Follow these leaders: thoughts and views from Jim Collins; Jim Collins spoke with Managing Editor Ellen M. Heffes in February--three months before his scheduled appearance as a keynote speaker at FEI's annual Summit in Chicago. The general topic: leadership related to today's business environment.

• Author: Heffes, Ellen M.
• Position: Leadership - Interview

Jim Collins is the consummate long-term thinker. The former Stanford faculty member who now runs his own research laboratory views his role as "taking a messy world and going from chaos to concept, and then teaching those concepts." Going through this process is his version of being a student.

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"You have to be a student before you can be a teacher," says Collins, who has spent the better part his 47 years both learning and teaching about what separates great companies from good companies, and how good can become great.

Co-author of the mid-1990s blockbuster Built to Last, Collins went solo to write Good to Great in 2001 (which still remains on every non-fiction best-seller list). From there on, it's, as we say, "history." His ideas and his popularity, have soared. Indeed, certain phrases that have become part of the business lexicon over the past decade can be attributed to Collins--such as "getting the right people on the bus" and "BHAGS" (Big Hairy Audacious Goals).

Some of his findings are surprising, and others are downright startling, as he and his research team focus on minute details of company and individual performance to cull information to fit into their very demanding benchmarks. Some findings even seem to crush myths on widely held themes of effective leadership.

Collins doesn't argue with non-believers, but explains that his findings are based on the data his team has accumulated. For instance, for every company that "makes the cut" to be included in a good-to-great study, Collins personally reads everything he can get his hands on that was written about the company for the past 80 or 90 years. So, while he has much knowledge, he is mindful of how he communicates his findings.

Indeed, speaking in the interview, he is careful to frame his comments around "what the data shows," and not a Jim Collins point of view. For instance, while many companies are enamored with changing the leadership ranks by bringing in CEOs from the outside, as well as with employing charismatic leaders, Collins warns of the dangers, saying he's found a "strong negative correlation between outside CEOs and companies becoming great."

Over 90 percent of the CEOs in the good-to-great study, he says, came from inside their companies, and many had what he calls a "charisma bypass." Thus, he concludes, there is an overwhelming weight of evidence suggesting that "the savior CEO model is correlated with mediocrity."

And, while it's hard to define and measure charisma, he argues his studies also found a negative correlation between charisma and building great companies. Sure, a Lee Iacocca (former savior CEO of the then-embattled Chrylser Corp.) certainly had charisma. But Walgreen Co. CEO Charles R. (Cork) Walgreen 3rd, who would probably not qualify as charismatic, built a company that has made it to the list of 11 good-to-great companies highlighted in Collins' book of the same name.

Clearly, he quips, "it doesn't mean if you're charismatic that it's lethal." He points to a few who have been able to "overcome and transcend their charisma to build great companies"--such as Sam Walton, who built Wal-Mart Stores Inc. When Walton passed his leadership on to insider and non-charismatic CEO David Glass, Collins says this proved that the roots of the company established by Walton were in place, and Glass carried on the legacy. "It was Sam Walton's way of proving, 'See, it wasn't my personality in the first place. The company has gone far beyond what I built.'"

So, why is charisma a negative? The way Collins explains it: If you're not charismatic, you have to win arguments over what you think the company should do based on...