You would be hard pressed to find two individuals more determined to uncover the secrets of business success than Jim Collins and Bo Burlingham. Collins is the author of the best-selling business books Built to Last and Good to Great, both of which address this simple but vexing question: Why do some companies become great while others flounder? Burlingham, an editor-at-large of Inc., has spent his career pondering the same question. The author of Small Giants and co-author of The Knack (with Inc. columnist Norm Brodsky), as well as two books with open-book-management guru Jack Stack, Burlingham joined the magazine's staff in 1983 and has developed an unmatched ability to get inside some of the nation's most fascinating organizations. For Inc.'s 30th anniversary, we decided to bring these two business thinkers together for a conversation that would serve as a kind of state-of-the-entrepreneurial nation -- examining where we have been, where we are, where we are headed, and what it will take to succeed once we get there. Burlingham met with Collins at his research firm, the ChimpWorks, in Boulder, Colorado. An edited transcript of the conversation follows.
Bo Burlingham
Jim Collins
I saw your talk at the last Inc. 500 conference and was struck by your thoughts about the evolution of business over the past 100 years. You believe that every 20 or 30 years, there is a major development that we become aware of only in retrospect.
Yes, that's right. Around the turn of the last century, for example, we began to see the business corporation emerge as a building block of modern society, but if you'd made that observation to people in 1900, they wouldn't have known what you were talking about. Then, in the period of the 1920s to '40s, we saw the emergence of management as a fundamental function and discipline in society. It was Peter Drucker who best articulated that idea. He saw that we were becoming a society in which management would be one of the central, important professions -- like medicine or law. Then came the third big development, which really flourished after the Second World War: the idea that work can be systematically broken down into pieces and reassembled in ways that dramatically increase both performance and humanity.
Where does entrepreneurship fit in?
That was the next big development. Up to about 1980 or so, we tended to view entrepreneurship as sort of a weird black art. There were these crazy, creative people who weren't like normal people. They didn't work for other people. They went off and started their own things. But beginning in the 1980s, there was a huge shift, and I think Inc. had a lot to do with it. We began to get the idea that entrepreneurship is a systematic, replicable process. Along with that recognition came a variety of mechanisms -- capital mechanisms, education mechanisms, media mechanisms, and so on. We realized that being an entrepreneur is a choice. It's not about temperament or personality. It's about action.
That's interesting. There were a lot of mavericks at our early conferences, but in the late 1980s, they began giving way to professional entrepreneurs.
I think we saw the best of entrepreneurship in the '80s. I invited Steve Jobs to my entrepreneurship class at Stanford in 1988 or '89. He was doing NeXT at the time. He said, "We aren't creating computers. We are creating bicycles for the mind." That was his phrase. He said the most efficient locomotive vehicle is a bicycle, and you could create a bicycle for the mind. It just happened to be a personal computer. Now, that way of looking at a business is very different from thinking, We're creating a company so everybody can get rich and retire. If that's how Jobs had seen it, he would have quit a long time ago. Same with Yvon Chouinard at Patagonia. He wanted to make incredible products, but those products would be part of something bigger -- creating a role model for people who wanted to build a sustainable organization. It was a noble vision of entrepreneurship, and a lot of these entrepreneurs shared it.
Some people might be surprised to hear you speak so passionately about entrepreneurship, considering that both Built to Last and Good to Great focused on giant public companies.
It just seemed to me that the best way to understand how great entrepreneurs become great company builders was to take the greatest companies of the 20th century and then rewind the tape of history to when they were start-ups. So, let's look at what Bill Hewlett and David Packard were doing and what [Sony founders] Akio Morita and Masaru Ibuka were doing and what Sam Walton was doing when he had two stores. There are thousands of start-ups, far fewer successful start-ups, fewer still that become successful companies, even fewer that go from successful company to enduring company, and a tiny handful that become great, enduring companies. I wanted to know how the great, enduring ones got started. So, for me, Built to Last was an entrepreneur's book.
How do you define entrepreneurship?
I take a broad view of it. The traditional definition -- founding an entity designed to make money -- is too narrow for me. I see entrepreneurship as more of a life concept. We all make choices about how we live our lives. You can take a paint-by-numbers approach, or you can start with a blank canvas. When you paint by numbers, the end result is guaranteed. You know what it's going to be, and it might be good, but it will never be a masterpiece. Starting with a blank canvas is the only way to get a masterpiece, but you could also blow up. So, are you going to pick the paint-by-numbers kit or the blank canvas? That's a life question, not a business question.
