Drew Buscareno runs a homeless shelter in South Bend, Ind., that takes care of 200 people a day. John Hess is chief executive of Amerada Hess Co., an energy company with $13 billion a year in sales. When either of them needs a quick pick-me-up, they turn to the same source: the writings of corporate strategist Jim Collins.

In a cynical, scandal-ridden age, Mr. Collins has become the business elite's version of Norman Rockwell or Mister Rogers. He makes everything safe and simple again. In his books and speeches, Mr. Collins champions such old-fashioned virtues as humility, patience and perseverance. Instead of saluting well-known billionaires in New York or Silicon Valley, he makes heroes out of little-known people who built Middle America companies in the 1970s and 1980s. "They will sell the mills or fire their brother if that's what it takes to make the company great," Mr. Collins declares.

A few years ago, Mr. Collins might have seemed hopelessly out of step with a go-go economy. For today's beleaguered bosses, though, a bedtime dose of Jim Collins has become irresistible. Mr. Collins's two most recent books, "Built to Last" and "Good to Great," each have sold more than one million copies. Years after their launch, they keep marching ahead on bestseller lists.

Strikingly, the 45-year-old Mr. Collins hasn't amounted to much as a company man himself. He worked briefly at Hewlett-Packard Co. in the 1980s but by his own account irritated his bosses. He made brief stabs at running a start-up business and being a sports agent, to no avail. He lasted a little longer as a junior faculty member at Stanford business school in the early 1990s, only to be told his contract wouldn't be renewed. Now he has set up shop by himself in Boulder, Colo., in an overhauled old school building that once housed his first-grade classroom.

Yet Mr. Collins's stubbornness and quirky career just add to his appeal. "I was captivated by him," Mr. Hess says. "He really gets you excited about your potential to achieve greatness." The Amerada Hess CEO has given copies of Mr. Collins's books to 150 of his company's top managers and has urged them to attend Mr. Collins's speeches -- a sign of the evangelical enthusiasm that is making "Good to Great" a much-envied blockbuster in business publishing.

For many CEOs, Mr. Collins's books don't just make them feel good. They also provide step-by-step advice for leaders who want to be recognized as humble, dedicated champions of progress. Bitterly defensive about the deteriorating public image of big business, bosses frequently embrace the homespun phrases and jargon of the Collins books as ways to regain their good standing.

At VeriSign Corp., a Silicon Valley Internet-services company, CEO Stratton Sclavos urges employees to "push the flywheel," a bit of Collins imagery that evokes mill workers' diligence a century ago. Similarly, Mr. Sclavos champions BHAGs, or "big hairy audacious goals," another Collins phrase that is meant to shake middle managers out of their complacency.

"I've read maybe five management books in my 21-year career," Mr. Sclavos says, "and the other four left me uninspired. But I was completely enthralled with the amount of data that Jim gathered for 'Good to Great,' and with the differences between the companies that made it -- and the ones that didn't." VeriSign's own stock performance has been choppy the past two years, but Mr. Sclavos says he feels his company is on the right track.

The grandson of a test pilot and the son of an artist, Mr. Collins grew up in Colorado. As a teenage rock climber in the 1970s, he made daredevil ascents in the Rockies and kept quiet about knot-tying blunders that nearly killed him. Later he decided that wild goals must be paired with fastidious planning and focus. "You can't understand me if you don't understand rock climbing," says Mr. Collins, who still climbs.

Business didn't interest him until after he graduated from Stanford University in 1980 and was hired at McKinsey & Co. to help gather data for "In Search of Excellence," which became a best-selling strategy book. Assigned to study Boeing Co., he became spellbound by the men who built the first 707s. "I was so excited," he recalls. "I used to point out Boeing jets to my friends any time one flew by."

After a stint in computer marketing at Hewlett-Packard, Mr. Collins created a software company to help athletes monitor workouts. It didn't last. He also tried his luck as a sports agent representing his wife, Joanne Ernst. She was the fastest woman in Hawaii's Ironman triathlon in 1985, attracting sponsorships from Nike, Bud Light and Speedo. When she later wrecked her knee, Mr. Collins needed a new gig.

In 1988, he joined the Stanford business-school faculty as a lecturer, earning about $30,000 a year. He co-wrote "Built to Last" with Stanford Prof. Jerry Porras and connected well with students, winning several teaching awards. Tenured professors were chillier, especially when Mr. Collins publicly criticized the way finance was being taught.

In 1995, Mr. Collins returned to Boulder to restart his career. He hired local business students to study why some companies with decades of listless stock-market performance later raced ahead, while others never improved. Mr. Collins says he spent $500,000 of his money on the project before seeking a publisher. Friends say he wanted to show he could surpass anything Stanford's professors were doing in terms of academic rigor. He doesn't dispute that.

"None of us knew exactly what we were doing," recalls Lane Hornung, one of the researchers. Mr. Collins added to the weirdness by urging his researchers to be as inquisitive as one of his favorite childhood characters, Curious George. He periodically called his aides chimps. Briefings were called "chimposiums." Researchers sometimes threw plastic bananas at one another in the midst of arguments.

Mr. Collins and his aides culled data on 1,435 companies and decided 11 epitomized the transformations that intrigued them. They also found their most memorable character: the late Darwin Smith, who headed Kimberly-Clark from 1971 to 1991. Mr. Smith embodied the blend of humility and fierce resolve that Mr. Collins decided to call Level 5 Leadership.

It didn't matter that Mr. Smith's career was lost in obscurity, or that this Neenah, Wis., CEO had been a shy fellow with thick glasses and ill-fitting suits. Those apparent shortcomings made him all the more appealing. Mr. Smith was positioned as an Abe Lincoln-like hero whose life showed that success was within anyone's grasp.

In the months after Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Collins's book became balm for many prominent people. On Oct. 26, 2001, the book debuted at No. 3 on The Wall Street Journal's list of best-selling business books, and it has been on the list ever since.

Critics note that some of the book's lionized companies, such as Fannie Mae and Circuit City Stores Inc. aren't doing well now. Mr. Collins responds: "What would you say about the UCLA basketball teams under John Wooden? They put together a nine-year winning record that will probably never be equaled. You can learn a lot about sports coaching from those teams. How they're doing today doesn't negate that. It's the same with the companies we study."

Right now, Mr. Collins is studying young companies that go public. He wants to know what distinguishes the likes of Intel Corp., though he isn't sure the answers will be worth a book.

He has higher hopes for a different project: analyzing why some social institutions go on to greatness, while others don't. That will be much harder than assessing companies, he acknowledges, because there is nothing as simple as stock-market performance to follow. It can be maddeningly difficult to define the success of a hospital, summer camp or city by any measurable standards. But he says those obstacles just add to the new project's allure.

"I remember going for a walk with Jim in downtown San Francisco one time," says William Lazier, a Stanford lecturer. "Jim was so busy talking that he nearly got run over by a bus while he was crossing the street. His wife and I had to grab him and pull him away from traffic. 'I told him: 'Jim, we don't want you to get hit.'

"He replied: 'Oh, Bill, I won't get hit. I've got so much to do!' "