#585 What to make of a life with Jim Collins (A Career Well Spent Series)

0:00Hi, my name's Sarah and this is the Squiggly Careers podcast. This episode is one of our special summer series where we're asking experts about what does a career well spent look and feel like? How can you figure that out for yourself? What are some of the questions, the actions that you can take to really make sure that your career feels fulfilling for you? We know that no two squiggly careers look and feel the same, so some really good questions to consider as part of these episodes. And today you're going to hear me in conversation with Jim Collins talking about what makes a good life. Some of you might have heard Jim on the podcast previously where I got to talk to him a couple of years ago and you might be familiar with his work things like Good to Great.

0:46Jim is always so compelling to talk to. He's thoughtful, he's insightful and he manages to turn those insights into really practical actions too. So I hope you enjoy our conversation together. Jim welcome back to the squiggly careers podcast you have the rare honor if that's the right word to be one of the very few people who've made an appearance twice so it's lovely to see you again wow I am honored by that very much so today we are here to talk about I'm going to hold your book up to the screen so people who are watching can see it what to make of a life and you can tell that I've read it because there are so many folded down pages it looks scruffy but that's always a good sign a pristine book isn't is never a good sign I don't think yeah um and like all of your work it's incredibly thoughtful and well researched and we were even talking before we started our conversation today about just how long you spent in monk mode to to get to the point and I found actually a section towards the end of the book particularly interesting where you talk about what you used to believe and what you now believe and I really appreciated I think your your honesty and openness to sharing that with with readers to sort of say well I I might have had this perspective in the past but having now done this work this research these reflections that's not where I am now and so I wondered if we could talk about some of those I've picked some that particularly stood out to me that I thought were interesting I've also picked some where I think I need to understand more where I was like oh I'm not sure about that I've got some questions yeah um so my first one which does link very nicely to the idea of squiggly careers is you say I used to believe in the primacy of having a long-term life plan I now believe much more in the organic unplanned simplex stepping nature of how great lives unfold yeah so I wonder if you could talk a bit more about that from and to for us um help us understand what simplex stepping is because I think that'll be a new a new phrase a new concept for lots of people and then maybe I think all of our listeners will always be asking the question so what does that mean for me So perhaps that's maybe a useful place to start.

3:09Yeah.

3:10Jim Collins:Yeah. So first of all, I think one of the real contributions that you make with all of your conversations is making this really directly relevant to the wonderful people who join your conversation. So I'll try to make as many links that way as we can. First of all, let's just start with the definition of this idea of simplex stepping. And basically, one of the things we found when we looked at the lives in this research, and we're looking over the long arc of some really rather remarkable lives done in a rigorous way, we can address that if you feel we need to. But the main thing is they had periods in their time where, put sort of two ideas together, one where they were actually kind of lost in the fog, a period of time where they felt confused or befuddled or disoriented or uncertain, hesitant, really a very foggy patch of their lives.

4:03Jim Collins:And again, you know, these are people who had huge lives in the end result, but they had these foggy patches. And then the question became very interesting to me is how did they get out of the fog? And so I'd like you to think of like, you're in the fog. It's kind of foggy. You're uncertain. You don't know whether you should move over here or move over there, or it's time to leave a particular path, or your life has just been hit by a big change or whatever, and you can only see like three feet in front of you. You can't see an end destination. You may have no idea that there is an end destination.

4:38Jim Collins:And so you just look around yourself and you kind of say, okay, if I don't really know where I'm going and I'm feeling lost in the fog and I can't see clearly, what just sort of looks like of the steps I can see right in front of me, the next possible best step. and I'll just take that step. And then I'll reset and look around again and see if I can take another next step and then another step. And then eventually the fog might begin to clear. These tips could be simple. They could be things like having a conversation with a longtime mentor. They could be that you attend a lecture of something that strikes you as interesting.

5:20Jim Collins:It could be that you've always wanted to explore, I don't know, something about painting when you were younger. So you just go off in your room and you paint a picture and see how it feels. In my own case, I was in a foggy patch in my 20s trying to figure out. I didn't know where I was going. I had a very much a fog of youth. And one of the simplex steps that I took was to simply write a couple of small articles. They were just little articles in the local paper. I didn't know that they would eventually lead to by a series of steps to these big projects and books and everything that I've spent most of my life doing.

