LEARNING FROM YOUNG LEADERS : Full Talk

Announcer:  Propelled by an unquenchable curiosity and a drive to ask the next great question, Jim Collins has invested a quarter of a century of his career into what makes great companies run and great leaders tick. Jim began his career at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, earning the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992. He went on to found a management laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, where he conducts research and engages in Socratic dialogue with CEOs and senior-leadership teams. Most recently, Jim has wrapped up a two-year appointment studying leadership at West Point. Today Jim is going to share with us the insights he’s gleaned on emerging leadership from his time at one of the U.S.’s most prestigious military institutions. Let’s welcome Jim Collins back to The Summit.

{Applause}

Jim Collins:  Well, good morning, good afternoon, wherever anyone might be. I would like to begin with an expression of gratitude, gratitude to Bill for his enduring friendship, for his mentorship to millions, to The Summit for the tremendous privilege to be back here again with all of you. I feel very much among friends. I am truly grateful. After investing a quarter of a century of my life researching the singular question of what makes a great enterprise tick, be it in the business or the social sectors, I had a transformative opportunity. For 2012 and 2013, I had the honor to serve as the Class of 1951 Chair for the Study of Leadership at the United States Military Academy at West Point. It is one of the world’s greatest leadership-development institutions. It’s been in the business of building leaders of character for more than 210 years. I traveled to West Point multiple times to engage in Socratic dialogue and to reflect on the essence of leadership, how leaders can be built, and how good leaders can become great leaders.

Today I would like to share some of my reflections and learnings. And I emphasize learnings because I was, in fact, the one who learned the most in this journey. I only hope that I contribute even a small fraction of the learning to the cadets and to the academy that I learned from them. Inc. magazine came out and wrote an article about my time in the chair. It was called “The Re-Education of Jim Collins.” It’s written by Bo Burlingham. You can Google it if you’re interested. But it had a wonderful little tagline: “The author of Good to Great went to West Point to teach leadership. Instead, he was the one who got schooled.”

{Laughter}

There is a lot of truth to that. I finished my two years in the Chair for the Study of Leadership at West Point with a one-hour talk to the corps of cadets. More than four thousand remarkable, energetic, dedicated, service-oriented young men and women who wear the cloth of their country, assembled in Eisenhower Hall. I had in my mind an image of each of those young leaders as being like a vector going out into time and space. And if you could contribute to or even slightly alter in a positive way the trajectory of those vectors over the course of a lifetime, it could be a huge sweep. Therefore, this felt to me like not only a huge opportunity but also a huge responsibility. So, my mission was to challenge these young leaders by integrating twenty-five years of research on great enterprises with the two years of my learning at West Point, what I learned largely from them. And today, inspired by a challenge from (Bill), I would like to translate what I shared with them to you. I would like to translate what I learned for young leaders in any sector, for young leaders who want to grow into great leaders. And for those who have a few more decades under our belts, I would simply like to suggest that we are all young leaders.

{Laughter}

I believe that questions are better than answers. So, I’m going to organize these reflections in the form of seven challenges, in the form of seven questions. To be clear, these are my personal reflections and views. They do not represent an official view of West Point or the Academy. They are just Jim’s take. I hope you find them useful.

Question #1: What cause do you serve? What cause do you serve with Level 5 ambition? In one of my seminars at West Point, I brought with me a truly great leader. She is one of my personal heroes. Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America. The first thing the cadets noticed is that Wendy is shy and reserved and soft-spoken, not particularly charismatic. You wouldn’t necessarily notice her in a crowd. And she told the story of how at age twenty-one she was in a funk. She didn’t know what she wanted to do with her life, and she had to do a senior honors thesis in college. She did it on education and she put forth two premises.

Premise #1: Every single kid—no matter what zip code, no matter what family circumstance, no matter where born—every single kid deserves a shot at a solid K–12 education. Two, we should enlist some of our best young people coming out of college to sign up for at least two years of deployment into our most underserved schools, from the Mississippi Delta to Harlem and the Bronx. Since its founding, Teach for America has deployed more than thirty-five thousand corps members in those schools, more than a quarter of a million have applied. Wendy Kopp shows that if you have a charismatic cause, you do not need to be a charismatic leader.

