LDI Session 2019

THE RE-EDUCATION OF JIM COLLINS

The Re-Education of Jim Collins

By Bo Burlingham

The author of “Good to Great” went to West Point to teach leadership.
Instead, he was the one who got schooled.

It was a warm, late summer afternoon on the banks of the Hudson River, and a large contingent of cadets had
gathered in the Hayes Gymnasium on the campus of the United States Military Academy. Dressed in gray T-shirts
and black shorts, they had come to train for the Academy’s grueling Indoor Obstacle Course Test (universally
known as the IOCT), which involves jumping through tires, climbing ropes, swinging on monkey bars, leaping
over barriers, running along a balance beam, and sprinting around a track with a medicine ball, among other
physical feats. Cadets say it is one of the hardest parts of a West Point education.

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THE RE-EDUCATION OF JIM COLLINS

On one side of the gym, a group of cadets watched an older, gray-haired man trying to mount a shelf 8 feet
above the ground. He was Jim Collins, the best-selling business-book author who was visiting West Point to hold
seminars on leadership. “No, sir,” a cadet said to him. “You don’t want to do it like that, sir. You look like an old man,
sir. You need to do it this way.”

“I am an old man!” Collins murmured. Then, he tried it again.

Why was the author of such business classics as Built to Last and Good to Great competing with college students
less than half his age? For one thing, Collins, 55, is an avid climber and seldom shies from a physical challenge.
(For his 50th birthday, he had scaled the 2,900-foot vertical rock face known as The Nose of El Capitan in Yosemite
National Park.) But what Collins really wanted was the opportunity to interact with cadets, to experience what
they experience. With that in mind, he had set himself the goal of completing the course in the same time
required of all male cadets before they can graduate--three and a half minutes or less. So he was grateful that
West Point’s rock-climbing team had turned out to coach him.

Glancing around the gym, Collins could see numerous other cadets struggling with various obstacles; some of
them were not much farther along than he was. Most of them had at least one or two other cadets standing
nearby, coaching, critiquing, and cheering on their compatriots.

On the Quad

Life at West Point is highly regimented and filled with pressure. So why, Jim Collins wondered, were the cadets he
met so much happier than students at civilian schools?

That struck Collins as interesting. West Point is a highly
competitive place. Every cadet wants to do the IOCT faster than
his or her peers. Every cadet also is extremely busy. Yet these
cadets were taking time away from their studies and other
duties to help their friends get through the course.

Their behavior in the gym was no anomaly. Collins had seen
the same phenomenon among his students. And not only were
the cadets more collegial, but they seemed to be happier--
much happier--than students at civilian universities, including
those he had taught during his seven years on the Stanford
faculty. Which was odd. After all, West Point cadets lead
extremely demanding lives. Nearly every minute of every day
is programmed, and every aspect of their lives is regimented,
down to the color of their socks and the way razors must be
positioned in their medicine cabinets. Meanwhile, they are

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THE RE-EDUCATION OF JIM COLLINS

constantly being tested both physically and mentally--and they often fall short. This goes on for four years with
almost no letup, followed by five years of active duty.

How, Collins wondered, did such a burdensome environment produce such a happy, lively, and confident
cohort of young men and women? In business, happy cultures tend to be associated with pool tables, foosball,
Friday-afternoon beer parties, and dogs in the office--in a word, fun. A cadet’s life is anything but fun. And yet
these young people seem to get something out of their lives that is missing from the lives of many of their
contemporaries.

Collins didn’t have long to reflect on this, however, as his coaches were already leading him to the next obstacle:
the balance walk on horizontal bars, followed by the jump through a hanging tire.

When Collins was offered West Point’s Class of 1951 Chair for the Study of Leadership in the early summer
of 2011, he was in the midst of preparing for the publication of his fourth bestseller, Great by Choice, which
would wrap up a quarter-century of research into great companies. Although he faced a packed schedule in
the coming year, he couldn’t resist the opportunity. For one thing, Collins is passionate about reaching out to
young leaders, especially those who had made a commitment to service, and none had made a more serious
commitment than had the West Point cadets.

In addition, he was curious about the place itself. West Point has been turning out “leaders of character” for more
than 200 years. “I expect that it will transform my thinking in some way,” Collins told me a week before he started.
“I have this feeling something’s going to happen to me that will set me on a new trajectory, a renewing path.”

