Olivia: What if the most celebrated, charismatic, larger-than-life CEOs are almost never the ones who build truly great, enduring companies? The real magic happens with leaders you’ve likely never even heard of. They’re the quiet ones. Jackson: Really? Because all we ever hear about are the bombastic visionaries, the ones who are practically celebrities. You’re telling me the real work is done by someone who’s, what, just quietly getting on with it? That feels like it goes against everything we're taught to admire. Olivia: It absolutely does, and that’s the disruptive idea at the heart of one of the most influential business books ever written: Good to Great by Jim Collins. And what’s fascinating is how he even came to write it. His previous bestseller, Built to Last, was a huge hit, but he got this sharp critique from a colleague at McKinsey who basically said, "Your book is useless for most of us because you only studied companies that were always great." Jackson: Ouch. That’s a pretty direct piece of feedback. Olivia: Right? So, Good to Great was Collins's five-year, self-funded answer to that challenge. He wanted to solve the mystery: can a perfectly average, good company make the leap and become truly great? And if so, how? Jackson: Okay, I’m in. So who are these mystery leaders then? What makes them so different from the ones we see on magazine covers?

Olivia: Collins calls them "Level 5 Leaders." And they are the absolute opposite of the celebrity CEO. They’re defined by a paradoxical blend of profound personal humility and intense professional will. They are ambitious, but their ambition is for the company, not for themselves. Jackson: Humility and will. That sounds like a strange combination. It’s like a quiet warrior or a humble titan. Can you give me an example? I’m having trouble picturing this. Olivia: The perfect example is a man named Darwin Smith, who became CEO of Kimberly-Clark in 1971. The company was, at best, a mediocre paper company. Smith himself was a mild-mannered in-house lawyer. The board wasn't even sure he was qualified. One director pulled him aside and said he lacked some of the qualifications for the job. Jackson: Wow. What a vote of confidence on your first day. Olivia: Exactly. And Smith was famously unassuming. When a journalist later asked him to describe his management style, he just stared back blankly and said, "Eccentric." But beneath that quiet exterior was an unstoppable will. Just two months after becoming CEO, he was diagnosed with nose and throat cancer and given less than a year to live. He told the board he wasn't dead yet and planned to keep working. He ended up living for another 25 years, 20 of which he spent as CEO. Jackson: Whoa. Okay, so the "intense professional will" part is definitely checking out. What did he actually do with that will? Olivia: He and his team confronted a brutal fact: their core business, traditional coated paper, was doomed to mediocrity. So he made a decision that seemed insane at the time. He decided to sell the paper mills, the very foundation of the company, including the mill in the town of Kimberly, Wisconsin, which the company was named after. Jackson: Hold on. He sold the core of the company? The thing that made them who they were? That sounds like corporate suicide. How did he get people to follow him if he wasn't this big, charismatic visionary giving rousing speeches? Olivia: That’s the second piece of the puzzle. Collins found that Level 5 leaders follow a principle he calls "First Who... Then What." Before they figure out the vision, the strategy, or where to drive the bus, they focus all their energy on getting the right people on the bus, the right people in the right seats, and the wrong people off the bus. Jackson: So you hire the team before you even have the plan? That seems completely backward. Olivia: It is! But the logic is powerful. If you start with "who," you can more easily adapt to a changing world. If people are on the bus because of who else is on the bus, they'll be motivated to find a great destination. If they're on board because of the destination and you have to change course, you've got a huge problem. Darwin Smith knew that if he had the right people, they would have the discipline and courage to make that terrifying leap with him, away from paper and into consumer goods like Kleenex and Huggies. Jackson: I see. So you’re not trying to motivate the wrong people; you’re hiring people who are already self-motivated. You avoid the "genius with a thousand helpers" model, where the company collapses the moment the genius leaves. Olivia: Precisely. The thousand helpers are left with no one to follow. But a bus full of the right people can keep driving. Over Smith's 20-year tenure, Kimberly-Clark generated stock returns 4.1 times the general market, crushing its competitors. All led by the quiet, eccentric lawyer nobody believed in.

