How the Mighty Fall by Jim Collins Part 1 of 6: Introduction
August 28, 2009 by dr. lam · 4 Comments
I love Jim Collins. His first two books Built to Last and Good to Great have been inspirational sources for much of my business and which I have referenced in my talks on leadership. Accordingly, I quickly bought his newest book, How the Might Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In, a worthy sequel to his more positively bent monographs. I always get something out of reading Collins, and I look forward very much to a 4-hour lecture that I am attending in Dallas that Collins is giving for my Entrepreneur’s Organization this coming October.
This blog is not going to talk about his book but about the man. I read a fascinating article on Mr. Collins on the May 24, 2009 edition of the New York Times about how Collins conducts his business practices. He spends 53% of the time being creative, 28% of the time teaching, and the remaining time of 19% he allocates toward other pursuits to get the job done. In fact, he is relentless with his time mangement, keeping a stopwatch to make sure that he lives up to his word of how he budgets his time. He commands a whopping $65,000 per lecture but consciously limits his speaking engagements to only 18 per year (hence I am quite fortunate to hear him talk this year).
What I got out of this article was that Collins at 51 is on a relentless pursuit of self improvement and nurturing his business through creativity, pushing away lucrative speaking engagements that compromise his vision. Collins’ guru is the famed Peter F. Drucker. To quote the New York Times: “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.
I also like Collins’ commitment to creativity, to push and to contribute to society. I really like the relentless pursuit of being better, thinking better, and ultimately contributing to society — a lesson that we all can learn. I hope you all can learn as much as I have from Mr. Collins in the coming blogs.