Jim Collins — A Rare Interview with a Reclusive Polymath (#361)
Photo by George Lange
“I’m not really a business author; I just happen to have used companies as the method to study human systems because there’s great data.” — Jim Collins
My guest for this episode is the incredible (and somewhat reclusive) Jim Collins.
This was a rare treat, as Jim rarely does any media or interviews. I’ve wanted to speak with him for more than a decade, and it was worth the wait. This conversation overdelivered on every level. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
So, who is Jim Collins?
Jim Collins (jimcollins.com) is a student and teacher of what makes great companies tick, and a Socratic advisor to leaders in the business and social sectors. He has authored or coauthored eight books that have together sold 10+ million copies worldwide, including Good to Great, Good to Great and the Social Sectors, Built to Last, How the Mighty Fall, Great by Choice, and his newest work, Turning the Flywheel.
Driven by a relentless curiosity, Jim began his research and teaching career on the faculty at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992. In 1995, he founded a management laboratory in Boulder, Colorado.
In 2017, Forbes selected Jim as one of the 100 Greatest Living Business Minds.
Jim is also an avid rock climber and has completed single-day ascents of El Capitan and Half Dome in Yosemite Valley.
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, Overcast, Castbox, or on your favorite podcast platform.
[image error] [image error] [image error] #361: Jim Collins — A Rare Interview with a Reclusive Polymath
https://rss.art19.com/episodes/5ba5c5e9-612a-4670-8fd2-e10b8832d3fc.mp3Download
Listen to it on Apple Podcasts.
Stream by clicking here.
Download as an MP3 by right-clicking here and choosing “save as.”
Want to hear an episode with someone else who likes to ask big questions? — Listen to my conversation with Nick Kokonas, subversive entrepreneur, angel investor, and restaurateur extraordinaire (stream below or right-click here to download):
#341: Nick Kokonas — How to Apply World-Class Creativity to Business, Art, and Lifehttps://rss.art19.com/episodes/c23d1aee-571f-4e87-ae41-4026a5a5e92d.mp3Download
This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn and its job recruitment platform, which offers a smarter system for the hiring process. If you’ve ever hired anyone (or attempted to), you know finding the right people can be difficult. If you don’t have a direct referral from someone you trust, you’re left to use job boards that don’t offer any real-world networking approach.
LinkedIn, as the world’s largest professional network — used by more than 70 percent of the US workforce — has a built-in ecosystem that allows you to not only search for employees, but also interact with them, their connections, and their former employers and colleagues in a way that closely mimics real-life communication. Visit LinkedIn.com/Tim and receive a $50 credit toward your first job post!
This podcast is also brought to you by Peloton, which has become a staple of my daily routine. I picked up this bike after seeing the success of my friend Kevin Rose, and I’ve been enjoying it more than I ever imagined. Peloton is an indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. No worrying about fitting classes into your busy schedule or making it to a studio with a crazy commute.
New classes are added every day, and this includes options led by elite NYC instructors in your own living room. You can even live stream studio classes taught by the world’s best instructors, or find your favorite class on demand.
Peloton is offering listeners to this show a special offer. Visit onepeloton.com and enter the code TIM at checkout to receive $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. This is a great way to get in your workouts, or an incredible gift. Again, that’s onepeloton.com and enter the code TIM.
QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.
Scroll below for links and show notes…
SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE
Connect with Jim Collins:
Turning the Flywheel: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great by Jim Collins
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t by Jim Collins
Good to Great and the Social Sectors: Why Business Thinking is Not the Answer by Jim Collins
Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies by Jim Collins and Jerry I. Porras
How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In by Jim Collins
Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck — Why Some Thrive Despite Them All by Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen
Turning the Flywheel: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great by Jim Collins
Acquisition of Japanese Kanji: Conventional Practice and Mnemonic Supplementation by Timothy Ferriss
What I Think: John McPhee by Jamie Saxon, Princeton University
Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process by John McPhee
A Sense of Where You Are: A Profile of William Warren Bradley by John McPhee
Encounters with the Archdruid: Narratives About a Conservationist and Three of His Natural Enemies by John McPhee
The Control of Nature by John McPhee
John McPhee, The Art of Nonfiction No. 3 by Peter Hessler, The Paris Review
Eckerd Corporation
Rubbermaid
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Concept: Level 5 Leadership by Jim Collins
Teach for America
Stanford University
IBM
Thelma and Louise
