How Bill Wilson Cofounded Alcoholics Anonymous and Created a Lasting Social Movement

BRIAN KENNY: With nearly $470 billion in liquor sales in 2023, it’s hard to fathom that there was a time when the sale of alcohol was banned in the U.S. The prohibition movement which led to the nationwide alcohol ban from 1920 to 1933 was driven by a combination of social, religious, political, and economic forces. At first, prohibition drastically reduced drinking and alcoholism. But within a few years, it contributed to different patterns of riskier underground drinking with more concentrated alcohol. Following prohibition, rates of alcohol abuse and dependence increased significantly, prompting the American Medical Association in 1956 to officially declare alcoholism a disease. Today, about 29 million people over the age of 12 suffer from alcohol use disorder, with about two-and-a-half million actively participating in recovery. For them, progress happens one step at a time. Today on Cold Call, we welcome Professor Bob Simons to discuss the case “Bill Wilson: Changing the World.” I’m your host Brian Kenny and you’re listening to Cold Call on the HBR Podcast Network.

Professor Bob Simons is an expert on strategy and the creator of the course Changing the World: Life Choices of Influential Leaders. That’s perfectly appropriate for what we’re going to talk about today. Bob, welcome back.

ROBERT SIMONS: Hi, Brian. Good morning. Great to be here.

BRIAN KENNY: We were just chatting before we went live here about we’ve had you on a few times now to talk about cases from this course. We discussed Muhammad Ali. We discussed Madame Curie. Those are still two of our most popular episodes. Listeners, you can find those if you look back in the catalog.

Today’s case, for me, was in some ways almost more remarkable than that because the person that we’re going to talk about today didn’t have the same sort of fanfare that Muhammad Ali had and Madame Curie had. He’s not a household name, but his story is absolutely remarkable and compelling. Thank you for writing it and thank you for being here to talk about it.

ROBERT SIMONS: My pleasure. I look forward to our discussion of a figure that many, many people don’t know, but has had a huge impact on the world.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. I think people are probably going to look him up, even after we’re done here. Let me ask you to start by telling us what drew you to Bill Wilson’s story? I should say, because I didn’t really say it explicitly in the introduction, but Bill Wilson is the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous.

ROBERT SIMONS: Yes.

BRIAN KENNY: Alcoholism is something that touches almost everybody’s life in some way so this is a person they need to know about. What drew you to his story and what made him a compelling figure for a case?

ROBERT SIMONS: Brian, as you know, the course that I teach with the modest title of Changing the World, we try to study people who have made a significant impact in the world, and try to understand the choices they made in their lives that allowed them to rise to positions of prominence. Our students I think are quite captivated by learning about these people.

We, as a matter of policy, went back and tried to look at analyses of the most important people in history. For example, we went back to Time Magazine or Life Magazine, the 100 Most Important People of the 20th Century. Icons of the 20th Century, 100 People Who Changed the World. These are the titles of the kind of lists we examined. In every one of those lists, Bill Wilson’s name was prominent. Although if you asked, I suspect, the man on the street who Bill Wilson was, most people would not know the name.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, yeah. I thought it was remarkable, in the beginning of the case, you talk about how he knew he was destined for greatness. In the beginning of the case you’re like, “Okay, well, maybe he is.” But then as you read the case you think, “Man, this guy is about as far from greatness as it gets.”

ROBERT SIMONS: Yes.

BRIAN KENNY: How do you think he was able to have that premonition about himself and then eventually live up to it?

ROBERT SIMONS: Well, it’s a very interesting question because he was a tormented soul on many dimensions, as you know reading the case study, through his life. But he was, on the other hand, I think a man of great potential. He was highly intelligent. He had natural ability, charisma. He was very hard-working. He did very well in school after he got over his initial self-doubts. I do think this is an issue and our students wrestle with this, if you believe in fate or if you believe in God, you could actually think that he really may have been chosen or predestined to do what he did in the world. Certainly, his wife Lois, who we’ll talk about, and Bill himself really did feel through his life and his early struggles that, at the end of the day, he really was going to make a difference in the world.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, Lois is a really remarkable person. We will talk more about her, but she stood by his side through thick and thin, for sure. Bill had a really tough early childhood, a really tough upbringing. Can you maybe describe that for us a little bit?

ROBERT SIMONS: This is very sobering for our students. He was born, small town in Vermont. His parents at an early age decided that they did not want either him or his sister. They literally dropped the two kids off at the grandparent’s house, left them on the doorstep, and drove away. Bill didn’t see his father for 10 years. His mother moved to Boston, and made it very clear to Bill that they weren’t interested in seeing him again and had no attachment to him whatsoever.

