Jim Collins Inspires Schools to Be and Create Great Leaders

“Embrace the noble cause of business schools,” said Jim Collins, one of two keynote speakers at the 2004 GMAC® Annual Industry Conference.

“Business schools provide the toolkit for living in a free, democratic, capitalist society.”

Collins is a former faculty member of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business and is familiar to many in graduate management education as the author of Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . and Others Don't (HarperCollins, 2001) and the coauthor, with Jerry F. Porras, of Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (HarperCollins, 1994), two books that analyze the keys to corporate success and staying power.

At the 2004 GMAC® Annual Industry Conference in June, Collins challenged the audience of business school professionals on two fronts: to make their schools great institutions and to prepare their students to lead institutions to greatness and manage them with passion, discipline, and humility.

Collins has spent years studying how companies progress from being good to being great. The most important prerequisite for a transformation to greatness, he said, is people. Great companies, he found, are run by “Level 5 leaders,” characterized not only by skill but by ferocious ambition to do something great for a cause, a company, or the greater good—but never for themselves. However, Level 5 leaders cannot be effective without the right employees. A company’s employees, Collins said, are even more important than its strategy.