Jim Collins: Two very different questions.
Thomas D. Gorman: Yes.
Jim Collins: So, I was thinking about the one you had raised about the, the question of when we wrote this, Jerry Useem and I, and it was really, really great to do that with Jerry, and I think we might spend a little time on some of those people, they are really interesting people.
Thomas D. Gorman: Yes.
Jim Collins: And we all need models and they're still models for us.
But first, let's address this question of American business and American businesses as models.
I do not believe that American Business is the model. There are many mediocre or average American businesses. I find this, for example, when I go to the social sectors, and people say, well, the whole key is to import the principals of the American business into the social sectors and they'll work better. Well, no, that's sort of a myopic view, it's a very arrogant view to simply say that American business or businesses in particular, kind of have a monopoly on wisdom. I don't believe that.
The really critical question is not, American business versus Chinese business, European business versus Latin American business. The real question is, great versus good.
And if you go in our work, you'll keep in mind, with all of our great companies we've got the contrast, we have lots of American businesses that are the ones you don't want to be, they're the comparison cases. And so, if you think of it as great American companies in contrast to not great American companies, then the words "American companies" drop out of the equation. What's left is great in contrast to not great.
I actually think there's a very, very interesting question, and I'll put it as a question, I don't have the answer to it, which is now if we take great Chinese companies in contrast to not great Chinese companies, great European companies in contrast to not great European companies, would the nationality drop out... do you see any differences?
My belief is that you would see some things we haven't seen so far, but the things we have seen so far, would still hold.
There's nothing to lead me to conclude otherwise, based on, well, I'm a student of history.
Thomas D. Gorman: Right.
Jim Collins: I love "The Rise And Fall Of Civilization"; I'm fascinated by what happened to Greece twenty-five hundred years ago.
I'm fascinated by the rise and fall, twice of Egypt, twenty-five hundred BC. Fascinated by Rome, and Rome's evolution and I'm fascinated by the rise of the great world religions. I'm fascinated by anything related to human systems, that rises and falls and comes and goes , and what you see.
Nothing in any of that would lead me to conclude that leaders who are really trying to build something that's more than themselves would be a bad idea in any culture.
There is nothing that would lead me to conclude that the idea that, a genius with a thousand helpers can work for a short while, like emperors. But, the problem is, they don't last.
It's not a sustainable model.
So if you have any kind of social system that is a genius with a thousand helpers, when that genius ceases to a genius, or when that genius disappears, you don't a system behind it.
The real great systems were like the royal legions, right?
They were like Greece during its best time, they're like a great company. What they have is the capacity to develop leaders, to develop managers and to pick people and to build all of this. Is there anything that would lead me to conclude that doesn't apply in China, Latin America, Russia, Brazil, India? No.
That said, I think if you go into different cultures, when you put that contrast on, I think we would see some things we don't see here.
I don't know what they are yet.
So, that's my frame, look for great companies, what great companies can teach, not just from one country.
Thomas D. Gorman: Right.
Jim Collins: Now your first questions, I believe was about these people, these leaders.
Let's just kind of pause for a moment about who's some of these remarkable people were.
It's just so fascinating to look at them.
If I recall correctly, we had on that list, let see if I can remember, we had David Packard of HP, we had Katherine Graham of the Washington Post, we had Darwin Smith of Kimberly Clark, we had David Maxwell of Fannie Mae, which is an interesting one. Who I still think is a great CEO. We had Bill Allen of Boeing; we had Charles Coffin of GE.
Thomas D. Gorman: He was number one, I think?
Jim Collins: He was number one.
We had Sam Walton, for his amazing ability to do succession.
That gives us seven.
We had George Merck of Merck... we're still missing two.
What were the other two we had picked at that time?
Well, they'll pop to me in a moment; I'm sort of working backwards through the list.
But, if you think about some of those remarkable people; oh, William McKnight, of 3M and Jim Burke.
And so each of these had certain elements, but they are great role models and they would be great models for today, each one had different pieces.
Charles Coffin took on the idea of; he was the real architect of GE. GE is probably the most consistently successful company in the 20th century, why? Because he built, what was his great invention? Management development, he invented management development. Now you can say, you can invent light bulbs, you can invent turbines, you can, but invent management development, and that really explains the success of GE.
Look at Bill Allen of Boeing, here's a person who is the Corporate Attorney. The CEO dies, the company's in crisis by the end of the Second World War, losing 93% of its revenue over night.
They turn to him and they say, here, you take it, and now what does he do, he doesn't sit still, he sits back and says, Boeing is all about doing really big cool things. And he moves the company and confronts the fact, that with just military bombers, it's the end of the story, and he makes a huge bold move.
Now if you met, Bill Allen, would you find a great personality, a towering, charismatic figure? No, but he bet on the 707 and he bet on 747, after a lot of empirical validation, led the world into the jet age.
