Jim Collins Reveals the Surprising Truth About Business Growth

Growth is a result to be managed rather than a "gigantic more is better" goal to pursue. If you get into the idea that growth is the point, you've missed the point.

Welcome to the K Newhoff Leadership Podcast on YouTube. Hey, something special today. I have got an exclusive interview with Jim Collins. It's part of my 10th anniversary for the podcast, and we talk about why growth is a terrible goal, how the mighty fall, like why do such great leaders and great companies fall? Why are they no longer great? And the liability of charisma. Did you know that charisma can work against you, not just for you? Jim even shares his own personal flywheel.

Now, a little different. We don't have video. Jim's team requested that this be an audio-only podcast. So I'm going to disappear, and you're just going to hear the audio conversation. But I think you're going to love it. Subscribe and leave a comment sharing an insight from the conversation. Thank you so much for a great 10 years.

And now to my interview with Jim Collins. Jim, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. I am thrilled to have this conversation. I'm looking forward to it, Carrie, as, uh, because you and I have a shared interest in a marvelous framework. We do. You know, we've been, uh, talking about this interview with your team for a little while, and they said, well, you know, if you did interview Jim, what would you want to talk about? And I said, I don't know whether this works for me or against me, but my favorite book of his is *How the Mighty Fall*, and, uh, I'm really excited we're going to be able to dig into that. So I'd love to start here. You know, your books are so positive, and this is a little bit of a different spin, right? It's about what happens when it doesn't go well. Um, what led you to write *How the Mighty Fall*?

Yeah, well, so, uh, leading into this, I get a couple of things, and then I'll tell you a little story. Sure, sure. Uh, that, uh, our work has always actually looked at both sides. And the, you, there's been deep method that my research mentor, Jerry Porras, really should get the real credit for, all the way back in *Built to Last*, which was, we, Jerry had had the insight that you should always do paired comparisons, where you have the company that say, became great, in comparison to a company that was in the same spot, same circumstances, same resources, same potential, that didn't. And you compare them over time at slices of history and ask, what's different? So the research has always had, across nearly, well, more than a quarter-century of research, it was always based on the comparative contrast method. So that we had a control. But the emphasis was always on how you build an enduring great company, a visionary company, or how you take a company from good to great, or how you, you, how you prevail in times of uncertainty or chaos, and so forth. But I'd never explicitly put the lens on, okay, let's make the primary question, how great companies lose it. And what happened is, first, I'd always been kind of curious about that. But this really has a real spark that came from Joanne, uh, my wife. We've been married 44 years.

Congratulations. It's wonderful. And I, we got engaged four days after our first date. And I always sort of describe, yeah, way back in college. And here we are, 44 years later, tightly bonded together. And I always sort of describe it in life that, you know, I'm the creative propulsion machine, but strategic guidance mechanism. And if it weren't for the strategic guidance mechanism, this little creative propulsion machine would have veered way off course and probably crashed into a cliff at some point. So I, I was looking at a, a particular situation, which is that, as was expected to happen, uh, you know, over time, not all companies that were great remain great. And a couple of companies that had been in my prior research had fallen. And it wasn't that they weren't great companies in the historical era that we studied them, uh, that, that wasn't an issue. Uh, it was that what was so really provocative is that they were great, and they fell. And, and the fact that a prior great company falls doesn't invalidate that research. The way I think about it is, if you think about say, the great UCLA basketball dynasty under John Wooden, won 10 NCAA championships in 12 years. Well, if the UCLA Bruins later are not the same stature of team as they were under Wooden, well, would that invalidate the principles you learned by looking at Wooden? Well, no, they wouldn't. Actually, the principles of Wooden would still remain in place. If you veer from them, you're going to fall, right? And so I was quite clear on that. I wasn't worried that somehow our, our research had become invalid. But it, but it did raise a very important thing, which is Joanne said, people need to understand how this happens. You need to understand it. And here's the deal, Jim, you need to write this before someone else does. You need to figure out how this happens before somebody else says, oh, well, you know, that company failed, so therefore there was a problem with the research. And you need to do the hard work on that. And so that's strategic guidance. She was absolutely right. But what happened as a result is I fell in love with the question, as usually happens for me. And I just became completely fascinated with watching the unraveling of those that had actually reached real heights. And, and here's the really interesting thing about it, Carrie. If you look at all the work that I've had the privilege to be connected to, back to *Built to Last* with Jerry Porras, and the *Good to Great* project, and *Great by Choice*, and all of these, there are principles in there. And I love uncovering Level 5 Leadership, and the flywheel, and all these sorts of things. But here's the interesting thing. It's easier to find a framework of ascent because there are things you have to do. You have to get the right people on the bus. You have to build flywheel momentum. You have to confront the brutal facts. There are things you have to do. So the path to building something great is fairly narrow, which in a way means that constructing a framework is a lot easier. And so there's lots of ways to fall off the path. And so, given the variety of ways that that could happen, it turned out that coming up with a cohesive framework, when there's so many ways in which organizations can bring about their own senseless self-destruction, made it one of the most intellectually stimulating and challenging journeys. Because every time I'd build a framework, it would fall apart. Then I'd build the framework and it would fall apart. Then I'd build the framework and it would fall apart. And finally, when it all came together, the framework was really beautiful and powerful. But boy, the journey to get there was intellectually harder than any other study I'd been involved with. Hence the affection for it.

I would imagine, you know, that's something that's interesting about your research, Jim. And you've said that, and we'll get to it maybe a little bit later with Level 5 humility. But you are empirically, you're driven by the data. And there's a lot of us who sort of make the data say what we want it to say, perhaps from time to time. And it's really quite remarkable that you would spend, I would assume, years saying, I think we found it. And then you look at more data and go, oh, that's not it. And then you go back. Can you talk a little bit about that drive around the research and your dedication to making sure that you've got a provable framework?

Yeah, so it, it begins with the fact that I am just afflicted with curiosity. I am just congenitally curious. I, I love questions. I love questions that I don't know the answer to. And, and for me, look, if you're going to do a, a massive piece of research, and all these are big research studies. I mean, *Built to Last* was five years, *Good to Great* was six years, *Great by Choice* was nine years. The new research I'm, I'm engaged in took me 10 years. These are big, monster studies. And they're, they're like moving a mountain with a shovel. They're just huge. And if all you did at the end of that was to basically reinforce what you thought was true, that would be incredibly depressing. Like, what's the point of moving the mountain if all you do is find what you expect to find? The whole point of doing research is to be surprised, is to have, is to come out at the other end thinking differently than when you went in. And what I love is seeing through the process. I love watching my brain being re-architected. And that, for me, if I just was reinforcing what I thought before, I wouldn't, there's no point to do it. It would just be like, oh, I was right. Well, I know I'm not smart enough just to just be right. My, one of my mentors, Peter Drucker, was, but I'm not. I need research. So I, so I just, and I just love. There's nothing I love more than sitting there and going, huh, who would have thought that? Huh, that's a very different framework than a lot of leaders I know who, you know, confirmation bias is a real thing, but they're kind of like, yeah, see, told you. I, I love this. So I'm curious, do you remember, I'm sure you might, one or two of the framework pieces that fell apart? And then, part B of the question is, what was the finding when you finally found the five stages that really, you went, oh, wow, I, yeah, I didn't know that. That really surprised you?

