JIM COLLINS calls his third-floor offices in the heart of this mountain-ringed city a “management lab.” But little distinguishes his workspace from most others, save for a few things.
There is, for example, the small sign outside the door: “ChimpWorks.” In case anybody doesn’t get the point, a large Curious George doll sits in a leather chair, delivering the we-ask-a-lot-of-questions-here punch line. And in a corner of the white board at the end of his long conference room, Mr. Collins keeps this short list:
Creative 53%
Teaching 28%
Other 19%
That, he explains, is a running tally of howhe’s spending his time, and whether he’s sticking to a big goal he set for himself years ago: to spend 50 percent of his workdays on creative pursuits like research and writing books, 30 percent on teaching-related activities, and 20 percent on all the other things he has to do.
These aren’t ballpark guesstimates. Mr. Collins, who is 51, keeps a stopwatch with three separate timers in his pocket at all times, stopping and starting them as he switches activities. Then he regularly logs the times into a spreadsheet.
He has a good jump, too, on another overarching goal he’s set for himself: to produce a lasting and distinctive body of work.
Within the sprawling and overpopulated world of self-styled gurus dispensing advice on management and leadership, Mr. Collins is in rare company. His last two books — “Built to Last” and “Good to Great” — were breakout hits, selling about seven million copies combined.
Rather than presenting silver-bullet formulas that are easily forgotten, Mr. Collins’s books offer tangible frameworks for understanding why organizations succeed. His winning streak is about to be tested with his just-released book, which takes a turn, as he says, to the “dark side,” focusing on why companies fail. At any other time, it would seem a long shot, in that it lacks the upbeat message of his previous books. But his timing, given the number of once-great companies now in ruin, couldn’t have been better.
It seems that Mr. Collins, for all his exacting approaches to time management and research, has been blessed with something he cannot control: repeated bouts of flat-out luck.
He started researching his new book, titled “How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In,” in 2005. Back then, the Dow Jones index had passed 10,000 and was still climbing, eventually to more than 14,000, and Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, General Motors and Fannie Mae still had bright futures.
Now the stages of decline that he maps out in the book — hubris born of success; undisciplined pursuit of more; denial of risk and peril; grasping for salvation with a quick, big solution; and capitulation to irrelevance or death — offer a kind of instant autopsy for an economy on the stretcher.
He writes that he’s come to see institutional decline as a “staged disease” — harder to detect but easier to cure in the early stages — which is likely to foster a sense of corporate hypochondria in many readers.
He started working on his previous book, “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... and Others Don’t,” in the mid-1990s, smack in the middle of New Economy fever.
“Good to Great” was finally published in late 2001 — not long after the dot-com bubble burst, the pixie dust surrounding visionary leaders had fallen away, and the 9/11 terrorist attacks shook the country to its core. The book struck a chord with its back-to-basics message: Quiet but determined leaders who remained focused on clear and simple goals were the real success stories of corporate America.
It won a following, about four million copies’ worth, that extended well beyond the business world and included football coaches, pastors and school principals.
“We were really slow, and so it comes out right after everything is falling apart,” Mr. Collins recalls. “If we had come out in 1998, I don’t think anyone would have read it.”
His first best seller, “Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies,” another five-year project, which he co-wrote with Jerry I. Porras, came out in 1994, on the heels of the re-engineering craze in corporate America; it also went on to sell millions of copies.
And his next book, which he is writing with Morten T. Hansen and is due out in two or three years, is about why certain companies manage to thrive through tumultuous times.
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