Jim Collins is the author of Good to Great, Built to Last and How the Mighty Fall.

Level 5 Leadership: The Triumph of Humility and Fierce Resolve The Idea in Brief Out of 1,4. Fortune 5. 00 companies that renowned management researcher Jim Collins studied, only 1.

What did these 1. Each had a “Level 5” leader at the helm. Level 5 leaders blend the paradoxical combination of deep personal humility with intense professional will. This rare combination also defies our assumptions about what makes a great leader. Celebrities like Lee Iacocca may make headlines. Free Download Game Pc Tumblebugs 2 Crack. But mild- mannered, steely leaders like Darwin Smith of Kimberly- Clark boost their companies to greatness—and keep them there.

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Darwin Smith—CEO at paper- products maker Kimberly- Clark from 1. Level 5 leadership. Shy, awkward, shunning attention, he also showed iron will, determinedly redefining the firm’s core business despite Wall Street’s skepticism. The formerly lackluster Kimberly- Clark became the worldwide leader in its industry, generating stock returns 4. The Idea in Practice Humility + Will = Level 5 How do Level 5 leaders manifest humility? They routinely credit others, external factors, and good luck for their companies’ success. But when results are poor, they blame themselves.

They also act quietly, calmly, and determinedly—relying on inspired standards, not inspiring charisma, to motivate. Inspired standards demonstrate Level 5 leaders’ unwavering will. Utterly intolerant of mediocrity, they are stoic in their resolve to do whatever it takes to produce great results—terminating everything else. And they select superb successors, wanting their companies to become even more successful in the future. Can You Develop Level 5 Leadership? Level 5 leaders sit atop a hierarchy of four more common leadership levels—and possess the skills of all four. For example, Level 4 leaders catalyze commitment to and vigorous pursuit of a clear, compelling vision.

Can you move from Level 4 to Level 5? Perhaps, if you have the Level 5 “seed” within you.

Leaders without the seed tend to have monumental egos they can’t subjugate to something larger and more sustaining than themselves, i. But for leaders with the seed, the right conditions—such as self- reflection or a profoundly transformative event, such as a life- threatening illness—can stimulate the seed to sprout. Growing to Level 5 Grow Level 5 seeds by practicing these good- to- great disciplines of Level 5 leaders: First who. Attend to people first, strategy second. Get the right people on the bus and the wrong people off—then figure out where to drive it. Stockdale paradox.

Deal with the brutal facts of your current reality—while maintaining absolute faith that you’ll prevail. Buildup- breakthrough flywheel. Keep pushing your organizational “flywheel.” With consistent effort, momentum increases until—bang!—the wheel hits the breakthrough point.

The hedgehog concept. Think of your company as three intersecting circles: what it can be best at, how its economics work best, and what ignites its people’s passions. Eliminate everything else. In 1. 97. 1, a seemingly ordinary man named Darwin E. Smith was named chief executive of Kimberly- Clark, a stodgy old paper company whose stock had fallen 3.

Smith, the company’s mild- mannered in- house lawyer, wasn’t so sure the board had made the right choice—a feeling that was reinforced when a Kimberly- Clark director pulled him aside and reminded him that he lacked some of the qualifications for the position. But CEO he was, and CEO he remained for 2. What a 2. 0 years it was. In that period, Smith created a stunning transformation at Kimberly- Clark, turning it into the leading consumer paper products company in the world.

Under his stewardship, the company beat its rivals Scott Paper and Procter & Gamble. And in doing so, Kimberly- Clark generated cumulative stock returns that were 4.

Hewlett- Packard, 3. M, Coca- Cola, and General Electric. Smith’s turnaround of Kimberly- Clark is one the best examples in the twentieth century of a leader taking a company from merely good to truly great. And yet few people—even ardent students of business history—have heard of Darwin Smith. He probably would have liked it that way. Smith is a classic example of a Level 5 leader—an individual who blends extreme personal humility with intense professional will. According to our five- year research study, executives who possess this paradoxical combination of traits are catalysts for the statistically rare event of transforming a good company into a great one.

Leaders at the other four levels in the hierarchy can produce high degrees of success but not enough to elevate companies from mediocrity to sustained excellence. Good- to- great transformations don’t happen without Level 5 leaders at the helm. They just don’t. Not What You Would Expect. Our discovery of Level 5 leadership is counterintuitive.

