This speech by Jim Collins for The Drucker Institute talks about The Stockdale Paradox, which is rooted in the story of Admiral James Stockdale, who was the highest-ranking United States military officer in the “Hanoi Hilton” prisoner-of-war camp during the height of the Vietnam War. Tortured over twenty times during his eight-year imprisonment, Stockdale lived out the war without any prisoner’s rights, no set release date, and no certainty as to whether he would even survive to see his family again. How? How does someone deal with the facts of their situation when there’s seemingly no reason to hope for a happy ending?
We can all endure anything if we know it’s going to come to an end, but what if you don’t know IF it’s ever going to come to an end, and you certainly don’t know when? – Jim Collins
Transcript:
I would like to give you a way of thinking that has been enormously helpful to me that came from the Good to Great research for dealing with great difficulty. It was what we came to call the Stockdale Paradox.
The Stockdale Paradox was taught to us when we were doing the Good to Great research, we were trying to make sense of the CEOs, and in doing that, I just by chance happened to get to know Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was the highest ranking military officer in the Hanoi Hilton, shot down in 1967, and was there till 1974.
They could pull him out at any time and torture him, and they did. He was tortured over 20 times. I had the privilege to get to know Admiral Stockdale, and we were going to The Faculty Club one day and I had read his book In Love and War, which was written in alternating chapters by himself and his wife about their years when he was in the camp.
I got depressed reading the book because it seemed so bleak, it seemed so difficult. It seemed, you know, like we can all endure anything if we know it’s going to come to an end and we know when. But what if you don’t know if it’s ever going to come to an end? And you certainly don’t know when.
So I asked Admiral Stockdale how he dealt with that. He said, “You have to realize I never got depressed because I never ever wavered in my faith that not only I would get out, but I would turn being in the camp into the defining event of my life—that in retrospect I would not trade.”
Later when we were up the hill, I asked him, “I said, Admiral Stockdale, who didn’t make it out as strong as you?” And he said, “Easy, it was the optimists.”
I said, “The optimists? You sounded optimistic.” He said, “No, I was not optimistic. I never wavered in my faith that I would prevail in the end, but I was not optimistic.”
I said, “What’s the difference?”
“Oh, the optimists always thought we’d be out by Christmas. Of course, Christmas would come and it would go, and then we were going to be out by Easter and Thanksgiving, and then Christmas would come again, and they died of a broken heart.”
That’s when Admiral Stockdale grabbed me by the shoulders and said, “This is what I learned: when you’re facing, when you’re imprisoned by great calamity, by great difficulty, by great uncertainty, you have to, on the one hand, never confuse the need for unwavering faith that you will find a way to prevail in the end with, on the other hand, the discipline to confront the most brutal facts we actually face.”
“And we’re not getting out of here by Christmas.”
Thank you Jim Collins for your thought-provoking speech and thank you to the Drucker Institute for amplifying his message by creating this video. This content was not created by Boulder Crest Foundation or our partners. It has been added to our PTG Resource Library given the value it provides for our PTG community.
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