Jim Collins’s leadership tips on how to frame your life for success 

Hello and welcome to Modern CEO! I’m Stephanie Mehta, CEO and chief content officer of Mansueto Ventures. Each week this newsletter explores inclusive approaches to leadership drawn from conversations with executives and entrepreneurs, and from the pages of Inc. and Fast Company. If you received this newsletter from a friend, you can sign up to get it yourself every Monday morning. 

Jim Collins, coauthor of Built to Last and author of Good to Great, didn’t set out to write another management book. His new work, What to Make of a Life: Cliffs, Fog, Fire and the Self-Knowledge Imperative, is a deeply researched meditation on how individuals navigate life’s transitions, from a wide range of human endeavors including arts, sports, media, and politics. But in researching and writing What to Make of a Life, a process that took 12 years, Collins found himself returning to—and evolving—one of his most famous concepts.  

Good to Great introduced the “First Who, Then What” principle, the notion that executives who led the most remarkable corporate transformations didn’t start with a vision or a strategy. They started with people. “The executives who ignited the transformations from good to great did not first figure out where to drive the bus and then get people to take it there,” he wrote. “No, they first got the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and then figured out where to drive it.”  

Collins’s What to Make of a Life research suggests that people are still important, but so is the role they play. Put another way: You need the right people on the bus, “but what I really came to see through this study is that it’s much more about the seats,” Collins tells Modern CEO. 

All the right shine 

Collins shares a new concept he calls “encodings”—the constellation of capabilities that reside within each of us. When an individual’s encodings are brightest, he describes them as being “in frame.” John Glenn, for example, was in frame during his run as a successful fighter pilot and astronaut.  

But Glenn also had periods of his life when he was less successful. He was a middling college student and an unremarkable corporate executive before moving fully back into frame as a U.S. senator. “He’s still the same person,” Collins says. “What’s changing is the frame of his life, and whether that frame is capturing a big, bright set of encodings.”  

Katharine Graham had similar moments being in and relatively out of frame, with some of her brightest coming when she was CEO of The Washington Post Co. and tested by her decisions to publish the Pentagon Papers and Watergate scoops. Singer Robert Plant was “running around the Midlands with John Bonham in pursuit of music gigs,” Collins writes, while his parents tried to convince him to become an accountant. He came into frame when he teamed up with Jimmy Page to form Led Zeppelin. 

Find the right frame

Collins says leaders should recognize that team members have different encodings, and to get them to succeed may require changing their responsibilities or frame. It’s a lesson Collins has learned personally. “I used to spend a lot of time feeling frustrated with what people are not,” he says. “I began to look at all the people in my life and on my team very differently. [Rather than] try to turn them into something they’re not, [try to] shift the frame—the seat they sit in—so that when they’re in that seat, they’re like John Glenn flying fighter jets. They’re like Jimmy Page playing guitar.” 

Leaders, in turn, can understand and embrace their capabilities and lead by putting themselves in the right frame or seat. Collins defines leadership as “the art of getting people to want to do what must be done.”  

“The key is not to look out into the world and say, ‘What do other great leaders do?’” Collins says. “The key is to say, ‘What are my leadership encodings that allow me, in my own idiosyncratic way, to exercise the art of getting people to want to do what must be done?’”  

Crack your encoding

What are your encodings as a leader? How do you get people to do what must be done? Send your reflections to me at stephaniemehta@mansueto.com. I’ll publish the best examples in a future newsletter.   

Read more: The best of Jim Collins 

• Good to Great for entrepreneurs  

• Is the economy just built to flip? 

• Walmart: Bigger, better, faster 

• Revisiting Beyond Entrepreneurship  

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