I think this sowed just tremendous self-doubt, insecurity in him as a young man. Later in life, he suffered from depression. It’s hard to know to what extent this came. I do think in many ways, it did maybe create a sense of empathy in him for the struggles that other people were going through.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, yeah. We’ve talked in some of the other cases that we’ve discussed. Also, I did a case about Martin Luther King with Bill George. Bill talks about crucible moments. I feel like many of your cases have crucible moments that are wedged in there. For Bill, this came out in the form of almost a vision that he had, that he calls a “hot flash.”

ROBERT SIMONS: Yes.

BRIAN KENNY: Can you describe that?

ROBERT SIMONS: Well, he was basically sent to the hospital, Townsend Hospital, one, two, three, four separate times in absolute broken down alcohol state. He was on the verge of being committed to an asylum for the rest of his life. He just thought he could not be saved. Apparently, he said that his room was overtaken. He asked, he said, “If there’s a God, let him show himself now.” His friend had advised him, who had basically fought his way through alcoholism. This friend Thatcher had advised him that he should reach out for help. Bill claims that a white light completely engulfed the room and he felt like he was standing on the top of a mountain, wind was flowing by him. He emerged from that room literally a changed man.

After that moment, he never drank again. People read different things into that story. Certainly, he was taking hallucinogens as part of his recovery, that may have contributed. But it depends what your beliefs are as to whether this could really be some kind of divine intervention.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. This follows on years and years of momentary recoveries and relapses.

ROBERT SIMONS: Yes.

BRIAN KENNY: Recoveries and relapses.

ROBERT SIMONS: Yes, yes. Over, and over, and over again. Promising to do better, failing. Promising to do better and failing. He would disappear for days on end with these drunken binges. He lost every job he ever held. He had had great promise, accumulated wealth, he lost it all. He lost everything. Was just at the absolutely bottom of where he could be in life, it was just an absolute train wreck.

BRIAN KENNY: This may sound familiar to some people who are listening who have loved ones who have experienced this illness. Let’s talk about Lois for a minute. Can you maybe just describe their relationship?

ROBERT SIMONS: Lois is the unsung hero in this story.

BRIAN KENNY: For sure.

ROBERT SIMONS: If it had not been for Lois, there would be no Alcoholics Anonymous today. She, in the early years, supported him. He studied to go to law school and actually completed the course. But she had to get him up in the morning, and dress him, and clean him up. She worked odd jobs, and worked at Macy’s and stores, trying to earn enough money to keep the family afloat. She discovered the only way they could survive was she gave him an allowance. She saved every penny she possibly could, but he again would be drinking. She stood by him, brought him back to Vermont, tried to dry him out again, and again, and again. Then after his epiphany if you like, as you describe it, she then was at his side as he founded the early chapters of Alcoholics Anonymous. And really was a co-partner in that entire endeavor, although she doesn’t get the credits for doing so.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Let’s talk about Alcoholics Anonymous. That’s what he is known for having established. Can you maybe describe a little bit, the thought process that he had and the way that he set it up? He made some very important decisions early on in the structure of that program.

ROBERT SIMONS: Well, as he tried to figure out how to build on early successes he had learned from the Oxford Group that brought people together to discuss their problems and was more oriented to God. It’s important to understand that Bill Wilson was an atheist. He did not actually believe in God himself. He decided that the important critical piece was to get people who had experienced the same thing as him, alcoholics together to talk to each other. There was no substitute for this. Specifically, trying to find people who had, I won’t say recovered, but had find a way to overcome their illness, and have those people act as what he came to call sponsors.

As he called it, “all you need to have for an AA meeting is two drunks and God.” He basically used this to leverage the organization where people would gather together in meetings and try to share each other their problems, the difficulties they were trying to overcome. And with some kind of self-supporting structure, have someone you could turn to in moments of temptation and crisis.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. And importantly, every meeting begins with people acknowledging that they’re an alcoholic.

ROBERT SIMONS: Yes. As people will know, you’ve seen this in many movies I’m sure.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah.

ROBERT SIMONS: The standing up, “My name is Bill Wilson and I’m an alcoholic.”

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah.

ROBERT SIMONS: That’s the opening line.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Bill had the opportunity after he had started Alcoholics Anonymous to actually earn a living with a program like that. He opted not to do that. Here’s a guy who has not been able to hold onto a job, a paying job, for pretty much his entire adult life and he turns down the opportunity to get paid for doing what he’s doing already.

ROBERT SIMONS: Yes. This is a very interesting insight I think into his reasoning. What you see again and again is the people we study in the Changing the World course, at some point in their life, they shift from personal ambition to mission. For Bill, as he was starting to build Alcoholic Anonymous, one of the underlying principles was that there would be no hierarchy, no bosses, everyone would be equal. As you mentioned, he was offered the job of going back to Townsend Hospital to work with alcoholics. This would be a paid position. It was very attractive because he was in a huge amount of debt as a result of failed investments. He had no livelihood to support himself. On the face of it, this was a very, very attractive opportunity. He convened a meeting of his AA friends and he put it to them, and they were adamant that he not accept the position because they felt that this would basically pull him away from the group, he would not be equal to them. He basically respected their decision and turned down the offer.