The appointment was for two years, starting at the beginning of 2012. Collins would visit West Point seven times,
holding a seminar with about 30 cadets on six of those trips and delivering a final talk to the cadet corps on the
last one. Most of the seminars would focus on the distinguishing characteristics of great military leaders, using
Collins’s signature methodology of examining matched pairs of great and not-so-great leaders who faced similar
situations and got different results.

When I spoke to him again after his first seminar, he was even more enthusiastic than he had been. He would
soon be heading back for his next seminar, which would be attended by tactical officers with combat experience
as well as cadets. They would be focusing on the concept of Return on Luck, which Collins and his Great by
Choice co-author, Morten T. Hansen, had come up with as a way to measure how much companies benefited
from unpredictable events, good or bad, that took them by surprise.

He was also looking forward to the third seminar, in which the participating cadets would be 38 members of
West Point’s rock-climbing team, who would explore the links between leadership and climbing. Back in 2006,
when Collins had begun his quest to conquer The Nose of El Capitan, he had trained with Tommy Caldwell,
a 35-year-old Coloradan who is widely viewed as one of the greatest rock climbers of all time. The two had
formed a close bond, so Collins invited him to participate in the seminar. Caldwell accepted, and they began

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THE RE-EDUCATION OF JIM COLLINS

brainstorming about how to use Caldwell’s many extraordinary climbing experiences to engage the cadets.

By the time I arrived at West Point to observe Collins in action, he had completed four of his seven trips,
including the one with Caldwell. On the night before the seminar, I joined Collins and 10 cadets for dinner in
MacArthur’s Restaurant, located in the historic Thayer Hotel, at the southern end of the West Point garrison. For
a couple of hours, they discussed a range of topics, from the qualities of great leaders to the risks and rewards of
contrarianism. Then Collins changed the subject. “What is the opposite side of success?” he asked.

“Isn’t it failure?” one cadet responded.

“Well, let’s talk about failure,” said Collins. “How many of you have experienced failure?”They all nodded or raised a
hand.

“Failure is part of life here,” said a diminutive female cadet, Kiley Hunkler. “There’s a recurring sense of inadequacy,”
she says. “For a 200-pound linebacker, it’s having to do a cartwheel. For me, it’s the survival swim in full combat
gear.”

“Does anyone get through West Point without feeling that sense of inadequacy?” Collins asked the group.

“No,” they said, more or less in unison.

“From the outside, it looks like everything here is difficult,” Collins said. “I think you can go through most
universities without ever having a big inadequacy moment. That doesn’t seem possible here. You keep getting
decked. So why do you keep getting back up?”

“It’s better to fail here and have other people help you get it right than to fail in Afghanistan, where the
consequences could be catastrophic,” said another cadet, Christopher Horstman.

“Here, everybody knows it’s a learning experience,” said Hunkler.

“Yes, and you’ve put yourselves in an environment where you can’t go through without failing,” Collins said.

Indeed, repeated failure was built into West Point’s culture. Yet that didn’t seem to faze the cadets in the least.
They came across as irrepressibly positive and devoid of the alienation that infected the other campuses Collins
knew. He had also found the cadets to be unusually open and direct in their one-on-one interactions with him.
They were curious, questioning, and intellectually engaged, and had no reluctance to let him know when they
disagreed with him. And then there was the phenomenon he had observed in the gym: cadets going out of their
way to help one another, even as they were competing intensely to outdo one another.

It was a puzzle, and it had been on Collins’s mind when he and Caldwell had headed east for the rock-climbing

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THE RE-EDUCATION OF JIM COLLINS

seminar in August 2012. They’d had a four-hour flight from Denver to Newark, New Jersey, and somewhere over
the Midwest, they had started talking about Caldwell’s ongoing, and so far futile, attempt to scale the Dawn Wall
of El Capitan in a free climb that is, without any aid from climbing equipment or ropes. No one has ever done it.
Caldwell was preparing for his fourth attempt that fall. He would stay on the wall as long as the weather allowed,
but the overwhelming odds were that he would once again fail to reach the top.

“Why do you keep throwing yourself at this?” Collins asked. “All it does is give you failure upon failure. Why go
back?”

“Because success is not the primary point,” Caldwell said. “I go back because the climb is making me better. It is
making me stronger. I am not failing; I am growing.”