Look at William McKnight, here's a person who invented the idea, of innovation as a systematic replicable process in a company. That idea had never been invented before, an extraordinary contribution. Really visionary in a social sense, as opposed to, just a product sense.
You look at Jim Burke, who understood, we all know about the Tylenol crises, we had here in the United States, and how J&J did an amazing thing. But the amazing thing about this story there is that Jim Burke understood that it was all about having the values in place and the people in place, before a crisis. So when that turbulent shock came, all the hard work had been done and it wasn't at all confusing about what to do. Not because they figured it out when it came, but because they figured it out long before it came.
Look at Darwin Smith and his courage to sell the mills, right? Cancer in your arm, you have to have the guts to cut off your arm.
Katherine Graham, whose embodiment of the idea of courage, is not the absence of fear. She was a fearful, terrified person most of the time, you read her own books and she describes being frightened and freaked and terrified.
Thomas D. Gorman: Yeah.
Jim Collins: And yet, she had the courage to stand up to an entire presidential administration, whatever the costs might be.
You look at David Packard, who invented so many of the aspects we consider key to a modern technology company, it was sort of the founding architecture of Silicon Valley.
These were people who did so much more, now we stand back and ask the question, this is my challenge for the Chinese generation up and coming. Which of you are going to be David Packard and Katherine Graham and Charles Coffin and Bill Allen and William McKnight?
The ones that when somebody writes about the great CEO's who did something that was so visionary, but it worked, wasn't dreaming, it worked. And thereby did something that fundamentally alters the course of the world that they touched, and every one of these CEO's did just that.
The ones who made just a bunch of money and retired, you never saw them here. They're not on this list.
And you asked the question, is that still a model?
Those people are models.
And of course, we'll see a similar group come from China and Russia and Latin America and Europe. |
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吉姆·柯林斯：这是两个非常不同的问题。
高德思：是的。
吉姆·柯林斯：能与杰里•乌西姆合写那篇文章是一件很好的事。我们可以研究文章中提到的那些CEO，他们都是非常有趣的人。
高德思：是的。
吉姆·柯林斯：我们都需要榜样，而他们仍然是我们的榜样。
不过首先，让我们来讨论一下美国企业作为榜样的问题。
我不认为美国企业是最好的榜样。美国有许多平庸的企业。我研究公立机构时，有人会说，如果把美国企业的那一套移植到公立机构，他们就会干得更好。并非如此。这种观点有些目光短浅。难道只有私营企业才具有商业智慧？我不赞同这种非常自大的看法。
问题的关键不是将美国企业与中国企业对比，或是将欧洲企业与拉美企业对比。问题的关键是将卓越与优秀对比。
如果你参加了我们的研究，你就会牢记一点，对于所有卓越的公司，我们都有相对比的企业。我们同时有许多失败的案例，你永远不想成为那样的企业，而他们就是对比案例。所以，如果你把卓越的美国企业和不卓越的美国企业进行对比，那么“美国企业”这四个字就可以从等式两边同时划掉了，剩下的只是卓越和不卓越之间的对照。
有一个非常有趣的问题，我把它提出来，但是先不必回答：如果我们把卓越的中国企业和不卓越的中国企业进行对比，把卓越的欧洲企业和不卓越的欧洲企业进行对比，是不是也可以把国籍从等式两边划去。这其中能看出什么不同吗？
我相信你将会发现一些迄今还没有发现的现象，但我们已经发现的规律仍将成立。
我以前是学历史的，就此看来，没有什么能让我改变结论。
高德思：对。
吉姆·柯林斯：我非常喜欢《文明的兴衰》（The Rise And Fall Of Civilization）这本书。我痴迷于2500年前发生在希腊的故事。我也痴迷于埃及在公元前2500年左右的两度兴衰。我还痴迷于罗马和罗马的演化，以及伟大的世界性宗教的兴起。我痴迷于一切和人类社会体系相关的事，它们前赴后继、兴衰更替。
如果有这么一批领导者，他们想建立一些超越个人利益的事物，那么对于任何文明来说这都不会是坏事。
“一个天才加一千个帮手”的管理理念在短时间内会奏效。我对此并不反对。因为许多帝王的朝政就是类似的案例。但问题是这种方式无法长久。这不是一个可持续的模式。
对于采用了“一个天才加一千个帮手”管理模式的社会系统，一旦这个天才江郎才尽，一旦这个天才消失了，这套体系便会分崩离析。
真正卓越的系统如同一个庞大的皇家军团，就好像鼎盛时期的希腊军队。卓越的公司就是如此。他们的过人之处在于懂得如何挑选人才，并且把他们塑造成优秀的领导人、经理人。这一点是否有可能不适用于中国、拉丁美洲、俄罗斯、巴西和印度呢？答案是：不可能。
如果你仔细研究不同的文化，并且将它们进行比较，就会发现一些之前没有注意到的现象。
目前我还不清楚这些现象是什么。
所以寻找卓越的公司，探究我们可以向卓越的公司学习什么，而不是只向某个国家的企业学习，这就是我的基本观点。
高德思：没错。
吉姆·柯林斯：我想，你的第一个问题正是关于这一类人，关于企业领导者们。让我稍稍停顿一下，看看这些了不起的人物都有谁。向他们学习是非常有意思的事情。
如果我没记错，我们的名单上有惠普的大卫•帕卡德、《华盛顿邮报》（Washington Post）的凯瑟琳•格雷厄姆（Katherine Graham）、金佰利的达尔文•史密斯、还有房利美（Fannie Mae）的戴维•麦克斯韦尔（David Maxwell）。麦克斯韦尔出现在这个名单上，可能显得有些奇怪，但我仍然认为他是一位卓越的CEO。名单上还有波音的比尔•艾伦、通用电气的查尔斯•科芬（Charles Coffin）。
高德思：我记得他好像排在第一?