The Simplex Method by Hamdy Taha, Operations Research, Wikibooks
Searching for Bobby Fischer Book and Movie
National Jewish Health
El Capitan
Bose QuietComfort 35 (Series II) Noise Cancelling Wireless Headphones
The Hedgehog Concept by Jim Collins
Creativity in Business: Based on the Famed Stanford University Course That Has Revolutionized the Art of Success by Michael Ray and Rochelle Myers
HP
The Effective Executive: The Definitive Guide to Getting the Right Things Done by Peter F. Drucker
Straight from the Hedgehog’s Mouth: Management Guru Jim Collins by Andrew Hill, The Irish Times
IndustryWeek
Drucker Day Keynote with Jim Collins, The Drucker Institute
Ten Lessons I Learned from Peter Drucker by Jim Collins
What is a Flywheel? Wikipedia
The Flywheel Effect by Jim Collins
The Retail Flywheel: Why Amazon Really Is Just Getting Started by Jon Allion, Seeking Alpha
How Does Your Flywheel Turn? by Jim Collins
Gimme Shelter by The Rolling Stones
Common Sense by Thomas Paine
Giro Sport Design
Intel
Triathlon Ironman World Championships 1985, TheSports.org
Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs by Jim Collins
Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman
On the Shortness of Life by Seneca
SHOW NOTES
We begin by Jim asking me a few questions. The first: What was the subject of my Princeton senior thesis? [08:24]
How do I go about acquiring a new language? [09:29]
Does language constrain or enhance the concepts we develop? Let’s ask Ludwig Wittgenstein. [11:54]
What it was like to take a writing class taught by nonfiction great John McPhee, and how it improved more than just my writing. [15:40]
What is a conceptual vessel, and how do you choose the right one for the occasion at hand? Jim tells us about the time his irreverent research team changed his mind and helped created what became a cornerstone conceptual vessel: the Level 5 Leadership hierarchy. [24:29]
What is the Level 5 Leadership hierarchy? [30:27]
Among leaders, how did Jim and his team use research data to identify genuine humility and separate it from false humility? [35:25]
How Jim’s students led him to pursue an entrepreneurial path, why he keeps a stopwatch with three timers in his pocket, and what insight this gives us about Jim’s own successful habits. [40:26]
How Jim summarizes the time he spends on any given day in a spreadsheet to maximize his creative hours and ensure he doesn’t get into a “funk.” [47:32]
The method Jim uses to correlate what his bad days (and his good days) have in common while pursuing his relentless “discipline in service of creativity.” [52:45]
What patterns has Jim discovered by using this method? [55:18]
Three components Jim believes are crucial for living the kind of life he wants to lead. [56:27]
When accounting for his time, how does Jim define what counts as “creative?” [59:27]
How does Jim think about, monitor, and account for the time he spends sleeping? [1:07:10]
As someone who benefits greatly from naps, when does Jim find time to catch them? [1:11:54]
Jim’s absolute favorite sleeping pattern. [1:13:45]
What is the bug book, and how does it tie in with the Hedgehog Concept? [1:15:01]
How observations Jim made in his bug book led him from working in a corporate landscape to where he is today. [1:20:47]
As an early version of his time accounting spreadsheets, how did the bug book compare? Was it as thorough? Was it something he brought with him everywhere and used every day? [1:22:25]
Jim talks about “who luck” — particularly the time he was fortunate enough to spend with business visionary Peter Drucker and why, at 61 years of age, he feels his life has really just begun. [1:24:26]
An important aside about making sure the time a mentor agrees to spend with you is ultimately worth it for both of you. [1:29:07]
What big question does Jim think Peter Drucker was trying to answer? [1:33:42]
Two important lessons Jim learned from Peter Drucker. [1:35:32]
What is a flywheel, and how does it conceptually tie in with the lessons of Jim’s latest work? [1:00:00]
How the team at Amazon elaborated on Good to Great’s flywheel principle, and what Jim came to understand from this expanded model. [1:44:59]
What can people expect from the Turning the Flywheel monograph, and why was this format chosen to convey this message? [1:50:25]
What is Jim’s own flywheel? Where does it start, and what fuels its perpetuation? [1:53:21]
Can a flywheel sometimes be more of a vicious circle of degeneration than a virtuous cycle that promotes growth? What might cause an otherwise virtuous cycle to become dysfunctional? [1:55:42]
The mechanisms and patterns demonstrated by a doom loop and how it compares and contrasts to a flywheel. [1:57:36]
Jim explains why two seemingly spontaneous events from his past weren’t actually as out of character as they might seem at first glance. [1:59:24]
How the best decision Jim ever made and one of his favorite paragraphs he’s ever written are related. [2:04:18]
How the relation between empirical validation and pure analysis is like firing bullets before firing cannonballs. [2:06:00]
According to one of Jim’s mentors, when does the option of a safety net have a negative value? [2:08:57]
Parting thoughts. [2:11:51]
PEOPLE MENTIONED
Ludwig Wittgenstein
John McPhee
Mark Twain
Reid Hoffman
Curious George
Jerry Porras
Jack Eckerd
Stanley Gault
Wendy Kopp
Jack Bogle
Joanne Ernst
George Dantzig
Josh Waitzkin
Walt Disney
Rochelle Myers
Peter Drucker
Bill Lazier
Tom Brown
Warren Buffett
Thomas Paine
Morten Hansen
Irv Grousbeck
Naval Ravikant
