Jim Collins Talks to Chinese CEOs About Leadership

The Importance of Seeking Mentors

    Q: You mentioned earlier the importance of mentors in your personal and career development. Was this more a result of your personal initiative, or school-organized mentoring programs?

    A: When I was in my 20s, I realized I really wanted to have guidance. I hadn't gotten that much guidance from parenting. I remember one day listening to an audio book while driving my car, a series of transcripts of interviews with the late American President Harry Truman. There was a line in there where Truman said "The only thing I know for certain is that if you don't know the difference between right and wrong by the time you are 30, you never will."

    I was about 25 at the time and I literally pulled my car off to the side of the road and thought to myself, I have 5 years to figure this out. So I came up with the idea of a personal board of directors. Companies have a board of directors, but I thought, I need a personal board of directors, a gathering of people I could really look up to, of my own choice.

    I took a sheet of paper and drew a little oval, like a conference table, and I put seven seats around it. The first seat I filled with my wife, Joanne. The others, as I started filling them in, I started really thinking who I would really want to be on my personal board. A couple of them never knew they were on my personal board, but they were enormously influential on me.

    I chose them more for their character than their successes. Some of them were extremely successful people, but that's not why I chose them; so instead of choosing employees based on character, I was choosing mentors for character. These people had a huge influence on shaping my life. I would carefully envision what they might say, and if the opportunity arose, I would ask them, and stay in touch with them.

    Since then what I've come to see is that mentoring becomes a giant debt. If you've had the privilege of having great mentors, your responsibility is to mentor others.

Career Planning Advice

    Q: Can we turn around the question of the five attributes of the right people and ask, on behalf of younger people in China today, what qualities they need to develop to become attractive and successful employees as they begin their careers?

    A: I think the five attributes are pretty fundamental and universal. I can only speak through the lens of our research and my own experience, and I'm hesitant to extend it to a culture that I know I don't know.

    However, if I look at the exceptional people that we've studied, two signature behaviors jump out as they develop.

    One is that they actively seek to be in the orbit of people that they consider to be high quality people. They don't necessarily think in terms of what job would be the best job. They might think instead of who they want to be associated with, such as certain types of enterprises where they have a lot of outstanding people.

    I like telling young people here who ask my advice when they are trying to decide what to do -- which job, which company -- that it's the wrong question. It's "who." There might be this one job, and it's got great "who's ", and another without the kind of "who's" you want. Go for the "who's", especially when you're starting out.

    And the second thought is: results. You look at all these people we studied. They weren't giant successes when they started. It's just that everything they did, even when they just had one little thing, they made it the very, very best it could be. They delivered results. They did what they said they were going to do, and they performed exceptionally well.

The Stockdale Paradox

    Q: Can you talk about your insights surrounding what you've called "The Stockdale Paradox" in the business context and perhaps a bit more broadly?

    A: A few weeks ago I had the privilege to do a session for a friend of mine who runs a great non-profit called The Positive Coaching Alliance which helps develop young people through positive coaching in sports. As part of it I had a session with a number of my former students at Stanford, so we had a room full of people, most of whom I hadn't seen in twenty or thirty years.

    At one point I asked them the question: "How many of you, since we last met, have gotten crushed by something in life -- personally, professionally, health-wise, whatever -- where something in life just came up and crushed you? "

    Every single hand in the room went up. I think that's the nature of the human condition: that sometimes life is going to come up and just crush you.

    And that brings us to The Stockdale Paradox. Admiral Jim Stockdale, whom we named it after, is really the one who crystallized the idea. He was one who never knew he was on my personal board of directors.

    He had been the highest-ranking U.S. military officer to be imprisoned in Hanoi during the Vietnam War, in the notorious prison nicknamed the Hanoi Hilton.

    I remember reading his book "Love and War" before I met him, and I got depressed reading it because it's about the years he spent in prison camp. It seemed so bleak. They could pull him out at any time and torture him. He didn't know if he would ever get out. All of a sudden while reading, I realized that at that stage in the story, he didn't know the ending. I knew the end of the story, that he got out, but he didn't. He must have been depressed, because I got depressed just reading it.

    When I met him, I asked him about this, and he said he never got depressed in the conventional sense, because he never wavered in his faith that not only would he get out, but that he would turn this experience into a defining event in his life.

    Something we didn't put into "Good to Great" was that he said how much he had learned about what freedom is. He said freedom is not your condition, it's in your mind; and he started pointing to people on the Stanford campus as we walked and talked.

    He said, "You see that gentleman over there, he's imprisoned by a tenured teaching position. He'd really like to be doing something else, but he's imprisoned by that. And that young woman over there is imprisoned by her parents' expectation that she become a doctor."

    He went on to say that he'd kept his freedom in here (pointing to his head) even though he'd lost his physical freedom, but that he never would have realized that had he not lost his physical freedom.

    Then I asked him about the other prisoners, those who didn't make it out, or did but not as strong as him. He said those were the optimists, which I found very confusing, because he sounded like an optimist to me.

    "No," he explained," I wasn't optimistic. I just never lost my faith that I would get out and turn the whole experience into a defining event in my life. The optimists were the ones who'd say ‘We'll be out of here by Christmas.' Then Christmas would come and go, and then Thanksgiving, and then Christmas again; and they died of a broken heart."

    And then he literally grabbed me by the shoulders and said "This is what I learned. You must never, ever, waver in your faith that you will prevail; and you must at the same time confront the brutal facts."

    This is what we called the Stockdale Paradox. You have to have both sides: if you think it's going to be over sooner rather than later, it's probably not; and if you lose faith in the fact that you're going to prevail, you won't prevail.

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    (To watch the video of this interview and additional parts of the interview not published, click here)