YouSaid · the spoken record

Jim Collins

lines on the record: 165
first: 2019-10-01
most recent: 2019-10-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So here's how I thought about that. So, first of all, I have a real deep understanding of what my own hedgehog is. I think individuals have hedgehogs as well as companies. So go back to the hedgehog and the idea of understanding what you're really passionate about. And in the case of the personal hedgehog, what you're truly genetically encoded for. And then third, where you can contribute the world and society will value, right? And then you can make a living for it or have some sort of resources to be able to pursue the goals you want to pursue.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so what's really interesting is when you look at, again, this is the power of the comparative method, you have the companies that build flywheels and they really understood what drove their flywheel around, understood it, right? It's about intellectual insight and understanding. Versus, if you don't understand it, you start reacting. You end up in the doom loop, and you end up grasping for salvation and just going down the other side. That's what we see in comparison companies in contrast to those that were on the other side of the coin of a flywheel that kept building.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But unlike really understanding why that happened so that you can correct what happens is a company reacts without understanding. Oh my gosh, we had disappointing results. And often what happens is they panic. They look for a new direction or a new programmer or a new leader or a new acquisition or a new technology or something. And because that never really produces a great result, it produces sort of a burst of false hope, but it's like kind of drinking a sugar drink as opposed to getting back to your core training. It doesn't give you any accumulated momentum, which then creates another negative inflection, more disappointing results, which then more reaction without understanding than another new direction, new fad, new program, new whatever, and then another failure to build momentum, more disappointing results, and then you're in the doom.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Got it. So, in good to great, the chapter is actually not called the flywheel. It's called the flywheel and the doom loop. And the reason is because when we looked at the comparison companies, because again, we're always doing contrast, right? You're always looking at companies that were in the same situation. Both of them could have gone good to great. One of them didn't. Why? What happened? And so if you think of the flywheel as kind of a cycle where great results begin to compound because you understand how those great results are created. The doom loop is exactly the opposite. And what happens is this, and I'm just sort of describe the inverse of the flywheel, which is the doom. Something happens that produces disappointing results. And it could be that it was a random event or something just happened that was out of your control or something that you just made a mistake or you bungled something, whatever. But you get disappointing results.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's kind of an inverse to the flywheel called the Doom loop. And one of the things that is interesting when we wrote the chapter in Good to Great, and I want to grab something here, hang on one sec. Let me grab this.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And something I've wanted to bring to the world. But let me just pause and see if you have any sort of thoughts or questions on the whole flywheel principle.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People think you can jump to the great result by skipping the flywheel. What we found is that the most durable results happen as a series of good decisions that accumulate one upon another over a very long period of time that create a massive compounding effect. And just like investing where it's high quality assets, you would presume to hold forever, then largely do and let them compound. This is the idea that you get a really good thing and you build strategic compounding over a very long period of time. And then you end up with a spectacular result. So that's the flywheel principle. Now let me pause there because the thing that then we've done since writing Good to Great, that came out of Good Degrade, was we've done a lot of work on, okay, well, then how do you really harness your own specific flywheel? And that has been the thing that recently we did with the flywheel monograph.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And no one pays any attention because it's just one giant slow, creaky turn. But you keep pushing and you refine the fast break and you begin to get different kinds of players and you begin to refine the system and you make the drills better and you learn from each and every game and boom, you got four turns on the flywheel. And then you begin to improve your record and you get eight turns on the flywheel and 16 and 32 and 100 and 1,000 and the flywheel is just building momentum, compounding one upon another upon another. And then at some point, boom, it breaks through. They win in NC2A championship. It's in a million turns on the flywheel and it looks like it came out of nowhere. But actually, it's been this long cumulative process of building flywheel momentum. And then you keep building it. And you go to a billion turns on the flywheel, 10 billion turns on the flywheel. Here's the thing.