How the Mighty Fall by Jim Collins Part 1 of 6: Introduction
August 28, 2009 by dr. lam
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.
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4 Responses to “How the Mighty Fall by Jim Collins Part 1 of 6: Introduction”
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Great stuff, Dr. Lam! Thanks for sharing. I look forward to the coming blogs!
thanks! me too!
I like Collins’ “rational”; practical way to make sure to not lose his long term goals for life: choosing and setting percentages of time to dedicate to different important aspects of his life.
I can’t help but wonder something, though, when reading what he said… and would like to know what you think about it.
Dr Lam tells us how Colins “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”.
What I wonder and am not sure of, is of whether or not when he is being creative and when he worries about doing things to contribute to society, he is still doing all of it with, through and by his job/work/profession.
I don’t know you, but as much as I am ok with using our creativity and with caring for contributing to the world with our job/profession, I also believe that in order to contribute better to the world, even for us to be more creative, we must split those same time percentages not just accross the activities linked to our means of living or profession, job, etc. but also to “other” activities and interests totally unrelated to our jobs and regular occupations. I have the impression that one of the keys to remain balanced in life is to not be wonderful in just one area of our life, to not contribute to the world only in one way, but to develop different potentials in us, linked both to activities directly and indirectly related to our job or occupation and to things that “have nothing to do” with them.
Maybe it’s a very personal thing, but as much as I love my profession, I believe I feel more content and equilibrated when I do all those things Collins suggests to do (although I had never thought of setting “time frames” and I think it is a great idea) but applied to many interests in my life, to areas of my life totally unrelated one to the other. Say, in my case, I am happier when I work at being efficient but also creative, etc. not just with things linked to my profession and job, but to activities totally unrelated to them: animal rescue activities, reading, traveling, etc.
. To try to grow and be creative and to contribute to the world not only in one field but in many. It is a way, I suspect, to develop more of our potential, or discover new ones, and, also, to deal better with frustration when things don’t go well in one area. When we don’t have “all the eggs in one basket”, we can keep our positive and keep on growing and contributing at least in some way always, even when there is some sort of crisis going on in one area of our life. Using an example: I wonder if people who focus all their creativity and potential in things linked to their job and/or profession might not have a harder time when a financial generalized crisis or some other “big” critical event takes place. Instead, when a person has many interests at once, when things don’t go “peachy” in one area, the person can still feel like he/she is growing and getting farther and further at least in some other area of his/her life.
In other words, I believe in applying his logics in many areas of our life at once, and not to develop “largely” only one area or aspect of our life, as great as it might be (like a profession we love). I guess I could say that I see life as better when we don’t put “all the eggs in one basket”, even if the basket is marvelously made
Do you understand what I mean? It’ really hard to explain!
i totally understand. collins was specifically addressing his life in business not his personal life. i think that we all need to achieve better balance in our personal life. these blogs are going to be focused exclusively on business but clearly we can extrapolate from them and learn what we can learn about our personal life too. those were some nice observations!
thanks,
sml