Also by Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
1. Thriving in Uncertainty
2. 10Xers
3. 20 Mile March
4. Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs
5. Leading above the Death Line
6. SMaC
7. Return on Luck
Epilogue: Great by Choice
Frequently Asked Questions
Research Foundations
Notes
Index
Copyright
ALSO BY JIM COLLINS
Beyond Entrepreneurship (with William C. Lazier)
Managing the Small to Mid-Sized Company (with William C. Lazier)
Built to Last (with Jerry I. Porras)
Good to Great
Good to Great and the Social Sectors
How the Mighty Fall
ALSO BY MORTEN T. HANSEN
Collaboration
FROM JIM:
To my grandmother Delores, who at age 97 still had big dreams and audacious goals.
FROM MORTEN:
To my daughters, Alexandra and Julia, whose generation will create the future.
WE COULD NOT have completed this project without the small army of people who made significant contributions of time and intellect.
We had a wonderful team of research assistants. They are smart, curious, irreverent, fanatically disciplined people who are a joy to work with. We would like to thank the following members of the ChimpWorks research team: Robyn Bitner for multiple years of marching on a range of analyses, Kyle Blackmer for turbulence insights, Brad Caldwell for Biomet and Southwest analyses, Adam Cederberg for company selection and IPO analyses, Lauren Cujé for 10X-company updates and title analysis, Terrence Cummings (a.k.a. Grande) for thousands of hours invested in dozens of pieces of the project, Daniel DeWispelare for Amgen analysis, Todd Driver for 10X-leader analyses and 10X-company updates, Michael Graham for comparison selection and comparative analyses, Eric Hagen for the IPO-list SMaC check and his big-brain contributions, Ryan Hall for a range of quantitative analyses, Beth Hartman for turbulence analyses and company selections, Deborah Knox for industry-turbulence analyses and extensive IPO analysis, Betina Koski for industry-turbulence analyses, Michael Lane for comparison selection and comparative analyses, Lorilee Linfield for company updates and multiple years of SMaC work, Nicholas M. Osgood for industry-turbulence analyses, Catherine Patterson for comparison selections and comparative analyses, Matthew Unangst for backup analyses and Moore’s Law research, and Nathaniel (Natty) Zola for becoming the guru of Southwest Airlines versus Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA). From Morten’s research assistants, we thank Chris Allen for data analyses, Muhammad Rashid Ansari for industry analyses, Jayne Brocklehurst for research support, Attrace Yuiying Chang for fact checking, Hendrika Escoffier for research support, Roisin Kelly for research support, Chittima Silberzahn for financial data and analyses, Philippe Silberzahn for Microsoft and Apple analyses, William Simpson for data analyses, Gina Carioggia Szigety for data analyses in company selections, Nana von Bernuth for years of amazing effort and commitment in conducting a wide range of indispensable analyses, and James Zeitler for data analyses.
We are indebted to our critical readers who invested hours in reading drafts of the manuscript, criticizing the work, offering suggestions, and pushing at every turn to make the work better. For their candor, insight, and perspective, we would like to thank Ron Adner, Joel T. Allison, FACHE, Chris Barbary, Gerald (Jerry) Belle, Darrell Billington, Kyle Blackmer, John M. Bremen, William P. Buchanan, Scott Calder, Robin Capehart, Scott Cederberg, Brian Cornell, Lauren Cujé, Jeff Donnelly, Todd Driver, David R. Duncan, Joanne Ernst, Mike Faith, Andrew Feiler, Claudio Fernández-Aráoz, Andrew Fimiano, Christopher Forman, John Foster, Dick Frost, Itzik Goldberger, Michael Graham, Ed Greenberg, Eric Hagen, Becky Hall, Ryan Hall, Beth Hartman, Liz Heron, John B. Hess, John G. Hill, Kim Hollingsworth Taylor, Thomas F. Hornbein, MD, Lane Hornung, Zane Huffman, Christine Jones, Scott Jones, David D. Kennedy, Alan Khazei, Betina Koski, Eva M. H. Kristensen, Brian C. Larsen, Kyle Lefkoff, Jim Linfield (father of chimp Lorilee), Ed Ludwig, Wistar H. MacLaren, David Maxwell, Kevin McGarvey, MD, MBA, Bill McNabb, Anne-Worley Moelter (SFVG), Michael James Moelter, Clarence Otis Jr., Larry Pensack, Jerry Peterson, Amy Pressman, Sam Presti, Michael Prouting, David P. Rea, Jim Reid, Neville Richardson, Sara Richardson, Kevin Rumon, David G. Salyers, Kim Sanchez Rael, Vijay Sathe, Keegan Scanlon, Dirk Schlimm, William F. Shuster, Anabel Shyers, Alyson Sinclair, Tim Tassopoulos, Kevin Taweel, Jean Taylor, Tom Tierney, Nicole Toomey Davis, Matthew Unangst, Nana von Bernuth, H. Lawrence Webb, David Weekley, Chuck Wexler, Dave Witherow, and Nathaniel (Natty) Zola. We also thank Constance Hale, Jeffrey Martin, and Filipe Simões dos Santos for their special attention to the research-methods section. In addition, we would like to thank Salvatore D. Fazzolari, Denis Godcharles, Ben R. Leedle Jr., Evan Shapiro, Roy M. Spence Jr., and Jim Weddle for helpful dialogue and feedback.