In twenty-five years of research into what makes great companies tick, one of the strongest and most consistent findings to come through all the data is the idea of Level 5 ambition. In Good to Great, as many of you know, we discovered the idea of the Level 5 leader, one blessed with a paradoxical blend of personal humility—that’s the X factor of great leadership—personal humility with an utterly indomitable will. But the deep inner essence of Level 5 is the idea of service, of leading in service to a cause. We are talking here about ambition. Towering, exhausting, relentless, nonstop ambition, but channeled outward away from yourself into a cause, into an enterprise, into a purpose, into something that is bigger and more important than we are. See, ego-driven Level four leaders, they’re really good at inspiring people to follow them. The Level 5 leaders inspire people to follow a cause. And therein is all the difference.

At West Point I was surprised to sense that many of the cadets whom I got to know seemed happier and more engaged than my Stanford MBA students from when I taught there. And part of that, in my view, is that the ethic of service, commitment to cause bigger than yourself, just runs through the entire West Point experience, through the entire institution. And it is service with a capital S. All of them know that some of them might die in that service.

Now, you might be thinking, “It’s easier to have this Level 5 ambition leading in some service to cause at places like Teach for America and West Point, where the sense of cause is so clear, so omnipresent.” But keep in mind, we originally uncovered the idea of Level 5 ambition using business corporations as the data set. That’s where we found it. We were not looking for it. It came to us from the data. This notion of the Level 5 ambition, ambition for a cause, ambition for something that is not you, was pronounced in all our research studies of companies when they were truly great in contrast to those infected with the disease of oppressive mediocrity or in decline.

That is why I’d like to challenge young leaders in every walk of life as you're heading out, as you're one of those vectors, to do what the greatest entrepreneurs and the builders, great builders, have always done: to infuse your enterprise with some purpose that goes far beyond just making money. Money is like blood and food and oxygen and water—essential for life. Without them there is no life. But they are not the point of life. Commitment to service is not a sector choice; it is a life choice. Or in the words of another great leader I’ve come to know, Frances Hesselbein, who led the Girl Scouts back from good to great: “To serve is to live.”

Question #2: Will you settle for being a good leader or will you grow to become a great leader? Peter Drucker, one of my mentors, the most significant management thinker of the last one hundred years, made the seminal observation that the twentieth century would be characterized by a fundamental shift in which the cellular structure of society, of free society, would be organizations well managed, and that this was the best and only workable alternative to tyranny. And in that he was profoundly right. I believe we might be on the cusp of a twenty-first-century shift from a society of organizations well managed into a society composed of networks well led. You don’t manage a network. And if that’s right, we are going to need great leadership distributed throughout all sectors.

One of my goals in the Chair for the Study of Leadership at West Point was to try to get clear on a deceptively simple question: what is leadership? We talk about it all the time, but what exactly is it? Of course, leadership is not personality. We confuse leadership and personality all the time. It is not position. It is not title. It is not rank. It is not power. I believe that James MacGregor Burns had it essentially right when he said, “True leadership only exists if people follow when they would otherwise have the freedom to not follow.” To invoke power or rank or position or title as your primary means of getting things done is an abdication of leadership. Some of the most effective military leaders whom I’ve come to know rely precious little on rank or position. General Colin Powell, in whose book It Worked for Me, which I warmly recommend to all of you, said, “In my thirty-five years of service, I don’t ever recall telling anyone that’s an order,” preferring instead to command with what he called the most delicate touch.

And at West Point, building on that idea of leading people from here to there, I came across a wonderful sentence from General Eisenhower in which he said that leadership is the art of getting people to want to do what must be done. Notice those three parts. As a leader, #1, you have to know what must be done.

I mean, part of the responsibility of being a leader is to figure out what must be done on the big things, and much more often than not, to be right. Two, it’s not about getting people to do what must be done; it’s about getting them to want to do what must be done. And third, it’s not a science; it’s an art. Each person has to cultivate his or her own artistry. It might be oratory. It might be the pen. It might be a genius for figuring out who are the right six people to get in a room and what is the one question to ask. It’s developing your own peculiar art form. You learn from others, but you don’t copy them. Beethoven learned from Haydn but did not copy Haydn.

