You once said that if you had to pick the all-time greatest CEO you would choose Charles Coffin, the very first CEO of GE back in 1892. So it's not a leadership or not question, it's a 'what stage of leadership' question – and what level of maturity are you. That eventually led to the idea that leadership is an evolving series of capabilities and levels of maturity. They suggested that I was looking at this as a digital idea - you are either a great leader or you are not, and that's the critical question.

My reply was that the comparison companies also had leaders, exceptional leadership in many cases, but the companies ended up not performing as well.īut the research team pushed back at me. The research team said that the CEOs of these companies had a huge impact on whether they shifted from one level to another, whether they went from the good level to the great level. So going down that path, the Level 5 Leadership finding which came out in Good to Great, was not what I expected to find. Let's assume there are other things to discover – laws of physics. In our research I've always said let's discount the role of the leader so we can find the other factors. Has this view of leadership influenced your research?

'Level 5 leaders are a study in duality', notes Collins, 'modest and wilful, shy and fearless.' His simple formula is Humility + Will = Level 5. The findings appear to signal a shift of emphasis away from the hero to the anti-hero.Īccording to Collins, humility is a key ingredient of Level 5 leadership. The leaders that came out on top in Collins' five-year study were relatively unknown outside their industries. Level 5 leadership challenges the assumption that transforming companies from good to great requires larger-than-life-leaders. Leaders at the other four levels may be successful, but are unable to elevate companies from mediocrity to sustained excellence. Level 5 refers to the highest level in a hierarchy of executive capabilities.

The book introduces a new term to the leadership lexicon – Level 5 leadership. In his latest book, Good to Great, Jim Collins examines how a good company becomes an exceptional company. Jim Collins, ranked #6 in the Thinkranking of management gurus, is best known for his highly influential books Built To Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies (1994) co-authored with fellow Stanford academic Jerry Porras and recent bestseller Good To Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…And Others Don't, (2001).