We would also like to thank the Transportation Library at Northwestern University for access to PSA’s annual reports; Betty Grebe and Carol Krismann at the University of Colorado William M. White Business Library; the Center for Research in Security Pricing (CRSP), Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago for its quality data and excellent service; Jasjit Singh for patent data and insights; Dennis Bale and Laurie Drawbaugh for the roving office; Leigh Wilbanks for joining our early concept debates; Alex Toll for proofing; Alan Webber for great moments of conversation that sparked key ideas; Jim Logan for enduring the seemingly endless journey; Tommy Caldwell for testing 10Xer ideas on sheer cliff walls; and all of Jim’s Personal Band of Brothers. Morten is especially thankful to Harvard Business School, INSEAD, and University of California–Berkeley, where he held academic positions during the time of this research.
We thank Deborah Knox for editing the final text, pushing us for consistency and clarity, continually challenging our ideas, and zooming out on the big ideas while also zooming in on the details. We thank James J. Robb for his graphics expertise, unbounded creativity, and enduring friendship. We thank Janet Brockett for her creative spark and design genius. We thank Caryn Marooney for being a farseeing guide through treacherous territory. We thank Peter M. Moldave for his dedicated and considered counsel. We thank Hollis Heimbouch for believing in this work early on, tirelessly navigating the changing landscape of publishing, and working in a true spirit of partnership. We thank Peter Ginsberg for his unbroken track record at bringing together creative and unusual arrangements that benefit everyone involved.
We thank members of the ChimpWorks home team, who make it possible for Jim to focus on doing huge creative projects. For their efforts early in the project, we thank Brian J. Bagley, Patrick Blakemore, Taffee Hightower, Vicki Mosur Osgood, and Laura Schuchat. We thank Jeff Dale for his measured and wise perspective as our strategic paratrooper; Judi Dunckley for her dedication to precision and accuracy (and for her joyful worrying); Joanne Ernst for serving as chairman of the council and for her unrivaled ability to analyze issues and sharpen our thinking; Michael Lane for his dedicated years of being productively irreverent; Sue Barlow Toll for serving as our director of operations and scampering down many a rabbit hole; and Kathy Worland-Turner for being Jim’s Right Arm and exercising her wonderful ability to create friends and build relationships. We thank Robyn Bitner and Lorilee Linfield for their heroic dedication to the project in its final year; they brought light and energy to our team, while being OPURs of the first order.
Finally, we owe an incalculable debt to our respective life partners, Joanne Ernst and Hélène Hansen, for their unyielding support, severest criticism, and endurance as we marched through the nine years of this project. This work would not exist without them.
“We simply do not know what the future holds.”
—Peter L. Bernstein1
WE CANNOT PREDICT the future. But we can create it.
Think back to 15 years ago, and consider what’s happened since, the destabilizing events—in the world, in your country, in the markets, in your work, in your life—that defied all expectations. We can be astonished, confounded, shocked, stunned, delighted, or terrified, but rarely prescient. None of us can predict with certainty the twists and turns our lives will take. Life is uncertain, the future unknown. This is neither good nor bad. It just is, like gravity. Yet the task remains: how to master our own fate, even so.
We began the nine-year research project behind this book in 2002, when America awoke from its false sense of stability, safety, and wealth entitlement. The long-running bull market crashed. The government budget surplus flipped back to deficits. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, horrified and enraged people everywhere; and war followed. Meanwhile, throughout the world, technological change and global competition continued their relentless, disruptive march.
All of this led us to a simple question: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? When buffeted by tumultuous events, when hit by big, fast-moving forces that we can neither predict nor control, what distinguishes those who perform exceptionally well from those who underperform or worse?
We don’t choose study questions. They choose us. Sometimes one of the questions just grabs us around the throat and growls, “I’m not going to release my grip and let you breathe until you answer me!” This study grabbed us because of our own persistent angst and gnawing sense of vulnerability in a world that feels increasingly disordered. The question wasn’t just intellectually interesting but personally relevant. And as we spent time with our students and worked with leaders in both the business and social sectors, we sensed the same angst in them. In the intervening years, events have served only to reinforce this sense of unease. What’s coming next? All we know is that no one knows.
Yet some companies and leaders navigate this type of world exceptionally well. They don’t merely react; they create. They don’t merely survive; they prevail. They don’t merely succeed; they thrive. They build great enterprises that can endure. We do not believe that chaos, uncertainty, and instability are good; companies, leaders, organizations, and societies do not thrive on chaos. But they can thrive in chaos.
To get at the question of how, we set out to find companies that started from a position of vulnerability, rose to become great companies with spectacular performance, and did so in unstable environments characterized by big forces, out of their control, fast moving, uncertain, and potentially harmful. We then compared these companies to a control group of companies that failed to become great in the same extreme environments, using the contrast between winners and also-rans to uncover the distinguishing factors that allow some to thrive in uncertainty.
