Jim Collins - Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0

Jim Collins is a student of companies great ones, good ones, weak ones, failed ones from young start-ups to venerable sesquicentenarians. The author of the national bestseller Good to Great and co-author of Built to Last, he serves as a teacher to leaders throughout the corporate and social sectors. His most recent book is Great by Choice, a look at why some companies thrive in uncertain times. His work has been featured in Fortune, Business Week, The Economist, USA Today, and Harvard Business Review. You can find more information about Jim and his work at his e-teaching site, www.jimcollins.com.

DEDICATION

For our best friends, Joanne and Dorothy

W hen B ill L azier and I co-authored the original edition of Beyond Entrepreneurship, based on the course we both taught at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, we set out to create a road map for leaders of small to mid-sized enterprises who want to build enduring great companies.

Bill embodied a rare combination of practical experience and academic reflection, and Beyond Entrepreneurship encapsulated much of his accumulated wisdom. And while Id go on to author or co-author multiple New York Times and Wall Street Journal best sellers on the topic of what makes great companies tick, many leaders have told me that this very first book remains their favorite. When Reed Hastings, co-founder of Netflix, introduced me at a gathering for KIPP Schools in 2014, he surprised me by saying that when he was a young entrepreneur, hed read Beyond Entrepreneurship six times. When Netflix won the Stanford ENCORE Award for the most entrepreneurial company, Hastings gave a piece of advice to aspiring young CEOs: Memorize the first eighty-six pages of Beyond Entrepreneurship. Through Beyond Entrepreneurship, Bill became a mentor to entrepreneurs whom hed never meet, inspiring them to strive to build truly great companies that can long endure.

But why create a re-release of Beyond Entrepreneurship, and why now? I decided to re-release Beyond Entrepreneurship as BE 2.0 for three reasons.

First, Im still fiercely passionate about entrepreneurs and leaders of small to mid-sized companies, whom Ive always seen as the readers I most want to reach. This might surprise readers of my later books in which Id researched companies that had become huge. But the eventual size of those companies obscures the fact that all the companies studied for books like Built to Last, Good to Great, and Great by Choice were once small start-ups, and I researched their entire histories all the way back to their beginnings. I devoted much of my curiosity to understanding why some early-stage companies became great and lasting, and why others didnt.

Second, I had substantial new material that could be directly useful to todays entrepreneurs and leaders of small to mid-sized companies. This new material, about people decisions, leadership, vision, strategy, luck, and more, found the right home in a re-release of Beyond Entrepreneurship. As you move through this book, think of it like a classic old home that has had a major addition. The new material appears in entirely new chapters and insert essays spread throughout the book, which are called out with the header Jims View from 2020. Nearly half of the text that follows is entirely new to the 2020 edition. I have, however, left the text of the original chapters fully intact as Bill and I wrote them in 1992 (with only a few corrections and minor adjustments). The original text appears throughout with a shaded backdrop.

Third, and most important, this re-release is meant to honor and extend the legacy of my co-author, the greatest mentor in my life, Bill Lazier. Without his shaping hand, I would not be who I am, and my life would not be what it is. When Bill passed away in 2004, I wanted to write something about him and the profound impact he had on people. Immediately following this introduction to BE 2.0, I share the story of Bill and what I learned from this wise and generous soul, a man who altered the lives of thousands of young people.

I hope BE 2.0 helps you create an iconic company. Even more, I hope some of Bills mentorship carries from these pages to live on through you and those you lead.

Jim Collins

Boulder, Colorado

March 2, 2020

B ILL L AZIER WAS THE closest thing to a father I ever had. My own father died when I was twenty-three, and he never took the time to teach me anything about the difference between right and wrong, about core values, about character. I came of age in the late 1970s in the post-Vietnam, post-Watergate era that felt devoid of any grand sense of cause or direction or purpose. By the time I graduated from college in 1980, Id never had a conversation with any of my classmates about commitment to service as one possible theme for our lives, and we rarely discussed the idea that living to a set of core values should guide our careers. By my early twenties, I had this gnawing feeling that Id missed something essential, something I couldnt quite put my finger on.

Then I met Bill.

Shortly before my twenty-fifth birthday, during my second year of study at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, I got hit with a lightning bolt of who luck, the type of luck that comes as a chance meeting with a person who changes your life. The academic dean had offered Bill, a successful entrepreneur and company-builder in his fifties, the opportunity to join the faculty and teach an elective course. Bill had accepted the Stanford position to share his practical wisdom, shifting his energies from building young companies to building young leaders. Id sought a spot in a different elective course, but the random lottery system that apportioned class assignments put me in Bills first-ever class offering. I asked my classmates, Anyone know anything about this Professor Lazier? Everyone shook their heads no. Well, I guess Ill just go to the first couple of sessions and see what hes like.

Its a good thing I did. Had the course-sorting mechanism randomly assigned me to a different class, or if Id dropped the course, its extremely unlikely that Id have launched myself down the path Ive taken with my lifes work. This book would not exist. Nor would any of my other authored or co-authored books, not Built to Last, not Good to Great, not How the Mighty Fall, not Great by Choice. None of the research and resulting books that Ive had the privilege to write would have happened. And my very character indeed, my deepest core valueswould have been different.

Bill somehow took an interest in me. I think he sensed that I was a high-energy propulsion machine with no clear guiding purpose. He regularly invited my wife, Joanne, and me to his home for dinner with him and his wife, Dorothy. And he kept doing so after graduation, pushing me to think hard about how best to deploy my talents and make a distinctive contribution. He did this in a kind but persistent way, inspiring me to commit to a life of research, writing, and teaching.