The Only 10 RULES You Need To Succeed | Jim Collins

I guess if you have an addiction in life, it's nice to have one like curiosity.

I am not going to figure out where to drive the bus until I've got the right people on the bus. Not only that, 15 of the 18 built-to-last companies lived through the 1930s Depression.

I can remain focused on and suffer for the big thing longer than anyone else.

And I'm about to fall. I'm 400 feet above the ground. Please turn off your electronic gadgets.

But what was Intel known for? Intel delivers.

See, if you have the right people, they're already motivated. The question is not risk or not risk. The question is, where do you place your big bets? I'm genetically encoded to do it. When I do it, I feel like a fish in water.

He's an American business consultant, author, and lecturer.

He's a student and a teacher of leadership.

He's authored or co-authored 6 books that have sold over 10 million copies worldwide.

He's Jim Collins, and here are his top 10 rules for success.

I guess if you have an addiction in life, it's nice to have one like curiosity. Yes. I mean, questions for me are where everything begins, and I always like to describe it that I don't pick questions. In many ways, they pick me. They kind of rise up and grab around the throat and say, "I'm not gonna let go." And to me, life is just a journey of question upon question, and there's so many chances to learn things. One of my mentors, John Gardner, who was in the Johnson administration, was a senior faculty at Stanford. Wrote about excellence. Wrote about excellence truly before people were thinking about it and renewal and self-renewal. And John had this wonderful way of saying, "Don't try to be interesting, be interested." And that stuck with me and this idea of always be interested. And you never know where a question will go. You sit down with somebody and you ask a simple question like, "Where are you from?" Right? So think about the power of that question. "Where are you from?" That's not a hierarchical question. That's not a question of, uh, "What do you do?" or "How important are you?" It's "Where are you from?" And somebody can choose. It's an invitation. "Well, I'm from Virginia," or "I'm from Greece," or "I'm from—" They can name their company. They can choose. And the interesting thing is you never know where that will go. And then in actual work, It all has to begin with questions, because if you actually know the answers, then I don't understand the point of doing the work.

When Dick Cooley became chief executive of Wells Fargo in the late 1970s, he knew he would be facing the storm of deregulation. He knew that the entire banking industry would be upended when deregulation swept through. The board, understandably concerned, asked Cooley, "What is your vision?" What is your strategy? Where will you lead us? How will you get us through the storm of deregulation? And Cooley had a wonderful answer.

I don't know.

Not only that, it's the wrong question. See, I am not going to first figure out where to drive this bus and then get people on the bus. No, I'm gonna do it completely opposite. I am not going to figure out where to drive the bus until I've got the right people on the bus. And only once I've got the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus, and the right people on the key seats, then and only then will I turn my attention to the question of where we will drive this bus. The best executives we've studied always think first about who and then about what. It's not about just getting a great team. It's not about finding talent. It's not about getting great people. No, the key word is first. First get right people. First get the people on the bus. First think about who. Put who up ahead of strategy, who ahead of tactics, who ahead of technology, who ahead of business ideas, who ahead of everything. First who. First who, first who, then what. I mentioned earlier the work "Built to Last." It was very interesting. We were studying enduring great companies in contrast to others. I went back recently and realized we selected the study set for that study in 1989, 2 decades ago. All 18 of the built-to-last companies are still standalone, independent, and almost all of them very successful companies. Companies today. If you took a random sample of large publicly traded companies 20 years ago, what are the probabilities that all 18 in your random sample would be standalone, independent, and largely successful today? The number is less— the percentage is about 0.02% probability. Not only that, 15 of the 18 built to last companies lived through the 1930s Depression. What do they teach us? What has enabled them to have that? What did we find that separated them? And what we found is that what really separated them was not necessarily that they had smarter strategies, although they often did, or that they were sort of more financially savvy, although they often were. It was because they were founded first and foremost and built always on a rock-solid set of core values that are not open for negotiation. And if you look at what gave them the reason to struggle, the reason to fight, the reason to endure, it wasn't strategic, it was values.

One of the greatest, probably the greatest rock climber of his generation— as you know, I've been a climber most of my life— is actually right now on the side of El Capitan, uh, out doing what will probably be the hardest rock climb certainly ever done in our lifetimes, trying to free climb a thing called the Dawn Wall on the Mescalito side of El Cap. A young man named Tommy Caldwell who is— he's in a category of one. And I was out climbing with Tommy one day and I said to him, Tommy, what makes you different? He has a record of 6 climbs on El Cap that have never been repeated. Okay. He's just— he is 10x in extreme environments. And he's still alive. I said, "Tommy, what is it that you have? You're not necessarily more physically gifted. You're not necessarily stronger. You're certainly physically gifted, all those things, but you're not this incredible athlete that just was born this way." And in fact, he had lost a finger in an accident. He cut a finger off. And so he's doing this minus one of his— An important finger. An important finger. And he thought about it for a long moment and he said, I can remain focused on and suffer for the big thing longer than anyone else. And I think that's what these people— the curiosity keeps them going, but once they get their hands on what they see as the thing, they don't let go. And they can stay with it and suffer for it.