Yeah, so a couple of things were, I would say, one of the, one of the biggest. It's actually a great question. I'll think about like, what was trying to rhyme back now to what was most surprising. But one, one is absolutely that the idea that the basic kind of disease would be a form of complacency. And would tend to think that, well, what happens is, is that a company becomes successful, and then it becomes kind of bloated. And this happens to organizations, and then they become kind of languid and complacent. And, and I want to be really clear, if you're infected with the disease of complacency, you're also going to fall. That, that's, that's clear. But what surprised me is that in stage two of the framework, uh, it's not about complacency. Only one of the companies I studied did I see evidence of that of the ones that fell. It's actually overreaching. It's the undisciplined pursuit of more. It's the aggressive pursuit of more growth, and more bigger, and more this, and more that. It was, it was the kind of, it was almost, uh, uh, it was an overdoing it, and an over-aggression, and an over-expansion. And, and that surprised me because, you know, the normal views, all people become, you know, successful and complacent and lazy, and then they kind of lose it. Sure. Yeah, that'll happen. That's not, that's not what, that's not the story here. And that was very surprising to me. And I, I was really trying to figure out where, what to do with that in the, in the framework. I think the second thing that really surprised me is, uh, well, gosh, as I kind of think through the framework, so many different aspects of it. But, but one, one of the other things that really surprised me that I, I kind of expected, but I thought was so interesting and how prevalent it was, which is that somewhere between stages two and three, in every single case, there's a problematic succession of power. And I had always been, you know, skeptical of putting too much emphasis on the single leader. Going all the way back to *Built to Last*, I mean, the, no great company, a great organization can be explained by a single person because they all eventually, uh, go away. And, and, and we were building a company, you know, this, CEOs don't last a hundred years. So, but companies can. So I'd always been skeptical of that. But, uh, what I really came to see is something very, very clear, which is that while no single leader can make an organization or company great by himself or herself, the wrong single leader, vested with power, can bring one down. And I didn't expect to see the pronounced effect of single leaders being so pronounced, powerfully, potentially on the downside. Um, the, the third thing, I think, that really surprised me is how far a company can fall and come back. And, uh, that, that really, I, I mean, it, what's really striking. So you think about say, IBM in the early 1990s. Yeah. They're still around. Exactly. And in fact, I just want to, I want to share with you something I just, I, I pulled it out because it's just a delight to sort of illustrate this idea of how far things can fall. I'm going to read you, without telling you the names, the name of the company, some headlines about a particular company back a number of, a few decades ago. Headline: The Fall of an American Icon. This company, once the hip flag bearer of its industry, is in sad decline. Related headline: Stock Takes Another Bruising. Shares have lost more than 75% of their value. Next headline: The Incredible Shrinking. And then listing the name of the company. Yeah. Okay. You don't know what that company was. No idea. Apple. Right? Because they almost died, late mid to late 1990s. Yeah. Before Jobs came back, right? Under John Sculley, they went through sort of intervening years, especially between Sculley and Jobs. And it, like, right, '96, '97 timeframe. And so, I mean, nobody would guess that that's Apple, right? And, and they came back. And Microsoft was pronounced dead numerous times, and they're, they're thriving right now. They're definitely thriving. Uh, so it's, I think that I was surprised at how, I mean, the signature of greatness is not an unblemished record, right? It's not perfection. It's the ability to come back from sometimes even right on the edge of Stage 5 and come back even stronger than before. And, uh, but, well, I was very surprised about how far, how far they can fall and come back. And that was an uplifting finding, actually. Because if you, if the company organization found themselves way late in Stage 4, to know that there is, in fact, well-founded hope based on actual historical evidence that it is not inevitable that you go all the way to Stage 5, was a wonderful, wonderful finding.

Well, and that's good news for, you know, most of our listeners to this show are church leaders, as you knew when you took the interview. And if you look at the landscape of America, I mean, you've spoken at churches before. You spoke for years at the Global Leadership Summit. I hope you, hope you do it again in the future, Jim. And, you know, America is littered, and the West is littered, with churches that are in Stage 5. Like, and we'll go through the stages in just a minute. And what, you know, church planting is a big thing, church growth is a big thing, but church revitalization absolutely needs to happen in our lifetime. And hopefully, this will be some hope along the way. Just so we can frame people, I realize, you know, not everybody's read the book. Do you mind walking through the five stages? And then maybe we can break those down little by little.

I've got them handy. If it's easier for me to do it, or if you've got them. I, um, uh, let me give a sort of a, an overview of them. And, uh, let me, uh, let me lead into it first of all with sort of an overall picture, if you will, and then quickly hit the five stages so people have got the context of this. There's a very interesting thing that jumped out when you look across the five stages, which is that you can be, you don't actually visibly fall where the where the world and the outside can see that you have fallen until Stage 4. So you actually go through the first three of five stages looking healthy on the outside, but you're already sick on the inside. And so, just as an, kind of a big picture frame, that's why this is so scary. Because you could be well down the path into the stages of decline, and everybody's still saying, you're great. And maybe you're convincing yourself you're great. And so that's just the overall meta point about how the framework works. So Stage 1 is hubris born of success. And it's not success. There's no, there's no, uh, definitive rule that says that if a company has been successful, it inevitably has to then be come mediocre or less successful because of reversion to the mean. You don't have to revert to other people's means. You might revert to your own. So if you're an 800-meter runner that can run a 1:42 800-meter, uh, and, that doesn't mean that, well, because you can do that, you're going to revert to the average of 2:15 for other runners. I mean, you might revert to your own mean if you had a really good day and then revert to your own mean, right? So there's no, there's no basic law that says that if you rise to certain heights, inevitably that one must go down the other side. Think about a company like Walmart today. I mean, it's still, uh, uh, cranking along all these years after Sam Walton founded it, way back with this first dime store in 1945. So, I don't know what the future holds, but it's been a pretty long run, right? So there's, so success does not inevitably lead to failure. It's when that success is coupled with the hubris that flows from success. And this is the idea, the great Classics Professor Jay Ruesch Ferris defined hubris in a way that I love, which is outrageous arrogance that inflicts suffering on the innocent. And isn't that a great definition of hubris? Fantastic. Yeah, exactly. And that, that comes from Jay Ruesch Ferris's, uh, classics courses. And, but, but the idea basically, that it's when the arrogance comes in, the hubris that comes in from success, that then leads to Stage 2. And this is the sort of transition where it's the undisciplined pursuit of more. And the undisciplined pursuit of more, it can show up in many ways. It often shows up in undisciplined pursuit of growth. It can, uh, show up in undisciplined big bets that don't have any calibration behind them. It can grow up in the lack of discipline to make sure that your growth is constrained by having enough of the right people to execute on that growth, uh, brilliantly. Uh, it can also just begin to show up in increasing loss of discipline. Whereas you try to rein in the chaos of all that pursuit of more, you begin by installing forms of kind of bureaucratic constraint rather than doubling down on, we need self-disciplined people who don't need that kind of, uh, bureaucracy. So all these kind of form together. And somewhere between there in Stage 2 and 3 is this, uh, thing that often happens, or happened in every case we looked at, which is a problematic succession of power. Then you go to Stage 3. So, so you've got hubris, point of success, undisciplined pursuit of more. Stage 3 is denial of risk and peril. Now, in this stage, what happens is warning signs start to accumulate. There's whether it be storm clouds in the outside world, whether it be your own internal sense for things, whether it be that your constituents are unhappy, whether it be that you're losing some key people and you can't quite figure out why, uh, whether it be that you've taken some really big, risky bets and you actually don't know the outcome of them yet, and if they go badly, it's going to hurt you really, uh, severely. I mean, there's a whole bunch of different ways. But what happens in Stage 3 is, well, the peril is mounting. The, the response to to it is denial. Uh, and it's denial in the form of, well, it's just a temporary economic blip, or, uh, that wasn't really our fault, or we got a stroke of bad luck, or, I mean, any number of different ways. That's not really true. That's not really true. Exactly. That's what I read in that chapter. It's like, yeah, that's not really true. That's not really true. And, and the whistleblowers, or the, the people that are bringing you the advice that, hey, you want to look at this, they just get dismissed. Exactly. What happens is you get really good at, like the, the folk, they get start getting isolated, and then they leave. Yeah, many times. So, and then if you don't actually, and then you blame them for leaving rather than saying, there's information in that, right? What's the information? So Stage 3 is denial of risk and peril. And then you're on the cusp of Stage 4. And this is when it all kind of comes home. The risks come go badly. The peril becomes, you know, something that is a real decline. You, you're in decline. There's no question about it. Whether you're falling in terms of whether it be in a company's case, it's economic conditions, it's marketing conditions, it could be your membership, whatever it happens to be. But there's no denying anymore that we're falling. But it's not the fall that is Stage 4. Uh, it is, uh, grasping for, and I'll put in parentheses, secular salvation here. So, and the church community will call it grasping for secular salvation. And that happens. And what it is, is it's looking for, you know, you begin, you react and overreact with a series of kind of semi-panicky moves. And you basically say, uh, oh, gosh, we just need a savior leader who's going to come in and fix it, or, uh, we need to, we need to merge with somebody else, or we need to place a big bet on an unproven technology, or we need a cultural transformation, or we need programs, or we need, you know, change initiatives, or whatever these things are, right? They're kind of silver bullet type things. And, and what happens is the thing that makes Stage 4 really hard is that those things often produce an upward blip, but it doesn't have the staying power. So you inflect down again. So it's, it's, it's hopes dashed, hopes dashed, hopes dashed, hopes dashed. And every time that happens, you erode vital forms of capital, whether that be financial capital, cultural capital, uh, whatever sort of different, it can be soft capital, hard capital, but it erodes it every time. And there's nothing that begins to corrode more than a series of false hopes dashed by events, as Churchill would put it. And then, if you do that long enough, eventually you go right onto the cusp of Stage 5. And Stage 5 is the one that you never come back from. And that's capitulation to irrelevance or death. And this is when you just can't come back. It could be, you know, either you just, you merge with someone else, you, you outright die as a, as an organization, uh, you run out of cash. I mean, it just basically, you're gone. And, and any real sense of having been there. And then it's, it's game over. So those are the, the five stages. Uh, and, and let me just actually, Carrie, now that we've run through them, and you've come at this from the, from the church world, let me just pause for a moment, if you don't mind. I'd be, as I've sort of run through those, and you've read the work, um, can you share with me how that looks through the church world? Right? Because I, I, you were drawn to this because of your experience, but as I describe those stages, how, what have you seen, and how does this come to life in the world of churches?