We labeled our high-performing study cases with the moniker “10X” because they didn’t merely get by or just become successful. They truly thrived. Every 10X case beat its industry index by at least 10 times. If you invested $10,000 in a portfolio of the 10X companies at the end of 1972 (holding each enterprise at the general stock market rate of return until it came online on the New York Stock Exchange, the American Stock Exchange, or NASDAQ), your investment would have grown to be worth more than $6 million by the end of our study era (through 2002), a performance 32 times better than the general stock market.2
To grasp the essence of our study, consider one 10X case, Southwest Airlines. Just think of everything that slammed the airline industry from 1972 to 2002: Fuel shocks. Deregulation. Labor strife. Air-traffic-controller strikes. Crippling recessions. Interest-rate spikes. Hijackings. Bankruptcy after bankruptcy after bankruptcy. And in 2001, the terrorist attacks of September 11. And yet if you’d invested $10,000 in Southwest Airlines on December 31, 1972 (when it was just a tiny little outfit with three airplanes, barely reaching break-even and besieged by larger airlines out to kill the fledgling) your $10,000 would have grown to nearly $12 million by the end of 2002, a return 63 times better than the general stock market. It’s a better performance than Wal-Mart, better than Intel, better than GE, better than Johnson & Johnson, better than Walt Disney. In fact, according to an analysis by Money Magazine, Southwest Airlines produced the #1 return to investors of all S&P 500 companies that were publicly traded in 1972 and held for a full 30 years to 2002.3 These are impressive results by any measure, but they’re astonishing when you take into account the roiling storms, destabilizing shocks, and chronic uncertainty of Southwest’s environment.
Why did Southwest overcome the odds? What did it do to master its own fate? And how did it accomplish its world-beating performance when other airlines did not? Specifically, why did Southwest become great in such an extreme environment while its direct comparison, Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA), flailed and was rendered irrelevant, despite having the same business model in the same industry with the same opportunity to become great? This single contrast captures the essence of our research question.
We’ve been asked by many of our students and readers, “How is this study different from your previous research into great companies, especially Built to Last and Good to Great?” The method is similar (comparative historical analysis) and the question of greatness is constant. But in this study, unlike any of the previous research, we selected cases not just on performance or stature but also on the extremity of the environment.
We selected on performance plus environment for two reasons. First, we believe the future will remain unpredictable and the world unstable for the rest of our lives, and we wanted to understand the factors that distinguish great organizations, those that prevail against extreme odds, in such environments. Second, by looking at the best companies and their leaders in extreme environments, we gain insights that might otherwise remain hidden when studying leaders in more tranquil settings. Imagine being on a leisurely hike, wandering along warm, sunlit meadows, and your companion is a great mountaineer who has led expeditions up the most treacherous peaks in the world. You’d probably notice that he’s a little different from others, perhaps more watchful of the trail or more careful in packing his small day-pack. But overall, given the safe predictability of a glorious spring day, it would be hard to see what really makes this leader so exceptional. Now, in contrast, envision yourself on the side of Mount Everest with this same climber, racing a murderous storm. In that environment, you’d see much more clearly what makes him different and what makes him great.
Studying leaders in an extreme environment is like conducting a behavioral-science experiment or using a laboratory centrifuge: throw leaders into an extreme environment, and it will separate the stark differences between greatness and mediocrity. Our study looks at how the truly great differed from the merely good in environments that exposed and amplified those differences.
In the remainder of this introductory chapter we briefly outline our research journey and preview some of the surprises we encountered along the way. (You can find a more detailed description of our research methodology in the Research Foundations appendices.) Starting in Chapter 2, we delve into what we learned about the individual people who led these companies, and in Chapters 3 through 6, how they led and built their companies differently from their less successful comparisons. In Chapter 7, we come to what, for us, was a particularly fascinating part of our journey: studying luck. We defined luck, quantified luck, determined if the 10X cases were luckier (or not), and discovered what they do differently about luck.
We spent the first year of our efforts identifying the primary study set of 10X cases, searching for historical cases that met three basic tests:
1. The enterprise sustained truly spectacular results for an era of 15+ years relative to the general stock market and relative to its industry.
2. The enterprise achieved these results in a particularly turbulent environment, full of events that were uncontrollable, fast-moving, uncertain, and potentially harmful.
3. The enterprise began its rise to greatness from a position of vulnerability, being young and/or small at the start of its 10X journey.
From an initial list of 20,400 companies, we systematically sifted through 11 layers of cuts to identify cases that met all our tests. (See Research Foundations: 10X-Company Selections.) Because we wanted to study extreme performance in extreme environments, we used extreme standards in our selections. The final set of 10X cases (see the following table) delivered extraordinary performance during the dynastic eras we studied.
