Jim Colins - 企管

Jim Collins
Aug 8th 2008
From Economist.com
http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=11880066


Jim Collins (born 1958) is a former Stanford Business School professor who
found himself with a publishing sensation when he expanded his Stanford
research—about what it takes to make companies endure—into a book. “Built
to Last”, published in 1994, enabled Collins to retire from teaching. This
and his other book, “Good to Great”, published in 2001, have become the
Harry Potters of management literature, hugely popular and holding the
promise of magic. “Good to Great” became the bestselling business book of
all time, overtaking the long-standing holder of the title, “In Search of
Excellence”, by Tom Peters.

Collins excels at the American method of empirical business research. He
gathers masses of data about a group that he wishes to study (in the case of
his first book, enduringly excellent companies), compares it with a “
carefully selected” control group that is not enduringly excellent and then
sets out to find statistically significant differences. It is a painstaking
method that takes time.

He says that “Built to Last” took six years to research, and “Good to
Great” took five years of work by a team of 21 assistants in Collins’s own
“management laboratory” in Boulder, Colorado, near the mountains that he
loves to climb. Although Collins can command enormous fees on the business
lecture circuit, he moves only rarely away from Boulder.

The subtitle of “Built to Last” is “Successful Habits of Visionary
Companies”, and Collins is very into the vision/mission thing. Enduringly
successful companies, he says, have a clear mission. Setting that mission can
be done in four different ways:

- By targeting. This can be precise, as was that of the Wal-Mart supermarket
chain, which in 1976 set itself the target of being a $1 billion company
within four years—a goal that it achieved. Or a target can be less precise;
for example, Merck’s 1979 target of becoming “the pre-eminent drug-maker
worldwide in the 1980s”.

- By identifying a common enemy. This is perhaps most famously embodied in
Honda’s three-word mission statement—“Yamaha wo tsubusu” (“We will crush
Yamaha”)—proving that Japanese firms are as fiercely competitive among
themselves as they are abroad. Nike, a sports-shoe manufacturer, also thrived
on a mission to defeat the enemy, first adidas, then Reebok.

- By setting up a role model. This is less common than the first two and
crops up in the form of “To be the IBM of the real-estate business” or “To
be the Rolls-Royce of the shoe industry”.

- By an internal transformation. This is often used by old organisations in
need of a shake-up. Procter & Gamble, for instance, determined at one time to
provide its workers with steady employment following a period when it had
become known for its rapid hire-and-fire policies.


Notable publications

With Porras, J.I., “Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies
”, HarperBusiness, 1994; 10th edn, Random House Business Books, 2005

“Good to Great”, Random House Business Books, 2001


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