Now, speaking of Eisenhower, what was Dwight Eisenhower doing in early 1936? He was a relatively undistinguished major working as an assistant carrying MacArthur’s bags in the Philippines. Eight years later he was Supreme Commander of Allied Forces and then President of the United States. He did not start out as Eisenhower as we know today. He grew into being Eisenhower. Most great leaders in every sector that I’ve had the privilege to touch—most great leaders do not start as great leaders. They grow into great leaders. The critical question is, will you do whatever it takes to scale your leadership as the demands of your enterprise grows? As your quest, as your cause, as your enterprise scales from 1X to 2X to 5X to 10X, will you scale your leadership from 1X to 2X to 5X to 10X? Because if your BHAGs are big enough, you're going to need to grow a lot. And that brings me to

Question #3: How can you reframe failure as growth in pursuit of a BHAG? On May 15th, 2007, I sat on the side of El Capitan in Yosemite Valley, rock climbing with a young man named Tommy Caldwell. Tommy is the greatest free climber of all time in the environment of El Capitan. We started talking about BHAGs. BHAG is a term that goes back to the book Built to Last, which I coauthored with my dear mentor and friend Jerry Porras. It stands for Big Hairy Audacious Goal. And Tommy asked me a question, “Jim, this BHAG thing, this hairy thing, does a BHAG have to be achievable?”

“Why do you ask?”

“I have this idea for a climb.”

And looking out across the side of El Cap, we could see the alabaster smooth wall called the Dawn Wall catching early morning light. To get a feel for El Capitan, I’d like you to imagine standing at the base of the Empire State Building. Then stack another one and then another half of one and look up and you get the sense for the height. Now, make it a mile wide; you get a sense for the scale of this thing. And it is vertical and overhanging. Tommy’s idea was to free climb the Dawn Wall, the smoothest, most beautiful, spectacular, terrifying part of the wall. To free climb means you do use ropes, but they’re there only as safety devices. You have to move up every single part of the climb under your own power of fingers and toes and hands. Some of the holds on the Dawn Wall are so small that it is easier to see them at night by headlamp when you can get a little bit of contrast than in the glare of daylight, when it makes it very hard to see the hold. Imagine that, holds so small you can’t see them in sunlight so you need to see them at night by headlamp. These are small holds. And it’s on a vertical wall and he’s going to free climb this. It would be the hardest big-wall free climb in history. “But I don’t know if I could do it,” he thought to himself. And he said out loud, “It might have to wait for a future generation.”

I said, “Well, Tommy, one thing I know is if you know for certain that you will do the Dawn Wall, then it’s not a BHAG.” 

Fast-forward five years to the summer of 2012. I brought Tommy with me on one of my visits to West Point to engage in a leadership seminar with the West Point rock-climbing team. Tommy had committed to the BHAG to free climb the Dawn Wall, and by the time we were flying out to West Point together, he had accumulated nothing other than an impressive record of failure on the Dawn Wall. He kept failing. For four years, he’d been failing. He kept failing to stick the dyno move. Imagine taking a pencil, right, and putting it up against the wall, and that’s your handhold. You literally grab that and you throw yourself sideways seven feet, nothing touching, no hands, no feet, like some sort of a tree monkey, seven feet sideways, one thousand feet above the ground, and grab another little hold. And it’s not even the hardest part of the pitch.

{Laughter}

I asked Tommy, I said, “It’s been four years. You just are failing and failing and failing. Why do you go back? You’re the most accomplished free climber of your generation and now all you’re getting is failure.”

“You don’t understand, Jim. I am not failing. I’m growing. And that is the point of the climb. It is making me stronger. What is the other side of the coin from success? It’s not failure; it’s growth.”

Then Tommy asked me, “How are the cadets on this, reframing failure as growth?”

That’s a great question. And when I asked the cadets assembled in Eisenhower Hall, “How many of you have failed at something here at West Point?” well, four thousand hands went up. “How many experienced some profound sense of inadequacy?” Four thousand hands went up. Let me see a show of hands in this room. How many, some time in your life, have felt a profound sense of inadequacy relative to what you faced?

{Laughter}

Yes. How can you reframe the entire experience as you are not failing; you are growing?

So, did Tommy ever succeed on the Dawn Wall? Two thousand eight hundred and one days after that day in May when he asked whether a BHAG has to be achievable, Tommy stood on the top, having succeeded on the Dawn Wall. But that’s not the really impressive part of the story. There are thirty pitches on the climb. After he had climbed the hardest middle pitches—pitches 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20—he stood on a thing called Wino Tower. There are one thousand feet to go, and those of us who knew Tommy knew that those last one thousand feet would not be hard for him, that he could push to the top in one go, grab the glory, the hardest climb in history with the whole world watching.

