Interview: Management Guru Jim Collins on Turning the Possible into the Practical

CIO — Business history is littered with great ideas that never crossed paths with great managers and as a result fizzled. Technologies are just so much R&D expense until they’re deployed by those who have the vision to recognize the great ideas and the skill to implement them successfully. That’s why half of the 20/20 Vision honorees were chosen?for their ability to recognize and shepherd great technology ideas through the organizational maze. In other words, they’re great leaders.

But how does one become a great technology implementer? And how big a role does technology play in organizational success, anyway? We consulted management pundit Jim Collins, author of the best-selling books Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don’t (HarperBusiness, 2001) and Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (HarperBusiness, 1994, coauthored with Jerry Porras), for insights on organizational leadership. Collins, a former Stanford Graduate School of Business faculty member who now runs his own management laboratory at the base of the Flatiron mountains in Boulder, Colo., underscores our point that it’s not just about the technology. He’s uncovered some seeming paradoxes about how great companies use technology:Outstanding organizations are pioneers in IT and other forms of technology?yet technology is a minor contributor to their success.

Early technological leads are an impediment to organizational staying power.

The best leaders are those who focus on a handful of useful technologies and ignore the rest, no matter how exciting the bandwagon looks.

Technology Accelerators

To write Good to Great, Collins and his research team spent five years studying great companies (defined as those generating sustained outstanding stock returns), narrowing down the universe of American business to a mere handful of stars. He then asked executives from this select group to identify the top-five factors that contributed to their success. Most surveyed didn’t mention technology at all. Those who did ranked it fourth out of five factors. "Given that we live in a technology world, this was really surprising," says Collins. "You could draw the conclusion that technology basically doesn’t play a role in excellence."

But that would be the wrong conclusion. "Regardless of what they said, every single one of the companies had become a pioneer in the application of technology," he says. "On the one hand, they hardly place any emphasis on it, yet on the other hand, there is no question they were pioneers in the application of technology."

When Collins set out to explain this, he discovered that organizational greatness always came first. "If you’re fundamentally mediocre going to worse," he says, "other people applying technology can be a further accelerator of your own demise. If you’re a good company going to great and want to stay there, technology can become an accelerator once you’ve made that leap, but it cannot cause it by itself."

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