Jackson: Okay, so you have this humble, iron-willed leader and a bus full of self-motivated people. But they still have to figure out where to go. How do they find that direction? Olivia: Well, once you have that bus full of disciplined people, you don't need a 100-page strategic plan. You just need one simple, powerful idea. Collins uses a wonderful metaphor from an ancient Greek parable. He says you have to decide if you're a fox or a hedgehog. Jackson: A fox or a hedgehog? Okay, this sounds a bit like a children's book. What does he mean? Olivia: The fox knows many things. It's cunning, it sees all the complexity, and it chases a dozen different goals at once. The hedgehog, on the other hand, knows one big thing. When the fox attacks, the hedgehog doesn't get clever; it just rolls into a spiky ball. It does the one thing it does better than anyone else. Great companies are all hedgehogs. Jackson: They find their one big thing. How? Olivia: Collins says they find it at the intersection of three circles. First: What can you be the best in the world at? And just as importantly, what can you not be the best at? Second: What drives your economic engine? This means finding the single metric, the one denominator like 'profit per customer visit' or 'profit per employee,' that has the most impact. And third: What are you deeply passionate about? Jackson: Passion, what you're best at, and how you make money. That actually sounds deceptively simple. Olivia: It is. Take Walgreens. For years, they were a decent drugstore chain. But then they developed their Hedgehog Concept: to be the best, most convenient drugstore with high profit per customer visit. That's it. Every decision flowed from that. Is this new location more convenient? Will it increase profit per visit? If yes, do it. If no, don't. They systematically closed inconvenient stores and built new ones on expensive, high-traffic corners. They pioneered drive-thru pharmacies. Jackson: And what was their competitor, the fox, doing? Olivia: Their main comparison company, Eckerd, was a classic fox. They were chasing growth for growth's sake. They bought stores all over the place, with no coherent convenience strategy. At one point, they even got into the home video market! They were chasing everything and had no central, simple idea. Jackson: So Eckerd was stuck in what Collins calls the "Doom Loop," right? Lurching from one big idea to the next, trying to find a miracle, but never building any real momentum. Olivia: Exactly. Which brings us to the final piece: the Flywheel. Collins says these transformations never happen in one "aha!" moment. From the outside, it might look like an overnight success, but from the inside, it feels like pushing a giant, heavy flywheel. Jackson: Walk me through that analogy. Olivia: Imagine a 5,000-pound metal wheel. Your job is to get it spinning. The first push barely moves it. You keep pushing, and after hours of effort, it completes one full turn. You keep pushing. It moves a little faster. Two turns. Then four. Then ten. You keep pushing in a consistent direction, and eventually, a breakthrough point comes. The flywheel's own momentum starts to work for you. It's spinning so fast it's almost unstoppable. That, Collins says, is what it feels like to go from good to great. It's a slow, patient, relentless push in a single direction, guided by your Hedgehog Concept. Jackson: That’s a powerful image. It’s not about a single, heroic action. It’s about the cumulative effect of thousands of small, disciplined pushes. It's unsexy, but it works. Olivia: It’s the most unsexy, un-dramatic, and powerful force in business. While the Doom Loop companies are looking for a silver bullet, the Flywheel companies are just pushing, day after day.

Jackson: This all sounds brilliant, Olivia. The quiet leader, the right people, the simple Hedgehog idea, the relentless Flywheel. It’s a compelling formula. But let’s be real. I’ve read that some of these "great" companies Collins identified, like Circuit City and Fannie Mae, completely imploded years after the book was published. Circuit City went bankrupt. Fannie Mae had a massive scandal and needed a government bailout. Does that invalidate the whole book? Olivia: That is the million-dollar question, and it's a completely fair and necessary critique. Collins himself has had to address this. The book isn't a magical formula for permanent, guaranteed success. It's a study of what it took for a specific set of companies to make a transformation from good to great during a specific historical period. Jackson: So it was a snapshot, not a prophecy. Olivia: Exactly. The principles—having humble leaders, disciplined people, a simple focus—are timeless frameworks for building momentum. But greatness is not a destination you arrive at. It’s a state you have to maintain. If a new, Level 4 celebrity CEO comes in and stops the flywheel to launch their own "revolutionary" program, the company can fall. If the organization loses its discipline and strays from its Hedgehog Concept, it can fall. The book shows you how to build the engine of greatness. It doesn't guarantee you'll keep it fueled and running forever. Jackson: That makes a lot of sense. The lesson isn't to perfectly copy what Walgreens did in 1985. It’s to understand the underlying process. For anyone listening, whether they're running a company or just their own career, the question becomes: what is my flywheel? What is that one small, consistent push I can make today, and tomorrow, and the day after that? Olivia: That’s the perfect takeaway. It’s not about finding a miracle. It’s about finding your direction and starting to push. And we’d love to hear from our listeners about this. What does the Flywheel look like in your life or your work? Share your stories with us on our social channels. It’s in those small, consistent efforts that real transformation begins. Jackson: It’s a powerful reminder that greatness is a choice, a discipline, not a stroke of luck. Olivia: This is Aibrary, signing off.