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It might have taken years to get there. Let's take the great UCLA basketball team under John Wooden. Breakthrough to start a run of 10 NC2A championships in 12 years from, I believe it was 1962 to 1974, something like that. That was sort of the era, right? And you would have thought that in 1962, there was this instantaneous breakthrough and bang, wooden teams jump on into everybody's consciousness. And it's, wow, right? But if you really look at it, that story had been in progress for well over a decade of all the things that wouldn't have been doing to put in place around his approach to running a team and the pyramid of success and the kinds of players he'd bring in developing the fast break and all these and getting better and better year upon year every single game and it begins to accumulate momentum and the first starts it's like pushing a giant heavy flywheel”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's one thought there's this thing called the genius of the end versus the tyranny of the ore. We don't need to spend a lot of time on that. Then that leads us to disciplined action. Disciplined action then is where the flywheel kicks in. And so if you think about it as that you begin to make a series of disciplined decisions, not all of them have perfect outcomes, right? Discipline decisions don't necessarily cause absolutely perfect outcomes, but they're disciplined. And then you begin to execute on them and you begin to build momentum. And it's a compounding effect. So that brings us to the flywheel. So indisciplined action, we have flywheel, the 20-mile march, and fire bullets and cannibals. Let's focus on the flywheel. Zooming way out here. One of the things you learn is that the way something really great result happens, say a great company happens, a transformation into a great result often looks like an instantaneous action because you all of a sudden become aware of it from the outside. But on the inside,”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the end, which all has to do with luck and return on luck, which is this massive kind of amplification variable, which is why we need to get to that in our conversation. Now, if we go back to that framework, in the framework and disciplined people, you have the level five leader we already talked about that. You have the discipline to get the right people before you decide what to do. The principle of first who and back on decision making very quickly on that, we talk all the time about decisions. One of my big takeaways from our research about decision making is try to change every what decision into a who decision. Not what should we do about this cybersecurity threat, but who should we have involved in it? What should we do about this investment decision, but who should we have involved in it, right? Change every what to a who as much as possible disciplined people.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Could not be, or a hole that could not be easily filled by anything else on the planet, either because of the excellence of what we do or the distinctiveness or both. Like, it would matter. Somebody would miss us. And then the third is lasting endurance. You're able to do this over a long period of time. And if you have those three superior results distinctive impact lasting endurance, that is sort of the outputs. Then the question becomes, what are the inputs that produce that? And what we have is think of it as sort of four stages that lead to those outputs. Stage one is about disciplined people. Stage two is about disciplined thought, which by the way, I think is a lot of where you spend great time in your interviews is around the discipline thought question. Stage three is about disciplined action. Stage four is about building it to last. And then there's this multiplier.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hang on and let's just take a look. Imagine if you're asking the question what makes a great company tick? First of all, you got to ask what's a great company? And that's the outputs. So think of it as that their inputs and their outputs. The outputs are, how would you know if you'd become a great company? And I would say there are three outputs you have to have. One is superior results. If you don't win at the game you play, you're not great at it, right? And that would mean superior return on invested capital for a business, or superior sports results as a team, superior education results, superior health results, whatever results are. Second is distinctive impact, which means you can actually ask the question, if our company, big or small, What we do disappeared, would it leave an unfillable hole?”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then our historical methodology and having control and contrast in it. Why did some teams, some companies attain a superior result and others in the same circumstances the best of our ability to control that did not? And then kind of in an epidemiological type style essentially trying to figure that out. And what we found after 6,000 years of combined corporate history of doing that across four major studies looking through different lenses at this question, kind of overall big question of what makes a great company tick through this rigorous research methodology. You zoom way out and you get a framework of principles. And I would just want to quickly highlight a couple of aspects of this framework because it took nearly 30 years to get down to something that fits on a page, right? And I think that the more you get small from a lot of work, the better off you are. And I'll put the flywheel in that context. So let's stand back for a moment.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so let me just zoom out here for a moment and just kind of, I mentioned earlier in the conversation there's this method that goes credit for the foundation of the contrast and the method goes back to Jerry Porus.