Jim Collins' Secret of Success

Long story short: Be lucky and good — and work like a dog.

That's the gist of Adam Bryant's entertaining story about the business guru, which appeared on the front page of the May 24, 2009 New York Times Business section; excerpts follow.

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Mr. Collins, who is 51, keeps a stopwatch with three separate timers in his pocket at all times, stopping and starting them as he switches activities. Then he regularly logs the times into a spreadsheet. 

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“I think it’s just pure luck,” says Mr. Collins, parsing his track record in an interview here. “You flip a coin and it comes up heads, and you flip a coin and it comes up heads, and you flip a coin and it comes up heads, and one day you have four heads in a row. You can’t really say you made it come up heads.”

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Part of the Jim Collins method borrows from other hypersuccessful people. He approaches every aspect of his life with purpose and intensity.

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Four days after his first date with Joanne Ernst in the spring of 1980 — an eight-mile run when both were students at Stanford — they were engaged, and married later that year.

When she announced over breakfast one day that she thought she could win an Ironman Triathlon, Mr. Collins gave up his job at Hewlett-Packard to help her train, be her roadie and negotiate her sponsorships with companies like Nike and Budweiser. Joanne won the 1985 Hawaiian Ironman Triathlon.

Back then, he says, his wife was the better-known half of the couple, and everyone assumed that his name was Jim Ernst.

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This orientation — a willingness to say no and focus on what not to do as much as what to do — stems from a conversation that Mr. Collins had with one of his mentors, the late Peter F. Drucker, the pioneer in social and management theories.

“Do you want to build ideas first and foremost?” he recalls Mr. Drucker asking him, trying to capture his mentor’s Austrian accent. “Zen you must not build a big organization, because zen you will end up managing zat organization.”

Therefore, in Jim Collins’s world, small is beautiful.

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For each book, he hires a research team of university students, up to a dozen at a time, to help him during long summers of work. He is picky about whom he hires, typically from Stanford and the University of Colorado. They’re not always business students; they might be studying law or engineering or biochemistry.

He prefers to learn as much as he can about them before he meets them. “Because if I meet them, I may like them, and then all the assessment of the person is going to be filtered by the fact that I like them, and what I really want to see is the quality of their work,” he says.

So he will look at their transcripts. “If they even have a small glitch in their academic record over the last year, they don’t really get considered,” he says. “I need people who have that just weird need to get everything right.”

If they clear other hurdles, he will finally meet them in person. He’s looking for four intangibles: smart, curious, willing to death-march (“there has to be something in their background that indicates that they just will die before they would fail to complete something to perfection”) and some spark of irreverence (“because it’s in that fertile conversation of disagreement where the best ideas come, or at least the best ideas get tested”).

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Writing is not so much fun — “painful,” “excruciating” and “brutal” is how he describes the process.

It is slow going.

“If I’m going really, really fast, I can do a page of finished text a day, on average,” he says. A 36-page monograph he published, “Good to Great and the Social Sectors,” took him the better part of two years to write. It sold 400,000 copies.

He then gets feedback from a large circle of people. To make sure they don’t hold back, he refers to them as his “critical readers,” and types in large letters atop the manuscript, “Bad First Draft.”

“That gives them the freedom to say, ‘Jim already knows it’s bad, so let me tell him how it’s bad,’ ” he says.

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If I were still in school I would so try with everything I had to get a job on Collins' research team.

I love his approach.