Jim Collins
Jim Collins was born in 1958 in Boulder, Colorado. He earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematical sciences from Stanford University and then his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he became a faculty member in 1988 after a stint at McKinsey and Company. He taught at Stanford for several years before leaving in 1995 to establish an independent management research laboratory in Boulder, where he has based his work ever since.
Collins’s research method is distinctive: he and his teams identify companies that have achieved sustained, exceptional performance and then compare them systematically to companies in the same industry that did not, looking for the differentiating variables. This comparative approach, first developed collaborating with Jerry Porras for Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (1994), allowed him to make evidence-based claims about organizational excellence rather than relying on impressionistic case studies.
That methodology produced his landmark work, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don’t, published in 2001. The book reported on a five-year study of eleven companies that transitioned from good to great performance and sustained it for at least fifteen years. The research identified a cluster of distinguishing characteristics: Level 5 Leadership (combining fierce professional will with personal humility), the Hedgehog Concept (clarity about what you can be best in the world at), and a culture of discipline. Good to Great became one of the best-selling business books in history, selling more than four million copies and remaining in use in business schools two decades after publication.
Collins has extended this research through books examining what causes great companies to decline (How the Mighty Fall, 2009), what enables organizations to thrive in chaos (Great by Choice, 2011), and how social sector organizations can apply business discipline without losing their character (Good to Great and the Social Sectors, 2005).
Jim Collins has consulted with a wide range of organizations including West Point, the Marine Corps, and numerous nonprofits. His work is unusual in the business literature for its methodological rigor, its longitudinal scope, and its consistent focus on the character and decision-making of leaders—a perspective rooted in his conviction that what ultimately differentiates great organizations is not circumstance but choice.