I think people are people, Jim. And one of the things that I think makes this such an important work, and why I keep rereading it, by the way, leaders, this is 125 pages. You can read this in an afternoon. It's not, it's not, I love the brevity of it and the succinctness of it. So to answer your question, Jim, I think there was a period in my leadership where we were growing so fast, and a bit at it for about a decade, where I think the seeds of Stage 1, 2, and 3 were in my leadership. We never ended up grasping for salvation or capitulating to irrelevance or death. We didn't start to decline. But when I read it, it was like a just-in-time medicine. And I think, you know, four and five are really good for churches that are in decline. When you see churches that are like, 50 people for 50 years, right? It's like, wow, the writing is on the wall. And that's a biblical reference, like, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? And so you see that. But for, we have a lot of growth-minded leaders, and leaders who are part of a growing church in the business sphere, you know, they go there on the weekend, they're on the Elder board, or we have church planters, and people who are revitalizing churches listen. And what I find, Jim, is success is intoxicating. I mean, we're learning a lot about the brain over the last 15, 20 years. You get the dopamine hits, and it is, you know, like to be 10 years into this podcast, you doing the 10, like that is intoxicating. And so I think that leads to a hubris born of success, and perhaps downplaying good fortune, luck, providence, etcetera, taking a little too much credit. Undisciplined pursuit of more, where that shows up in the church world, and we're going through a really interesting correction right now, is, uh, the creation of of what we've called multi-site over the last 20 years, 25 years. And that is a church as one location, but there's a lot of people. So you open a second location, a third location, a fourth location, a fifth location. And sometimes the constraints aren't there to make you go, wait a minute, what is this about? What does this look like? And so what's happening to a lot of churches right now, particularly after succession, after that next leader, the leader who built it all was a boomer and is now stepping out, is a millennial walks in and goes, okay, we don't need five campuses, we don't need eight campuses. What were we thinking? There's only 50 people who attend this one campus. And they're having to constrain. So that's, there's that undisciplined pursuit of more. That's a constant temptation in my life. I've seen it in other leaders as well. And then denial of risk and peril. I mean, you know, one of the things I'm, I'm going to work for a couple of years on is something on church culture and trying to make it healthier. But this is, this is a very poorly kept secret in church world that leaders can be very difficult, senior leaders can be very difficult to approach. And, you know, the worst part is, and we talked about this in other episodes on this podcast, is we spiritualize it. So Jim, if you come to me, I'm the lead pastor, you're an elder, or you're, you know, on my staff, and you're like, hey, Carrie, I'm just noticing, you know, I don't see momentum like I used to. These people are a little bit upset. I'm like, ah, Jim, you know, don't even worry about it. We're fine. You know, and you keep up that. And then all of a sudden, you're disloyal. All of a sudden, you're, and then we'll spiritualize it and say, well, God isn't speaking through you, Jim. Which, you know, is a form of spiritual abuse, I think. And we have to be so careful. So I see it playing out in those spheres. And even though you're a Christian, and even though you really love God, it doesn't mean that you're exempt from these temptations. Not, not in the least.

So does that help at all? Give you a little framework? And I'm, I want to make an observation and then, uh, something you said, and then I, I want to ask you a follow-up question. Um, but, uh, you were talking about this thing about perhaps church leaders can be hard to approach. Mhm. One of the things that, uh, I, I noticed when, whether they be comparison companies in our prior research or in the denial of risk and peril part of the *How the Mighty Fall* framework, there's this really dangerous moment when the primary reality that people inside an organization worry and think about is the reality of the leader. Meaning, how's the leader going to react? Yeah. As if that's, as if that's reality. As if, you know, and that, for them, might actually be the reality of their lives. The reality of eggshells, right? The reality of their, their, the reality of their day-to-day life is that that leader's reactions, behaviors, uh, tone is the reality they're living with, most, you know, day-to-day. And if, and if, in fact, they're principally managing that reality, what's happened is the reality of that leader's behavior has all of a sudden replaced real reality. Because real reality is what's actually happening. What's actually happening in our relationship to the external community? What's actually happening in terms of how well we're executing? And when the leader becomes the reality, rather than reality being the reality, that is really a turning point. Wow.

I think that might be a particular poison in the church. You know, one of the things I wanted to explore with you, you know, particularly around Level 5 humility, but it probably ties directly into Stage 3, denial of risk and peril, is, you know, leaders are, depending on your tradition, seen as anointed by God, or, you know, special, etcetera. I always tried to downplay that. I'm like, hey, I got called into this late in the game. I'm just like you. My prayers don't go direct, okay? They go the same way yours do, Jim, when you pray. So, you know, I've, I've, I'm not of that tradition. But, you know, if you're a leader and you've got momentum, people seem to inherently respect the pastor and want to follow the pastor. And so I think that is an occupational hazard in ministry. And then when you put a microphone on every week, and you've got 40, 45 minutes of uninterrupted screen time, attention time, you know, giving a keynote, which no CEO really has with their organization. I think you fall into, uh, double trouble with that scenario. It's, it's a tremendous amount of power and charisma around one particular leader that can lead to that hubris born of success and denial of risk and peril, plus the undisciplined pursuit of more. Can I, I just want to actually, I want to share a story related to this with, uh, with, with someone and a leader that I admire greatly, who overcame the liability of charisma. And, and I really do view it that way. Often people think that, well, charisma is a, is fundamentally an asset, right? Not a liability. And my research has led me to the conclusion that charisma is at least as much a liability as an asset. Because here's the deal. If I have charisma, through, I can look at you, I can take my blue eyes and I can pierce them through you, and I can bring a sense of just energy and intensity and draw you in, and I can convince you that I am right, even if I'm wrong. Wow. But if, on the other hand, I lack charisma, well, then I actually have to win my argument on the merits of the case, because I don't have that power of personality of persuasion. I have to get you to want to do what must be done through the actual logic and evidence and calm, rational approach. And so, what charisma is very, very dangerous because you can so easily convince people you're right when you're not. So if you are one of these people that has charisma and has always thought of it as an asset, I simply ask you to consider the possibility that it is as much a liability to be managed as it is an asset to exploit. Now, the story I want to share with this is, uh, Sam Walton. And I, Sam is one of the great Level 5 leaders we studied him in *Built to Last*. Founded Walmart with a single dime store in the Southeast. And after about five years, he had two dime stores and just kept building, uh, from there. And it was a long, slow process initially of kind of adding a dime store roughly every few years. And eventually got the, the superstore concept. And then that was 1962, first Walmart. And then began building flywheel momentum from there. And of course, Sam Walton was not unlike many of the people who might lead churches. He had tremendous charisma. And he understood that the power of that. He actually would lead something that would be a little less like a business meeting and more like a revival session or something when they would do the Saturday morning meetings. And he would jump up on trucks and get all excited about things. So, but notice a couple of things. The first is that Walmart went well past Sam. And he always wanted that to happen. He never wanted it to be that Walmart would fall after he was there. But he also, all the way along, would always model for his people that there was something to learn from others. And you should never, no matter how successful you are, take that as a valid that you're doing everything right. And there's this story where they went to the, they would always go visit competitor stores. And they, you know, go into the parking lot and count how many cars they are. And they'd go into the store and they'd measure aisles and whatever, right? They're trying to go in and they went to, I don't remember which chain they went to or what store they went to. But some of his executives came out and they were laughing, like, oh, can you believe how bad they did this? And they, you know, how terrible that is, and whatever. And Sam said, you go back in that store right now and you come out with a half a dozen, or whatever the number was, things that they do better than us. And don't come out until you do. Now, that was Sam Walton, right? He would have never laughed at a competitor. He would have said, I can learn something from them. Deep humility. There's that Level 5 humility. Absolutely. Totally.