In fact, Caldwell viewed failure as an essential part of his search for the outer reaches of his capabilities as a
climber. “To find your limit and experience the most growth, you have to go on a journey of cumulative failure,”
Caldwell said. “Even if I never succeed in free climbing the Dawn Wall, it will make me so much stronger, and so
much better, that most other climbs will seem easy by comparison.”

Caldwell asked how the cadets viewed the tension between growth and success. It was a very good question,
Collins realized, given how prominently failure figured in the West Point regime. But there was another element
that couldn’t be overlooked or taken for granted--namely, a commitment to service. Everything the cadets did
grew out of their desire to serve. Why else, after all, would college-age students choose West Point over a civilian
university where the demands were fewer, the discipline almost nonexistent, and the opportunity for fun and
games infinitely more available?

As the plane descended into Newark’s airport, Collins took out a piece of paper and drew a triangle. One point
he labeled success, another growth, and the third service. Those three corners of the triangle, he sensed, held an
answer to the paradox he had observed in the culture of West Point.

They arrived at the Academy that afternoon. Over the next two days, they spent time with the cadets in the West
Point climbing gym and the IOCT gym, alternating workouts with leadership discussions. Collins would present a
scenario based on one of Caldwell’s adventures, such as the time he and three other climbers were captured and
held hostage by Islamic militants in Kyrgyzstan. The cadets would then ask questions and talk about how they
would have responded.

Through it all, Collins listened with the triangle in mind. He realized that, on one level, it was about motivation
and finding “a balanced approach to life and leadership,” as he later put it. Success was the obvious one.
Everybody likes to win, and the thrill of victory is a heady reward in itself. But people who become the best at
what they do are never content with success. Like Caldwell, they have a deep craving to get better and better,
which often means repeatedly failing, although--like Caldwell--they don’t necessarily experience it as failure.

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THE RE-EDUCATION OF JIM COLLINS

It was on the point of service that the West Point cadets had really opened Collins’s eyes. “I’ve never been in an
environment with so strong an ethos of service running through it,” he says. “This is not like doing volunteer work
on a Saturday. It’s a big signature, a big step up, and it could cost them their lives someday, which they’re all well
aware of. But they’ve made that choice.”

It’s easy to see the success-growth-service triangle as a kind of self-help tool, a framework in which to address
the highly personal question of creating a sense of completeness and meaning in life. As Collins says, “It is very
difficult to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without
meaningful work, or to have meaningful work without all three legs of the triangle. The cadets in my seminars
have been some of the happiest, most engaged, and most purposeful young men and women I’ve ever met. I
believe it’s because they’ve begun to live the triangle early.”

But Collins, of course, is best known for pondering the secrets of organizational, not personal, success. So what
do these West Point revelations mean for company leaders whose shelves are lined with Collins’s books?

He sees a number of useful lessons. First, “If you want to build a culture of engaged leaders and a great place to
work,” he says, “you need to spend time thinking about three things.”

• Service to “a cause or purpose we are passionately dedicated to and are willing to suffer and sacrifice for.”
• Challenge and growth, or, “What huge and audacious challenges should we give people that will push
them hard and make them grow?”
• Communal success, or, “What can we do to reinforce the idea that we succeed only by helping each other?”

Collins says he has observed these principles in action in a number of companies he has studied, at least during
their best years-;including IBM, Apple, Johnson & Johnson, Southwest Airlines, and Federal Express.

His time at West Point has also given Collins a new appreciation for some aspects of leadership that he had not
previously thought much about. The first has to do with frontline, or unit-level, leadership. “I have come to see
how important it is,” he says. “We tend to think that what matters is having outstanding leadership at the senior
level. But great leadership at the top doesn’t amount to much if you don’t have exceptional leadership at the unit
level. That’s where great things get done.”

He has also realized that great leadership comes in two forms. One form Collins describes as being the right
tool in the toolbox at a particular moment in history: “The world needs a Phillips-head screwdriver, and you are
a Phillips-head screwdriver. You can get exceptional results, but they tend to be less durable because when the
world needs a socket wrench, you’re not one.”The other type of great leader adapts and grows as demands
change: “When Steve Jobs got booted from Apple, a lot of people thought he was a tool in a toolbox. They were
wrong.”

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THE RE-EDUCATION OF JIM COLLINS

Third, leaders need to know when to become followers, and followers need to know when to become leaders.
“The ability to toggle between leading and following is critical,” he says, “because circumstances change.”