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, no, I think that there's, I mean, What I find for me now that I'm 61 is that what drives me changes though because When I was younger, so much of what drove me, I think, was from experiences like that and so forth, right? And you create sort of just a drive. As I've gotten older, what I've really found is that I don't need the fuel of that because the work itself, the love of the work is its own self-perpetuating fuel. And that part of the journey has been to go from the sort of kind of youthful drives, as I would think of it, to more the sense of this sustained sense of, you know, I really, the work itself motivates me. I'm just motivated by what I do and what it can do. And when you have that, then you kind of, it's a different kind of emotion. It's kind of this generative emotion, right? That's very joyful.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's part of the story. Yeah, I don't need to go into huge amounts of detail, but I'm sure everybody has something in their life that's like that, right? And do you think it's dealt with?”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because the whole course was around feelings, I still remember the moment when just overwhelmed me like a tsunami wave just crashing over me that much of my drive had really come from channeled feelings from that, which I had truly thought was just, oh, I've already dealt with that, but I hadn't. And for me, Jerry gave me this great gift for the first time in life when he created the course where that could happen. And then later, of course, we became very close friends through the research and so forth. But I think this notion that we tend to think decision making, we tend to think that approaches to life, we tend to think that we are rational because we're smart. But deep down, feelings win. That was Jerry's view.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was actually very hard. And I remember driving down on the bus. I was a Greyhound bus I took from Boulder down to Santa Fe. And I was going to get out with my brain. And so I was studying and I'm sitting there on this Greyhound bus highlighting Plato on the way down to Santa Fe. I still remember it very vividly. I probably still have the book. But anyways, and I came back from that and I just made this very what I thought was very stoic decision. I'm just writing, I'm just going to move on with my life, right? I'm not going to try to do a lot with this. And I think that was very self- I fully taken care of that. And then in this course, is in 374, which Jerry, my research mentor years later, I was just a graduate student when you first met”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was very much MIA as I was growing up. And I kind of the last real interaction I had with my father was he was living in an Adobe hut and outside of Santa Fe and I took him a turkey for Thanksgiving. And anyways, that didn't go very well. It had a dirt floor and the whole deal. And I realized my father was just very self-absorbed and just didn't have any bandwidth to be a dad.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They operate at the level of feelings. And you go into a discussion or a negotiation or a classroom and you go at intellectual level, but the real level people are at is feelings. That was the whole point of that course, which is like if you wear that lens, right? You wear that lens into any conversation. There can be good feelings, they can be bad feelings. We operate at the level of feelings. We're feeling beings is Jerry's view. And I took this course and I had this my father. I don't want to go into a lot of detail about my father. I've over time come to really, he died when I was 23.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With another 11 graduate students in a couple of facilitators and sort of saying like, well, I think it's not really part of the deal. It's you have to be going to your feelings. And two things that were really impactful for me on that. One is just, you know, Jerry's basic point, and I try to teach this to young people as much as I can. People do not operate first and foremost at the level of thoughts.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And one of the things that Jerry is just this range of quality of person, but he taught this course at Stanford that everybody ended up feeling they needed to take or that they really, I don't know if it's at any other graduate school at this point. It was called Business 374, but called interpersonal dynamics. But we all called it touchy-feely. But the idea behind this course was you basically were in these groups, these groups where the only thing you're allowed to discuss. Now picture this Stanford MBAs and graduate students. The only thing you're allowed to talk about for 10 weeks when you're in your group is feelings. You could only talk at the level of feelings, okay?”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, I go back to my mentor, my research mentor. I've had so many mentors in my life, but I go back to Jerry Poras. You come across some people in your life that have a kind of, not just an intellectual wisdom, but a life wisdom that for me was profound and kind of the grace and humility that come at things. For example, I still look back on Jerry, who was a dean at Stanford Business School, massively tenured, senior, soon-to-be emeritus. And we started to build the last research, and he agrees to partner with me as a pure colleague. And when we did the book, we put our names on in alphabetical order. My name came first in alphabetical order, even though we were almost 30 years, 25 years apart in age and experience. I mean, just Marvel Path gone that.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Can I ask you one other question that I came into this with? Because we're talking about decision making, which you and I have puzzled on a lot over the years. But you're in the great joyful position of being able to ask a lot of really remarkable people questions. You have themes in your questions and then a lot of variation around those themes based on the person. But I'm curious what questions you keep asking and no matter how much you ask them, you are still incredibly unsatisfied with the answers in your understanding.