Author: Jim Collins

In 1995 Jim Collins left the Stanford Graduate School of Business faculty and set up his own research shop in Boulder, Colorado. He had just published Built to Last with Jerry I. Porras, then a professor of organizational behavior and change at Stanford. Six years went into that book. They picked eighteen firms that had prospered across generations, paired each with a rival of similar age and industry that had only done well, and hunted for what separated the pairs. Their answer ran against the management writing of the day: the enduring companies owed less to a magnetic chief or one brilliant product than to a durable core ideology. Collins was born at Aurora, Colorado, in 1958, read mathematical sciences at Stanford, took an MBA there, and won the school's Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992.