Decision making

Jim Collins on Decision Making

When he's not out scaling mountains (he's a world-class rock climber), author Jim Collin seats, drinks, and sleeps business. So when FORTUNE senior writer Jerry Useem (a sometime Collins collaborator) asked him to discuss the art of decision-making, he got so into the idea that he pored over 14.years of research and interviews he had amassed in the course of writing his business blockbusters Built to Last and Good to Great. Then, in a series of conversations, he and Useem explored the intriguing insights he had gleaned from analyzing the processes behind key decisions in business history. For example, lasting excellence in corporations seems to stem less from decisions about strategy than decisions about people, and seeking consensus is not the way to make the tough calls. Here are edited highlights of their talks.

What were the surprises when you reexamined your research through the lens of decision-making?

We tend to think that decisions are very much about "what." But when I look at my research notes and I look at interview transcripts from the executives we've interviewed, one theme that comes through is that their greatest decisions were not "what" but "who." They were people decisions.