When I was in high school, I must have been I would have been maybe 16 or 17 years old. And I went rock climbing in Eldorado Canyon where I— near where I grew up in Boulder. I'd been climbing about 3 or 4 years and I went to do a climb called T2. Now at the time, T2 was a relatively difficult climb and I went at it with a kind of an arrogant lack of preparation and I hadn't prepared for being able to to do certain kinds of finger cracks. I figure I'll figure it out when I get there. And I also didn't pause— this is that thing about boldness and discipline— I didn't pause to really double smack— double check all my systems. OK. So I'm on the 4th pitch. I'm about 400 feet above the ground. I'm going across this slanting crack system that I'd had that I started to have trouble with. My forearms started to engorge with blood and lactic acid, which means at some point, even if you're on a big hold, your hands are going to melt off. Okay?

And I'm about to fall.

I'm 400 feet above the ground. But it should be okay because there's protection. I'm tied into the rope. I may take a fall, but I'll get caught. For some reason, and to this day I still don't know why, my brain triggered that I should look at my knot. And I looked down at my knot. My knot had come untied. I had made the mistake of never really thinking about the best knot for certain types of situations. And I tied him with what's a bowline. Now, the advantage of a bowline is it's easy to untie, right? The disadvantage of a bowline is it's easy to untie. It had come untied as I kept moving across. And it is just hanging in my harness. I'm seconds away from falling. Only now I will die. I will die if I fall off. My forearms are melting. And the knot had come untied. And so I called down to my partner.

I said, "My knot came untied." "What is he gonna do? He can't do anything.

He'll just watch me fall." fall to my death. And there was an old fixed piton in the rock that we put there from the first ascent, an old soft iron piton. And I looked at it. And I probably had 15, 20 seconds before my hands would unwrap, if that, maybe 10. I took a runner and I clipped it into the piton. I clipped the piton into my harness— that runner into my harness and just went, please hold. And I let go. And it held. I put in a backup. I grabbed the knot, retied it, went to the ledge. I didn't convulse. I was very calm at that moment. I got to the ledge, I went into convulsive shaking. I was sick to my stomach for days because of the— whatever happened chemically. What I learned from that is two things. The first is that when you're in an unforgiving world, Gravity is unforgiving. It doesn't care. It never takes a day off, ever. And if you make one mistake, it can kill you, if it's the wrong kind of mistake. And what I learned is that sense of, yeah, I want to do adventurous things. I want to climb rocks. I want to be in Yosemite. I want to do things that get my adrenaline going. I— but I need the discipline to always do all the right preparation, to always think about the right knots, to always be cross-checking my system so that I can do those bold things and stay alive in an unforgiving environment. And as you and I spoke about earlier today, I think that's the rest of— I think we're all heading into an unforgiving environment where we're going to have to be both bold and disciplined. The second thing I learned, what if that python had not been there? We might not be here together. It was just by chance that that P'tom was right there. And what you realize when you rewind the tape of your own life is that there are these crucial moments where if the luck had gone the other way, you might have gotten killed. And so what you have to do is to always be putting those extra disciplines in place because I was lucky to live. And what I took from that is I never want to have to be lucky to live again. I want to live because of my discipline, not because of my luck. Please turn off your electronic gadget. Not for others, but for yourself. Effective people take time to think. Begin the discipline of putting white space on your calendar where there's no phone, no email. I was going to say no fax, but they don't even have that anymore. No Twitter, no emails, no connections, and engage in these glorious pockets of quietude to think. Do you know that Rick Warren reads a book every single day? A book a day. A book a day, 365 days a year. You wrote 1,000 books in 3 years.

First, innovation is extremely important. I would not want to send any indication we should stop innovating and America shouldn't innovate. That would be an inaccurate reading. No, no, we better damn well understand what made us innovative and make sure we don't lose those things. Exactly right. We can't afford to lose those things. What we found is that any given industry has a threshold level of innovation. And that once you get to that—

you have to get to that threshold.

For something like airlines, it's relatively low. And for something like biotech, it's really high.

And—

but that once you meet that threshold of innovation, it's not innovation alone that makes you exceptional. It is actually the blend of being able to put the innovation plus the organizational discipline. Again, we go back to, is Apple just an innovation story? No. At some point, it was a whole bunch of other things around it that made it work. Work.

If we go back and we look at Intel, what was Intel known for?

