EntreLeadership - #130: Jim Collins—How to Build an Enduring, Great Company

Episode Date: January 18, 2016

Want to create a company that’s built to last or take your business from good to great? Then listen in because one of our favorite guests is joining us for a unique conversation about both. Jim Collins, best-selling author, researcher and lifelong teacher of leadership, calls in for an in-depth discussion on what makes successful companies tick. If you want to be great by choice, don’t miss this podcast! entreleadership.com/podcast Goal Tracker Another great episode sponsored by our friends at Infusionsoft   Another great episode sponsored by our friends at Infusionsoft. - See more at: https://www.entreleadership.com/posts?view=tile&format=podcast&action=index&controller=podcasts#sthash.JfKpMD1v.dpuf Another great episode sponsored by our friends at Infusionsoft. - See more at: https://www.entreleadership.com/posts?view=tile&format=podcast&action=index&controller=podcasts#sthash.JfKpMD1v.dpuf Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

helping business leaders grow themselves, their team, and their profits. This is the Entree Leadership Podcast. Now, here is your host, Ken Coleman. Broadcasting from the Music City, we are thankful for your download. Our feature conversation this episode is with Mr. Greatness himself. Now, I made that up. He would never call himself Mr. Greatness. I'm speaking of Jim Collins.

This is a really unique conversation. I'm very excited about it. I'll tell you in about 30 seconds. But in a little bit, I'm going to have Eric the producer come in here. And we're going to talk about the goal tracker that we've been talking about. We created for you to use in January. And I thought, well, let's put young Eric the producer on the spot because we're using the goal tracker. And let's see how he's using it.

This is a great free tool. So that's all coming to you in moments. But I want to talk about our interview with Jim Collins. This guy is one of the most delightful interviews. I have now had the chance Eric to interview Jim. I think four or five times. It's either number four or five. And I would have been fine with one. What a special pleasure it is to talk to Jim. The last time he was on this podcast, we did a co-interview with his longtime mentor, Bob Buford, author of Half Time. And so we asked Jim, since he's coming to, and I'll tell you more about this, the Entree Leadership Summit, May 22 through 25, we said, hey, can we get you on the phone and let's talk? And so we begin to talk with his team and with Jim about what we would. would do. And this is really one of the most unique interviews I've ever done. Here's why. Jim's books

have sold over 10 million copies. The big four, good to great, great by choice, built the last, how the mighty fall. I mean, these four are, I call them the big four because they are in my mind, if you were going to make a top 10 of business books, I believe those are the Mount Rushmore. I just think you've got to read all four of those. It's empirical research and it's unbelievable. So what we did in this conversation was I went through each book. And we talked specifically about how it developed the research behind it. And in this conversation, Jim reveals a very rare story. I'm not going to say it's never been told before, but I would venture to say on business podcast, it's never been aired.

Really excited about it. So let's get right to it. Here's my conversation with Jim Collins. Well, Jim, as we look at your career, it's amazing. 25 years, you spent researching companies to answer one big question. What makes great companies tick? So I think it would be fun to go back to the origin of all that study and all the research and all the books. What was the driver behind that question? Well, the question really came about. It actually originated. I can actually pinpoint the moment. Was in 1988, I had the great privilege

to inherit teaching responsibility for a course on entrepreneurship and small business at Stanford Graduate School of Business. And I was preparing for my first year of teaching, and I began to revise the syllabus for the course, because I had gotten the syllabus from the previous professor who had taught that section before me. And the original syllabus said something like, this will be a course on the mechanics and challenges of the new business venture entrepreneur and the small business manager. And to this day, I don't know why I did this, but I just impulsively crossed out the opening line of the syllabus, and I rewrote it to say something along the lines of, this will be a course on how to turn an entrepreneurial venture or small business into an enduring great company. And I looked at that, and I thought to myself, wow, I don't know anything about that. So I figured that if I was going to reframe the course around that, I should probably figure out what it does take to build an enduring great company. And that really launched the research that took 25 years and now has more than 6,000 years of combined corporate history and the research database through the different studies.

But it all goes back to that one moment where I wrote that down of reframing it as how to build an enduring great company as a opposed to just run a business, and the question just stuck with me. That is beyond fascinating, because there's so much metaphorical truth in that story. Who among us that wants to start a business doesn't want it to endure, to even be great, yet we know so little about it, and if we don't study and figure it out, then we have a very little shot of it. That's what's so great about that story. So you dive into this. I want to go through the four books and kind of ask these big questions. This is going to be fun. But before I do that, kind of a follow-up here.

Sure. Give us the timeline, Jim. So here you are. You're looking at that sentence staring at you from the syllabus. What was the timeline, the progress of that original thought? I better go find out how to do this if I'm going to be able to teach it. What was that like before the first book, Built the Last came out? How long was that?

So 1988, I began teaching the course. And it was either the fall of that year or the beginning. beginning of 1989, I teamed up with a mentor Jerry Porras. And Jerry and I began working on this research project. And essentially what we did was we said, you know, what we really want to do is to be able to find companies that really proved out to be these what we called at the time visionary companies, enduring great companies, companies that would rise to an iconic stature and would have changed the

world that they touched. I mean, companies that just is really hard to argue that they didn't fundamentally alter our landscape, whether they be, you know, like Disney, wanting to basically bring imagination to people or Boeing bringing the world into the Jet Age or 3M inventing the idea of creativity as a strategy or IBM going from butcher scales to computers and everything that went after or Walmart from a single dime store into the largest, most successful retailing company in history or HP, which invented Silicon Valley. So Jerry and I had this idea that, well, if we could find these companies that had started as startups, small companies, they were entrepreneurs, but they ended up building from that startup phase into Disney, Boeing, 3M, IBM,

Walmart, HP, those kinds of companies, and then study how it happened in contrast to others that could have done it and didn't, we would have the genesis of some insight. And so we started that progress probably around 1988, early 1989, we had to work on it all the way until 1994 before it was done. It was a six-year project before we finished that research. It was monstrous because remember we had to study the entire history of those companies. We weren't interested in what they were when we were studying them. We were interested in how they went from zero to become what they are. You know, what did Walt Disney do when he was in a garage? What did Sam Walton do when he had a single dime store? What did they do different? What did Bill Boeing do when he was running out of cash and had

to go into the furniture business to keep his airplane company in the air? And to really look at how then they went on to build these companies. So that's what really led to built to last. And Jerry Pores deserves tremendous credit for inspiring the invention of a methodology. And that methodology was, the historical match pair method. The idea that what you can do is you can go back in time and find pairs of enterprises that were in similar conditions but ended up with very, very different results. And so you compare those companies over time.

And it was a really spectacular journey. We learned a tremendous amount. This is always worth reviewing. But how would you summarize the huge takeaway that turned into the book built to last? Well, so there are really, Each book has different ideas, if you will, but they all kind of integrate as a whole. So first let me just make one comment on that and then make a couple of comments about what really came out of built to last.

I like to think of each study, whether it be built to last and then subsequently good to grade or how the mighty fall, grade by choice, is like punching holes inside a black box, right? And inside that black box are the enduring principles that help to create an enduring great company. and that each study is like walking around to one side of that box, punching a hole in it and looking inside. The question is the same, but the lenses are different. And so as a result, we get different answers that are complementary, meaning you see something different when you look through one angle versus another,

and then the entire set of findings add up to one integrated hole. From the built to last study, and the three big things that stand out to me now looking back, gosh, over 20 years, are one that the entrepreneurs who were able to start these companies that went on to become iconic, visionary, enduring great companies, they made the shift from being time tellers to being clock builders. And they understood that instead of being the genius with a thousand helpers, instead of being sort of some charismatic visionary hero on whom everybody depends, they said, you know, I want to build a clock. I want to build a clock that can tell

time, even if I'm not here. I don't want this place to depend upon me having to tell everybody what time it is, right? That's that great heroic time teller runs out of steam because eventually I won't be here. So I have to build a clock. The second is key idea is probably one of the most enduring ideas, or I would say, most deeply satisfying ideas to come from all of our work. And it's the notion of preserve the core and stimulate progress. And I actually see this is applying to any social enterprise, any corporation, any great nation, and basically that to truly endure as great, you have to do two dynamics at the same time. Think of a big yin-yang symbol. On one side is preserve the core, and then the other side is stimulate progress. And preserve the core means you have

to be really driven by a set of core values that are not open for negotiation, they're not open for discussion. They're not open for change. These don't define what you do. They define who you are. They define what you stand for. And a core purpose that is a reason for being that goes far beyond just making money. No truly great company had as its purpose principally to make money. No truly great company ever was driven principally just to make money. It was money as like blood, food, oxygen, and water. Absolutely essential for life. But it's not the point of life.

You don't come at life and say, you know, the point of my life is to breathe oxygen and eat food. No, the point of life is to do something useful and significant. And so what we found is that's how these people built these companies. So, you know, you look at Walt Disney, he wasn't trying to make money. He was making money so that he could do what he was really about, which was to make people happy, right? That was the drive.

And so that's one side. preserve the core, the values and the purpose. But the other side is stimulate progress, which means to be constantly stimulating change and improvement in innovation and renewal, always evolving your practices and your strategies as the world around you changes. So you go from Mickey Mouse and Little Films to eventually doing features to eventually doing Disneyland, right? That's a lot of stimulating progress, but consistent with the core. And then finally, the third idea. So you've got Clock Builders versus Time Tellers idea, idea number one, preserve the core, stimulate progress, idea number two.

Idea number three, that's really, to me, most satisfying from built to less is the idea of be hags, big, hairy, audacious goals. I mean, we're going to bet the company on the 707 and bring the world into the jet age. I mean, we're not talking about small goals here. We're talking about big, hairy, audacious goals. And that one way you stimulate progress is to set goals that are so big, so monstrous that when they own you, they take over your life. You're laying there in bed and you're about to go to sleep and you look over in the corner and they're standing there with giant furry feet and big glowing eyes and sharp teeth is the be hag. And it looks at you and says, better good a good night's sleep because I own you. And you wake up first thing in the morning and you kind of open your eyes and you look and there standing in the corner, staring back at you with big glowing eyes and huge sharp teeth and giant furry feet is the be hag.

Good morning. I own you. I have taken over your life. That's what B-Hags do for you. So those are the big ones out of belt to last. I love that. And I love the analogy you gave on how all four of these books really work together. So let's keep steaming along here.

Yep. So then you come at it from a different angle. Yeah. And good to great. And I love that it had a question mark, you know. This idea of this big question, you know, how do they go from good to great? That's essentially behind the title there. And again, I love this perspective, Jim.

And if you're looking back and take us to the, to those initial findings as you began to look at it from this perspective. Well, so here's what happened to kind of lead to good to great. The essence of how it started is that my friend Bill Meen, who ran the San Francisco Office of McKinsey and Company, had read Bill to Last. And he said, you know, Bill to Last is really interesting, but it's useless. And I said, what do you mean it's useless? He said, well, you know, those companies that you study, they were great from the get-go.

They had the right parenting. But what if you wake up partway through life and you didn't have the right parenting? Wow. You wake up part way through life and you didn't have Sam Walton as a founder or Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard as a founder or Walt Disney as a founder. I mean, you've just been chronically, perpetually, oppressively mediocre. Maybe you'll never become great. And so as a result, Bill to Last is interesting, but it's useless.

So that led me to say, that's a great question. and so I flew home on the airplane and drew a curve, which was a sideways curve going horizontal along a page, hitting an inflection point and then rising at about 45 degrees. And the question of my mind was, can a good company, horizontal line, breakthrough to begin to rise and become a great company, and if so, how? And then there was a second line, which is a horizontal line that stays horizontal, which is while other companies don't, right, that could have done it, right? What prevents companies from making that leap?

and then what does it take? And when we started the study for good to great, we didn't know if we'd find any, actually. We thought it was entirely possible. There were no good to great companies. But we did find that companies can indeed go from good to great, and that took five years to do that research. Unbelievable.

So then you move into Have a Mighty Fall. And it's obviously, you know, there's a negative title. It's like the tragic story of Rome, but all so important. You know, because if you want to be great and sustain greatness, you need to probably look at how other great companies have fallen. And this is really interesting. What were you trying to uncover here? So when we turned away from good to great,

and I have to say that good to great, I mean, it completely changed my life and had no idea that it would be as wide-reaching and impactful as it has been. But it left unanswered a question, which is the other side of the coin, right? So you've got the good-to-grade inflection, But what about those that go from great to good, to mediocre, to bad, to irrelevant, to gone, right?

And if you really, it's very dangerous to only study success. And you also have to explicitly study failure in how that happens. And what's really scary in how the mighty fall is, in fact, a lot of great companies eventually do become ungrate. Even some of the greatest in history can fall. And if they can fall, then anyone can fall. So you should just be absolutely paranoid and terrified all the time. And what we found is that actually most enterprises that fall, it's not because of what the world does to them.

Whether you prevail or fail or endure or die, has more to do with what you do to yourself than what the world does to you. Now, let me just briefly tie together good to great and how the mighty fall, because what's interesting is they're kind of almost mere images of each other. One is a negative inflection, the other is a positive. And so when you see a great company fall, they begin to abandon many of the things we found in Good to Great. So in Good to Great, we found the idea of Level 5 leaders, which are those ones who are guided by a deep personal humility combined with a willful ambition for the company, not themselves. And when you begin to see great companies fall, you get people who are more level four.

behavior. It's more really about themselves and what they're going to get and the hubris that comes from that. When you look in good to great, you see the notion of the right people on the bus and the right people in the key seats. That's far more important than your strategy, then your direction, then growth, right? Everything has to begin with first get the right people, then figure out where to drive the bus. And what we find when you go to how the mighty fall is you begin to find this notion of undisciplined pursuit of more means you begin to grow and expand beyond your ability to get enough of the right people to execute on that growth. And that brings about your fall.

You look at, in good to great, the discipline to stay focused on your hedgehog concept, which means getting remaining relentlessly focused on the intersection of three circles, what you're passionate about, what you can truly be the best in the world at, and what drives your economic engine. And you make very, very disciplined decisions to stay right in the middle of that. If we're not passionate about it, if we can't be the best in the world at it, If it doesn't drive our economic engine, we shouldn't do it. When you shift over to how the mighty fall, you find that folks become very

undisciplined and begin to make decisions outside of that. Now, the last thing that I would say about how the mighty fall is that it kind of creeps up on you. We found that the great companies that fell, it happens in stages, a little bit like a disease, you know, stage one, stage two, stage three. And we found five stages of decline. and what's really scary is you go through the first three of five stages, still looking healthy if somebody were looking at you from the outside, but you're already sick on the inside.

Wow. Jim, this may be overly simplistic, but I don't mind asking this. I've interviewed you many times. You'll be kind and gentle to me if it's a silly question, but I'm listening to this, and I'm just wondering, how big of a factor in preventing the fall? is a vibrant, fanatical approach to a healthy culture. And when I say culture, I'm speaking pretty macro here,

you know, from the leadership on down so that there's a, for lack of better phrase, a check and balance from allowing this creep to take place. Is it a factor from your research? Well, so all companies have a culture. And what we found is that culture and even having a strong culture doesn't necessarily distinguish a great company from a not great company. It's rather something about the culture. And what you really find is that a great company is marked by a culture of discipline,

self-disciplined people who engage in discipline thought and who take disciplined action. And when you begin to lose a culture of discipline, that's when you really begin to fall. The other is the best culture is the one that does both sides of that coin that we found back and built to last, which is you preserve the core and stimulate progress, which means that you have to keep your culture aligned, whatever your values are, whatever the purposes that you have to be fanatic about preserving that. You begin to lose it, you're going to fall.

But the other side is you have to have a culture that really, really, really wants to stimulate progress. I mean, it's got this sense in it of, think of the B-Haggs as setting out to do these big, monstrous climbs, right? The hardest climbs you can possibly do, and they're big and they're scary and they're overwhelming. And the thing is, and here's the thing you have to keep alive, is the sense that when you get to the top of a climb and you are tired, you are exhausted, everything hurts, you're bleeding. And your first reaction to that should be to look out and say, next climb, right?

And if you ever lose that sense of no matter how hard what we've just done is, there's something harder for us to do. And we love to do harder. And we love to go further. And we're going to do bigger things. And it's never going to stop. And we're never going to rest. and we're never going to retire, and we're never going to go on the glide path to irrelevance. It is just a relentless search for the next challenge that's going to push us,

make us feel inadequate, so therefore we have to grow. And what you have to do is to keep alive that sense, that that's just, that is what we love to do. We love to put ourselves in situations where we are just overwhelmed and we overcome. And if you ever lose that desire to just set the next goal for yourself that is just almost going to terrify you. I mean, there isn't, the moment you ever say, you know, someday I'm actually going to retire and rest. This makes no sense if you're going to build a great company.

One day you won't be able to keep going. One day you'll be dead. But until then, wow. Now, folks, I'm just going to tell you folks right here, this is, this is me telling you to rewind that last two, two and a half minutes and find a way to cut that sound bite out, that whole two and a half minutes from Jim Collins because, Jim, I got to tell you, buddy, that sounded like a locker room talk for me for every company in America, from one people to a thousand people. That is unbelievable. I love that. Well, it's not meant to be restful.

No, no. Hey, listen, I'm ready to go tackle somebody right now. As soon as this interview's over, I'm going to find somebody to tackle. All right, so, great by choice. Yeah. And incidentally, I want to tell you this, I love the titles to your books. I'm a guy who likes the simple, get me to the point, built to last, good to great. Those are three-word titles, how the mighty fault, four-word title. And then here you come with Great by Choice. And here's what I love about this book. You start to look at companies and how they deal, thrive, survive, whatever, within chaotic environments.

So I want you to break this down for us. What was the big takeaway out of this research? Yeah. So my colleague Morton Hanson and I began the work on Great By Choice because we realized that the world was, going to remain full of chaos and disruption and uncertainty. I mean, people kept asking after, you know, the turmoil coming out of the dot-com era or the recession of 2008-2009 and all the other things that we face, you know, what's going to be the new normal?

And our answer is there is no new normal. There will only be a continuous series of not normal. And if that's the case, then the question becomes, what can you do to ensure that you are able to navigate and still build a great company despite the fact that you are facing big, fast-moving, uncertain forces out of your control, things that can totally clobber you. And we designed this study. Morton is a great, brilliant methodologist.

And we designed this study where we kind of went back to the entrepreneurial roots. We took companies that started at zero and then went on to become 10 times better than their industry. But they did it in environments where those environments could easily kill them. So we had industries like biotech. I call them kind of high carnage industries where there's just a lot of folks who don't make it. Biotech semiconductors, airlines, software. I mean, the ones that if you make it really big, you can be very successful, but a lot never even survive. And we asked ourselves a question, what really marks those who win by 10 times?

That was the genesis and the environment is 10 times out of your control. And what do the leaders do different? That was the critical thing for us, because we're always looking at asking, why did Southwest Airlines become Southwest? And Pacific Southwest Airlines, which has the same business model in the same era, isn't here today, right? What was different? And the contrast between one set of companies and another set of companies.

So in this study, we really, one found, I would just point to three things that came out of it that most impacted me. One is the idea of the 20-mile march. And the great irony is that when you set out to navigate an uncertain and turbulent world, what you want to have is think of it as walking across the United States, and you've got two ways. One is to let the weather conditions determine your pace. Good weather, you go far, bad weather you sit and wait for conditions to improve.

Or you can be the type that says, no, we determine our pace. we're going to 20 mile march every day. Good conditions are bad. We're on a 20 mile march. And we're 20 mile march, 20 mile march, 20 mile march. What we found is that the companies that did well in these environments were all 20 mile marchers. They exerted self-control in a world out of control. And they did that by setting something like Southwest saying,

we're going to be profitable every year no matter what, which doesn't sound like much except that it's the airline industry. The idea of being profitable for 30 or 40 consecutive years in airlines is a tremendous march. There's a lot of bad weather of the industry. Or Intel in semiconductors, basically saying we're going to double computing power on a chip. Every 18 is really a number of components on a chip at affordable costs every 18 months like clockwork. Moores law. You look at a company like Pixar today, which is doing three films every two years like clockwork. That's not determined by conditions. That's determined by their

own creative discipline. So one is the 20 mile march. Two, is the idea of navigating by firing bullets and cannonballs and that they innovate in a different way. What they're really good at isn't just innovating, but scaling their innovations. And so picture it is that you have a certain amount of gunpowder and put all that in a big cannibal and you fired an oncoming ship and you miss,

and you turn and you look and you're out of gunpowder, you're in trouble. So what if instead of firing big cannonballs that you just hope hit, you take a little bit of gunpowder, put it in a bullet, fire, it's directionally right, you reset again, fire another bullet, fire a third, fire a fourth, until you hit the side of the oncoming ship and you have a calibrated line of sight. Now with that calibrated line of sight, you take your gunpowder and you put it in a big

cannonball and you fire on that calibrated line of sight. And what we found is that if you want to navigate a world full of uncertainty, you need to be firing a lot of bullets to figure out what will work in an uncertain world. You need to have the guts to convert a calibrated line of sight to a cannonball, because if you don't go big, you don't get big results at some point. And third, you have to have the discipline to not fire big, uncalibrated cannibals. And then the last idea, and for me, this is still the most delicious idea from all 25 years of research in many ways, is the one that answers the question, how much of it all comes down to luck. and Morton, my colleague on Great Buy Choice, is a brilliant methodologist, and working together,

we figured out how to define and quantify the variable of luck and ask the question, were our big winners luckier than our comparisons? I mean, in the end, there's just a big residual plus L at the end that explains a lot of stuff. It comes down to, well, you just better make sure you also have a lot of luck, right? And what we found was really fascinating when we really quantified it and studied it. What we found is that the big winners were not luckier than their comparisons. They didn't get more good luck or less bad luck or better timing of luck or bigger spikes of luck, right? Both sets of companies got good luck and bad luck in pretty equal amounts.

So luck didn't distinguish. But what did distinguish is this. It wasn't the luck. It was their return on luck. the question isn't whether you're going to get hit with luck events good and bad you are the question is what you do with the luck that you get and i've come to the conclusion based on that research that about 50% of great leadership is what you do with the unexpected it's not the unexpected that matters it's what you do with the unexpected that matters and that is for me one of the

big takeaways of great by choice. And part of why we named it great by choice. What it basically, it's not great by luck or great by chance or great by circumstance or great by the hand you're dealt, right? It's great by the choices you make and the disciplines you employ. Hence it is what you choose to do with what happens to you, not what happens to you. And that for me was a great kind of concluding piece of analysis that we did. That is so good. Grabbing opportunity and making great choices. Well, and also grabbing the other negatives. That's right. Absolutely. I mean, you're going to get just as much bad luck as good. That's right. And how you choose to respond to that. You're right. Choice is the real operating golden word there. Jim, last question for you. And this is kind of

fun irony here. You've done all this research. You know, we've reviewed briefly these four great books that came out of this research. And obviously, a lot of it is focused on larger companies. Yet at the beginning of our conversation, you took us back to the very beginning of all of this. And here you are teaching a college course and you're passionate about entrepreneurs and small business leaders. And so we have a huge swath of those folks listening in here. And so I want to ask you, in 2016, with the current environment, as you observe everything, what encouragement or challenge would you throw at entrepreneurs and small business men and women? So two thoughts for entrepreneurs and small business people. The first is that all the companies that we studied in our

research were once startups and small businesses. And the reason I got so excited about our research in many ways is that you look at how these folks went from zero in Bill to Lasz and Great Byteries, for example, they went from zero to through the small business midsize and then to great company. And that you have to think of it as a progression from idea to business, from business to company, from company to great company, from great company to enduring great company. And that's what all these folks did. And what it says to me is all the great ones started small. That they became big is a residual reflection largely of what they did when they were small, not when they were large. So that would be point one. Point two is this. The only mistakes you can learn

from are the ones you survive. So we write a lot about, in both Great by Choice and how the mighty fall, productive paranoia. And the idea being that you have to stay in the game. I mean, luck favors the persistent, but you can only persist if you stay in the game, stay alive in the game. And so that means you actually have to be really, really disciplined on your financials. We found over and over again that when our companies were small, they carried three to ten times the cash to assets ratio of other companies. And it wasn't a function of the fact that they were already big and successful. They were small when they started this. But that tremendous financial discipline allowed them to endure the inevitable ups and downs and hits and misses of life

and building a company so that they could have the long run. And that productive paranoia of channeling your paranoia into building buffers into always being financially conservative while you build your company so that you can absorb the unexpected shocks was a big part of how they were able to last long enough to really, really get their flywheel going. He is Jim Collins. Jim, it's always a joy to talk with you. Thank you so much for your time. Looking forward to being with you at our Entree Leadership Summit event in Dallas, Texas this spring. It's going to be great fun, and we appreciate you being with us today and can't wait to see there. Well, I look forward to it as well, as you can probably tell from our conversation.

