Thomas D. Gorman: As you know, we talked about ten Chinese companies on the Fortune Global 500 list 2001 versus 37 today. Most of the bigger Chinese companies and most Chinese companies for that matter are fairly young. So the whole question of succession planning is very top of mind and timely.
Jim Collins:Yep.
Thomas D. Gorman: And you know, based on your research, how much time in advance, how far in advance should a good CEO be thinking about succession planning? How much effort and research should they put into it? And thirdly, how transparent should the process be at some point, in the game?
Jim Collins: There's a question that you alluded to a little later that I may highlight a little now and then we'll go into the succession thing. One of the things that's fascinating is that there is a methodology which shows that entrepreneurs and company builders are different people. And what you have from the entrepreneur is they kind of run out of steam, as an entrepreneur, and then you've got to have a company builder.
高德思：刚才我们谈到，在2001年只有10家中国公司进入 《财富》世界500强排行榜（Fortune Global 500），而如今这一数字已经增加到37家。很多中国大企业，以及榜单中的大多数中国企业，都非常年轻。所以选择接班人的问题眼下看来非常重要，也正是时候。
Jim Collins: But, then you couldn't explain Gordon Moore of Intel, right? And you couldn't explain, Bill Gates and you couldn't explain David Packard, you couldn't explain, Akio Morita of Sony. These are people who were entrepreneurs, who then became company builders. So my first point that really relates to your question is, we'll get to the succession piece in a moment, but the first task for those that are young, for those that are building a company, for those that are entrepreneurial, first thing they need to do is to make the shift, to say, I am shifting from being an entrepreneur into being a company builder, and the greatest ones do that. They make that shift from what Jerry Porras and I called the difference between the time teller and the clock builder, right? And that's a conscious shift, it's not a temperament, it's a decision. You look at Sam Walton, he was an entrepreneur, he started with a single dime store and over the course of his very long career, he was meeting on his deathbed with store managers at the very end. He spent his whole life doing this but, he became a company builder, and like he'd like to say, "I have the personality of a promoter, but I have the soul of an operator." And so he really had that clock building trait and then he eventually, he became a company builder, so you have the entrepreneur, who gets this great machine going. So, Sam Walton, does that, but then he doesn't stop, he goes on and himself becomes a company builder. Grows it to, at that time, somewhere on the order of 30 or 40 billion dollars in revenues. But the whole time he's also worried about the next generation, because he knows he won't be there forever. He's watching people from within and he's starting to identify, a few people, not all of them proved to be the ones to succeed. And then he made a very smooth handoff, to David Glass. And David Glass, was a very different package, back to that thing: it's not the personality, right? If you looked at David Glass, who was almost the "anti-Sam" on the outside. But on the inside they were very similar. Very different person, I think what Sam was doing, was deliberately demonstrating that the success of the company wasn't a personality. It was somebody who could build and lead a company, which may come in multiple packages. How do you prove that? You give the company to David Glass. Very smooth transition and what happened? Then we look at Wal-Mart today and it is, what? Almost four hundred billion dollars in revenues. When Sam, who is one of the greatest entrepreneurs in American business history, died, it was less than a hundred billion. So it just keeps right on going, why? Because he did really great succession planning, he went from entrepreneur to company builder, to somebody who passed the company on to someone else. He started worrying about that, not months before, not years before, but decades before. Because he was building a company and he wanted it to be successful beyond him. So the answer is, it's absolutely essential and I would point to two things about it. The first is, that your report card as a company builder, or an entrepreneur, or as a CEO, doesn't come in until your successor succeeds. You don't get to say, your report card is in when you're done. So if you haven't set up your successor, like Sam did, then if your successor fails, you have failed. This is a very important point. If your successor fails, you have failed. And so, if you come at it as if, I don't want to fail, so therefore, I have got to figure out who to pick, and then what I need to do, is set them up to be successful, rather than to set them up to fail. Now, how do you do this? How do you start preparing for this? And there are a couple of things that I would point to. We're going to come to this a little bit later. But, succession planning is probably 20% of the equation; the other 80% is just a relentless nonstop effort to continue to fill your key seats with great people. Because ultimately what you have to have, are a pool of people who you have empirically tested. Why was Lou Gerstner able to pass it on to Palmisano? Why was Sam Walton able to pass it on to David Glass? Why was Anne Mulcahy able to pass it on to Ursula Burns? Because they had someone in place that they had seen, they had watched, they had worked with, they had been empirically tested, validated, they knew how they would work. And so when they passed off to that person, it was a proven quantity. Well, you have to have the people in the company to be the proven quantities. Then your problem is, I've got five great people. Question is, which one am going to pick? To what extent in those examples that you cite that there was a successful or phenomenally successful transition. To what extent was the process transparent at some stage? Or, was it pretty much-closed loop in that the company builder had to just figure it out and announce when the decision was made? It's actually very interesting how it happened in different situations; there was actually quite a range. Sometimes it's just a growing span of responsibility and you can really see who's coming up. I think by the time that David Glass became Chief Executive of Wal-Mart, it wouldn't have been a surprise to anyone. There are other situations that we all know about, the great decisions within General Electric and their whole process that had selected Jack Welch. Welch was kind of a surprise when he was picked. Surprise or not a surprise, Greg Jones went to a lot of effort in these different people, and he was testing, and the different interviews and finally a selection. And while the process may have been somewhat transparent, it wasn't clear who would win. So it could be either way, I think that the critical thing is, however it is done, is picking the right person and then making sure that the transfer of power is smooth. In "How the Mighty Fall" where we looked at companies that fell. Remember I started out as a leadership skeptic? I grudgingly came along to see how important these level 5 leaders are, and ok, I accept what it is. Now, were looking at the decline side and seeing something more. And I still don't believe a single leader makes a great company. I don't think the evidence supports that, not a big enough company; it has to be more than that. But, I do believe that the wrong leader vested with power can bring them down. And so, there are very few mistakes that you cannot afford to make, you can recover from most. Getting your successor wrong is one you cannot make.
