Power play: business guru Jim Collins says great legislators find a way to get good things done.

• Author: Smith, Edward

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Jim Collins is the first to tell you he doesn't know very much about state legislatures.

The former Stanford University business professor who has emerged as a top business leadership guru in the past 15 years says he is still trying to understand how leadership works in the public arena. Listen to him for awhile, however, and he displays a remarkably nuanced and insightful understanding of the differences between leading people beneath a capitol dome and from an executive suite.

"Business is the special case. It is the case of concentrated executive power," Collins says. "If Sam Walton wanted Wal-Mart to turn left, it would turn left. But when you step outside of business, you have a very different power map."

In the legislative arena, he says, "the question is how to assemble enough points of power to get the decisions to happen that, if you had executive power, you would just make. And I've come to the conclusion that it is much more difficult. Really difficult leadership is getting things done when you don't have the power."

Instead, Collins says, you need to employ other skills "that I imagine these people are really great at: the power of language, the power of shared interests, the power of coalition, the power of the favor jar."

"That is legislative leadership. I think a lot of business people have trouble when they step outside business. They've had the crutch of concentrated power, and now they have to operate without it."

Those legislative leadership skills are especially challenged in times of great adversity, says Collins, who is the author of five books about why companies fail or remain mired in mediocrity. Perhaps the best known is Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... And Others Don't. That was followed by a 36-page monograph, Good to Great and the Social Sectors, which grappled with leadership in nonprofits and government.

Education is one area where legislative leaders are particularly concerned about maintaining quality. Collins recounted a study in Arizona to try to improve education for poor Latino children. The study, conducted with some assistance from Collins' organization, compared two similar schools one with great results and the other with a poor track record.

Collins mentioned two key findings. One is familiar to people who look at education policy: Strong leadership from a principal can make an enormous amount of difference in a school's success.

The other finding, however...