Before we move on, let’s address a key point about the cases in our study. We studied historical eras of dynastic performance that ended in 2002, not the companies as they are today. It’s entirely possible that by the time you read these words, one or more of the companies on the list has stumbled, falling from greatness, leaving you to wonder, “But what about XYZ company? It doesn’t seem to be a 10X performer today.” Think of our research as comparable to studying a sports dynasty during its best years. Just because the UCLA Bruins basketball dynasty of the 1960s and 1970s under Coach John Wooden (with its 10 NCAA championships in 12 years) declined after Wooden retired does not invalidate insights obtained by studying the Bruins during its dynastic era.6 In this same vein, a great company can cease to be great (see How the Mighty Fall by Jim Collins), yet this does not erase its dynastic era from the record books, and it’s on that historical dynastic era that we focused our research lens and based our findings.
Our research method rests upon having a comparison set. The critical question is not “What did the great companies share in common?” The crucial question is “What did the great companies share in common that distinguished them from their direct comparisons?” Comparisons are companies that were in the same industry with the same or very similar opportunities during the same era as the 10X companies, yet that did not produce great performance. Using a rigorous scoring framework, we systematically identified a comparison company for each 10X case. (See Research Foundations: Comparison-Company Selections.) As a group, the 10X companies outperformed the comparison companies by more than 30 to 1 (see diagram “A Study In Contrasts”).7 The contrast between the 10X cases and the comparisons during the relevant era of analysis led to our findings.
Here then is the final study set of 10X cases and their comparisons: Amgen matched to Genentech; Biomet to Kirschner; Intel to AMD; Microsoft to Apple; Progressive to Safeco; Southwest Airlines to PSA; and Stryker to United States Surgical Corporation (USSC). Regarding the selection of Apple as a comparison case, we’re aware that as of this writing in 2011, Apple stands as one of the most impressive comeback stories of all time. Our research lens for the Microsoft-versus-Apple contrast focused on the 1980s and 1990s, when Microsoft won big and Apple nearly killed itself. If you’d bought Apple stock at the end of December 1980, the month of its initial public offering (IPO), and held it to the end of our era of analysis in 2002, your investment would’ve ended up more than 80 percent behind the general stock market.8 We’ll address Apple’s amazing resurgence under Steve Jobs later in this book, but one point is worth noting here: companies can indeed change over time, from comparison to 10X, and vice versa. It is always possible to go from good to great.
We then performed a deep historical analysis of each pair of companies. We collected more than seven thousand historical documents to construct a clear understanding of how each company evolved, year by year, from founding through 2002. We systematically analyzed categories of data, including industry dynamics, founding roots, organization, leadership, culture, innovation, technology, risk, financial management, strategy, strategic change, speed, and luck. (See Research Foundations for more details on our data collection and analyses.) We didn’t begin our journey with a theory to test or prove; we love being surprised by the evidence and changed by what we discover.
We developed the concepts in this work from the data we gathered, building a framework from the ground up. We followed an iterative approach, generating ideas inspired by the data, testing those ideas against the evidence, watching them bend and buckle under the weight of evidence, replacing them with new ideas, revising, testing, revising yet again, until all the concepts squared with the evidence.
We placed the greatest weight on evidence from the actual time of the events. The core of our analysis always rested on comparing the 10X cases to the comparisons across time and asking, “What was different?” This method of inquiry proved particularly powerful for not only developing insights but also shattering deeply entrenched myths. In fact, many of the findings ran absolutely counter to our intuition and every major finding surprised at least one of us. As a preview of what’s to come, here is a sampling of myths undermined by the research.
Entrenched myth: Successful leaders in a turbulent world are bold, risk-seeking visionaries.
Contrary finding: The best leaders we studied did not have a visionary ability to predict the future. They observed what worked, figured out why it worked, and built upon proven foundations. They were not more risk taking, more bold, more visionary, and more creative than the comparisons. They were more disciplined, more empirical, and more paranoid.
Entrenched myth: Innovation distinguishes 10X companies in a fast-moving, uncertain, and chaotic world.
Contrary finding: To our surprise, no. Yes, the 10X cases innovated, a lot. But the evidence does not support the premise that 10X companies will necessarily be more innovative than their less successful comparisons; and in some surprise cases, the 10X cases were less innovative. Innovation by itself turns out not to be the trump card we expected; more important is the ability to scale innovation, to blend creativity with discipline.
Entrenched myth: A threat-filled world favors the speedy; you’re either the quick or the dead.
Contrary finding: The idea that leading in a “fast world” always requires “fast decisions” and “fast action”—and that we should embrace an overall ethos of “Fast! Fast! Fast!”—is a good way to get killed. 10X leaders figure out when to go fast, and when not to.
Entrenched myth: Radical change on the outside requires radical change on the inside.
Contrary finding: The 10X cases changed less in reaction to their changing world than the comparison cases. Just because your environment is rocked by dramatic change does not mean that you should inflict radical change upon yourself.
Entrenched myth: Great enterprises with 10X success have a lot more good luck.
Contrary finding: The 10X companies did not generally have more luck than the comparisons. Both sets had luck—lots of luck, both good and bad—in comparable amounts. The critical question is not whether you’ll have luck, but what you do with the luck that you get.