And it’s January, cool enough to grab those little holds, but that comes with a risk, which is that if you get a snowstorm, it could wipe out the ascent because you get the snow on top, which then melts into ice sheets, which then break off like windowpanes of guillotines that come slicing down at you. Horrifying. So, every day that goes by is a risk that it could still come to an end. And there was a problem. Tommy’s partner, Kevin Jorgeson, was stuck back down at pitch 15. You have a choice. Do you push to the top, grab the summit, achieve the BHAG? Or do you do what Tommy did? Tommy went back down, risked the extra day, stayed on the wall, and committed himself to getting Kevin through the climb. And coached him and stayed with him and belayed him through 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, and 20; and they summited together as a team.

{Applause}

That brings me to Question #4. How can you succeed by helping others succeed? Early in my time in the leadership chair at West Point, I kept asking the cadets, “What’s hard here? What’s difficult?” They would talk about the course load and the fact that they had to balance a difficult course load with the physical demands and the military training; it’s a difficult environment and just managing your time is difficult. But eventually I kept hearing this word, the IOCT. I’m like, “Well, what’s the IOCT?”

“Sir, you don’t want to know what the IOCT is.”

“No, I really do.”

“Sir, you don’t want to know.”

“Tell me about the IOCT.”

It stands for indoor obstacle-course test. It’s in Hayes Gym, and the way it works is that basically the clock goes off; and you have to crawl under barriers and run across tires and leap over a pommel horse and grab an eight-foot shelf and mantle up and fly sideways across these bars and jump through a tire, cross a balance beam, somersault (which they call a combat roll) over a wall, across monkey bars, hand over hand up a rope; then you grab a medicine ball and you sprint around the track. It really hurts.

But here’s the key. There’s a graduation time. Three minutes thirty seconds for the men. If you do not make that time, you don’t graduate. Slightly different time for the women. They don’t make their time, they don't graduate. Imagine going through four years of West Point clocking at 3:35 and not graduating. So, I wanted to experience a little bit of the cadet’s experience, so I decided, against all better judgment . . .

{Laughter}

that for my fifty-fifth birthday gift to myself . . .

{Laughter}

I would train for and try to run the IOCT in twenty-two-year-old-cadet graduation time. I do not recommend this for your fifty-fifth birthday.

{Laughter}

And I remember being over there at Hayes Gym, and I’d be working on the obstacles, and the cadets would come to help me, and I’d be working on the shelf, and they’d come along and very kindly say, “Sir, don’t do it like that. Sir, you look like an old man.” Well .  .  .

{Laughter}

I am an old man. So, one day I’m standing there, and I took a break working on the IOCT, and I stood back and I noticed something interesting. There were clumps of cadets helping other cadets. Now, you’ve got to remember, in West Point everybody’s failing at something. There were some cadets for whom the IOCT was the thing that could really get in their way. Their classmates were taking time out of their busy lives to come and make sure that their friends got through the IOCT. If I could take away one thing from that experience that I wish I could bottle and put into every organization, it would be this idea that we succeed at our very best only when we help others succeed. This idea that when you're facing severe challenges or inadequacies or difficulty or risk or fear that the response is, “Let me help you.” And to create this incredible idea, which is you are never alone.

I came away from my time at West Point thinking about engaged cultures. And I drew this triangle—Tommy and I drew it on the airplane—of inspired motivations. If you could build this into your organization, these three points of this triangle. On one point at the top is the idea of service. And on the bottom right is the idea of success. And on the bottom left is the idea of growth, right? We’ve talked about all three of those: service, success, and growth. But if you could build a culture that has service to cause or purpose that you are willing to suffer for, that you are willing to sacrifice for; and that has challenge or growth in the form of BHAGs that push people and make them grow because they’re so hard; and has the idea of communal success built into the culture, the idea “What can we do to reinforce the idea that we only succeed by helping each other?”—that is how I think we build meaning. For it is impossible, in my view, to have a great life unless it is a meaningful life. And I believe it is very difficult to have a meaningful life without meaningful work. And how do we create meaning? Service, growth, communal success.

Question #5: Have you found your Hedgehog, your personal Hedgehog? In prior talks here at The Summit, I discussed the idea of an organizational Hedgehog Concept. It’s the crux idea in Good to Great. It’s the idea that by focusing on the intersection of three circles—what you're passionate about, what you can be the best in the world at, and what drives your economic or your resource engine—with great discipline in the middle of those three circles, you eventually start to get momentum in the flywheel that produces a breakthrough from good to great. But today I want to hit on the idea of the personal Hedgehog.

