Jim Collins

Jim Collins was born in 1958 in Aurora, Colorado, and earned a bachelor's degree in mathematical sciences and an MBA, both from Stanford, before returning to Stanford's business school as faculty — teaching and researching entrepreneurship and organizational performance and winning the school's Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992.

In 1995 he founded an independent management research laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, where he has run large-scale, team-based research projects built around a specific method: pairing companies that made a documented leap in performance against closely matched peers that never did, in an effort to isolate what actually causes sustained organizational greatness rather than simply describing traits successful companies happen to share. He first applied this method with Jerry Porras for Built to Last, then made it the signature of Good to Great, which produced some of the most widely cited frameworks in modern management writing — Level 5 Leadership, First Who Then What, the Hedgehog Concept, and the flywheel among them.

Beyond his own books, Collins has spent much of his career consulting directly with CEOs and senior leadership teams, and has extended his research into the social sector — nonprofits, government, healthcare, and education — arguing the same underlying discipline separates great organizations from good ones regardless of how they measure success. He served a two-year appointment as the Class of 1951 Chair for the Study of Leadership at West Point, holds honorary doctorates from the University of Colorado and Claremont Graduate University's Drucker School, and was named one of Forbes' 100 Greatest Living Business Minds in 2017.