Well, yes, it had a lot of innovation because to be in semiconductor industry, you had to have a lot of innovation. But were they always the most innovative? No. And at critical junctures, they might have even been a little bit behind. But what was Intel known for? Intel delivers. So you're IBM. What's your worst nightmare? You don't have enough chips at affordable cost when the time comes. And you can look at different companies. You got maybe one chip that's more innovative, but you've got another chip that's innovative enough but it's got the organization behind it with the discipline and it delivers, where are you gonna bet? It delivers. It delivers.

Exactly right. I've always loved the story Silver Blaze, which is the Sherlock Holmes story where at the end of the case, the constable asks Holmes, what was the key to the case? And Holmes says, it was the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime. And the constable says, but the dog didn't do anything in the nighttime. Ah, ah! Yes, that was the curious incident. The dog didn't bark. And so therefore, I knew the criminal must have been somebody who knew the dog. In our research, it is the dogs that do not bark that often give us some of the best clues. And the dogs that do not bark helped us see the who principle. Now, you would think that if you're leading a company from good to great, One of the things you would expect to see, one of the dogs you would expect to bark, is that you would find very motivating and charismatic leaders who could infuse motivation into the troops so that they would go out and do good to great things. Well, as our research unfolded, what we found is that most of the good to great leaders had had a charisma bypass. They couldn't motivate anybody as just a pure motivational force. That's not how they led. But then when we began asking them, how did you get alignment? How did you get people motivated behind what you were trying to do? The dog just didn't bark. They didn't spend any time on that. That's not how they led. And we scratched our heads a little bit. How would you make sense of the fact that you're getting a whole company to go in a different direction, and yet the leaders who made this happen didn't invest in figuring out how to motivate people, how to inspire people, how to get people behind the flywheel. And this is when we learned something. See, if you have the right people, they're already motivated. The right people are self-motivated. The right people are self-disciplined. And the challenge of management, the challenge of leadership is not to how to figure out How to motivate the wrong people into the right people. It's how to get the right people and then not do all the stupid management things that tend to demotivate the already motivated people. But what you also talked about in your book is, is not to take big risks. Not to, you said, fire cannonballs. Yeah, what you— well, you want to fire cannonballs. So this is the really interesting thing. Fire bullets, then fire cannonballs. It's not a matter of— the question is not risk or not risk. The question is, where do you place your big bets? Because if you don't place a big bet, then you're never actually going to achieve exceptional results. If it's— if you're never really going big. The question is, how do you place your big bets and bound your risk at the same time? And there, the answer is what we found is that all of our companies and all of our leaders did place big bets. But they placed them after they had proven that they had taken most of the risk out by proving that that bet would likely pay off. The uncalibrated cannonball is dangerous. The calibrated cannonball is how you get something great. If you think about sort of how people apply themselves, when we go back and we look at the Good to Great data and some of the other data, we find that, that there's these 3 circles, and you put your energies in the middle of 3 3 circles. And the first circle is what you're passionate about and what you love to do and what you stand for. And the second circle is what you can be the best at. And the third circle is what drives your economic engine. Okay, now, and you focus your energies there. But let's drop that down a level to the individual. How many of the folks under age 30 in here have had cross your mind the thought, "I wonder what I'm going to do with myself." OK. I'd like you to think then about finding your own 3 circles at an individual level, which is— think about it this way. Imagine that you could engage your energies and your time directly in the middle of 3 tests. First, it is something for which you have great passion, that you love to do, that absolutely reflects your values. And when you wake up in the morning, there's this sense of, "My goodness, even if I'm getting paid for this, I would want to do it even if I wasn't getting paid for it." Now imagine if in addition to that, you could marry it to a second circle, which is finding what you're genetically encoded for. And there's a big difference of what you're what you're genetically encoded for. I discovered this as a young person. I went off to college. I thought I would be a mathematician. I had done well on math tests. But when I entered courses like real analysis, I met those who were genetically encoded for math. Not being one of them, I, I was I needed to find another version of my 3 circles. And now imagine the third circle. As you're engaged in something that makes— that is of great value, it's of either social or economic or both of value. It makes a contribution. You are useful Now imagine you have all three. Man, I'm passionate about this, I love to do it, it expresses my values, I'm genetically encoded to do it, when I do it I feel like a fish in water, and then finally, third, I'm useful. And what percentage of the world do you think has that? 5%? Maybe not even. What would happen to the world if— let's say it's 3%— if we then made it 20% of people who are doing what they're passionate about, genetically encoded for, and are useful, are in positions of real contribution and value? Now, I don't know the answer of how we make that percentage go up. But linking back to the idea of Maslow, how did he describe self-actualization? It wasn't hanging out on the beach. He defined self-actualization as discovering what you were meant to do and committing to the ardor of pursuing it with excellence. The purpose of free society, I would suggest, is to systematically increase the percentage of people who do exactly that. And then they can do it for very long periods of time.

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