When we were studying in Built to Last, we were looking at companies that were visionary through generations, which meant sometimes you had to discount the role of any individual leader. You couldn’t say that Walt Disney was Disney because Walt Disney’s walking around anymore. There’s something about the company. And I still believe that. I still believe that even if you go back to the founding of our country, we had to have a very important starting president, but nonetheless, it was the Declaration, it’s the mechanisms of the Constitution, it’s the cultural fabric, it’s a variety of other things, that it’s not any one president, or any one leader, and their wisdom was to recognize that we actually have to build the right mechanisms to compensate for the fact that we’re going to have variations in leaders. I still hold to that view. If you build the right kind of organization and the right kind of culture, you don’t have to depend on a singular leader.
That said, Good to Great really changed my view about the role of leaders at key inflection points. Good to Great was really about how companies made a real shift in their capabilities after years of wandering in their averageness, if you will. They were at best good, and they made a leap into at least 15 years of great performance. Well, there you really saw the pronounced role of an exceptional leader and exceptional leadership teams.
Author: Jim Collins
Source: Chief Executive
Subjects: Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior
Click to Add the First »