Jim Collins - How To Go From Good To Great

**Jim Collins** (0:00)
The most important question is who.
Who are you going to allow to mentor you? Who are you going to work with? Who are you going to spend your life with? Who are going to be your friends? Who will you let shape you?
And if you could just early, and who are you going to take care of? And what are you going to do? Not what is your next career step, but who are the people in your unit that you are going to take care of as a leader? Take care of your people, not your career. And that shift from what to who, the sooner you can do that in life, that's how my life changed. I had great mentors, but I also understood that I didn't have to have the answers to the what's if I really paid attention to finding great who's.

**Ryan Hawk** (0:54)
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Hey, everyone, thank you so much for being here. It's Ryan Hawk with The Learning Leader Show. Think back to a few years ago, episode number 23, I had my younger brother AJ on, and he was asking me questions towards the end of it. And one of his questions was, who are a few of your dream guests, the people who you would love to have on more than anybody else? And I named two people at that time. I named Elon Musk, and the second person I named is my featured leader tonight, Jim Collins.
It's kind of surreal at times when you're able to speak with your leadership heroes. Jim, for those of you who don't know him, is perhaps one of the greatest leadership management thinkers slash writers ever. Authored Good To Great, Great By Choice and Built To Last. And I had incredibly high expectations for this conversation. I mean, it's been three years in the making. Good To Great is really the foundation in which my leadership journey was built upon over 15 years ago. And so it was quite a moment to have this one-on-one conversation with Jim. We scheduled about 30 minutes and you'll see we went over an hour. And he even asked to speak more, which also if you study Jim, you'll notice that he never does podcasts. He carefully selects the specific moments when he shares his message. He looks for teaching moments and he chose The Learning Leader Show to do that over just about any other place. And so I'm deeply honored by that and I loved this talk. It was incredible. You can even tell by the different tone of this intro. It just means so much to me that we were able to do it. A few of the topics that we discussed on this wide ranging conversation. It's the moment or the story when he met his leadership hero, Peter Drucker.
And I found the story to be incredible. I think you'll love it.
Jim can retell it so well.
And it was a pure joy for me to hear it. And he even started our conversation similar to how Peter Drucker started the conversation with him. And then how each of us can find our personal hedgehog, what that means and how we can do it. And then he closed the conversation by discussing the most important question to ask yourself.