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the main. Now, why I don't have an answer for? I don't understand the psychology of discounting the ugly facts versus those that simply are very comfortable reveling in the ugly facts, even if those ugly facts are about yourself, right? Man, our stores are no longer the right size stores. That's just a fact. Why are some able to do that better than others? That I don't have an answer for.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, they'll discount the negative. You go over to the folks with Kroger and they were looking at it and saying, man, this is really scary. We're really afraid. Will let's look over the rocks and see all the ugly things underneath. And their natural instinct is to go right into the teeth of the ugly facts and then wrestle with what they might mean. Same environment, same time, same moment in history, same kinds of business. Everything's exactly the same. And the facts are the same. One tilts to revel in the brutal ugly facts, and the other chooses to discount them.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Rights should be Kroger today. The grocery store industry starts to change, moving towards larger footprint stores, uses of certain kinds of technologies like scanning devices, and so on and so forth. It's a familiar story of how things unfold. Now, if you look at what happened at that moment in time, what was different? If you go over to the A&P folks, you see a lot of defense. Of why their model should continue to work the way it is, despite the fact that they can see in front of right in front of themselves, it will explain away ugly facts.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So then you have to step back and say, well, it's not necessarily that they have better information. It's not necessarily that they had better data. It's not necessarily that they saw things in the industry that other people didn't see. There's comparison companies saw often the same things. But what was interesting to see was at that very moment in history, the capacity of one group of people to essentially look at the facts that everybody can see on the table and choose to pay attention to the really ugly ones versus to discount the ugly ones. So you take the grocery chain industry. Let's just use one example of this. So in the early 60s, early 70s, and I know go back into history a lot, but I'm a historian by nature. You have two grocery chains. You have Kroger and A&P. They have a significant footprint, A&P by all.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is there any evidence that the people at critical junctures of industries or critical junctures of kind of strategic decision or inflection had better information than their comparisons? Did they have better knowledge of the industry, better insight, better data, better any of that? The answer is we can find no evidence that they had that or that they even necessarily had better analysis.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How did they look at it and what decisions did they make, and how did they think about those decisions different than another company like the comparison, which was advanced micro devices? And so when you do this, say you always have to have a control comparison. It's a brutal amount of work to do this because you have to do historical slices and you have to pick a good comparison and do comparative analysis all the way through. And that's why our work keeps me in a cave, which I love the cave, but it keeps me in a cave for so long because it's just a brutal crushing amount of work to do, but it's the only way I know to gain some confidence in the insights. Now, in that comes a very interesting question. You're going through walking through time.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Noise at Intel in the early 1970s, and you're making decisions, what did the world look like to them then? That's the way you have to do it, right? And that's why we do the historical analysis. But then Jerry added a second part. He said, but you have to ask,”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly, the capacity to deny brutal facts is immense. We are always looking at comparison. Let me just take a moment on this because what my research mentor, Jerry Porris, another stroke of hulak in my life, right? When I first started looking at this question of how would you figure out how you go from a startup to an enduring great company? And my approach was to historical because I believe that retrospective gives you bias. So what you want to do is what historians do. Historians, if you really want to understand how the Civil War unfolded in the United States, you don't do retrospective accounts. You try to look at like, what did it look like from Grant's point of view in 1863? And Lincoln's point of view in 1863, not 1983 looking back to 1863. And so I said we need to do historical analysis that way and move through time. So if you're Grove and Moore at Intel and Bob,”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, or worse. And one other thing just on decisions, though, we were talking earlier about how people, the leaders we talked about, keep themselves kind of focused on what's important versus just say being right. And one of the key things we learned in Good to Great was this notion of you don't start with a vision. You start with confronting the brutal facts. And this ability, this very stoic ability to just simply say, let's begin with the very best accounting of the brutal facts that we can. That enhances your ability to see more clearly. If you start out with simply what you want to make happen or what you hope will happen, any of that, those are maybe fine things to get to. But the first step is what are the brutal facts?”