I’d like you to imagine living in the intersection of three circles. Top circle, man, you are passionate about it and you love to do it. When you wake up in the morning, you think to yourself, “I so hope I get a long life because there’s nothing I’d rather be doing than what I am doing.” Second, now the circle changes from best in the world to what you are encoded for, what you are made for, what you are constructed for, what you were put here for. Now, this is very different from what you might be good at. Let me illustrate the difference in my own experience.

When I went off to college, I thought I was going to be a mathematician because I was one of these kids who was good at math. So, I majored in mathematical sciences. But along the way I met those who are genetically encoded for math.

{Laughter}

I had to find a different Hedgehog. Now imagine the third circle. You have an economic engine. You can make a living and you can fund your BHAGs. Now imagine if you have all three of those. You're passionate about it and love to do it; and, man, you are constructed, you are made for it, you were put here to do it; and you have an economic engine to make a living and fund your BHAGs. You have found a Hedgehog. And when you lead out of your Hedgehog, that is part of the wellspring of the incredible, irrational endurance to persist.

I met a persistent Hedgehog in 1988. I was just thirty years old, and I had the great privilege to begin teaching a course on entrepreneurship at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. And I felt inadequate. I felt intimidated. Many of my students were more experienced than I was, smarter than I was, and I knew it. I figured I needed some help. So, I picked up the phone and out of the blue I called Steve Jobs. And I said, “Hi, you don’t know me, but I’m teaching this course on entrepreneurship, and I really want it to be about how to turn a small business into a great company, and I don’t really have any idea what I’m doing. Would you come down and guest lecture with me and my students, and do a session?” Steve, who was in my experience always gracious, agreed.

Partway into the session with my students, he made this little quip, “Well, I got booted out of my last company.” Something we should all probably experience at some point is getting fired. This was 1988. Just three years earlier he had lost control of Apple in a bitter boardroom battle. And many people wrote him off. Some people even laughed behind his back. Consider this: when there was a gathering of the five hundred supposedly most important technology leaders in Silicon Valley, he didn’t get an invitation. This is Steve Jobs. His new company NeXT wasn’t becoming the next big thing. The wonderful stories of Pixar were off in the future. They were just getting going. He was in the wilderness.

And you would think he might show some bitterness, some anger about that. I mean, I’m sure he was hurt. But he shows up. He bounced down in the middle of the classroom, sits cross-legged right in front, and says, “So, what do you want to talk about?” And we had this almost two-hour session on life and leadership and creativity and technology and building companies. And he just exuded nothing except passion and energy and intensity. This was a man in his Hedgehog. He had an unquenchable love for his work, which is why no matter what anybody said, he got up every day and he went to work every single day. And he had a passion for an idea, the idea that the most efficient animal in the world is a man on a bicycle and computers are bicycles for the mind. And he would ask, “What would change the world more?” We could make one computer one thousand times more powerful; or we could make computers small, elegantly, beautifully accessible and put them in the hands of one thousand creative people. He never lost passion for that idea. And he was encoded for it.

What if Steve Jobs had quit in 1985? What if Wendy had quit when no one would fund Teach for America early on? What if Tommy had quit at Year Four on the Dawn Wall? What if Winston Churchill had quit in 1932 when Lady Astor quipped, “Oh Churchill? He’s finished.” Not quite. True creators stay in the game. We cannot control, we cannot predict every hand we get dealt in life. That’s not entirely up to us. Sometimes you're going to get good hands and sometimes you're going to get bad hands. But if you believe that life comes down to a single hand, man, you can lose really easily. But if you see life as a series of hands, and you refuse to leave the game, and you play every hand you get, whether it’s a good hand or a bad hand, to the very best of your ability, that adds up to a huge, compounding effect.

Show of hands, how many of you somewhere along the way have at some point in life been flat out decked? I mean laying on your back looking up, decked. Yes. That’s when you have to stay in the game. It is a whole lot easier to stay in the game, of course, and to get back up every time you’re decked, which would give you a chance to grow and mature as Steve Jobs did from that young, immature entrepreneur, the harsh, peculiar genius with a thousand helpers; but he stayed in the game and he grew and he matured to become a mature company builder. But you have to be in your Hedgehog. You love to do it. You’re made to do it. You’re called to do it. So, no matter what hand you get, why would you stop?

