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Good To Great, by Jim Collins
Ambition For The Company:
Setting Up Successors for Success
Chapter 2, pages 26–27
Level 5 leaders want to see the company even more successful
in the next generation, comfortable with the idea that most people
won’t even know that the roots of that success trace back
to their efforts. As one Level 5 leader said, “I want to
look out from my porch at one of the great companies in the world
someday and be able to say, ‘I used to work there.’
”
In contrast, the comparison leaders, concerned more with their
own reputation for personal greatness, often failed to set the
company up for success in the next generation. After all, what
better testament to your own personal greatness than that the
place falls apart after you leave?
In over three quarters of the comparison companies, we found
executives who set their successors up for failure or chose weak
successors, or both.
Some had the “biggest dog” syndrome—they didn’t
mind other dogs in the kennel, as long as they remained the biggest
one. One comparison CEO was said to have treated successor candidates
“the way Henry the VIII treated wives.”23
Consider the case of Rubbermaid, an unsustained comparison company
that grew from obscurity to number one on Fortune’s
annual list of America’s Most Admired Companies and then,
just as quickly, disintegrated into such sorry shape that it had
to be acquired by Newell to save itself. The architect of this
remarkable story, a charismatic and brilliant leader named Stanley
Gault, became synonymous in the late 1980s with the success of
the company. In 312 articles collected on Rubbermaid, Gault comes
through as a hard-driving, egocentric executive. In one article,
he responds to the accusation of being a tyrant with the statement,
“Yes, but I’m a sincere tyrant.”24
In another, drawn directly from his own comments on leading change,
the word I appears 44 times (“I could lead the charge”;
“I wrote the twelve objectives”; “I presented and
explained the objectives”), whereas the word we appears
just 16 times.25
Gault had every reason to be proud of his executive success. Rubbermaid
generated 40 consecutive quarters of earnings growth under his
leadership—an impressive performance, and one that deserves
respect.
But—and this is the key point—Gault did not leave behind
a company that would be great without him. His chosen successor
lasted only one year on the job, and the next in line faced a
management team so shallow that he had to temporarily shoulder
four jobs while scrambling to identify a new number two executive.26
Gault’s successors found themselves struggling not only with
a management void, but also with strategic voids that would eventually
bring the company to its knees.27
Of course, you might say, “Yes, Rubbermaid fell apart after
Gault, but that just proves his personal greatness as a leader.”
Exactly! Gault was indeed a tremendous Level 4 leader, perhaps
one of the best in the last 50 years. But he was not a Level 5
leader, and that is one key reason why Rubbermaid went from good
to great for a brief shining moment and then, just as quickly,
went from great to irrelevant.
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