Behind the Bestsellers | Big Think

Behind the Bestsellers

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive videos

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Best-selling author of “Good to Great” and “Built to Last,” Jim Collins reflects upon his childhood and constant professional struggle.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jim Collins:

Jim's book, GOOD TO GREAT: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... And Others Don't, attained long-running positions on the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Business Week best seller lists, has sold 3 million hardcover copies since publication and has been translated into 35 languages, including such languages as Latvian, Mongolian and Vietnamese.

His most recent book, HOW THE MIGHTY FALL: And Why Some Companies Never Give In, was published on May 19, 2009.

Jim began his research and teaching career on the faculty at Stanford Graduate School of Business. In 1995, he founded a management laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, where he now conducts research and teaches executives from the corporate and social sectors.

Jim has served as a teacher to senior executives and CEOs at over a hundred corporations. He has also worked with social sector organizations, such as: Johns Hopkins Medical School, the Girl Scouts of the USA, the Leadership Network of Churches, the American Association of K-12 School Superintendents, and the United States Marine Corps. In 2005 he published a monograph: Good to Great and the Social Sectors.

In addition, Jim is an avid rock climber and has made one-day ascents of the North Face of Half Dome and the Nose route on the South Face of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley. He continues to climb at the 5.13 grade.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Jim Collins: One of the things I always find very interesting is people who have great anxiety when they’re in their teens that they don’t yet know what they’re going to do with their life. But actually very few people know what they’re going to do with their life when they’re 17, 18, 19, 20 years old.

In fact if you look a back at a lot of people who ended up with very interesting trajectory and someone like Harry Truman, one of our great presidents, he didn’t know he was going to end up in politics. He certainly didn’t know what he was going to be doing when he was in his teens and that’s true for a lot of people.

It was certainly true for me.

If you would have asked me when I was 17 years old whether I’d be doing what I’m doing today, there’s no way I would have come up with this, even on a list of 100 possibilities, with one caveat. The one thing I knew by the time I was 17, 16, 15, probably by the time I was eight, is I was infected with the incurable disease of curiosity. And everything in my life has been driven by a relentless nonstop curiosity. I just got to figure stuff out.

Jim Collins: My influences really began in my college years and in my 20s, because the role modeling I got as a kid was almost a negative role model. It was what to not be.

And what really captured my attention were people who had really high standards of values and really high levels of intellect and curiosity. And so it was generally great teachers and great professors. I had a wonderful professor when I was in college my freshman year, named John ****. And I’ll never forget this moment when I spouted off something about Hegel in a philosophy seminar and John *** had me come to his office. He was the ombudsman professor of philosophy, he was a ****. And he sat me down in his office and he said, “A word to the wise, Mr. Collins.” And I was this 18 year old kid, freshman in college. “One ought not to speak about what one does not know”, and then shuffled me out of his office.

And I guess probably I’ve been really blessed by mentors starting at about that age who always would smack me upside the head whenever I would get off track, whenever I needed a bit of correction. And I listened to those people.

In my early 20s I built a personal Board of Directors as a replacement. I didn’t have a particularly great father role model, so I decided to build one, to invent one, to create one from scratch. And so the way I did this was to assemble a Board of Directors of people who I would really want to look up to, whose values I wouldn’t want to let down. I put seven people on that personal Board. And then that personal Board of Directors was the mechanism that I used as a way to guide myself through life, combined with reading a lot of biographies.

So if you didn’t get those role models you can actually invent them. And if you happen to be in your mid 20, which is what I was when I came up with the personal Board, I really recommend it as one of the key mechanisms in life.

Read the full transcript at