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They are really useful. Okay, so you've got to do something with no biopsies. Do you, what are the risks of lymphedema? What do I use? And you draw a decision tree. It's a perfect thing to use. In a decision tree, you have choice notes and probability notes. And when you roll that back, you may have made the absolute right decision for each choice. But those probability nodes are still probability nodes. And so I think that that notion of accepting the reality of those probabilities and then separating good decision, adverse outcome is a better approach than bad decision process, good outcome, because bad decision process with good outcome reinforces bad process, which then when you were talking about compounding ends up producing Compounding in the wrong direction.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, you think about, say, medical decisions, like if you go through a personal, as all of us will, some kind of somewhere in our lives, ourselves, or somebody we love or whatever, you're going to have to make decisions about treatment, about drugs and side effects or surgeries or whatever it happens to be. Those are probabilistic. If you get an adverse outcome, it doesn't mean you made the wrong decision. It just means that the probabilities that you were considering went against you at critical nodes on that decision tree. And one of the things I've learned, by the way, is I used to laugh when I was in graduate school. Who would ever draw a decision tree? Well, actually, I ended up drawing decision trees, real actual decision trees.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your take. Well, yeah, so it's interesting with decision making, and it's something I might have been something that Howard Mark said, but it was. One of the fundamental things I find trying to help people understand and to keep in mind myself is this idea of do not confuse decision process and outcome. If I could go to all high schools and just say what is the one course that everyone should have before they graduate in the math and sciences areas, it would be statistics. It would be probability and statistics because we live in a probabilistic world when our brains aren't wired for it. Even people have been trained in statistics and probability make probabilistic errors all the time because for whatever evolutionary reason, we don't naturally think that way. And so you can make the right decision and still have a bad outcome.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm curious, what do you know now from having done all these conversations? It's like you're having Jefferson dinners with all these people who think about decision making. What do you know now that you didn't know before you started these conversations that you're pretty confident of about decision making, about how to make a better decision?”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just go for hours. Let's have this of a conversation because I am, by the way, I really have enjoyed your conversations with people. And what I really love about them is the desire to Create a conversational environment or real insight happens that people can benefit from. And it's interesting, there's been a couple of things, I mean, I just, I loved your interview with Barbara Oakley, for example. I mean, actually changed some of the ways I go about my own learning. Of course, I can. I could never not want to learn from Howard Marks. I mean, it's just fascinating the way he thinks about different pieces and cycles and luck and so forth. But as you've kind of gone through these, one thing I've noticed in your interviews is you come back to the puzzles around decision making, whether it be through the lens of behavioral economics or how to think through the lens of models or how to think about complex systems as you did with Scott Page and so forth, but you come back to this kind of frame on getting better and better at decision making, right? And I've noticed that that's a theme that runs through as like a thread that runs through.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So sure, you could be doing something that's less save the world and lives as airlines, or you could be at Amjan, or you could be doing iPods, or you could be the nobility of the post, or it could be making people happy at Disney, or there's a lot of different versions. The key is you really are ambitious for that. And that's where the five really, really begins. We live in an era where there are just as always, there's a split, right? Those who want to do built-to-flip and there are those who want to do built to last. I've always been on the side of those who want to do built to last.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“U.S. grant like. But in the end, he knew that what they were doing could affect lives. And in the very end of his own life, he ended up being a patient of the very key product EPO that they had built. And he would sit there and be getting his blood work and there'd be other patients in there. And he'd say, yeah, I had a little something to do with this.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To Abbott and ran part of kind of some of the medical stuff at Abbott. And then in his 50s, he's recruited into the birth of this new industry, which is biotechnology, a Cambrian explosion of new entrants and remarkable investors saw him and brought him in. So here's a guy with this corporate career who steps into one of the great Wild West environments as an entrepreneur and ends up building probably to this point the earliest founded still out there great today independent biotechnology company. There's some other great ones too, but it was very early in, it was like 76 when it was founded. And Rathman, of course, had this incredible sense of what biotech could do. And there's a very interesting circle to the story. He would defend Amjan's patents. I mean, he was like General Grant out there. Just we will go forward. We will defend these patents no matter what he's very.