This book adds to a body of work on what separates great companies from good ones that began in 1989 with the Built to Last research (conducted with Jerry Porras), and continued with the Good to Great research and the How the Mighty Fall analysis. The complete data set from all this research covers the evolution of 75 corporations, for a total of more than six thousand years of combined corporate history.9 So, while this is a distinctive and original piece of research, it can also be seen as an integral part of a longer journey to explore one question, “What does it take to build a great company?”
We think of each research study as like punching holes and shining a light into a black box, inside which we find enduring principles that distinguish great companies from good ones. Each new study uncovers additional dynamics and allows us to see previously discovered principles from new angles. We cannot claim that the concepts we uncover “cause” greatness (no one in the social sciences can ever claim causality), but we can claim correlations rooted in the evidence. If you apply our findings with discipline, your chances of building an enduring great company will be higher than if you behave like a comparison case.
If you’ve read Built to Last, Good to Great, or How the Mighty Fall, you’ll notice very little discussion in the next six chapters about the concepts uncovered in those works. With the exception of a direct link to Level 5 leadership, we’ve deliberately not written in the coming pages about principles like the Hedgehog Concept, First Who (the right people on the bus), core values, BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals), cult-like cultures, the Stockdale Paradox, clock building, the five stages of decline, or the flywheel. The reason is simple: why dwell on what’s already well covered in the previous books in this book? That said, we did test the principles from the previous books and found that they do apply in a chaotic and uncertain world. At the end of this book (see Frequently Asked Questions), we’ll address common questions about how the concepts in this work link to those in prior books. But the primary purpose of this book is to share the new concepts learned from this study.
Now that we’ve completed our research journey, we feel a much greater sense of calm. Not because we believe life will magically become stable and predictable; if anything, the forces of complexity, globalization, and technology are accelerating change and increasing volatility. We feel calm because we have increased understanding of what it takes to survive, navigate, and prevail. We are much better prepared for what we cannot possibly predict.
Thriving in a chaotic world is not just a business challenge. In fact, all our work is not fundamentally about business, but about the principles that distinguish great organizations from good ones. We’re curious to discover what makes for enduring great organizations of any type. We use publicly traded corporations as the data set because they provide a clear and consistent metric of results (so we can carefully select our study cases), and easily accessible and extensive historical data. A great public school, a great hospital, a great sports team, a great church, a great military unit, a great homeless shelter, a great orchestra, a great non-profit—each has its own definition of results, defined by its core purpose—yet the question of what it takes to achieve superior performance amidst unrelenting uncertainty faces them all. Greatness is not just a business quest; it’s a human quest.
So, we invite you to join us on a journey to learn what we learned. Challenge and question; let the evidence speak. Take what you find useful and apply it to creating a great enterprise that doesn’t just react to events but shapes events. As the influential management thinker Peter Drucker taught, the best—perhaps even the only—way to predict the future is to create it.10
“Victory awaits him who has everything in order—luck people call it. Defeat is certain for him who has neglected to take the necessary precautions in time; this is called bad luck.”
—Roald Amundsen, The South Pole1
IN OCTOBER 1911, two teams of adventurers made their final preparations in their quest to be the first people in modern history to reach the South Pole. For one team, it would be a race to victory and a safe return home. For members of the second team, it would be a devastating defeat, reaching the Pole only to find the wind-whipped flags of their rivals planted 34 days earlier, followed by a race for their lives—a race that they lost in the end, as the advancing winter swallowed them up. All five members of the second Pole team perished, staggering from exhaustion, suffering the dead-black pain of frostbite and then freezing to death as some wrote their final journal entries and notes to loved ones back home.
It’s a near-perfect matched pair. Here we have two expedition leaders—Roald Amundsen, the winner, and Robert Falcon Scott, the loser—of similar ages (39 and 43) and with comparable experience. Amundsen led the first successful journey through the Northwest Passage and joined the first expedition to spend the winter in Antarctica; Scott led a South Pole expedition in 1902, reaching 82 degrees South. Amundsen and Scott started their respective journeys for the Pole within days of each other, both facing a round trip of more than fourteen hundred miles (roughly equal to the distance from New York City to Chicago and back) into an uncertain and unforgiving environment, where temperatures could easily reach 20 degrees below zero F even during the summer, made worse by gale-force winds. And keep in mind, this was 1911. They had no means of modern communication to call back to base camp—no radio, no cell phones, no satellite links—and a rescue would have been highly improbable at the South Pole if they screwed up. One leader led his team to victory and safety. The other led his team to defeat and death.2
What separated these two men? Why did one achieve spectacular success in such an extreme set of conditions, while the other failed even to survive? It’s a fascinating question and a vivid analogy for our overall topic. Here we have two leaders, both on quests for extreme achievement in an extreme environment. And it turns out that the 10X business leaders in our research behaved very much like Amundsen and the comparison leaders behaved much more like Scott. We’ll turn to the business leaders in a few pages, but first let’s add a bit more detail to the tale of Amundsen and Scott. (To learn even more about Amundsen and Scott, we recommend starting with Roland Huntford’s superb book The Last Place on Earth, a massive, well-written comparative study of these two men.)
