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James C. Collins (born 1958) studied mathematics at Stanford before completing an MBA at the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1983. He joined the GSB faculty, won the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992, and in 1995 left academia to found a management laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, where he has conducted long-cycle empirical research and run Socratic sessions with senior leadership teams ever since.
His body of work — Built to Last (1994, with Jerry Porras), Good to Great (2001), How the Mighty Fall (2009), Great by Choice (2011, with Morten Hansen), Turning the Flywheel (2019), and BE 2.0 (2020) — has sold more than 11 million copies worldwide. The books share a method: pair a sample of companies that achieved sustained excellence against carefully matched comparisons that didn’t, then identify what the great group did differently. From that method came a series of operational frameworks now standard in strategy vocabulary — Level 5 Leadership, the Hedgehog Concept, the BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal), the Flywheel and the Doom Loop, the Stockdale Paradox, and “first who, then what.”
Forbes named him one of the 100 Greatest Living Business Minds in 2017; he holds honorary doctorates from the University of Colorado and the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management at Claremont. Collins is a serious rock climber and cyclist — the disciplined-practice metaphors that run through his books are drawn from those domains as well as from the research.