In Good to Great, Jim Collins writes about Admiral Jim Stockdale, who was captured by the enemy during the Vietnam War. He was "the highest-ranking United States military officer in the 'Hanoi Hilton' prisoner-of-war camp…. Tortured over 20 times during his eight-year imprisonment from 1965 to 1973, 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. He shouldered the burden of command, doing everything he could to create conditions that would increase the number of prisoners who would survive unbroken, while fighting an internal war against his captors and their attempts to use the prisoners for propaganda.

"At one point, he beat himself with a stool and cut himself with a razor, deliberately disfiguring himself, so he could not be put on videotape as an example of a 'well-treated prisoner.' He exchanged secret intelligence information with his wife through their letters, knowing that discovery would mean more torture and perhaps death."

Collins had the chance to meet Stockdale, who now walks with a limp because "his stiff leg never fully recovered from the repeated torture." Collins asked Stockdale how he could deal with the uncertainty of his fate and the brutality of his captors when he did not know the end of the story.

"'I never lost faith in the end of the story,' he said. 'I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.'"