第二十五讲：导师的重要性

高德思：先前你在我们的对话中提到了导师的重要性。我想到的是中国刚刚加入劳动大军的年轻人和那些已经着手干一番事业的企业家们。就你的经历而言，你提到导师对你个人、职业和思想的发展产生了重要的影响。这更多的是你个人努力的结果，还是归功于那些教育机构建立的导师制度？这是如何发挥作用的呢？

导师制并不是通行的，我认为大家都可以从导师那里大获裨益。但是我想很多年轻人是不会费这个劲或主动走出去寻找导师的。在我回答这个问题之前，告诉我你认为这在中国会有什么不同吗？

我会给你一个例子。我在香港的一所大学担任导师，他们让新闻界的人做新闻专业学生的导师。这是个很好的想法，但是据我所知在中国其它地方并不常见。中国很多大学生毕业生就业很困难。然后我想到了实习，许多跨国公司在中国开展实习生项目，但这并没有全面铺开，而且也很难找。导师制并不那么常见，依我看来公司和教育机构应该考虑多开展这样的项目，为年轻人才搭建更好的桥梁。

吉姆·柯林斯：这是很有意思的，因为我不了解中国与导师相关的文化规范。所以我不知道我的这种看法在这里是否适用。有些想法是基于我的自身经历。对人们来说会是个挑战。当我二十几岁的时候，我意识到我真的很想要人指导我。就像我刚刚提到的，我意识到我从父母那里没有得到太多指导。我记得我听过一部有声书，是采访美国总统杜鲁门的记录。其中他有一句话：“我唯一确信的事是，如果你在30岁的时候还分不清对错的话，那你就永远也不会有那么一天了。”

Thomas D. Gorman: You mentioned earlier in our conversation the importance of mentors. I'm thinking of both young people entering the work force in China as well as the entrepreneurs that are already trying to do something. In your experience, you mentioned that mentors had an important impact on your personal and career development and your thinking. Was that more a result of your personal initiative, or educational institutions creating mentorship programs, or ... how should that work?

Mentorship programs are not universal and I think all can benefit from mentors, but I think a lot of young people may not take the trouble or take the initiative to go out and look for that. Before I answer that, tell me how you think this might be different in China?

Well, I'll give you an example. I'm a mentor at one of the universities in Hong Kong, and they match people in journalism careers with students in the journalism department. It's a great idea, it's not very common in the rest of China though, to my knowledge and I think, when I look at these numbers of young people coming out of China's universities, many of them having trouble finding jobs. And then I think about internships, for example, multinational companies do them in China, but they're not across the board, they're not that easy to find. Mentoring programs are not that common, so it seems to me that maybe companies and educational institutions ought to be thinking about programs like this to try to create better bridges for young talent.

Jim Collins: It's interesting, because I don't the know what the cultural norms are in China relative to mentors. So, I don't know if my observations from here apply. But, there are a couple of thoughts I would have based on my own experience. And then kind of a challenge to people. When I was in my 20's I realized I really wanted to have guidance. And I realized, as I mentioned, I hadn't gotten that guidance from parenting, so much. And I remember actually listening to an audio; it was actually an audio book and it was a series of transcripts on interviews that had been done with one of our American presidents, Harry Truman. And there was a line in there where, Harry Truman said, "The only thing I know for certain, is if you don't know the difference between right and wrong by the time you're 30, you never will."

Jim Collins: And I was 25 or something at the time and I literally pulled off the side of the road and I thought to myself, I have five years to figure this out. So, I came up with this idea of a personal board of directors. Now, companies have a board of directors, but I thought, I need a personal board of directors, I need a gathering of people who I can really look up to.

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 was with my wife, Joanne. But, others I started filling in and I started really thinking, who would I really want to be on my personal board. Interestingly, a couple of them never knew they were on my personal board, but they were enormously influential on me.

And I chose them for their character more than their success, some of them were enormously successful people, but that's not why I chose them. I chose them for character, for the kinds of people they were, for the sorts of ideas they had. Instead of choosing employees for character I was choosing mentors for character. And these people had a huge shaping influence on my life, and I carefully would envision what they would say, but sometimes I would, actually if I had the opportunity I would ask them, and I would stay in touch with them. And by having a systematic mechanism like that, that became a way for a group of people to help me develop, and it was huge in my own development. Those people, at critical times, I didn't necessarily have that much contact, but they might have had a profound influence with one thing that they said.

Since then what I've come to see, is that mentoring then becomes a giant debt. So, if you had the privilege of having some great mentors, you have an incalculable factor. And as a result, I don't know how this would fit with the culture of China, I hope it plays here in the United States, but there's an informal process which you have to pay the debt back. And before you're done, your responsibility is to mentor others and then that becomes, and then you're open, it's not that you can on everyone, but as you see people and they come into your orbit and they seem coachable. You kind of take them on and it becomes your responsibility to do that. So, the next generation works on the generation coming up, and so on and so forth forever. Now, the other side of that I think sometimes involves actually reaching out to try to reach out to those mentors. That's why I say; I don't know how that would work in China. In my experience, I reached out to some of these people, directly and just said, for whatever reason, I would like to have their input and then I felt that my debt was to really listen. So, sort of a two-sided debt, if someone mentors you, you have to honor it. And if you have been mentored, you have to mentor others.