West Point professor Michael Hennelly shared with me a remarkable vignette. When General George Catlett Marshall was about fifty-five years old, he wrote a note to a mentor lamenting that he feared that he was fast becoming too old to be of significant use, to have any future importance to the army and to his country. But he was in his Hedgehog, that of being a leader who gets things done behind the scenes without accepting a lot of credit. That was George Marshall. So, he stayed in the game. And after that note, he became the first five-star general officer in the history of the United States Army, chief of staff of the Army in World War II, a chief architect of the Allied victory, later Secretary of State known for this little thing called the Marshall Plan, and recipient of the Nobel Prize. If any of you are reaching your forties or your fifties or your sixties or beyond, and wondering, “Am I fast becoming too old to be of any use?” I would just like to simply suggest that real creative impact accelerates, if you choose, after fifty.

Male:  Amen!

{Laughter and applause}

Jim Collins:  Wonderful thing to do on a fiftieth or sixtieth birthday is to simply say, “Nice start!”

{Laughter}

Question #6: Will you build your unit, your minibus, into a pocket of greatness? One thing I gained greater appreciation for at West Point is that great leadership at the top doesn’t amount to very much without exceptional leadership at the unit level. This is the cellular structure. This is where great things get done. When I look at how the good-to-great CEOs became CEO, they did it by not focusing on their career. They focused on their unit of responsibility.

At every stage of their career, whatever they were running, whether it be a little accounting department or whether it be a manufacturing facility, controllership, they built their unit into a pocket of greatness. That is why they were tapped. Focus on your unit, not on your career. Every responsibility you get, make it a pocket of greatness. If you do that, you are more likely to die of indigestion from too much responsibility than starvation from too little. And focusing on your unit means above all being a First Who leader rather than a First What leader. And that the #1 executive skill for building a pocket of greatness of any size is figuring out who should be in the key seats on the bus, to be rigorous about your people decisions. And we’ve spoken about this before, but it also means not being ruthless. Be rigorous, not ruthless. That means taking care of your people. For in the end, life is people.

One of our greatest living military leaders, a four-star, told me a story of how early in his career after graduating from West Point, he worried a lot about promotions and how, perhaps, he might not be advancing as fast as he had hoped. Then he had an epiphany, and he changed his focus from taking care of his career to taking care of his people. And at that point, he said, everything changed. “They would not let me fail.” Life is people.

A few decades ago, a young girl sat dejected after a cross-country running meet where she ran on the boys’ team because, amazingly, there was no girls’ team. And she had had a bad race. Her cross-country coach and physics teacher, Roger Briggs, walked over and gave her a handwritten note, some words of encouragement that ended with, “Your time will come.” That high school girl became my wife of now thirty-five years. The thing I am most proud of in my life is my marriage. Joanne Ernst.

{Applause}

When we were going through her journals recently for an award she was going to receive, I noticed this piece of paper; she still carries around that handwritten note from four decades ago. If you ever wonder about the value of an expression of support and kindness—four decades. Her time did come. She went on to become world champion, in fact, winning the Hawaii IRONMAN Triathlon World Championship in 1985. Despite an epic battle with a running injury that limited her run training to just seventeen miles a week, sixteen miles into the marathon with ten miles to go that caught up with her; and with a ten-minute lead, she started losing a minute a mile. Do the math.

{Laughter}

With three miles to go, she had to literally stop and pound on her quadriceps and plead, “Let me run.” And the race shifted to a race in which she wanted to finish knowing she couldn’t have run a step faster. She won a race lasting more than ten hours by a mere ninety-three seconds. And it did not make her happy.

{Laughter}

It did not give her meaning because it was just an individual achievement. “I won the IRONMAN.”

In the great circle of life ten years after that, we returned to our hometown of Boulder, Colorado, and she got a call from her former high school cross-country coach and physics teacher, Roger Briggs, who said, “We have a need for a high school boys’ and girls’ cross-country and track coach. Would you take the job?”

She returned to that school, threw herself into the kids’ program, and built a dynasty with four state championships, boys’ and girls’, with no stars. She did it by building a culture in which the kids are not running for themselves; they are running for each other. And when you are suffering at the end of the race, you are not running for you. And she said, “I have found something that makes me happy and gives me meaning.” Investing in the kids. Building a program. Showing them what’s possible. Changing their lives.

The greatest leaders and people I have known and studied, they find a way to make a contribution, have a distinctive impact on people—on real-live flesh-and-blood people. And so, I close with the seventh question, THE question “How will you change the lives of others?” It might be a lot of people or just a few, but how will some people’s lives be better and different because you were here on this earth? Life is people. And I hope you take advantage to be useful.

I end where I began. I am grateful. It has been my tremendous privilege to be back here at The Summit, to be here with all of you to share a little of what I have learned. Thank you very much.

{Applause}