Did you spend time, I'm not sure about the timelines, did you spend time personally with Sam? Or I did not. Uh, I, so Sam was, uh, towards the end of his life when we were doing. I wondered about that. Yeah. *Built to Last*. And I, the closest I got to Sam was a wonderful little story, though, uh, that happened. I was teaching in the executive program at Stanford. And I, it was folks, CEO executives from around the world. And was doing the research on *Built to Last*. And I was, did kind of a preview of what would be in *Built to Last*. And in the front row, there was this Brazilian executive, his name is Jorge Paulo Lemann, who has since become one of the really dear, enduring, great friends of my life. And Jorge Paulo, uh, and I got into an argument because I was using Walmart as an example. And I sort of saying, this is how you kind of want to think about Walmart. And, and Jorge Paulo says, I'm not, I don't really see it that way. And we went, and I said, well, we've done the research. And then Jorge Paulo said, well, Sam's a friend of mine. And so, and so, you know, so we ended up, we ended up becoming dear friends out of this. But he told me this story about how he became friends with Sam Walton and things that happened, which is that they came out of Brazil, and they had bought a discount retailing company in Brazil. And they didn't really know much about discount retailing. So they wanted to learn how to do it. And they sent letters to like, the retailing CEOs in America, like 10 of them. All but all but Sam either just declined to say, please come up, and we'll be happy to show you how this works, or didn't reply at all. Sam said, sure, come on up. And so Jorge Paulo tells me the story as they, they fly up from from Brazil, and they land in Bentonville, Arkansas. And Sam shows up in his truck with his dog, Roy, and drives them around. And, and, and, you know, they're standing at night doing dishes together, these these Brazilian tycoons. But Jorge Paulo said, you know what I realized was after about two days, all he did was ask us questions. And I finally realized he invited us up here to learn. That's that was Sam Walton.

So that's where I want to drill down on because the overlap between Level 5 humility, uh, and the hubris born of success, it's just such an interesting dovetail. And I think, you know, if you look at church growth, I mean, there weren't too many churches of a thousand. And listen, let me preface this by saying, I know some of the pastors quite well of the largest churches in America. They're not all arrogant. I mean, some of them have deep-rooted humility, very disciplined pursuit of growth, uh, no denial of risk and peril. I mean, they're, they're stellar people with great character. On the other hand, we also have, uh, you know, more than a baker's dozen of, of, you know, leaders who maybe could learn from this. And I'm always checking my internal motivations because I realize, oh, you know, pride goeth before a fall, you know, when you think about Level 5 humility and what you found about the hubris born of success, uh, I want to go back to what you found in *Good to Great*. When, again, the research, I've heard you tell this story, you write about this story, but the research suggested this Level 5 humility. And tell us about your initial reaction to what your team had to say, and how that could possibly be a factor in enduring greatness.

Yeah, so as I mentioned earlier, I have, I, I began my journey into all of this in being somewhat skeptical of putting much emphasis on leadership. And it's kind of ironic because in the years since, I've become known as a, as a somebody who knows a little bit about leadership. And I even held a two-year chair at the United States Military Academy at West Point, was the Distinguished Chair for the Study of Leadership, funded by the Class of 1951. So it's just, here I go to the, one of the, one of the world's greatest leadership development institutions in the world to work on the question of leadership. And I'm had originally started by not even believing in the idea.

Can I, can I ask you why? Why were you of leadership? What made you think it can't be leadership when you were starting this whole journey?

Yeah, I would say that it was more skepticism than it was just saying it couldn't be. But I would, I was very, very skeptical. But I'll tell you why I was very skeptical. I was very skeptical for, for, uh, because I have a historical lens in everything that I do. And I, if you look over a long enough period of time, you cannot explain enduring organizations through a single leader. And I'll never forget the beginning of, of *Built to Last* research, Jerry Porras and I was, you know, we were talking about things. And he just said, I have a question for you, Jim. Who, who's the visionary leader of 3M? I said, I have no idea. He said, that's kind of the point, don't you think? And, and he said, you, I think there's a thing. He said, we, we want to change a frame, which is, we put so much emphasis in today's world on a visionary leader, but they're pretty perishable. So what if there's such a thing called a visionary organization? And that's what really spawned *Built to Last*. And, and so I really came to see that it was the companies that overemphasize the dependence on a single leader that were much more our comparison companies. And even Sam, who was, you know, look at what happened with Walmart after he left, with with a lot of things in place. We could go through lots of CEOs in history where they set it up to be fabulous beyond them. Steve Jobs did it too. He went to Level 5. And so I, I, uh, I was skeptical from that standpoint. Plus also, I have a, a deep love affair for our country. And as part of that love affair for our country, I have always been fascinated with the, uh, formulation of the country in the Constitution. And the United States Constitution being something where, if you think about the founding of the United States, with all of our flaws, but the whole idea was, we don't need to have rise and fall depending upon whether we have the hereditary good luck of a king, of a good king. We can create a system that accounts for all of our human frailties, has the potential to change with the amendment mechanism, and has a structure to work within. And we talked back in *Built to Last* about, you don't want to be a time teller, you want to be a clock builder. Well, folks who wrote the Constitution were clock builders. They were clock building. And so I came at the world with the idea that you don't want to be the charismatic time teller, you want to be the clock builder. And, and so when we started *Good to Great*, I said to the research team, just to be really clear, we're not going to have a leadership answer in this book. I know everybody's going to want to be like, it's about the leader, and what did the leader do? And I'm like, first of all, it's boring. Second, it's, uh, I mean, because it's just kind of like, it's such a trite answer. And I thought, and if we think it's that, then that's all we're going to find. I don't want to, let's, let's actually look and see what's much more under the hood. And what happened is, my very strong views about this, I came in one day, and the whole research team had kind of joined hands and they said, today, Jim, is the day we've decided to tell you that you're wrong. Said about what? And they said, about this anti-leadership bias that you have. We've been studying, as you've asked us to do, very deeply, the, the *Good to Great* cases. And you'll be going through all the data with us and so forth. And there's no way you can remove the leader that was there at that time of inflection from the story. It would be irresponsible to the data. And you always tell us, Jim, pay attention to the data, not to you. So we invoke that here today. You're wrong. And so I said, well, let me just ask you a question. How do you explain the comparison companies? Because didn't they also have leaders? And I went to the little whiteboard and I said, it's just like an algebraic, you know, simple ratio where if you have the same variable in the numerator as in the denominator, the variable crosses out. So in, we have leadership in the *Good to Great* companies, but guess what? We also had it in the comparison companies, often very charismatic leadership. So we have leadership in the numerator, leadership in the denominator, leadership crosses out, leadership therefore doesn't, you know, distinguish. It's an irrelevant variable. And I put down the little marking pen and sat down and said, no, let's go back to work and do something useful. And, and so this was great because I love, there's nothing I love more than having really smart young people around me who really don't care what I think, and they pushed back. And they said, and they marshaled a really strong case. But what they then said, and this be, this was the power of having a great research team of people following the data, not me, they said, you're right that both sets of companies had leaders. But there's something different about the *Good to Great* leaders. They're from a different cloth. That was interesting. And that was the seed. And what happened is, we came to see that the *Good to Great* companies had Level 5 leaders, as we came to call them. The comparison companies had Level 4 leaders. And so it wasn't leadership or not. It was the difference between five and four. And the difference between the five and the four was the great surprise. It was their humility. And it was a humility combined with a fierce, ferocious will on behalf of what it was they were leading. And that was, for me, a major turning point. And it happened because we followed where the evidence went. And I've spent the last, that probably happened 25 years ago now. See, yeah, more than, yeah, 25 years ago, that meeting probably happened. And in the last 25 years, I've just gained kind of deeper layers of understanding about what Level 5 is really all about.

I think that's really what I want to drill down on a little bit because, you know, you've got a

picture of Sam Walton showing up in his pickup truck with Old Roy next to him and they're doing dishes at his house. There's no entourage, there's no security detail, there's no, you know, media team following him around. And I know it was a different era, but when you look at the world in 2024 today, and you know, I, I, I'm very concerned about the hubris born of success and also would aspire to have a humility that would accord with my faith and, you know, being a better leader. What are some of the attributes or characteristics of a Level 5 leader with that kind of humility that you notice in the world today?