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and I think there's actually two things that really play in there. One is a focus on the mission or the purpose of the enterprise. And by the way, I don't think that that always has to be as grand and noble. It could be as simple as, want to give people a sense of freedom to fly around the country, inexpensively, reliably, and create a great culture that people really love to be part of. And it's Southwest Airlines, right? But it's still, in the end, it's about Southwest Airlines and what it's doing in the world. And then you could have some companies like Angin, where George Rathman recruited out of Abbott to do one of the very first biotechnology company startups. That's a very interesting case, by the way, if people are thinking about their own trajectory. Here's a guy that in his 50s had had a corporate career. He'd been 3M in like, I think adhesives and worked in the R&D side, then moved over.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Grabbed onto it and grew into becoming a great chief executive. But what's interesting is that she felt that the post had a noble role in the world. And she had to step up to guard and protect and lead around that. And then what happens? The Pentagon papers, the labor strikes, massively difficult decisions. Her indomitable will for what she saw as the cause of the post, even though she hadn't necessarily ever seen herself in this role. It just pulled the level five ambition right out of her. And she established herself as one of the great chief executives of the last 50 years. And she really did steer the post through those very turbulent years, classic level five.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To describe what she describes in her own book, you just read the text in her own book of what happened at that moment. But there was also this, while she was dealing with her own personal grief, there's the question of what happens to the post. And at that time, there are people who are saying, well, Catherine, who are you going to bring in to run it, meaning what manner are you going to bring into run it? And in a wonderful, almost aretha Franklin like way. It's like, thanks. I think I'll do this myself.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, and I think that, again, it kind of goes back to this notion of the indomitable will channeled into what the company needs and the cause needs. So let me talk about one person who I think did go through something quite dramatic in her life and one of the great level five leaders. And that's Catherine Graham of the Washington Post, who I think is one of the great chief executives of the last 50 years. So Catherine Graham never thought she was going to run or build the post. That wasn't her objective. It's a wonderful book, by the way, Personal History, which if people are interested in kind of the interior development of a level five leader, I think personal history is one of the great memoirs and it reads very honest. Catherine Graham's husband, Phil Graham, ran the post and it was her family's company and he committed suicide. And all of a sudden, her entire life, I don't even want to try.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most of them did not. Herp Callagher, George Wrath, Gordon Moore in the 1980s semiconductor meltdown, Sam Walton took a long time to get to his first few stores. But I wouldn't say that that's a dominant pattern.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Southwest Airlines. If George Rathman of Amgen, if Gordon Moore, right and Robert Noyce of Intel, if Sam Walton of Walmart, Jay Willard Marriott Sr. of Marriott, Phil Knight of Nike, Fred Smith of Federal Express, Bill Hewlett, Dave Packard HP, we talked about Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, right? One of the people who I think is one of the greatest entrepreneurs did it in the social sector is Wendy Kopp, who founded Teach for America. And what all these folks share in common is they were entrepreneurs. Every one of them were entrepreneurs. But look at what they built. Every one of them built a company. So they went from startup entrepreneur to great company builders. And if I go look at that list and I could go make the list longer than this too, but most of them did not have the crushing wilderness experience.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is all channeled outward into the company or into a purpose that's larger than them or into a great piece of writing or something that is creating an idea that's durable, but not about them. And then they know that in order to do that, they have to be in service to that ambition rather than that ambition is in service to them. And then with that is underneath is this notion of a personal humility. I have to learn from this. Maybe Ed Cackle can help me grow as a leader, right? That's a humility. And a will, which is I'm never going to stop. And no matter what, on the fundamental principles, we will never compromise. And so that's the beauty of the humility and the will with the question of what are you really ambitious for? So now if we kind of go back, you were asking, here's some great entrepreneurs in history. You have Herb Kelleher.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The essence of the five is there may be even more ambitious than most people, right? But the ambition is not about them. That's the essence of it. The ambition, the burning, driving, exhausting, relentless, just like we can never stop ambition.”
2019-10-01 · The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish · #67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT