Author IDs enemy of greatness.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: Jim Collins - Identifies

Jim Collins has spent his professional life taking apart companies and organizations to figure out what makes them work, and the best-selling author believes he knows what stands in the way of greatness.

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"Good is the enemy of great," Collins told a crowd at the Colorado Convention Center during the Urban Land Institute's Fall Meeting in October. The four-day event attracted more than 6,000 professionals in real-estate development from around the world.

"It's one of the reasons why we have so few things that ever become truly great," he said. "We, by and large, do not have the opportunity to send our children to great schools. Why? We have good schools. We, by and large, do not operate under great government because we have good government, and it works pretty well. Most companies, most firms, will never become great because most are really rather good. Therein lies much of their main problem."

Collins is the author of the best-sellers "Built to Last" and "Good to Great." In 1995 he founded a "management laboratory" in Boulder.

"We do not study the successful and ask what they have in common," Collins explained of his research group. "We study the contrast. We do the equivalent of those twin studies where you find two that were born at the same time with the same opportunities potentially, or they were born in the same family but were separated at birth and had different outcomes. And you rewind the tape and you ask why their outcomes were different when they got the same start."

Collins is an accomplished rock climber, and his wife is a former Ironman triathlon champion. His keynote address to the Urban Land Institute gathering included some mountain-climbing examples to make his point about the importance of preparing for the worst, and the hazards of mistaking the luck of a favorable business cycle with skill.

"Here in Denver a big chunk of our economy was tied to the telecom industry," Collins told the crowd. "That was 2001, and it was like an Everest storm. It just melted down and evaporated nearly overnight.

"That's not a cycle, that's a disruption. That's unpredictable. We are going to see more of those. What it means is that it's all the more important that you manage yourself in good times as if there are bad times all the time.

"It is the decisions you make today that are your hedges against what you cannot predict," said Collins. "We live in a world where you cannot predict the future, but you can prepare...