5:56Jim Collins:They were just simple little steps. And I think what is reassuring about that, or a few things that are reassuring is, one, everybody has foggy moments. It doesn't mean that you've gone. Even foggy long episodes. Yes. And people, I think, I sometimes hear people give themselves quite a hard time about those moments like oh I've I've done something wrong or I should have done something different and I think almost accepting so I think accepting that we will all have those moments but then I like how realistic it feels to then think well I've not got to figure all of this out I've not got to try and clear the fog all I've got to do is think about a really simple near-term action just to make some progress it's sort of this point that some progress is always better I think than being stuck or stalling and stuck and stalling are two words that we hear people use describing their career a lot and nobody likes that feeling and I was like oh I think in a fog you're more likely to feel like that and so that's when you might just be looking for those sort of real near-term actions.

7:02Jim Collins:Yes you know Sarah I let's let's give to all of the wonderful people who join your conversations who listen in on this, two really important things I'd love for them to take away. One is when you're lost in the fog, one of the things that we learned from this research is don't make big irreversible decisions. Because when you're in the fog, and the fog can come in the wake of something that hits you in life, right? You could just be reeling or you've got, you know, everything just changed on you. Or it could just be you're just trying to figure it out. But if that uncomfortable feeling of being in the fog could lead to two extremes, neither of which is good.

7:44Jim Collins:One is to just sit still, as you were talking about, and do nothing. But the other is, I just so badly want to get out of the fog, I'm going to make a big irreversible leap and just hope I get out of it. And you might just actually end up in a worse position. So, one, don't make big irreversible decisions when you're in the fog. But the second one is this, and you put your finger on it. to draw sustenance from this research, which validates there's nothing wrong with you. And actually, that may not sound like a practical step. It's a hugely practical step, because anyone who's been in the fog, and I've asked rooms of people, often very accomplished people, this question, how many people here have had an episode of fog?

8:29Jim Collins:Almost all the hands go up, if not all. But then I ask a second question, which is, how many of you were self-critical or felt criticized by others when you were in that fog. And lots of hands go up, probably 90%. And I think that one of the things I would love for people to take away is this idea that all of these people had fog. Fog is an artifact of living. It is going to happen, and there is nothing wrong with me when I'm in the fog. we always encourage um everyone who who we work with to create not wait so to really have this like take take the initiative like where you can where you can anticipate um you know to to actually to take action i now want us to think a little bit um about this idea of giving and through this i think we'll also transition into some of your leadership insights which i think um this series of conversations we're having um you're the kind of person who i think will have the most insights for people who are in those leadership roles that we'll perhaps talk about whether roles is the right word um but i did want to start with this where you say you used to believe that giving primarily means giving money and volunteering and i think that's what a lot of people would think about i now believe that the highest form of giving is to give of one in codings um let's start with what that means.

9:57And then I have got a few extra encoding based questions. Yes. Yes.

10:01Jim Collins:Okay. So, so first of all, let's, let's define for people what these encodings are. And encodings are these kind of durable capacities, kind of our intrinsic construction that lie within us awaiting discovery through the experiences of life. And so to quickly grasp them, I'll take a couple of, maybe one of the people in our study, there's a woman named Grace Hopper, and she was one of the early pioneers in computer science. She worked on the first computer at the Mark I at Harvard in World War II and had this huge impact on the development of software. But her life, if you go early in her life, she's a little girl.

10:54Jim Collins:And she goes to this summer home and she looks around in the summer home and there are all these clocks. There's seven clocks in seven rooms or something like that. She takes them all apart, right? And leaves these piles of clocks on the floor. And to the great consternation of her mother, but what that showed was Grace Hopper had this encoding for needing to figure out how gadgets work. And this impulse, this how can I make this gadget work better? So when she stepped into through a series of kind of almost accidental events, it was truly a squiggly shift for her. She was a professor of math.

11:33Jim Collins:World War II happens. she joins the Navy, she gets assigned to this project. None of this was in her plans. She walks in, sees the Mark I and says, it's the most beautiful gadget that I ever saw. She fell in love with computers and her career went a completely different direction towards these computers. But what you have there is it activated something that was already in her. She had this encoding for gadgets and wanting to figure out how gadgets work. You might have encodings for questions and practicality, right? I might have encodings for teaching and trying to bring an idea to life. And the challenge, the key is they're not just kind of strengths we add.