Yeah, so first, I, I want to share something that, uh, uh, that I, I want to, let me first, I guess, put a little shading on kind of what I don't mean by it or, or sort of filling it out, because it, it's not about necessarily the package, if you will, that it, that it comes in. The range of personalities that you see in Level 5 leaders is immense. So if you take two really great, uh, Level 5 CEOs from American history, Katharine Graham of the Washington Post and an M.L. of Xerox, right? About an M.L. pulling Xerox out of a tailspin and how the mighty fall, how they, she got it out of stage five. If you look at these two Level 5 leaders, they're both Level 5, but their personalities were really, really different. I mean, M.L.K. is kind of magnetic. She walks in the room, the lights would just sort of go up even if you didn't flip the switch. I mean, you just had a certain magnetism. You just felt better when you were in A.M.L.'s presence. So she's got charisma. She did have charisma, yes, and tremendous humility. So you can be a Level 5 with charisma. She's a really good example of that, and she's very charismatic, Level 5. Uh, Katharine Graham, uh, was much more of a sort of serious character. She had a wonderful laugh and a great sense of humor, but, but she, uh, was much more sort of reserved and, and, and almost more patrician, and, and her kind of whole demeanor would have been very different than than in M.L.'s. And Katharine Graham, for example, was much more, uh, likely to say, "Change people and, and remove them if they weren't doing well," whereas A.M.L., he would tend to really invest in developing people if they weren't doing well. There were, they were different kind of personality approaches to things, but they were both Level 5. So my point there is that don't get hung up on kind of the external packaging. It's not about that. And also, here's the other thing. This actually came up with somebody who was at a lab obsession with me and had had was really puzzled on Level 5 because of a church pastor. It was somebody who, it wasn't in the church world, but he attended a particular church. He said, "Trying to reconcile this with my pastor." And he said, "I think he has humility, but on the other hand, there's certain aspects of just he's so strongly clear about what we should do." And what I realize is, and I think about, like, my wife Joanna, I mentioned earlier, who's so strategically clear, she's just brilliantly clear about things. Sometimes people confuse clarity with arrogance. If you are just clear and, and, uh, really can see strategically, profoundly, the, the, the through line, that doesn't mean you're arrogant. It just means you're clear. And so don't, and so if somebody's just really clear, it may not mean that they're arrogant. They just might be five steps ahead of you. That, that's, is possible, right? Uh, so what is the other side of it? And first of all, it is not just the humility. It is the combination of the humility and the will that is the crux of Level 5. It is that you have a, you, I mentioned Katharine Graham earlier. She clearly had the Level 5 humility. She had the window and the mirror, as any Level 5 would have, which is when things go well, they're really good at pointing out the window to factors other than themselves about how they were lucky, about how conditions served them well, about how the wonderful people around them helped things happen. And when things go badly, they're really good at standing in front of the mirror and saying, "I'm responsible." Versus the non-Level 5s who do the opposite. Things go well, they look in the mirror, "I'm really good." And when things go badly, they point out the window and say, "It wasn't me." Uh, Katharine Graham clearly had the right relationship to the window and the mirror. She was a voracious learner. When Warren Buffett invested in her company, she said, "I'm going to make Warren Buffett, who wasn't well-known at the time, my teacher." And he would bring 20 annual reports from different companies, and then she would have to read them and report back, and they would have Socratic discussions about what was in them. She was just a voracious student, always, always, always learning, and always thinking of herself as a leader in development rather than a leader that is made. But the flip side of Katharine Graham is the will. When it came to the moment of whether to publish the Pentagon Papers, and pretty much everyone around her told her not to, including, as I understand it, her board chair, who said, "Well, I, I guess I wouldn't." And her thought was, "Well, he didn't say no." And, and then, but, but she, she wanted the Washington Post. She, she got it from her. It was a tragedy that led her there, and it was a family company. She said, "You know, this is kind of a moment where it's a real inflection. We can either be a nice little local paper, or we could step up to maybe be mentioned in the same breath with the other great papers in the world." And at that moment, she made the willful decision. She made it, uh, when it came to backing her reporters, Watergate. She did that. When it came to some very, very difficult decisions later related to the O.P. Pressman strike, she was the one that had the iron resolve to get through it all, and including bringing in helicopters to land on top of buildings to get printing plates into the helicopters to take them to other places so they could get the paper published. So to understand Level 5, you have to understand that it is both sides. It is the, it's the, it's the real humility, and it's the will. It's the combination of the two. And the real deepest essence of Level 5 is simply the answer to the following question: What's the truth of your ambition? Is the truth of your ambition that it is about you, or is the truth of your ambition that it is about what you're really building, trying to do, and contributing? And not what you say it is, but what is the inner truth of that? And whatever that inner truth is, it will show.

Well, that was my next question. How do you know what your motivation is? What are some signs?

I, that's a great question, Carrie, because I ask myself that question all the time, Jim. And my best answer is, it's mixed, and it depends on the moment. Yeah.

So how would you, how would you answer that question?

Yeah, you know, it is interesting. Um, there's a phrase that I've often heard used because, let me just back up for a second and just say, I want to underscore what you said, because I think what we often can end up with is a divergence of the two qualities of a Level 5 leader. On some occasions, you get a truly humble person, but there's no resolve, there's no will, there's no mission focus. It's just a nice person doing nice things. Yeah. That's not, that's not, that's not Level 5 leadership. On the other hand, you get people who are just killing it on the mission, like doing unbelievable things. They just don't have a deep personal humility. And it's the fusion of the two that brings Level 5. So my mind goes here, Jim, and it's a really great question. Thanks for flipping it back. It's a hard one to answer. Um, I would say, how loosely do I hold things? You know, we, is it about the mission? I'll give you a very practical example. You know, I was lead pastor of our church, which we're still a part of. We are part of a small group, we give, we attend there. I'm the founding pastor, which means I'm functionally useless, is what it actually means now. Jim, I handed things over nine years ago to a great leader who has been doing incredible things. And, you know, that's always an adjustment, right? To be a founder who is still part of the organization. But we've lived in the same community for almost 30 years, I guess, and have lived in two houses. And last night, my wife and I were going for dinner, and we drove by the old house. And I'm a little bit OCD. I mean, my lawn, you know, is very neat, and the gardens are kept, and everything. And that was true of the old house. But, you know, the people who purchased it, or maybe they've sold it a couple of times, I don't know. Uh, it's, it's, it's gone to the point where it's degraded quite a bit. And part of me, you know, my friends will say, "Wow, does that bother you that your old place has sort of gone to pot?" And I'm like, "I shouldn't have sold it." Like, then I shouldn't have sold it. I should have owned two houses and maintained both of them. You've got to hold things loosely. And so I'm, I've got a big birthday next year. It's a 10th anniversary. You know, I love this. I love, like, the fact that we are having this conversation for the 10th anniversary is a dream come true. On the other hand, if it all disappeared tomorrow, you know, what does that do? I don't know. I think, you know, and I've, I've, I've gone with a few mentors, people who have finished or are finishing well, and asked this question. And I think about my next decade. I think what I want more than success is the freedom and ability to make a contribution. I don't know whether my books, the next book, will sell one copy or 100,000 copies, but I want it to be well-researched and thought out enough that if somebody read it, it would be genuinely helpful for what they're doing. Um, you know, it's, it's almost like, uh, this is a little bit of a lab. You don't really know what your motivation is until things are taken away, right? And so, having been through a couple of rounds of that, leaving law, and then leaving ministry, I think, "Okay, you know, it was, it was hard. Leaving ministry was harder than leaving law, for sure." But, uh, I look at it that way. And then, you know, is my entire universe built around the work that I do, or do we have friends who are just friends, and hobbies that are just hobbies, and pursuits that are just pursuits? And, you know, the other question I would ask regularly when I was a lead pastor is, uh, because, you know, theoretically, we're all Christians, hopefully in practice as well. But you get into this occupational hazard where, you know, you get paid to believe what you believe, right? Which is really weird. You don't, you have a job, but you go home, and you're a husband, and you get to go hiking in the mountains. And then I go home, and I'm still a Christian. I'm like, "What does that mean?" You know? And so I would ask this question to myself and to my team: "If all of this went away tomorrow, what would be left of your faith?" And it's a good question. I mean, I read my Bible this morning and prayed, and, you know, it's quite a vibrant faith, maybe, you know, as good or, or perhaps hopefully matured a little bit from when I was leading the church, because you get older. Um, so I look at things like that. That's a pretty jumbled answer, uh, because I, I don't know. What do you hear in that? What do you see in that? It's, and I'm, I'm asking myself the question on a regular basis, "What really are my motives?" And then trying to surrender them in prayer. Yeah.

