#67 Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion

**Jim Collins** (0:00)
Here's the interesting thing about luck. Luck is asymmetric as a cause.
Bad luck can kill you, but good luck cannot make you great.

**Shane Parrish** (0:20)
Hello and welcome. I'm Shane Parrish, and this is The Knowledge Project, a podcast exploring the ideas, methods, and mental models that help you master the best of what other people have already figured out.
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Today, I'm speaking with Jim Collins. Jim is the author or co-author of books like Built to Last, Good to Great, How the Mighty Fall, Great by Choice, and Turning the Flywheel. Together, I think they've sold over 10 million copies, and you've likely heard of one, if not all of them.
This conversation is amazing and detailed. We start with an understanding of how Steve Jobs helped him teach at Stanford, and go on to explore what makes companies and people successful using the lenses of Level 5 leadership, flywheels, bullets and cannonballs, the 20-mile march, compounding, and so much more. We also talk about why companies fail. And Jim flips the script on me and asks me a few questions as well. And we also explore why leadership can be learned but not taught.
Jim has spent his life studying businesses, and this conversation is far more productive than an MBA. It's time to listen and learn. Thank you for watching. The Knowledge Project is sponsored by Metalab. For a decade, Metalab has helped some of the world's top companies and entrepreneurs build products that millions of people use every day. You probably didn't realize it at the time, but odds are you've used an app that they've helped design or build. Apps like Slack, Coinbase, Facebook Messenger, Oculus, Lonely Planet and many more. Metalab wants to bring their unique design philosophy to your project. Let them take your brainstorm and turn it into the next billion dollar app from ideas sketched on the back of a napkin to a final ship product. Check them out at metalab.co. That's metalab.co. And when you get in touch, tell them Shane sent you.
Jim, I'm so happy to have you on the show.

**Jim Collins** (2:33)
I'm really looking forward to our conversation.

**Shane Parrish** (2:35)
When I was doing research for this, I came across an anecdote where Steve Jobs helped you prepare for a class at Stanford University. Can you expand on that? I thought that would be a good place to kick this off.

**Jim Collins** (2:51)
Well, sure, and tell you what, actually, I'll begin there. And then as we kind of tilt back, I'd love to ask you a couple of questions, just things that have been provoked in my mind as I've enjoyed learning from the classroom that you've created with your marvelous guests. So a couple of things that occurred to me, I'd love to ask you.
The story with Steve Jobs, so I had the great, really, privilege when I was only 30 years old to begin teaching a course on entrepreneurship and small business at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. And I had a great mentor. One of the things I believe in is you get not just luck in life, but who luck. And a little bit later, by the way, I hope we circle back to the question of luck because we actually systematically studied and quantified its role in our research in one of our studies. And I think that we ought to hit that. But people think about luck as kind of what luck. And I've had great who luck in my life. And who luck is when you come across somebody who changes your trajectory or invests in you, bets on you, gives you guidance at key points. So I had a great mentor named Bill Azir, who was a professor of mine when I was a graduate student at Stanford and who then went back for me with the deans to get me to teach this Entrepreneurship and Small Business course. And so when I first got the course, I'm 30 years old and I somehow at the very beginning of the course changed its frame. And that leads me to why I ended up calling Steve Jobs. So I changed the frame. Originally, the original syllabus said something about, this will be a course on the mechanics and challenges of the new venture entrepreneur and small business leader or something like that. And I ended up impulsively crossing out the first line of the syllabus and replacing it with, this is going to be a course on how to turn a new venture or small business into an enduring great company, period.