12:13Jim Collins:They're encodings we discover. And when we discover them, what we found in the study is when people began to orient their life with these discoveries of their encodings, their lives tended to work better than if they were operating outside of those encodings. and the bit that I reread and I was I was sort of really thinking about because we do a lot of work on strengths so obviously that bit kind of captured my imagination and I think you you have a title where you say you like this this means more than strengths or this is sort of certainly you want to make a distinction to strengths because I do think of strengths as something that you discover that often through the jobs that you do uh the experiences you have you you discover those strengths and then maybe you figure out and I think you say this in the book actually often there's quite a few things that we could do but often our job to do is to figure out well which ones do I enjoy which ones give me the most energy so how do you because I but I sensed I was like but I feel like you've got a different view here I feel like you were pulling apart and making that distinction between these strengths and these encodings um so perhaps we could you could just talk about a bit more for me because I'd love to kind of create a bit more clarity for myself selfishly so okay so so um uh so let's think about it that uh these encodings are there to be discovered and if you work on them once you discover them so you know Grace Hopper could turn this encoding for gadgets but then she could turn it into by learning and development and all kinds of things that she did into kind of a super strength because it was resting upon this encoding But that's different than, say, training and development not resting on an encoding, which could be something that you become strong at, but it's not the same as encoding multiplied times development, right, versus just development.

14:07Jim Collins:So let's take something that maybe all of us can relate to. Checklists. Okay. So if you take one of the people in the study, John Glenn, who was a fighter pilot, test pilot, and then an astronaut in his first rendition before his life took others quickly turns. It turns out that one of the things that John Glenn just had an encoding for, he just gravitated towards, was checklists. He described him. He was just check happy. He ran everything in his life by checklist. And so, of course, to be a really good fighter pilot and a really good test pilot and a really good astronaut. I mean, think about the checklist as you're coming down to a countdown, right?

14:52Jim Collins:I mean, it's checklist city, right? It's what it is. Now, but what's interesting about that is, OK, so his line of life aligned with one of his encodings, which was to be super like just drawn to doing checklists so you never miss a check and find yourself in unnecessary danger. But suppose, say, like I am not encoded for checklists. Suppose I'm a little more freeform, and I just kind of like to have a big white space in my morning and get into creative work. But actually, I might then have to learn the skill of a checklist because in order to be able to manage all the other stuff in my life, I better start adding this capability that's not the intrinsic one.

15:42Jim Collins:But I had to get competent enough at checklists to be able to not just be the creative guy floating off in the clouds, right? And so the way I think about that is I can turn checklists into a skill and I can turn checklists into something almost as a strength because I've learned how to do it so well. But it isn't something I'm naturally encoded for. Yeah. So where the great power comes is when you have an encoding times development, skill development becomes a super strength. Versus no encoding, but I still got to have it as a basic skill, in which case it's a skill strength. Does that help? It does.

16:26It does help. thank you for taking the time I think to um describe that because I I connect with that idea of it's a sort of natural encoding you've got and then like you said you're almost supercharging it and then you can see that that is when you have the most impact whether you're applying that in your job or or in your life and you make the link when you're talking about kind of leadership um um you you talk really clearly about which i agree with there cannot possibly be one recipe for leadership um and i've always liked um you might know their work rob joffey and gareth jones is uh why should anyone be led by you they have a lovely definition of leadership which is be

17:08Jim Collins:yourself more with skill um and i really like this idea of going there's not there's not a blueprint there's not a blueprint for leadership um and though role models are useful it's not a prescription it's not you use a kind of lovely phrase like don't see it as like a cookie cutter template so you describe in the book the value of leading from your encodings and kind of what that looks like so if somebody is listening now and maybe they're in you know their first leadership role or maybe they've been leading for a while because we have quite a wide range of people listening describe what that would look like so how do I know if I'm leading from my encodings I think people might have a clue based on kind of what you've just said yeah and what do I do if I'm not leading from my encodings because I think some people will read your work or listen to what you've said and think I understand that and that is not where I am I am doing things I have got good at through practice, but it's not my natural encodings.

18:13It's not those things that are going to be those sort of super strengths. And then I'm probably left with a bit of a question mark about what now and what next.

18:21Jim Collins:Yeah. So, so let's, let's unpack this a little bit because I want to, first of all, share how I've come to understand what leadership is and how it ties into encodings. And just, you know, as you know from having read the book, I didn't expect – I mean, I was doing what to make of a life, not how to lead. That was what this was about. And I'd done all this other work on great companies and all this stuff. And it surprised me that I ended up having kind of an extended lens on leadership through this book that I wasn't looking for. It just kind of happened by the process of making sense of their lives.

19:00Jim Collins:So as I, through a series of, you know, experiences and studies, I don't need to go in depth in here, I came to understand that leadership, at least as I see it, is about the art of getting people to want to do what must be done. And so what that means is as a leader, if you take that apart, there are three elements of that. One is someone's got to get clear on what must be done. And there may be many ways you do that. It might be analytical. It might be instinctive. It might be experience-based or whatever. But one way or another, you are leading if you take the responsibility to begin to get clarity about this must be done.