Well, you know, it's interesting because I, so I, that'd be a very hard question for me to answer, looking, peering into somebody else. I, yeah, I think that that's hard to see. I do. I, I'm also quite confident that all of us have mixtures of motives. That there's no, uh, and I always sort of think of it as when I was kind of a, kind of, it's a 100-point allocation, if you will, between two buckets. One, I'd call light force motivations, and the other, I'd call dark force motivations, right? And dark force motivations are more around, you know, you know, ego motivations, fear motivations, you know, whatever, right? And, and life force motivations are things like, just the sheer, absolute, uh, exquisite day-to-day experience of the joy of doing it, for example, and just because. And, and there could be other forms of light force motivations. And I've seen in my own life, the journey has been to shift the point allocation. So I don't ever expect that I will have 100 points in light force motivations, but now I'm 66, which I consider to be mid-career. I think of it as that the point allocations have shifted. And so maybe, you know, when you're young, you have more points in the dark force motivations, and the journey becomes, kind of, reallocating. And I, and I think that that is not a, it's not, for me, anyways, that has not been a light switch, right? That has been a, a continuous, uh, evolutionary journey. And sometimes maybe some points flip back to the other side, and there can be moments where that happens. I, I can share with you. I'll give me, give you a question here in a moment that might be helpful. I'll just give it to you. I'm thinking about it, which is, I think the question I would always ask somebody is, "What do you want to be responsible for, for which you get no credit?" That's a great question. What do you want to be responsible for, for which you get no credit? And if you live with that question, that, that's a question that's come from my, from my new research, the, the, the new book I'm working on. That's buried in there. But I really believe that that question is one of the great, most important questions in life. And that if you really have accepted full responsibility for something for which you will never receive credit, then you're heading more towards Level 5 on something. And, uh, I am, uh, I'll share with you, though, how sometimes this, this ion can happen. So for me, I, I'm more of a teacher and a learner. And, you know, my own flywheel, I think we even shared it with you, is really not about building organizations. I'd love to talk, touch on that if we have time. It's about building ideas. And all that. But I share with you a moment that was, you know, a non-Level 5 moment for me, where I got some nice, uh, nice self-correction from Joanne. So, I had, I don't remember exactly where I'd come across it, but it was, it was something where a couple of the ideas that had come from our work, I think Flywheel and BHAG, or something, were, were being, you know, discussed and put on posters and things like that, and absolutely no credit back to where they came from. And I kind of grumbled about it to Joanne. I was like, you know, I don't even, you know, know that the BHAGs came from Built to Last, and the Flywheel came from Good to Great. They're just, you know, they're just being used. And, and, you know, sort of like, uh, and, and Joan looks at me for a long moment of just this just wonderful thing about having these wonderful people in life. She looks at me, she goes, "You realize that means the idea is [Laughter] won." And she said, "If you were really Level 5 for the ideas, you would be taking, you know, this is the ultimate victory lap that you're not needed. The ideas exist without you. And if you're really Level 5 for this, it doesn't matter if people know 50 years from now. When you're 50 years from now, if people are still really, and they should, because it's an enduring idea, wrestling with Level 5, but they don't know that it came from you. First of all, you won't be here to know it. And second, um, wouldn't it matter?" That's so, Jim, are you Level 5 for the ideas or not? I mean, it was a wonderful, wonderful, great challenge, great challenge, right? And, like I said, I married well. And so the, but then I, I find myself, the time that I know I really feel this way is when I get to the stage of, like, where I am right now with this new, after 10 years of work, uh, book I'm working on, and I call it the "not allowed to die" stage. And that's when I feel such a sense of responsibility to complete the work because it must exist, and I'm the conduit. It must exist. Uh, I, I, you know, I feel that it needs to be out there. That my feeling is, I'm not allowed to die because because it has to get done. Wow. But then it would be okay. I mean, it wouldn't be okay. I mean, first thing to go through my mind is Joanne. Right? If something happened to, but, but, but from the standpoint of the work, after that, I could die because it got out of you and you were done your assignment. I've done my assignment. And, and I know that I feel really motivated for the work itself when I enter the "not allowed to die" stage. And, and it can take a long time to get there. But when you're there, it's like, "No, I have a responsibility, and I have to get to the end." That is very challenging and really interesting. I mean, I turned 60 next year. You're 66. So young. Yes. I love the fact that you call this mid-career. I, if we get a chance, I want to explore that a little more. You know, can you repeat the question that you asked earlier?

What do you want to be responsible for, for which you will get no credit?

Yeah. So two summers ago, I went through a bit of a, a second calling in ministry and really spent a lot of time reflecting, talking with friends, praying about it in my own tradition. And kind of came up with the mission that would motivate me for the indefinite future. And I, I talked to Seth Godin about it. He was very generous with his time because he asked this question on Tim Ferriss show, which you've been on, where he said, "What would you do if you knew that you would fail?" Because usually the question is, "What would you do if you knew you wouldn't fail?" Right? The question is, "What would you do if you knew you would fail?" In other words, you hit 80 and you're like, "Wow, that was a bust, but it was worth it." In other words, you don't regret it. And so for me, it's to help reverse the decline in the church. That's, that's it for me. It's like, "We've got to, we've got to just help with that project." And if I got no credit for that, but I'm responsible for it, I think that's okay.

Yeah, that's exactly that. And that is the, I had a dear friend who became the, uh, chair of the, uh, Board of Trustees of one of the great universities in the world. And he asked me, "What guidance would you give?" I said, "I don't know anything about being a chair, so I don't really have any direct guidance. I just have a question for you, though. I, I would just ask you that over the course of your tenure, that you answer that question: What's one thing you want to take responsibility for as chair that you will never get credit for, but that you know that when it's done, it was important, and that it would not have happened if you were not there?" It's a great question. It's a great question.

Well, that's Level 5 humility. Um, it's a couple things. I do want to touch on in our remaining time. Um, can we talk a little bit about the undisciplined pursuit of more? Uh, I think this is a quote from you: "Growth is not a goal." No. Um, that owns a lot of leaders when you say that. Clearly, can you explain why growth is a bad goal?

Well, so, um, and I want to ask you about this in the, in the, in the world of of churches, because growth would be defined very differently than in a company. But when you really look at how great companies get built, growth is a residual outcome of building a great flywheel. And that when you really look at how a great organization happens, there's a series of things. They have Level 5s, and they get the right people on the bus, and they get really clear about what they can distinctively do better than anyone else, and they begin to make really good decisions that fit with that, uh, more of what fits what we called the Hedgehog, and what doesn't fit. And they compound that over time, and they get this flywheel effect, like, get a huge, heavy flywheel that begins to compound momentum. And that flywheel begins to build turn upon turn upon turn to the point of breakthrough and beyond. Boom. Flywheel, flywheel, compounding effect. And, uh, and if you do that really well, and if you get your flywheel really right, if you really get that fly crystal clear, and and turn it with great discipline and intensity and imagination, the result of that, the result of that will be likely that you're going to die of indigestion of too much opportunity for growth than starvation for too little. And so the result of that then means that that growth is a result to be managed rather than a gigantic "more is better" goal to pursue, right? If you get into the idea that growth is the point, you've missed the point.

How does that play out? What are some examples? And feel free to use some from the corporate world, uh, of companies, because you've got, you know, we mentioned Walmart a lot, but one of the, the graphs in, and this is interesting, I barely remember Ames. I think I remember Ames, but they were neck and neck with Walmart for years, and then all of a sudden they capitulated to death and irrelevance, and Walmart took off to become what we know. I don't know, it was a factor for as, but other companies where maybe the undisciplined pursuit of more got the best of them.

Well, I think what, um, so I, I think the, the, where I would really point people in this is that what, so let's, let's flip it around this way. What does disciplined pursuit mean? Yeah. And disciplined pursuit means a few things. It means, first of all, you don't break Packard's Law. Packard's Law originally came from David Packard, the founder of HP, co-founder of HP, and we put it in Good to Great, which is basically the idea that if you allow growth in scale, in volume, in revenues, whatever it happens to be, complexity to exceed having enough of the right people in the key seats to execute on that growth brilliantly, you will fall. So disciplined pursuit of growth means that your real throttle on growth is not opportunity, it's people. Second, undisciplined pursuit of more growth means that, or pursuit of growth means that you do place big bets, but they are calibrated big bets. So there's a principle that came from one of our works called "fire bullets, then fire cannonballs." The idea being that instead of just taking a bunch of gunpowder, putting it in a giant cannonball, firing it at the oncoming ship, and hoping it hits, then it doesn't, and then you're in trouble and you're out of gunpowder, you take a little bit of gunpowder and you put it in a bullet, and you fire a bullet and see if it hits. And if it doesn't, you recalibrate, set fire another one, fire, reset, fire another one, until ping, you hear the hull of the oncoming ship. You know you have a calibrated line of sight, and then you fire the cannonball on the calibrated line of sight. So undisciplined pursuit of more means firing big, uncalibrated cannonballs. Disciplined pursuit of growth means firing first bullets to calibrate, then firing cannonballs. And then finally, the other is the notion of disciplined growth means really building consistent with a real deep understanding of how your flywheel really turns. It means that, uh, you, one of the things that was different between, uh, Walmart and Ames, for example, we could go through lots of cases, is that is the understanding of, "Oh, we really understand how this entire flywheel really works so that we can feed it as a continuous looping process." We don't view it as just kind of a bunch of initiatives. There's an underlying logic of momentum. We know what that is. We know how it works. We know how it feeds upon itself. And if we look at companies that sometimes got off track, what happened is they either neglected their flywheel, uh, or they failed to see how far the flywheel could go, when they ended up abandoning it, abandoning a good one too soon. So those are the aspects of disciplined pursuit, which probably might give people the most, you know, sort of help and guidance for how to stay true when they're in a time of tremendous opportunity.