While in his late twenties, Roald Amundsen traveled from Norway to Spain for a two-month sailing trip to earn a master’s certificate. It was 1899. He had a nearly two-thousand-mile journey ahead of him. And how did Amundsen make the journey? By carriage? By horse? By ship? By rail?
He bicycled.
Amundsen then experimented with eating raw dolphin meat to determine its usefulness as an energy supply. After all, he reasoned, someday he might be shipwrecked, finding himself surrounded by dolphins, so he might as well know if he could eat one.
It was all part of Amundsen’s years of building a foundation for his quest, training his body and learning as much as possible from practical experience about what actually worked. Amundsen even made a pilgrimage to apprentice with Eskimos. What better way to learn what worked in polar conditions than to spend time with a people who have hundreds of years of accumulated experience in ice and cold and snow and wind? He learned how Eskimos used dogs to pull sleds. He observed how Eskimos never hurried, moving slowly and steadily, avoiding excessive sweat that could turn to ice in sub-zero temperatures. He adopted Eskimo clothing, loose fitting (to help sweat evaporate) and protective. He systematically practiced Eskimo methods and trained himself for every conceivable situation he might encounter en route to the Pole.
Amundsen’s philosophy: You don’t wait until you’re in an unexpected storm to discover that you need more strength and endurance. You don’t wait until you’re shipwrecked to determine if you can eat raw dolphin. You don’t wait until you’re on the Antarctic journey to become a superb skier and dog handler. You prepare with intensity, all the time, so that when conditions turn against you, you can draw from a deep reservoir of strength. And equally, you prepare so that when conditions turn in your favor, you can strike hard.
Robert Falcon Scott presents quite a contrast to Amundsen. In the years leading up to the race for the South Pole, he could have trained like a maniac on cross-country skis and taken a thousand-mile bike ride. He did not. He could have gone to live with Eskimos. He did not. He could have practiced more with dogs, making himself comfortable with choosing dogs over ponies. Ponies, unlike dogs, sweat on their hides so they become encased in ice sheets when tethered, posthole and struggle in snow, and don’t generally eat meat. (Amundsen planned to kill some of the weaker dogs along the way to fuel the stronger dogs.) Scott chose ponies. Scott also bet on “motor sledges” that hadn’t been fully tested in the most extreme South Pole conditions. As it turned out, the motor-sledge engines cracked within the first few days, the ponies failed early, and his team slogged through most of the journey by “man-hauling,” harnessing themselves to sleds, trudging across the snow, and pulling the sleds behind them.
Unlike Scott, Amundsen systematically built enormous buffers for unforeseen events. When setting supply depots, Amundsen not only flagged a primary depot, he placed 20 black pennants (easy to see against the white snow) in precise increments for miles on either side, giving himself a target more than ten kilometers wide in case he got slightly off course coming back in a storm. To accelerate segments of his return journey, he marked his path every quarter of a mile with packing-case remnants and every eight miles with black flags hoisted upon bamboo poles. Scott, in contrast, put a single flag on his primary depot and left no markings on his path, leaving him exposed to catastrophe if he went even a bit off course. Amundsen stored three tons of supplies for 5 men starting out versus Scott’s one ton for 17 men. In his final push for the South Pole from 82 degrees, Amundsen carried enough extra supplies to miss every single depot and still have enough left over to go another hundred miles. Scott ran everything dangerously close to his calculations, so that missing even one supply depot would bring disaster. A single detail aptly highlights the difference in their approaches: Scott brought one thermometer for a key altitude-measurement device, and he exploded in “an outburst of wrath and consequence” when it broke; Amundsen brought four such thermometers to cover for accidents.
Amundsen didn’t know precisely what lay ahead. He didn’t know the exact terrain, the altitude of the mountain passes, or all the barriers he might encounter. He and his team might get pounded by a series of unfortunate events. Yet he designed the entire journey to systematically reduce the role of big forces and chance events by vigorously embracing the possibility of those very same big forces and chance events. He presumed bad events might strike his team somewhere along the journey and he prepared for them, even developing contingency plans so that the team could go on should something unfortunate happen to him along the way. Scott left himself unprepared and complained in his journal about his bad luck. “Our luck in weather is preposterous,” penned Scott in his journal, and wrote in another entry, “It is more than our share of ill-fortune … How great may be the element of luck!”
On December 15, 1911, in bright sunshine sparkling across the vast white plain, with a slight crosswind and a temperature of 10 degrees below zero F, Amundsen reached the South Pole. He and his teammates planted the Norwegian flag, which “unfurled itself with a sharp crack,” and dedicated the plateau to the Norwegian king. Then they went right back to work. They erected a tent and attached a letter to the Norwegian king describing their success; Amundsen addressed the envelope to Captain Scott (presuming Scott would be the next to reach the Pole) as an insurance policy in case his team met an unfortunate end on the journey home. He could not have known that Scott and his team were man-hauling their sleds, fully 360 miles behind.
