (and thus, its employees) above his or her own.

Jennings's third, and latest, book is Think Big, Act Small: How America's Best Performing Companies Keep the Startup Spirit Alive (Portfolio, May 2005). It highlights the heads of nine off-the-radar companies, out of an initial candidate pool of 50,000, who embody his leadership ideal while having racked up a decade's worth of double-digit profit growth. Included among the featured companies are outfits such as Cabela's, the wildly popular outdoor-store-cum-tourist-attraction; Koch Industries, a privately held $40 billion behemoth quietly making piles of money in more than 100 unsexy industries ranging from road paving to oil-sludge refining; and Petco, a veritable home-away-from-home for a booming population of spendthrift pet owners.

Here, in his own words, is the leadership gospel according to Jason Jennings.

Focus on the company, not on yourself.

When most corporate types think of growth, they think only about themselves -- about getting that big yacht. Not the people we interviewed.

Look at Pat Tracy. He's the founder and CEO of Dot Foods, a $1.57 billion food-redistribution business in tiny Mount Sterling, Illinois. Tracy cares less about how big of a house he lives in and more about keeping his company healthy for others. He wants the local guy who starts out working in cold storage to get his college degree through the company and eventually make a $150,000 salary there. Jim Goodnight at SAS Institute, which makes business intelligence software, isn't interested in managing his bottom line for what he calls "some 27-year-old snot-nosed analyst on Wall Street." When people say these CEOs get it, the "it" they're talking about is an understanding that running a business is about something much deeper than turning a quick buck.