I still have as much as ever tremendous passion for the entrepreneur and small business leader. You absolutely do. Thank you so much for your contribution to these leaders. And as you know and agree with us, they are the huge engine of this economy. So thank you so much for all you've done. Very good. Take care. He is Jim Collins. Hope you enjoyed that. How about that story? I told you. I teased it. story of him looking down at the syllabus. And can't you just see? It was kind of like a Harrison Ford

professorial moment, you know, from Indiana Jones. He's kind of in the classroom by himself. He looks down. He's going to write this thing. He looks at it. And the way he recalibrates changes the course of untold stories in business. Really cool stuff. We love Jim Collins, as I mentioned earlier. He's going to be at our Entree Leadership Summit,

May 22 through 25, Omni Hotel Dallas, Texas. Jim will be joining Dave Ramsey, Seth Godin, Pat Lynchione, Dr. Henry Cloud, and our very own Chris Hogan and Christy Wright. We also have one other guest that we're not allowed to talk about over the broadcast airways. Many of you have tweeted me. I've had a few emails from people said, you weren't joking. It's a pretty big deal. But you have to go to Entreeleadership.com slash summit to see who I'm talking about.

By the way, if you want to get any of the books we discussed in the conversation, You want to learn more about Jim. Jim Collins.com. And as always, this episode brought to you by our friends at InfusionSoft. They're all about serving you, the small business man or woman. Go to infusionsoft.com slash entre. Infusionsoft.com slash entree. All month, we are emphasizing the gold tracker giveaway.

It's absolutely free. I'll tell you how to download it and what all you're going to get with that. But I thought it would be fun to kind of bring this thing alive because you want to know that we're, eating what we're serving you. And we are, and Eric the producer, you hear me talk to him during these podcasts, and you hear me talk about him as we wrap each podcast. But this guy is an absolute warrior. He's an eagle. He's not a donkey. And this is kind of cool because he's a professional drummer. And while he was on the road as a professional drummer, he used to listen to this Entry

Leadership podcast. Would you have ever guessed at that point, young 20s, you still are, that you would produce this podcast. Never. I listened to this podcast actually sweeping floors trying to make it in music. Oh, really? So I got the story wrong. You started listening before you made it. Yep, I was working for a small business owner. He had five employees. Wow. I was doing janitorial work. That's fantastic. How long ago was that, by the way? Podcast started originally 2011, so this is over four or five years ago. Good grief. Well, he's doing a fantastic job. So Eric, I brought you and I said, would you let me put you on the spot? And you said, sure. We're going to talk about the gold tracker and the tool. we're giving is a PDF and folks can download it again. I'll tell you how to text in or how to go to

the website and get it. I'll give all that to you a minute. It's absolutely free. But let's talk about how it works. So you get this PDF downloaded and what does it look like for you? Well, Stragers great, our team wrote it up and there's different categories in the wheel of life. So you just write down your goal. You choose the category, put an action plan, written out step, and target date. That's right. So here's the categories, career, family, intellectual, spiritual, physical, social, financial. And so you write the corresponding goal down, and then this thing tracks it for you. And it allows you to really kind of keep pace and it gives you some accountability. And so let's talk about one of your goals. Well, because I listen to so much audio all the time,

and then with all the authors we have, sometimes I don't actually get to go through all the books. Right. And I skim them. And so I'm going to commit to listening to one business book every month. There you go. So the way I'll do that is my goal is one business book per month, category that'll be intellectual. My action plan, typical book is nine hours to get through the whole thing. And so I'm going to just listen three times a week, 30 minutes at a time. And then over course of a month, that should definitely get through the book. And I won't have half listened through books. I may have to ask you to give me some audio book reports just so you feel like a student again. Always like it. I kid, I'll never make you do that. All right, here we go.

Here's how you get it. You just text the word, goal, 2016. I know that's a word and a date, but that is the word, no spaces. Goal, 2016. Goal, 2016. You text that to 33444. That's 33444. You'll get the PDF download. This has got lists.

It helps you walk through it all. Very simple, simple stuff, examples, all the stuff that you need to really begin to get some intentionality in your life. And remember, Chris Hogan, who talked to us about this recently on a podcast, we're going to give you his free article, five goals. secrets of successful leaders. So that comes with the PDF as well. And for those of you who don't want to text in, we're going to give you the online option. Just go to entreleadership.com slash podcast. That's entreeleadership.com slash podcast. Click on this episode, Jim Collins,

and you can get the download. So take advantage of it. This is your year, 2016. You can begin to set goals on purpose and win big. All right, folks, it is off and running. That is 2016. And we're have you alongside of us. Thank you so very much for being a part of this special entree leadership community. Well, that's going to do it for this episode. On behalf of Eric Anthony and our entire entree leadership team, we thank you so very much for hanging out with us. We'll talk with you again very soon.