More than a month later, at 6:30 p.m. on January 17, 1912, Scott found himself staring at Amundsen’s Norwegian flag at the South Pole. “We have had a horrible day,” Scott wrote in his diary. “Add to our disappointment a head wind 4 to 5, with a temperature −22° … Great God! this is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have labored to it without the reward of priority.” On that very day, Amundsen had already traveled nearly five hundred miles back north, reaching his 82-degree supply depot with only eight easy days to go. Scott turned around and headed back north, more than seven hundred miles of man-hauling from home base, just as the season began to turn. The weather became more severe, with increasing winds and decreasing temperatures, while supplies dwindled and the men struggled through the snow.
Amundsen and his team reached home base in good shape on January 25, the precise day he’d penned into his plan. Running out of supplies, Scott stalled in mid-March, exhausted and depressed. Eight months later, a British reconnaissance party found the frozen bodies of Scott and two companions in a forlorn, snow-drifted little tent, just ten miles short of his supply depot.3
Amundsen and Scott achieved dramatically different outcomes not because they faced dramatically different circumstances. In the first 34 days of their respective expeditions, Amundsen and Scott had exactly the same ratio, 56 percent, of good days to bad days of weather.4 If they faced the same environment in the same year with the same goal, the causes of their respective success and failure simply cannot be the environment. They had divergent outcomes principally because they displayed very different behaviors.
So too, with the leaders in our research study. Like Amundsen and Scott, our matched pairs were vulnerable to the same environments at the same time. Yet some leaders proved themselves to be 10Xers while leaders on the other side of the pair did not. “10Xers” (pronounced “ten-EX-ers”) is our term for the people who built the 10X companies. In our research, we observed that the 10Xers shared a set of behavioral traits that distinguished them from the comparison leaders. In this chapter we introduce these traits, and in subsequent chapters we describe how our 10Xers led and built their successful companies consistent with them.
Let’s first look at what we did not find about 10Xers relative to their less successful comparisons.
They’re not more creative.
They’re not more visionary.
They’re not more charismatic.
They’re not more ambitious.
They’re not more blessed by luck.
They’re not more risk seeking.
They’re not more heroic.
They’re not more prone to making big, bold moves.
To be clear, we’re not saying that 10Xers lacked creative intensity, ferocious ambition, or the courage to bet big. They displayed all these traits, but so did their less successful comparisons.
So then, how did the 10Xers distinguish themselves? First, 10Xers embrace a paradox of control and non-control.
On the one hand, 10Xers understand that they face continuous uncertainty and that they cannot control, and cannot accurately predict, significant aspects of the world around them. On the other hand, 10Xers reject the idea that forces outside their control or chance events will determine their results; they accept full responsibility for their own fate.
10Xers then bring this idea to life by a triad of core behaviors: fanatic discipline, empirical creativity, and productive paranoia. Animating these three core behaviors is a central motivating force, Level 5 ambition. (See diagram “10X Leadership.”) These behavioral traits, which we introduce in the remainder of this chapter, correlate with achieving 10X results in chaotic and uncertain environments. Fanatic discipline keeps 10X enterprises on track, empirical creativity keeps them vibrant, productive paranoia keeps them alive, and Level 5 ambition provides inspired motivation.
10X LEADERSHIP
In the late 1990s, Peter Lewis, CEO of Progressive Insurance, faced a seemingly irrational Wall Street driving Progressive’s stock price wildly up and down. On October 16, 1998, Progressive’s stock jumped nearly $20, an 18 percent jump in a single day. Did anything fundamentally change about the company that day? No. Did the economy make a sudden lurch? No. Did the market rally 18 percent that day? No. Absolutely nothing of any significance had changed for Progressive on October 16, 1998. Yet the stock price soared an astounding 18 percent.
Then in the very next quarter, on January 26, 1999, Progressive’s stock plummeted nearly $30, a 19 percent drop in a single day. Did anything fundamentally change about the company that day? No. Did the economy make a sudden lurch? No. Did the market crash? No. Absolutely nothing of any significance had changed for Progressive on January 26, 1999. Yet the stock price fell an astounding 19 percent.5
These fluctuations stemmed in part from Peter Lewis’s belief that playing earnings games to satisfy Wall Street lacked honesty. He refused to play the game of telling analysts about forthcoming earnings so that they could more reliably “predict” those very same earnings, a behavior Lewis saw as a shortcut alternative to deep analysis and field work. Lewis also rejected the idea that a company should “manage earnings” by smoothing them out from quarter to quarter so as not to rattle the markets, viewing such shenanigans as undisciplined. But this caused a problem. Because Lewis rejected the “I’ll tell you what we’ll earn and you predict what we’ll earn and we’ll both be happy” model, and because he refused to smooth earnings, analysts couldn’t consistently predict Progressive’s earnings. As one analyst complained, “I might as well flip a coin.”6
And so, on October 16, 1998, Progressive exceeded analyst expectations by 44 cents a share, driving the stock up, and then on January 26, 1999, Progressive’s earnings fell below analyst expectations by 16 cents a share, driving the stock down. If Lewis were to continue to refuse to play the game, Progressive’s stock price would continue to spike up and down, which could make the company vulnerable to raiders. To ignore that risk would be like a polar explorer choosing to ignore the possibility of a freak storm that could kill him. Yet capitulating would compromise Lewis’s principles. What was Lewis to do?