You've mentioned "who not what" famously, "getting the right people on the bus." That is something I've become consumed with over the last few years, and, you know, it does make a big difference when you have A-players, when you have the right people. The market is shifting a little bit, you know, a lot of people work for themselves, people don't stick around as long. Any thoughts? Any updates on how to get the right team? What that looks like for people? Because I think everybody is sort of, particularly in a market like the church world, um, you know, pay isn't top of the pay scale, etc., etc. How do you, what is the importance of "who not what" or "who before what"? And then, um, any thoughts on getting the right people on the bus today?

So, two, two thoughts on this. First of all, I have, in all the ideas over time, they've evolved as I continue to live with them. It's not that the ideas, none of the core ideas that have come from our research have been ones that later I've gone back and said, "Oh, the idea was wrong." But what I've come back to see is that my understanding was primitive. And so I'm constantly learning and evolving. And one of the ways that I've really evolved on the whole principle of "first who" is that early on, it's very much about, "First, get the right people on the bus, right? And then figure out where to drive the bus." But what I've really come to see is that the critical thing is the right people in the key seats. That's the critical thing. It's about the key seats. And that furthermore, one of the most powerful things you can do is when you, you look at your, your company, organization, your entity, whatever it happens to be, is to be able to say, "I may not have a bus problem here, but what I might have is a seat problem." And what I might, could I could get a huge acceleration? Think of it is, you take somebody who is a 100-watt light bulb in this seat, they're doing fine in it, they're okay. And then, but if I moved them over to this seat where that would just fit them so incredibly well, they might go from a light bulb to just a full-on lightning bolt. Like, "Wow, where did that come from?" And so sometimes you don't necessarily need to find new people. It's that you have the right people, but you've got them in the wrong seats. And that is where I've really come to see that there's almost more work to do than on the bus. The second thing I'd say about "ver two" is this: it's an entire ethos. First, everything in life is a "who" thing. And the idea that every question you come at in life, every, it's, it's not a business idea, it's not an organizational idea. Personal story on this about around the time I was working on How the Mighty Fall, Joanne had a cancer event. And I, being somebody who deals with the world by understanding things, that's how I deal with stress. I immediately went to buy a bunch of books on the biochemistry of cancer. I started like understanding how mutations work, and I was learning about oncogenes and proto-oncogenes, and I was learning about MOG, mobile genetic elements, and I was learning about the different sorts of ways in which, you know, things move through stages of necrosis and all, you know, gradation and all these different sorts of things, as if somehow this is going to be helpful, right? And, and one day Joanne comes in and looks at me and she says, "Why don't you read your own book? There's a chapter in there which is 'First Who'." And if you really want to be helpful to me, why are you spending any time on the "what"? The question here is not, "What's the diagnosis? What's the treatment? What's the schedule?" You know, any of that. If you want to be helpful, Jim, help me get the right "who." If we get the question is, "Who is the oncologist? Who is the radiologist? Who is the surgeon?" If you help me get the right "who," we're going to get the best "what." So read your own book. I, I share that story because that's not about like hiring people. That's not about all the kind of normal kind of stuff that we think about about just this whole thing of talent, etc. It's just, in any situation, do you take a "what" frame or do you take a "who" frame? In every single part of life, "what" frame or "who" frame? And what "first who" is all about is, it's first "who." Life is first "who."

Yeah, that's a great, great principle and a great reminder. I mean, as much as, and you know, that's only gotten worse in the last 15 years. We have access to so much information. We're all mini-experts. And yet, you know, despite all your scholarship or my scholarship, we're probably not going to advise the best cancer surgeon in the world on, uh, the best course of treatment. I can assure you, I would not have been able to do that. Although I do remember my oncogene and proto-oncogene. It wasn't helpful. Joanne's well today. She is. That's fantastic. It really is. And so we have, we have a few more minutes. What, what would you? Yeah, I'd love to ask about your personal flywheel. So that was wonderful. Your team sent it along. And also maybe a question on your hyper discipline. You have been, this has been a year in the making, you know, in the research cave, working on this new book, 10 years in the making. Okay. And, and the interview, we've been, you know, quietly back and forth for about a year to get it all set up and everything. And again, so grateful. But I love, I love your flywheel, and I hadn't seen that in print. It's a fantastic book, "Turning the Flywheel," which, by the way, summarizes a lot of your work. Yeah. And so I've, I've had a shot at my personal flywheel, but would love for you to dissect yours.

So, so the idea behind a flywheel is that whether it be an organization or whether it be any other kind of, you know, a company or any other kind of organization is that it's a, it's not a series of steps drawn as a circle. It's not a flywheel. A flywheel is that if you do A, then you can't help but do B. And if you do B, you can't help but do C. And if you do C, you can't help but do D, all the way back around to the top of the flywheel. And what it is, is that it's an underlying logic of momentum that feeds upon itself because each part drives into the next part, drives into the next part, around back to the top of the flywheel. That's the power of a great flywheel. And a great flywheel also has these sort of components to it that allow, sort of, one side to be what the flywheel does in the world, if you will, or kind of how you operationalize what you're doing creatively, and then how it comes back around to where you can fuel it, right, if you will. So mine has a similar flavor, but I'm an individual, not a company. But this is essentially the flywheel that has driven me since I first went off and started teaching at Stanford in when I was 30 years old and started my research with Jerry Porras, which then led to, you know, Built to Last, Good to Great, How the Mighty Fall, Great by Choice, the new research, etc. The top of the flywheel is the core for me, which is: Follow my curiosity. Find the next big question. That's where it all begins. It always begins with a question I don't know the answer to. If I have a question I'm really curious about, and it's a big enough question, well, then I can't help but conduct research and study and learn. If I really want to understand how organizations fall, I can't, I can't just write it down. I can't help but want to conduct research to study and to learn everything I can about it. And if I do that, and I get deep into it, and the things start to, I've got all this information, well, then the next stage in the flywheel is, I can't help, I'm just constructed, I can't help but want to go from chaos to concept, which is all the data, all the information, all the right. What I thrive on are those moments when everything just kind of fits into place, and all of a sudden you can take what was a mess of all the research and you see a concept. That moment when Level 5 fused in my brain after my team challenged me, and it was all of a sudden I could see the hierarchy from Level 1 to 2, 3, 4, and 5. The difference. Bang. That for me, those, those are just crystalline moments. And I can't help but want to go from chaos to concept. I'm just congenitally drawn there. So curiosity, number one, that leads to, I can't help but conduct research, study, and learn, which that means I can't help but want to go from chaos to concept. Well, once I have the concept, once I have the framework, once I have the, I can't help but want to write it and teach it. And if I, and then if I write it and teach it, at least well enough, I can't help but create impact through the power of ideas. And if I do that, then I can't help but be able to generate enough funding to fuel my next big questions, which will bring me right back to the top of the flywheel, so that I can follow my curiosity and pursue the next big question, conduct research, go from chaos to concept, write it and teach it, create impact through the power of ideas, which will lead to being able to fund the next big question, and around and around the flywheel will go. And one day my body will give out, but until then, I'm 66 in mid-career. That's my flywheel.

So you see yourself with decades ahead in this flywheel, following the next big question. What has been the question that's consumed the last decade for you?

Well, so as you know, when you were trying to reach out to us, I've been, I'm very disciplined about staying in the cave. And extremely, very. Yes. I, uh, I'm, you know, it's interesting with that. It's not, it's one of the things I've really tried to manage with the right tone, which is why I have such wonderful people like Mel, who you've met, and people on my team, which is that I'm just enormously clear about how to deploy myself. And clarity can be confused with arrogance. I really hope it's not arrogance coming through. It's more just, I'm really clear. There's only so much time I have. And so therefore, I, and I, and this flywheel is what I have to do, right? So if I agree to too many things, then I'm not going to be able to do the research and the thinking and the, the deepness of it. There was a great computer science professor named Don Knuth, and he had this, I think it was an auto-reply on an email, but basically essentially was like, "There's some people's responsibility in life to stay on top of things, and for a few of us, our responsibility is to get to the bottom of things." And, uh, I'm the second. I'm in the second category. That's my responsibility. And so I, um, uh, so you've gotten lots of, hopefully, very, very friendly and gracious, uh, nos.