吉姆·柯林斯：是的，他排第一名。
还有山姆•沃尔顿，他挑选接班人的能力实在惊人。
到目前有7个人了。
还有默克公司（Merck）的乔治•默克（George Merck）。还差两个。
我们选的另外两个人是谁呢？
没关系，他们一会儿会提示我的。我们只是回顾一下名单。
噢对了，还有3M公司的威廉•麦克奈特（William McKnight）和强生公司的詹姆士•伯克（Jim Burke）。
如果你仔细观察这些优秀的人物，他们每人都有一些过人之处，都是我们今天可以效仿的卓越典范，每个人都有值得我们学习的地方。
查尔斯•科芬是通用电气真正的总设计师。通用电气也许是20世纪最持续成功的公司。为什么？因为查尔斯•科芬是一名企业建设者。他最大的创举是什么？他首创了管理发展模式。你可以发明灯泡，发明涡轮，你还可以发明管理发展模式，这充分解释了通用电气成功的原因。
再看波音的比尔•艾伦，他是企业律师出身。当时，CEO刚刚去世，波音公司在二战结束后陷入危机，一夜之间损失了93%的收入。他们找到比尔•艾伦，对他说：你来接手吧。比尔是怎么做的呢？他并没有坐以待毙，而是表示波音要做的是真正了不起的事情。他推动公司变革，直面严峻的现实：如果只生产军用轰炸机，波音就没有未来。他做出了一个非常大胆的举动。
如果你遇到比尔•艾伦，你看到的会是一位具有非凡人格魅力的伟人吗？不会。但正是这样一个人把赌注押在了707和747飞机上，经过多次实证检验后，波音将全世界带入了喷气机时代。
再来看看威廉•麦克奈特。此人首创了系统的、可复制的流程化企业。在那之前，从来没有人提出过这样的想法，这是对人类的伟大贡献。从社会进步的角度看，而不是仅仅从产品的角度看，这是个高瞻远瞩的创举。
至于詹姆士•伯克，我们都知道美国发生的泰诺林感冒药（Tylenol）危机，强生公司在这次事件中应对得非常漂亮。但这个故事最精彩的部分在于，危机发生前詹姆士•伯克就想到了最重要的是树立正确的价值观，并选拔合适的人才。这样，当危机发生时，他们早有准备，应对起来从容不迫。这里的关键不是在危机发生时他们如何找到应对办法，而是远在危机未到来之前就准备了对策。
再来看看达尔文•史密斯，他必须有极大的勇气才能卖掉工厂。如果胳膊上有了恶性肿瘤，你必须有勇气断臂自救。
凯瑟琳•格雷厄姆也具有极大的勇气，但她并不是无所畏惧的。她在大多数时候都心存畏惧。在她的自传里，描述了她如何的害怕、恐惧和担忧。
高德思：是的。
吉姆·柯林斯：但是，她有勇气面对一个庞大的权力机构，不论代价是什么。
再看看大卫•帕卡德，他创造了很多管理方法，成为现代高科技公司效仿的典范，有点类似硅谷的初创构架。
这些人做了超乎常人的事情，现在回过头来，我们要问的是，积极进取的中国新一代企业家应该做些什么？你们当中，谁会成为大卫•帕卡德、凯瑟琳•格雷厄姆、查尔斯•科芬、比尔•艾伦、或者戴维•麦克斯韦尔？
这些卓越的CEO们虽然高瞻远瞩，但是他们也会踏踏实实地将梦想实现，而不是流于空想。他们的工作从根本上改变了世界的进程，他们每一个人都做到了这一点。
而那些仅仅为了赚够钱就退休的人，他们的名字不会出现在这个伟大的名单上。
你会问：这样的人也可以效仿吗？
我认为那些胸怀大志的企业家才是应该被效仿的榜样。
当然，我们将看到中国、俄罗斯、拉丁美洲和欧洲会出现类似的人物。 |