He rejected Option A (to ignore) and Option B (to capitulate), and chose Option Q. Progressive would become the first SEC-listed company to publish monthly financial statements. This would give analysts actual performance data as the quarter progressed, from which they could more easily estimate quarterly results. Other companies had capitulated to the guidance game because, well, they felt they had no choice, that they were imprisoned by this huge force out of their control. But Lewis freed Progressive from the prison. He accepted that these pressures existed, yet he mitigated their effect by prodigious effort.7
What does this story have to do with “discipline”?
Discipline, in essence, is consistency of action—consistency with values, consistency with long-term goals, consistency with performance standards, consistency of method, consistency over time. Discipline is not the same as regimentation. Discipline is not the same as measurement. Discipline is not the same as hierarchical obedience or adherence to bureaucratic rules. True discipline requires the independence of mind to reject pressures to conform in ways incompatible with values, performance standards, and long-term aspirations. For a 10Xer, the only legitimate form of discipline is self-discipline, having the inner will to do whatever it takes to create a great outcome, no matter how difficult.
10Xers are utterly relentless, monomaniacal even, unbending in their focus on their quests. They don’t overreact to events, succumb to the herd, or leap for alluring—but irrelevant—opportunities. They’re capable of immense perseverance, unyielding in their standards yet disciplined enough not to overreach. In our research-team discussions, we struggled with how to best describe the discipline we found in the 10X leaders. Most business CEOs have some level of discipline, but the 10Xers operated on an entirely different level. The 10Xers, we concluded, weren’t just disciplined; they were fanatics. Lewis’s decision to issue monthly financial reports is akin to Amundsen’s riding his bicycle from Norway to Spain and eating raw dolphin meat; their behavior fits nowhere on a normal curve.
Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines believed passionately in sustaining a high-spirit, fun-loving, and iconoclastic culture full of passionate people infused with a rebellious “Warrior Spirit.”8 Kelleher understood that superb customer service naturally arises when people have fun at work and love their company. As the airline grew from a small Texas commuter airline with only a handful of airplanes into a major national carrier, it would be increasingly difficult, and increasingly important, to sustain the culture. So, Kelleher himself behaved as a fanatic exemplar of the culture.
“I will bet you one thing,” Kelleher told 60 Minutes, “that I’m the only airline president in America that would go over to his maintenance hangar at two o’clock in the morning in a flowered hat with a feathered boa and a purple dress.” 9 When asked to grace the cover of Texas Monthly magazine, he showed up in a white suit, zipped down to show off his bare chest; the cover shot portrayed him doing some sort of an Elvis-like dance next to the headline “Herbie Goes Bananas.”10 When he faced a trade-slogan-ownership dispute with Stevens Aviation, he met Stevens’s CEO not in the courtroom, but in an arena filled with hundreds of employees punching the air with pompoms—to resolve the matter with an arm-wrestling contest.11 We on the research team joked that Kelleher’s Technicolor quirks evoked a Hunter S. Thompson quote with a slight twist: when the going gets weird, the weird become CEO.
But to focus on Kelleher’s weirdness as weirdness would miss the point. He wasn’t weird to be weird; he was behaving with outlandish consistency to animate the culture, like an impactful actor who stays perfectly in character while on stage. He was also a complete monomaniac about building Southwest Airlines, never resting in the quest to make Southwest the best low-cost, high-spirit airline, winning every battle and every war with its competitors. “In my spare time, I work,” Kelleher explained in 1987, “seven days a week, usually until 8 or 9 o’clock at night,” then he’d settle down before bed to make progress on reading the thousands of books scattered about his home.12 Kelleher was like Muhammad Ali, combining a deadly serious intensity with a blustery, comical exterior. You might laugh with Kelleher, much like enjoying an Ali press conference, but then find yourself flat on your back if you dared to square off in the ring. By one account, Kelleher showed his competitive ferocity speaking to a gathering of Southwest people, “If someone says they’re going to smack us in the face—knock them out, stomp them out, boot them in the ditch, cover them over and move on to the next thing.”13
Both Kelleher and Lewis, like all the 10Xers we studied, were nonconformists in the best sense. They started with values, purpose, long-term goals, and severe performance standards; and they had the fanatic discipline to adhere to them. If that required them to diverge from normal behavior, then so be it. They didn’t let external pressures, or even social norms, knock them off course. In an uncertain and unforgiving environment, following the madness of crowds is a good way to get killed.
And why would they have such independence of mind? Not because they had more inherent audacity than others, and not because they were more brash and rebellious than others, but because they were more empirical, which brings us to the second of the three core 10Xer behaviors.
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