Indeed, it is countercultural. People generally assume that transforming companies from good to great requires larger- than- life leaders—big personalities like Lee Iacocca, Al Dunlap, Jack Welch, and Stanley Gault, who make headlines and become celebrities. Compared with those CEOs, Darwin Smith seems to have come from Mars. Shy, unpretentious, even awkward, Smith shunned attention. When a journalist asked him to describe his management style, Smith just stared back at the scribe from the other side of his thick black- rimmed glasses. He was dressed unfashionably, like a farm boy wearing his first J.

C. Penney suit. Finally, after a long and uncomfortable silence, he said, “Eccentric.” Needless to say, the Wall Street Journal did not publish a splashy feature on Darwin Smith. But if you were to consider Smith soft or meek, you would be terribly mistaken.

His lack of pretense was coupled with a fierce, even stoic, resolve toward life. Smith grew up on an Indiana farm and put himself through night school at Indiana University by working the day shift at International Harvester.

One day, he lost a finger on the job. The story goes that he went to class that evening and returned to work the very next day.

Eventually, this poor but determined Indiana farm boy earned admission to Harvard Law School. He showed the same iron will when he was at the helm of Kimberly- Clark. Indeed, two months after Smith became CEO, doctors diagnosed him with nose and throat cancer and told him he had less than a year to live. He duly informed the board of his illness but said he had no plans to die anytime soon. Smith held to his demanding work schedule while commuting weekly from Wisconsin to Houston for radiation therapy.

He lived 2. 5 more years, 2. CEO. Its economics were bad and the competition weak. But, they reasoned, if Kimberly- Clark were thrust into the fire of the consumer paper products business, better economics and world- class competition like Procter & Gamble would force it to achieve greatness or perish. And so, like the general who burned the boats upon landing on enemy soil, leaving his troops to succeed or die, Smith announced that Kimberly- Clark would sell its mills—even the namesake mill in Kimberly, Wisconsin. All proceeds would be thrown into the consumer business, with investments in brands like Huggies diapers and Kleenex tissues.

The business media called the move stupid, and Wall Street analysts downgraded the stock. But Smith never wavered. Twenty- five years later, Kimberly- Clark owned Scott Paper and beat Procter & Gamble in six of eight product categories. In retirement, Smith reflected on his exceptional performance, saying simply, “I never stopped trying to become qualified for the job.”Good- to- great transformations don’t happen without Level 5 leaders at the helm. They just don’t. Not What We Expected, Either.

We’ll look in depth at Level 5 leadership, but first let’s set an important context for our findings. We were not looking for Level 5 or anything like it. Our original question was, Can a good company become a great one and, if so, how?

Vision, values and purpose according to Collins and Porras. For anyone familiar with vision, values and purpose, chances are that you’ve heard of Jim Collins and Jerry Porras. Built to Last (written by both Collins and Porras) and Good to Great (written by Collins) have been described by The Economist as “the Harry Potters of management literature”. Built to Last was a fixture on the Business. Week best seller list for more than six years and Good to Great (which has been translated into 3. For this reason, Collins and Porras cannot be ignored and they have been credited with being “largely responsible for a revival of interest in the . Now there’s some business advice worth taking.

Personally, I love Collins and Porras’ work and believe that we can learn a great deal from their insights. Yes, critical thinking must be applied to every text and it’s important to learn from later events but that’s not to say that works authored by Collins and Porras are lacking in value. Matt and I have put their approach to building vision to the test (both ourselves and with our clients) and we believe it works.

I agree that no theory or book should ever be taken as gospel but, in our experience, Collins and Porras’ philosophy is a great place to begin the journey of articulating vision, values and purpose. At the very least, it provokes lively discussions within management teams and their organisations, stimulates the discovery of valuable insights and provides food for thought. All of these are worthy outcomes and if such experiences lead to strategic alignment, a unified focus and motivated people, then I believe their philosophy offers much that we can learn from.

A little history. This framework consisted of a . It should also be said that, in creating a framework, Collins and Porras intended to remove some of the “fuzziness” surrounding vision: If we look at the literature on organizations and strategy, we find numerous terms for “vision” that sometimes are used synonomously, sometimes have partially overlapping meanings, and sometimes are intended to be totally distinct from each other. As one CEO told us: “I’ve come to believe that we need a vision to guide us, but I can’t seem to get my hands on what . It’s really frustrating!”Eventually, the ideas first articulated here evolved into the framework many will now be familiar with from Built to Last and also Building Your Company’s Vision published by Harvard Business Review in 1.