Ultimately, Collins says, he comes away believing more strongly than ever in the urgent need to learn how to
develop great leaders. “I’m convinced that every major problem we face as a country is a leadership problem,” he
says. “Whether it’s short-term thinking in business or a problem with government performance, every problem
requires superb leadership to solve.”

He tells the story of a cadet who approached him after the Return on Luck seminar. “Sir, we’ve been talking about
Return on Luck in the context of success,” the cadet said. “But I see luck differently. The greatest form of luck, at
least for me, is the opportunity to be of service and to help others. When you’re presented with the opportunity
to improve someone else’s life, to help them go through a particularly difficult challenge, to engage with great
comrades and achieve a noble mission; what could be luckier?”

FROM THE OCTOBER ISSUE OF INC. MAGAZINE

Bo Burlingham: Burlingham joined Inc. in 1983. An editor at large, he is the
author of Small Giants. Burlingham is also the co-author with Norm Brodsky of
The Knack; and the co-author with Jack Stack of The Great Game of

Business.@boburlingham

IMAGE: MILLER MOBLEY

56

APPLICATION EXERCISE:
PERSONAL HISTORY WORKSHEET

Personal History Exercise

First, work to identify key moments from your childhood, adolescence and adulthood that have influenced who
you are today. If you get stuck identifying key moments, some questions are provided to help you get started.
Then, work to complete the questions about your mentor on the back of this form.

Childhood Where did you grow up? Did you have one childhood home or did you move around
a bit? How many siblings do you have and where do you fall in that order?

Wha t was yo ur hap piest m emory as a chil d? Your bigges t disapp ointme nt?






Adolescence What activities did you participate in? (Sports, dance, music, arts, etc.)
What d id you l ike/disli ke abou t high school?






Adulthood Did you attend college?
Di d your p arents influen ce your choice of care er? How so?






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SESSION FOUR

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PROGRAM REVIEW

Make the connection: Building on previous sessions.

Session 3 Session 4 Continued
Skill Essentials of Application
Leadership
Exercises Experiential
Re-Education of Learning
Business Jim Collins
Session 2 Breakthrough
L.E.A.D. Five Dysfunctions
Session 1 Self Assessment Exercise of a team
Foundations of Case Studies Resilience
Leadership L.E.A.D.
Three signs of a Essentials of
Leadership

The Three Ps miserable job

Foundations Team engagement
of Leadership
EI Skills

Safety

Thoughts:







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SESSION FOUR LEARNING OBJECTIVES

Session 4 Learning Objectives

Explore the Re-Education of Jim Collins
Overcome the Five Dysfunctions of a Team
Build leadership resilience
Learn about the Essentials of Leadership
Complete and report on your Leadership Development
one-page plan

Thoughts:












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THE RE-EDUCATION OF JIM COLLINS

“If you want to build a culture
of engaged leaders and a

great place to work, you need
to spend time thinking about

three things.”
– Jim Collins

SERVICE to "a cause or purpose we are passionately

dedicated to and are willing to suffer and sacrifice for."

CHALLENGE AND GROWTH, or, "What huge and audacious challenges

should we give people that will push them hard and make them grow?"

COMMUNAL SUCCESS, or, "What can we do to reinforce

the idea that we succeed only by helping each other?"

Takeaways from the article:









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THE RE-EDUCATION OF JIM COLLINS

Small Group Activity

As a small group, please consider these questions:
What did you get out of the article?







How will you apply these principles to your team?













We will ask one person to share your collective feedback with the entire group.

62

LEADERSHIP RESILIENCE

TWO
MINDSETS

Fixed Growth
Mindset Mindset

Intelligence Intelligence
is static can be
developed
Leads to a desire to look
smart and therefore Leads to a desire to learn and
a tendency to... therefore a tendency to...

.... avoid challenges .... embrace challenges

Change Your Mindset

Video Summary:

In this clip, Angela Duckworth describes the way to build Grit and encourages leaders to invest in the
development of their own Grit.

Angela shares four specific ways, taken from her research, that develop Grit. Select and complete which
one of the four may be most helpful for you in this season.

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LEADERSHIP RESILIENCE

1. Develop your interests before training your weaknesses. Write one question or concept you can get
curious about to develop your interest.