Oh, your team's amazing. They are so kind. And I, you know, I respect it. I know that that was your discipline. Yeah. But you really stick to it. Some people say I'm not available, but then, you know, suddenly they, they break it. So it's, I mean, there's a little material in this, but it is, I, I, I track my creative hours every day. And they have to always be above a thousand for any 365-day period. And the rule for myself is, you know, I will be above a thousand creative hours for every 365-day cycle for every single day, meaning today is July 3rd to the last July 3rd, and whatever the day is, for 50 consecutive years. Very simple rule. I can never miss. So in order to hold to that, I have to be very disciplined in what I say yes to and very, hopefully, kind and gracious in what we what we decline.

I was trying not to duplicate material. Is this the system you talked about in the Tim Ferriss episode a few years ago?

Yeah, still following it. Oh, yeah. I mean, absolutely. Consistently. Every single night before I go to sleep, the spreadsheet gets filled out with what was in the day, what was the quality of the day on a plus two to minus two scale, and how many creative hours did I get? And then it runs a bunch of numbers looking back. And I've been doing that for many, many, many years, and I will continue to do the numbers. They're posted right behind me on the wall, so I always know what they are. The, uh, so I won't, uh, go into much detail about what I've been working on, but the essence of what's consumed me is coming up on 55 or so. Uh, I knew that, uh, my work on what makes great companies and great organizations tick was reaching a point where I was satisfying my curiosity. The map of concepts were coming together. Uh, I'd done nearly 30 years of work. And, and I didn't want to just kind of go into the repeat zone of just doing smaller and smaller slices of what I'd done before. I felt like that was coming to close to an end. So I decided that for the next big phase of life, that I wanted to turn my attention to other topic areas, but still use a lot of my powerful methodologies for how to do it. And so starting, uh, about a decade ago, I began a project on what is, I think, the most fascinating topic of all, which is people and their lives. And I, um, this study that I'm finishing up the writing on now was the first where I don't use companies or organizations as the unit of analysis, but the entire arc of lives. These are some very exceptional and remarkable lives, using my matched-pair methodologies of more than 2,500 years of people's lives, systematically studied across 34 utterly remarkable life cases. 50% are women, uh, and they come from many walks of life: musicians, actors, scientists, writers, athletes, aviators, people from political leadership, business leadership, cause leadership, social activism, parenting, people from law, medicine, military, global affairs, architecture, fashion design. I mean, it is, it is, uh, all over the map. We have somebody from the faith community. That study has really been a profound journey for me. It's the biggest study, most overwhelming in its magnitude, that I have done in my life. I always thought when I was younger, they could never get bigger. This one got bigger. And I'm not yet sharing the main content, but I will say this: it has changed me profoundly. And at the end of this study, I am a different person. And I have, I will never look at life the same ever again. I will never look at other people the same ever again. And by studying how these people's lives were transformed through the lens that I looked at it, it was I that became the one who was transformed. Wow.

Well, I've heard a little bit from your team about what's coming in that they said it's the most deeply personal work that you've ever embarked on. I do not want to do a spoiler alert, and if you prefer not to answer the question, that's fine. We'll pass. Can you, are you comfortable sharing perhaps one change that has happened to you as a result of the research? One way you're seeing the world or yourself or life differently?

Well, there are so many. Um, I'll share one that I have shared, uh, in in settings where people know about it. Well, well, two that I think are enough public that I can share. Sure. One is that, um, I used to spend a lot of time feeling frustrated with what people are not. And I have completely changed. My dominant emotion is to feel grateful for what they are. Wow. And that happened during this study. Uh, second is my whole sense is to, when the real clock of the big stuff of life starts, has completely shifted. And the idea that our younger selves must tower over our older selves is forever vanished from my way of thinking. I really believe that the many, much of our in it, in the evidence of our most groundbreaking, most creative, most energetic, uh, work and activities and phases of life, uh, can, and in the lives I've studied, do happen well past the midpoint. And so the idea that somehow the kind of the big stuff happens early, and everything else is kind of a, there's sort of a winding down or a glide path from there, or any of that, that's just a frame of reference you can choose to accept. But these people didn't. And I'm not going to. Hence, mid-career at 66.

66. Exactly right. This is, this is great news. You know, there have been some epic interviews that I've had the privilege of doing over the last decade. And Tim Keller, may or may not be familiar with him, he died a couple of years ago. But my good, what a, what a fantastic contribution he made. And he does a devotional on the Book of Proverbs. And the main thing I did reading a proverb a day for a year was I saw that I need to change how I look at people. So I cannot wait. That's an ongoing problem in my life. I cannot wait to get my hands on this research to see your work, Jim. Any final thought? You've been super generous with your time, and this has been, uh, just a tremendous privilege for me to spend this time with you.

My only, um, real thought is is to express my appreciation for, uh, your, I think, very wise, uh, acceptance of your responsibilities as you were describing them. And also the, the gift you have given me of the opportunity to bring a light back to "How the Mighty Fall." And as you will, that book will never sell as much as "Good to Great" and, you know, the others, because people want to read about, even though the comparisons are in there, they want to read about, you know, the, the upward inflection, not the downward inflection. But the truth is that life has plenty of opportunity for both. And, and you're actually the, you know, kind of in the emergence of the podcast era, the first person that's actually reached out and said, "I really want to focus on, I really want to what a light on on 'How the Mighty Fall'." And that's a work I'm, I really feel has deep human power in it. And I'm just really grateful to you for the opportunity to shine a light back, uh, on that work, because I actually believe that it, uh, it deserves a light shined on it. The framework deserves.

Well, thank you, Jim. And, you know, I would just say, we have a lot of young leaders listening. And I see "How the Mighty Fall," particularly, you know, the first three stages, which, which, as you say, everything can be up and to the right, and you're in stage three. Yep. And nobody knows it. Nobody knows it. And, you know, what I want to see is I want to see lives that don't fall. I want to see churches and organizations and businesses that continue to thrive from generation to generation. And if it can operate, maybe like warning lights on your dashboard, it's like, "You better check service soon on this one." Like, "Hey, you should pull over." "Why don't you hit the next gas station and just see if somebody can have a look at this, because there's trouble ahead." And that's what it did in my life. It came out at a very providential time. There were a couple of check engine lights. I was able to get a diagnosis. I'm able to keep that in my frame. I mean, you can see it, I know it's audio only, it's a very well-worn copy of "How the Mighty Fall." And I will probably, it's one of my top 10 recommended leadership books for leaders, period. And, um, I'll continue to reread it as long as, uh, I have breath. So I want to thank you for that work. And can't wait to see what is next for you. Does that book, the new work, "The Meta-Biography," or whatever you would call it, does that come out next year, 2025? Do you have a publication date yet?

No, there's no publication date yet because I've just been writing it. I'm in, I'm very, but I will be done with the manuscript before Joanne and I go to Italy at the end of August. I have sort of a self-imposed deadline to do that. And then it'll go to critical readers, and then, and it'll go through the revision and fact-checking process. I'm very fanatic about being factually very accurate. And, and then copy editing from there. And then, of course, it's also possible it could never get published because I don't yet have a title. And so maybe it'll just sit there unpublished without a title. But I don't think so. I'll come up with the title somehow. Titling is such a really hard art. Actually, I've been really lucky with titles. Built to Last, Good to Great, great titles. But how they happened were totally different. I mean, Good to Great, I had from early. Built to Last happened after I vetoed 125 terrible titles, seriously. And then we were almost like, going to miss our publication deadline. They were ready. We were like, we're going to have to like, go to a whole another season because I just kept vetoing titles. And finally, the, the, the head of the publishing company, uh, went away on the weekend and came back and wrote a note to put a little 3x5 card on my editor's desk and said, "See if they'll go for this." And on that was the words "Built to Last," and that was it. Had it. And so I have no pride of authorship at all in where the title comes from. I'm just, I'm just crossing my fingers one will magically appear. So.

Well, Jim, this has been fantastic. Thank you so very much.

You're very welcome. And, um, maybe, uh, down the road, we'll, we'll chat again. In between now and then, I will, I will make sure that I stay alive to complete the work.

Well, you do that. You're not done yet. And you know that, you know that. And I would love another conversation. I got to a few questions along the way, but there's so many others. And, you've really blessed so many of us, Jim. Thank you.

You're very welcome, Carrie. You take care.