19:41Jim Collins:The second is it's not about getting people to do it. It's about getting people to want to do it. And then the third is it's an art. And it's in the artistry where the notion of the encodings comes in. And if you think about it, that if each of us is a different kind of leadership artist, our way of getting people to want to do what must be done means that we can look at a lot of leaders out there in the world, but they have different encodings than you do. And the key is to figure out, well, what are my leadership encodings that activate in others that want doing what must be done, them wanting to do what must be done?

20:22Jim Collins:And let me just use one of my favorite little stories, a personal one from my wife, Joanne. She, by the way, very impressive. You sound so impressive. When I was reading, I was like, wow, what a woman, essentially. Yes, yes, yes. And we've been married 45 years, and there are ways in which our encodings are a very good match. But Joanne became, after her world-class athletic career, she became, through a series of foggy steps and so forth, but she became a high school cross-country and track coach. And, okay, so you got all these high school kids, right? And you want them to, first of all, be able to run competitively.

21:06Jim Collins:And they ended up winning four state championships, boys and girls, and all of that. but you also want them to really learn how to do your best in a cross-country race. And one of the things that happens in a cross-country race is that you might be in 75th place as a runner, but your score, if you're in 75th, is going to add 75 points to the team score, and it's lowest score that wins. So you have to get the kids who are way back in 75th, because the difference between 75th and 65th is 10 points. So you need them to run really well, even if they're not at the front of the race, right? How do you lead kids to do this?

21:47Jim Collins:One of Joanne's wonderful encoding she discovered is she leads with spreadsheets. Okay, so now think about that. Leading with spreadsheets, what she got really good, she had this instinct for realizing that the kids loved letting the data inspire them. And so she began putting into spreadsheets like how they did at each mile of the race, but then counting somebody's position to be able to count how many kids each kid passed in the last mile. And then they would get their data and their spreadsheets. Right. And she would highlight the kids who passed the most kids. And those spreadsheets every week, the kids are like, I want to see my data.

22:29Jim Collins:I want to see my numbers. I want to see how I did. And then she was building into them the, I want to run my best at the end. I want to pass as many, no matter what place I'm in, I want to run them down. And the reason I share that is, you wouldn't think of a spreadsheet, but her encoded ability was to understand how the mind of an athlete might work and information to draw them forward. And so you could read a lot of books on the recipes of motivating a team and giving a speech and, you know, how to rah-rah them and all that. And Joanne's up at 11 at night doing their spreadsheets. And so the point on this is your leadership in codings are different than my leadership in codings or different than Joanne's leadership in codings.

23:18Jim Collins:And the key is the self knowledge. This is what works for me in getting people to want to do what must be done. I might be quiet, I might be shy, I might be reserved, but I might have the encoding to listen for the one right moment to ask the one right question that will turn the tide. That's very different than I need to have a bold vision and inspire everybody. Well, some people might be encoded for that, but maybe not you. And I think I've got this right. You'll have to tell me if I've not but you describe the book actually as a not a self-help book but more about self-knowledge and actually I think that distinction is really important because as I was reading through the book that's what really came across I was like this is about knowing myself yes in a way that is then useful I mean I was obviously thinking about useful for my squiggly career but also useful for my my life in general and I think that self-knowledge is actually really helpful framing mean because not everybody connects with the idea of self-help sometimes people might be like well that's that's not really for me um and self-knowledge is something about that as well that it feels like well it's in our gift it's in my gift to know myself better and it's not about comparing myself to other people or what other people might be doing it's sort of much more about me like my encodings like how I find my way to doing this in a way that kind of works for me like when I listen to that story, I think I would never have come up with spreadsheets as the answer to that question.

24:57When you said she did it by, and I was thinking, okay, what's going to, spreadsheets is not your first thought. But for her, it is her first thought, because that's what she's so brilliant at, is what she's kind of naturally encoded for.

25:08Jim Collins:That's right. And can I just pass along something? I know you read it in the book, but I think it's a really important thing to share with your listeners, which is that it was kind of a reframe about how you deploy yourself in the world. I can't remember what chapter it's in. It might be in chapter three. But anyways, essentially that the critical question is not what you can do better than others. The critical question is, how can you better expend yourself relative to other ways you could expend yourself? And when you think about it as that way, that is a very different way. It's like there are things at which I'm much more encoded and feel much more fire for than other things.

25:56Jim Collins:And if I trust those, it's not about the comparison to those out there. It's about the understanding inside myself. And over here are my encodings and over here are not. And and then it. So the critical question is to spend time here. Not here. versus I have to figure out how to be better than everybody else. And I think most of the people in our study, that is really how they went about the world. Even if they weren't consciously saying it, that's really what they were doing. What they were doing. Can we circle back to your... That paragraph, by the way, got a circle. When you said that, I was like, I was like, oh, that was one of my circled paragraphs.

