As we visited with remarkable people all over the world, we were struck over and over again by the notion that no one does anything that matters alone. This book is no exception. We’re grateful for all the talented people who made this journey possible for us. They have all been great partners and many have become good friends. Wharton School Publishing Publisher Tim Moore brought us the resources of the world’s largest publisher, Pearson Education, and generously provided valuable coaching and advice.

Equally important, he made a great team available for Success Built to Last. We give special thanks to Amy Neidlinger (marketing manager), Gina Kanouse (managing editor), Christy Hackerd (project editor), Sarah Kearns (copy editor), Sheri Cain (proofreader), Lisa Stumpf (indexer), Gloria Schurick (senior compositor), Chuti Prasertsith (cover designer), Dan Uhrig (manufacturing buyer), and Susie Abraham (editorial assistant). Russ Hall (development editor) helped us make our intentions in the text crisper, sharper, and livelier, and we look forward to collaborating on many more adventures.

We are grateful to Jim Collins, coauthor of Built to Last, whose continuing passion to contribute to leadership and management development, through learning and teaching, further inspired and informed this work.

Thanks also to Dean Robert Joss and the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University—the epicenter of our efforts—along with Professor Cliff Nass of the Stanford School of Humanities, for their encouragement to create an interdisciplinary book project that spans the business and the social sciences worlds.

Professor Jerry Wind at The Wharton School gave us expert guidance and fresh perspective on our secondary research. This made it possible to conduct a World Success Survey with a world-class team under the leadership of the Dr. Howard Moskowitz, whose research at Harvard evolved into a career as one of the leading scientists in his field. The i-Novation division of Moskowitz Jacobs included an amazingly talented crew of researchers, including Barbara Itty, Rachel Katz, Chris Pomponi, and Alex Gofman. As we turned the survey into prose, Moskowitz added the technical writing skills and ideas of Charles Loesch, director of Marketing Research at FiSite Research.

We are indebted to Chuck Schwab for making it possible for Mark Thompson to create the Schwab CEO Series and to engage in the World Economic Forum and the Republican and Democratic national conventions. These events made this project inevitable and the subject of success even more irresistible.

We are grateful for the talents of Richard Wilson, who produced many of these interviews with Mark and who, along with leadership expert Terry Pearce, inspired him to expand this adventure to engage with remarkable people from so many different fields, faiths, and walks of life.

Bonita Thompson, our research director, poured through hundreds of hours of digital recordings and hundreds of pages of transcripts. Her passionate and tireless data analysis yielded ideas as diverse as the cause has charisma and the identification of the three circles, Meaning, Thought, and Action. Her diverse background—embracing behavioral psychology, human resources, information systems, statistical analysis, and business—contributed rich context and methodology to the book’s structure.

Joan Emery provided us with feedback about what made a difference (and what didn’t) in this manuscript based on her great community network, along with her decades of coaching individuals and teams to find their greater potential in nonprofit and corporate settings. Joan also discovered that the ideas and practices set forth in this book not only serve critical issues that impact careers and organizations, but also families and teenagers for whom this work has become a valuable resource.

We want to thank Frank Patitucci for introducing Stewart Emery to Jerry Porras, and Denise Thomas for introducing Stewart to Mark Thompson. Without these serendipitous events, this book would not have been written. Thank you to Professor Klaus Schwab, Frances Hesselbein, Marshall Goldsmith, Jack Canfield, Dave Pottruck, Davia Nelson, Baylee DeCastro, Jason Jennings, Senator John McCain, President Jimmy Carter, Visa’s Susanne Lyons, and the New York Stock Exchange’s Carie Crandall for so many important introductions and illuminating questions that informed our inquiry.

We feel blessed and grateful to have so many remarkable people participate in these interviews over the past decade, from those who toil out of the limelight in communities of need, such as Norma Hotaling and Brother David SteindlRast, to those who are household names on very different journeys, such as Richard Branson, Steve Forbes, Maya Angelou, Herb Kelleher, Nelson Mandela, and The Dalai Lama. (A summary of participants can be found in the biographical index at the end of this book, and more information is available at www.SuccessBuiltToLast.com.)

We want to thank everyone we have had the privilege to meet and know in creating this work. We have been forever changed by your insights. We have only just begun.