Jim Collins, "What To Make Of a Life," and What He's Meant to Mine

Oh, and then there was that rock climb with Jim that scared the shit out of me

In early 1993, I was working on a column about IBM’s search for a “visionary CEO” – the search that would end with Lou Gerstner taking the CEO job. (What’s funny is that Gerstner then rejected the idea that he was a visionary.)

While doing my research, I called the PR folks at Stanford University’s business school and asked if they had anyone who studied the concept of visionary CEOs. They put me in touch with a young professor named Jim Collins.

Jim and I talked on the phone and hit it off. I really liked the way he framed things and his sweeping historical perspective. Later in the call, Jim told me he was working on a book, and wondered if I’d like to see the unedited manuscript. Yes, of course, I said. He sent along a printout. It was titled Built to Last.

I dug in and thought it was the most important business book I’d ever read. I completely bought into its concepts of how to build great, enduring companies – and wanted to broadcast it to a business universe that I thought was too obsessed with short-term concepts like quarterly results and stock prices. I told Jim that I wanted to write a story when the book came out.

Built to Last, co-authored by Collins and another Stanford professor, Jerry Porras, was published on October 26, 1994. My cover story for USA Today, headlined “Secrets of Outliving Competitors,” appeared on October 31. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the story was the first major-media attention that the book got. A couple of decades later, Jim would tell me (and I still don’t entirely believe him) that my article was the catalyst that sent Built to Last on its bestseller path and ultimately made Jim a superstar author.

There were two separate paragraphs in my story that, looking back, helped shape the lens through which I still look at companies.

The first: “Collins and Porras found that the keys to what they call visionary companies have little to do with strategic planning, charismatic CEOs, or the MBA mantra, ‘Maximize shareholder wealth.’ More important are a strong corporate culture and a set of characteristics that can only be described as institutional courage.”

The other: “The book’s central concept is what the authors call ‘clock building, not time telling.’ At the long-successful companies, leaders have rarely focused on creating a specific product, service or technology. They have concentrated instead on building the company itself – the mechanism, the culture, the style, the written and unwritten rules that make a company go.”

Re-reading those lines from 30-plus years ago makes me kind of sad. I don’t see much of it at today’s companies. Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Michael Bloomberg – they seem to have been in the Built to Last camp. Mark Zuckerberg? Elon Musk? Sam Altman? Please.

Anyway, all of that was the beginning of a long relationship that has been one of the most important of my career. I can’t count the number of times Jim and I took a walk or met for dinner and talked about what we were working on, our beliefs about business and leadership, and big questions that we’d like to answer, or at least explore. Those conversations shaped my thinking and the direction I’d take as a journalist and author more than probably anything else.

Jim talked with me about his research for Good to Great well before the book came out in 2001. That book became the bestselling hardcover business book of all time. As I was working on my biography of Thomas Watson, who built IBM, we took a long walk in Colorado and I talked Jim through why I saw Watson as one of the great “clock-building” CEOs in history. Jim ended up writing the foreword for that book, which came out in 2003. (The Watson bio is not anything close to an all-time bestseller, but it’s the best work of literary non-fiction I’ve ever managed to write.)

In 2009, I went on a different kind of adventure with Jim. Throughout his adult life, Jim had been a passionate and exceptional rock climber. He built a rock climbing wall at his house in Boulder, Colo. He’s ascended peaks that would make me dizzy just to look at. That year, Jim had a new book coming out, How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In. I had been doing some writing for Fortune magazine, and pitched them an unusual story idea tied to Jim’s book release.

I proposed that I interview Jim while going rock-climbing with him. The Fortune editor approved. Jim loved the idea.

Now, I had never climbed any kind of rock, so I made sure to tell Jim that I wanted this to be – and I’m sure these were my words – a “baby rock climb.” He said OK.

I arrived in Boulder. Jim outfitted me with rock climbing gear. Then he took me to Boulder’s Flatirons. This was not going to be a fucking baby rock climb.

But Jim assured me I’d be fine. He’d go up the steep incline first, secure a line attached to me, and I’d follow. If I were to slip I wouldn’t fall. (My bigger worry was that if Jim, who had no safety line, fell, he’d take me down with him.) So up we went.

I’ve always been a decent athlete. I can tell you that this rock climb was the hardest physical thing I’ve ever done. Whatever interviewing I was going to do was going to happen after the damn climb. I barely had an ability to talk during it.

Yes, I made it to the top, and it was thrilling. (Not so thrilling that I’ve attempted to do anything similar again.) Jim helped me rappel down the back side. I wrote the story and it appeared in Fortune. Unfortunately, when I search for it now, it’s nowhere online. My former colleague at USA Today, Bruce Rosenstein, wrote a bit about the article here.

It’s been a while since I’ve had those walks and talks with Jim. And in the intervening years he wrote a few books that are important but didn’t get the traction of Built to Last or Good to Great. Now, though, he’s hit the bestseller list again with a book out last month, What To Make of a Life. It’s a massive research project that tries to answer a question he’s talked about for as long as I’ve known him: Why do some people thrive when others who have the very same talents and advantages struggle? And if we know that, can we use those insights to live better lives? It’s kind of Good to Great about individuals.

Jim and I have been in touch a bit since the book came out. I’m certain that sooner or later we’ll find ourselves in the same city and pick things up right where we left off. It doesn’t really matter how long it’s been since I’ve seen Jim in person. Like a moral code or religion, he’s just a part of how I see – and act in – the world.

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The first photo above is one I took of Jim at the summit of the Flatiron. The second is one he took of me.

Below is the story about Built to Last as it ran in USA Today on October 31, 1994. And below that is my column that quoted Jim that ran in USA Today on February 7, 1993. The clippings are from Newspapers.com.