26:35Because I think that is, it is really worth people appreciating that. Because that, I think, is you making a choice from all the choices that you have around what you what you could do is really thinking what's worth my energy my attention like where can I do what's going to be brilliant for me that really fuels me um and and it's it's kind of making those choices that I I felt was I felt that was a really important distinction because we do hear from people that they get caught up in comparison um perhaps some of the ways that we you know interact with technology now means that that's easier to do than ever you know like when I say to people you know how do you feel about yourself versus maybe some of your peers um everyone's like awful you know like people people because often we only share the shiny stuff people do get kind of caught in this trap of well I need to be more like them um and I need to be better like someone else versus a better make it better for for myself and I feel like that that critical question is is a really important one for everyone to ask themselves that's one for all of our listeners we will put that question at the top of our summary um so Jim we summarize our podcast into a one page and we always choose a kind of critical question to start with and I feel like that would be a good first question for everyone just to go back to giving was there anything else you wanted to say about this idea of um giving your encodings and like how that that feels when you think about what what giving looks like um you used to say it's more about money or volunteering and now feel it felt to me like you were sort of saying this idea of actually giving what you've got like those encodings that's where a lot of

28:22Jim Collins:value and impact lies yeah so um so it's really uh interesting to me because we tend to have these kind of almost pre-formed cookie cutter views as to what quote giving means or what leadership means or whatever. And this study really made me just think about a lot of those things differently. And giving was very much one of them because I had thought of it as, oh, it's mainly about giving money or volunteering, giving your time. And by the way, those are good things to do. I'm not saying they're not. But if you think about giving can be that you have these encodings and maybe your best gift of the world is to express them in the world.

29:04Jim Collins:And I think of one of the other women in science, the other side of the pair, from Grace Hopper, Barbara McClintock, who was a geneticist. And she spent, that was her hedgehog. She was solving genetics puzzles. That was she was encoded for. She had set the fire for. She just needed enough money to be able to do it. And her life was a beautiful, wondrous, expanding, big thing of these genetics. But you know, it's really interesting as what she was really driven by was solving these genetics puzzles. She was so motivated to solve genetics puzzles that when the lab was locked, a wonderful story, the lab was locked on a weekend and she couldn't get in.

29:44Jim Collins:And so she was at university at the time. And instead of going back to get her keys, like, I got to solve the puzzle, she climbs up the outside of the building and, you know, climbs in a window because she has to solve the genetics puzzle. Okay. And she's not thinking about changing the world or giving, you know, or doing something that's going to be monumental. She's just solving puzzles. But it turned out that by trusting and following her encoding, she found a discovery that segments of DNA can pick up and move, transpositional genetic elements, led to profound insights about her understanding about cancer and laid some of the foundations for the biotech industry.

30:21Jim Collins:But if you look at her life, that's not what she was trying to do. She didn't as a 20-year-old say, I'm going to go do something that's going to help understand cancer. She's just like, I've got these puzzles they've got to solve. And by doing that, her gift was to trust her in coding. And the writers in our study, they just wrote their books. It wasn't, I'm writing my books to massively impact the world. I'm writing my books because I want to read them. And then I just think about it simply this way. Take the architect, I.M. Pei, who is in our study, and he, you know, later in his life, he did some of his best architecture, such as the Louvre Pyramid in his mid-70s.

31:10Jim Collins:Now think about this. Imagine if it's, say, 60. He said, I'm going to retire from architecture, and now I'm going to volunteer, here and I'm going to give my money away. Versus what he did was he gave us the Louvre pyramid, which was an expression of his encoded capabilities. And so I think about it this way, and I, with folks who are at a point in life where they have the ability to give, I would frame the question as, even if it involves giving money or your time, can you still choose a responsibility of giving that is really tapping your encodings versus just, oh, this seems like a good cause.

31:58Jim Collins:And that I think is the highest form of giving. That's such a lovely way to start to bring us to the end of our conversation together. So my last question for you, which I do feel is a slightly unfair one, given the book and the big questions it tries to address what do you want to leave our listeners with today so we have talked about lots of different things you've got your own stories in there there are some we haven't really talked about the inspiring stories in the book you've brought some of them to life for our listeners which is brilliant um partly because i i'd quite like people to discover those for them for themselves to hopefully feel like you've sowed a few seeds today and people will be able to learn more about the incredible people as they spend time with your work um but as well as reading the book, what either reflection or maybe something that you've learned through the process do you want to leave people with?