2. Know the science of deliberate practice. Repeat deliberate practice by using the four components
(goal, focus, feedback, reflect, and refine) of the deliberate practice exercise.




3. Cultivate purpose. How does your work provide meaning to your life and to the lives of others?
Describe below.




4. Change your mind about changing your mind. Do you fundamentally believe “people are who they
are and really don’t change” or that “people can learn and grow”?




Write one specific area in your own life where you may see an opportunity to learn and grow.










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LEADERSHIP RESILIENCE

“Grit is sticking with your future day in, day out, not just for the week, not
just for the month, but for years and working really hard to make that
future a reality.” ­– Angela Duckworth, Professor and Psychologist

Make the connection: Servant leaders help others recognize

their potential to overcome adversity by modeling resilience.










“The servant-leader shares power, puts the needs of others first and helps
people develop and perform as highly as possible.”­– Robert Greeleaf

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LEADERSHIP RESILIENCE Reflection:

Rumination: Reviewing the past
Planning for the future
Regrets from the past
Anxieties about the future

Dr. Henry Cloud’s formula for leaders: Notes:

Log and dispute negative thoughts

Work to get back into control

Connect – “The opposite of bad is not good,

the opposite of bad is love.”





What will be lost if you’re not resilient?

At least ______________________________________________________________________

At most ______________________________________________________________________

“The most striking thing about highly effective leaders is how little they
have in common. What one swears by, another warns against. But one trait
stands out: the willingness to risk.” – Larry Osborne

66

THE FIVE DYSFUNCTIONS OF A TEAM



INATTENTION TO
_____________

AVOIDANCE OF
______________

LACK OF

_______________

FEAR OF

________________

ABSENCE OF
________________

T RUS T

Said another way; Build Commitment
Give attention to Results Handle Conflict
Embrace Accountability Develop Trust








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THE FIVE DYSFUNCTIONS OF A TEAM

The fundamental attribution error:

Placing a heavy emphasis on internal characteristics to The flip side of this error is the actor-observer bias, in
explain someone’s behavior in a given situation, rather which people tend to over-emphasize the role of an
than thinking about external situational factors. external situation in their own behaviors and under-
emphasize the role of their own internal characteristics.














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THE FIVE DYSFUNCTIONS OF A TEAM

Vulnerability-based trust

“Trust is the confidence among
team members that their
peers’ intentions are good, and
that there is no reason to be
protective or careful around
the group. Teammates are
vulnerable with one another;
they are confident that their
respective vulnerabilities will
not be used against them.”

– Patrick Lencioni
















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THE FIVE DYSFUNCTIONS OF A TEAM

Quick Application: Notes & Case Study Takeaways:

Ways to refocus a team

Observe Expect Retrace
Quietly observe Patiently expect
positive change. wrong steps as a
the team. team. List these
Look for clues.
steps out of
dysfunction.

Back-up Mentor Care
Ask the team to Bring in positive
mentors to guide Determine whether
back-up the members of
the team the team care to
Draw Set refocus.
it out with
markers, visual team rules and Mediate
graphics, and in responsibilities
other terms. Use mediation
Acknowledge Find techniques to hear
and identify each one another and
Help the team team member’s
acknowledge, for find a solution
themselves, that strength.
there is a problem. Mix-up

how the team
members are seeing
each other and the

task at hand.

Hear Replace Confront
Practice active members of the behaviors as a
listening and team that hold
hearing skills. team if they the team back.
cannot work it out.

Build Collaborate Focus
Start over and with others who Once the past is
build a team. can look in and handled, focus on
Document help mediate the
the future.
the progress. If the issues. Sketch
team reverts, point Hear
out what the team each other out it out and keep it
has accomplished. in the team. Are visible.
there personal
hurts or offenses?

70 70

FINAL APPLICATION EXERCISE
1. Update your Leadership Development

one-page plan
2. Share progress made with your VP





















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COMPLETE YOUR ONE-PAGE PLAN

Name:

Leadership Philosophy:

Personal Mission:

Leadership Development Goal:

Personal Strategic Anchors: What do I want to gain from LDI?
1.
2.
3.
4.

Session 1 Initiatives: Session 2 Initiatives:
1. 1.
2. 2.

Key take-away: Key take-away:

Session 3 Initiatives: Session 4 Initiatives:
1. 1.
2. 2.

Key take-away: Key take-away:

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Notes




























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Notes




























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