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$200 MILLION AND FIVE YEARS TO LIVE
This approach to company building--thinking about what you stand for, using mechanisms, being an architect--is different from some of the management trends of recent years because unlike, say, quality programs or reengineering, it allows you to be an incremental revolutionary. You don't have to do it all at once. Small steps--such as Granite Rock's altered invoice--drive revolutionary long-term changes. Ironically, the best illustration of that is a mechanism that's not organizational but personal. This mechanism is the reason I ended up doing what I'm doing now.

When I was 25 years old, I had what I think of as an excruciatingly early midlife crisis. I'd graduated from Stanford Business School, I was working at Hewlett-Packard, and I was miserable. The company paid me well. I was good at my job. But it just didn't fit with what I stood for. Truth is, I didn't know what I stood for.

And I didn't know what I wanted to do. I didn't know where I wanted to end up. So, instead of trying to determine where I wanted to end up, I sat down and asked myself, "What kind of life do I want to have?" And I thought, "You know, a good life would be one where if I woke up in the morning and suddenly had $20 million in the bank and only 10 years to live, I still wouldn't change how I spent my time." That's the test. (Now it's $200 million and 5 years. You know, inflation and all...)

I call it the "Gordon, the Guided Missile" mechanism. I got the idea from a John Cleese lecture. Gordon doesn't know what he's going to hit. He just gets fired into the air, the way all of us get shot out into life. We don't know who the hell we are or where we're going or what we're going to hit. Nobody gives you a life target; we're as unseeing as Gordon. We just rocket along.

And I thought, "I'm going to be Gordon, the Guided Missile." The way Gordon works, you understand, is that even though he never knows where the target is, he's always responding to some kind of feedback. He gets feedback and shifts--a little high, a little low, a little over. He gets more feedback and shifts again. And eventually he hits the target, which is the only moment he knows what the target is.

"Well," I thought, "I don't know what my target is, either, but if I can build a Gordon, the Guided Missile, mechanism, I'll hit the target, whatever it is." And the $20 million/10 years mechanism is what I came up with. It requires me to keep two lists: one for things that I would continue to do if I woke up tomorrow and discovered I had $20 million and 10 years to live, and another for things that under those circumstances I'd stop doing.

I review the lists over time, and I realize activities on the first list are really neat and I'd like to do more of them. And Gordon, the Guided Missile, shifts to the left. And other things keep showing up on the wrong list, and I realize it's time to quit them. Gordon shifts the other way.

So there's positive feedback and negative feedback; Gordon is getting feedback the whole time. And then whenever you're down, you've hit the target, whatever the target happens to be. Initially, in my own life, the mechanism caused some big sweeps to take place--Gordon was flying east, and I needed to go north. It prompted big changes, like quitting HP. Like deciding I was going to go back and join the academic world at Stanford. I wasn't turning a full 180 degrees, but it was a 90-degree swing. Since then the mechanism has been more iterative, the adjustments closer to the current course.

Either way, it's the perfect example of what I mean by using a mechanism instead of a strategy. I didn't know where I was going to end up. I didn't have a strategy. If somebody were to ask me now where I'm going to be in 10 years, I'd say, "I don't know, but I can tell you this. In 10 years I'll be able to wake up on any morning and say that if I suddenly had $200 million and 5 years to live, I wouldn't change the way I lead my life."

It works.

Jim Collins operates a management laboratory in Boulder, Colo.

THE BIG IDEA
A dozen companies and the goals that express what they stand for

BOEING: To push the leading edge of aviation, taking on huge challenges and doing what others cannot do

WALT DISNEY: To make people happy

HEWLETT-PACKARD: To make technical contributions

WAL-MART: To give ordinary folk the chance to buy the same things as rich people

SONY: To experience the sheer joy of advancing technology and applying it for the public's benefit

MERCK: To preserve and improve human life

3M: To solve unsolved problems innovatively

MARY KAY: To give unlimited opportunity to women

TEACHING CO.: To ignite in all people the passion for learning

MARRIOTT: To make people away from home feel that they're among friends and really wanted

PATAGONIA: To use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis

NIKE: To experience the emotion of competition, winning, and crushing competitors

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