For those of you unfamiliar with this framework, I hope to provide an introduction below. Core ideology. For Collins and Porras, core ideology is absolutely integral to vision setting. Their use of the yin yang symbol was deliberate: core ideology is essentially meaningless without progress or movement towards the future, whilst a congruent vision cannot be created without a stable foundation.

For a vision to be created, it is essential to first understand those elements of the organisation that will always remain unchanging. In the words of Collins and Porras themselves: Core ideology defines a company’s timeless character. It’s the glue that holds the enterprise together even when everything else is up for grabs. Imagine your own personal values: it may be that, in relationships, honesty, integrity and kindness are important to you; you may value courage, fearlessness and daring; or how about fun, humour and happiness?

For Collins and Porras, organisational core values are the same—they are as natural as breathing. Throughout their research, Collins and Porras consistently found that “companies tend to have only a few core values, usually between three and five”—any more than this and they believe that core values are being confused with other factors. From their perspective, . Although we all aspire to worthy ideologies, if a value is not authentic to the behaviour of your organisation, Collins and Porras suggest that treating it as core is likely to lead to justifiable cynacism. Instead, they believe that aspirations are more appropriate to an envisioned future. So, what does your organisation really believe in? There is “no universally right set of core values” and it is even likely that other organisations will hold at least some of the same core values as you.

It is important however to determine those values that your organisation would hold steadfastly. To test whether a value is truly core, Collins suggests asking whether you would want your organisation to stand for this value in 1. Core purpose. In many ways, core purpose is similar to core values: it is natural and fundamental to an organisation, it is deeply held and unchanging, it need not be unique, and it must be discovered rather than created. For Collins and Porras, every organisation has a purpose, even if it hasn’t been articulated yet. Purpose could be described as the heartbeat or soul of your organisation—your organisation’s “most fundamental reason for being”. Not to be confused with product lines, services or customers, purpose motivates and inspires. A true purpose grabs “the .

Where core ideology “resides in the background, ever- present and . That said, for Collins and Porras, “a BHAG should not be a sure bet—it will have perhaps only a 5. However, an organisation should nonetheless believe that it can achieve the goal, something that Collins and Porras came to call the “hubris factor”. To set BHAGs requires a “certain level of unreasonable self- confidence” or, at the very least, unreasonable self- ambition.

The easiest way to explain BHAGs is to compare them to stretching and challenging personal goals. For example, I have reasonably good levels of fitness and enjoy exercising regularly but to set myself the goal of cycling from Land’s End to John o’Groats, completing an Ironman triathlon, or climbing Mount Everest would require extraordinary effort on my part. All of these goals are potentially within my reach should I ever wish to complete them but they are certainly no walk in the park! BHAGs are the 1. 0- to- 3. What does your organisation wish to achieve in its future that would require “extraordinary effort and perhaps a little luck”? Perhaps the other thing that should be said about BHAGs is that, much like core ideology, they should be inspiring.

To be honest, I have no real wish to climb Mount Everest at present, so I am unlikely to ever achieve it. Setting a BHAG simply for the sake of setting a goal is pointless. Rather, Collins and Porras suggest you should ask, “Does it get our juices flowing? Do we find it stimulating?

Does it spur forward momentum? Does it get people going?” In their words: The envisioned future should be so exciting in its own right that it would continue to keep the organisation motivated even if the leaders who set the goal disappeared. Vivid description. Unlike a BHAG—which should be concise (usually no more than a sentence or phrase), easy to understand and capable of being expressed in a multitude of ways—a vivid description is an organisation’s opportunity to express in detail what it will feel like to achieve their goal. For Collins and Porras, a vivid description is essential to making a BHAG tangible. Describing the achievement of the BHAG is about “painting a picture with your words”—a “vibrant, engaging” picture that brings your goal to life. For example, climbing Mount Everest is certainly a goal but how would it really feel to stand on that peak and look out across the mountain ranges below?

What else would have already been achieved along the way? Although it can be uncomfortable to express emotions in an organisational context and Collins and Porras readily acknowledge that some managers find this difficult, they also believe that “passion, emotion and conviction are essential parts of .

It is precisely these ingredients that motivate others. We must dispose of the widely accepted norm that rationality should rein supreme, and that emotion should be kept in check.