BRIAN KENNY: You mentioned earlier that he was a smart guy, he had a good business sensibility about him. That gets lost a little bit in the ebb-and-flow of his life-

ROBERT SIMONS: Yes.

BRIAN KENNY: … and the founding of AA. Maybe you can talk a little bit about his business acumen and how that played into his ability to start a successful organization in AA?

ROBERT SIMONS: Yeah. Well, Bill was amazingly entrepreneurial and I guess this does play through into his building AA. This was coming out of the roaring ’20s and everyone was making giddy money on the stock market. It just was gambling, it was going up, up, up, and everyone was getting rich. Bill had the idea that this didn’t seem right and he thought that he could actually visit companies. Rather than just gamble in the stock market, he could actually visit the operations of companies to try to identify which ones would be good investments. He was really the first financial analyst in the country to do this. He was a vanguard for what became an industry.

He would visit a plant, General Electric plant in upstate New York for example. And he would buy one share of the company stock. He’d arrived at the door and introduce himself. He’d have the management walk him around the facility and share with him his strategy. Then from that, he would write up position papers or investment papers, giving people advice. He was selling that advice and doing very, very well. He made just a ton of money doing this. But again, this entrepreneurial spirit comes through very, very early in his life.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. The case, to my mind, was also fraught with all these tensions because Bill is a deeply conflicted person. He has this business acumen. At some point in his life, he has the epiphany where he turns things around. But even after that, still, he had a lot of flaws.

ROBERT SIMONS: There’s no question that that is a huge understatement. He was a womanizer. Basically, he was not reliable on many, many dimensions. His poor wife, Lois, people are in such pain for her.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah.

ROBERT SIMONS: He was a very, very flawed individual. Of course, at the root of this was his dependence on alcohol, which as you said earlier, cost him every position, every ounce of respect and money that he had.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Another tenet of Alcoholics Anonymous of course, I mentioned this, one step at a time. There’s 12 steps to the program.

ROBERT SIMONS: Yes.

BRIAN KENNY: You don’t have to go through all of them, but if you can talk about how that’s a good grounding mechanism for the way he established the program.

ROBERT SIMONS: Well, I think the lesson in the 12 steps and the 12 traditions really is the importance of having foundational principles that really underpin any organization and don’t change over time. If you think of the 12 steps, for example it talks about higher purpose. It talks about your effect on other people. It talks about taking a personal inventory of your faults. The importance of these steps is they are there to guide you in tough decisions. As an individual, when I have to make a tough decision, these 12 steps are there.

The same is true for the organization, where he developed 12 traditions and talked about the primary purpose of the organization. The organizing principles that they would follow. And importantly, set very clear boundaries in terms of what the organization would not do. Again, these offer very important guidance when you’re faced with tough decisions, either as an individual or as an organization.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, I thought that there were certainly leadership lessons to be drawn from the 12 steps. One of which is to understand how other people perceive you. You ask, “What are three things that you like about me? What are three things you don’t like about me?” Just the thought of going through that exercise for me makes me feel a little hesitant. I’m not sure I want to know.

ROBERT SIMONS: I know, I know. That’s exactly right.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah.

ROBERT SIMONS: He said to people they have to do a moral inventory. They have to reach out to people that are affected. They have to understand they’ve got to give up their power over themselves and really put yourself in the hands … He was very careful how he used these words. He says, “God as you understand him.”

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah.

ROBERT SIMONS: There was no sense of preferencing or privileging any particular religion or view of God, but there was this sense that there was a higher power that you have to acknowledge.

BRIAN KENNY: Right. Lots of acts of humility there. One of the greatest acts of humility that any founder encounters is at some point, handing the reigns of their organization over to others. How did that work out for Bill?

ROBERT SIMONS: Well, it’s I guess a little bit humorous on one level, because I think at the back of his mind, he wanted to be sure that no one like him could ever run the organization because of the all the personal failings he had.

BRIAN KENNY: Sure, yeah.

ROBERT SIMONS: He did hand it over to a board. But again, he built an organization that was extraordinarily decentralized. Back to this idea of two drunks and God, this notion of the local chapters determining their own direction and fate. He put together an organization with a central office, but very, very minimal. No top-down direction, no authority from the center, everything was basically decentralized to the chapters.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. We haven’t talked about the scale and scope of AA today, but it’s in the millions and it’s global.

ROBERT SIMONS: Well, that’s right. I looked back and it’s over 150 countries. This was an older piece I looked at. I know there are more than two million active members today. I’m suspecting the number of people that have been helped by Alcoholics Anonymous since its founding would reaching into the tens of millions.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, yeah. Not to mention the loved ones, and families, and supporters of these people because there are analog organizations that do the same thing for those folks.

ROBERT SIMONS: Absolutely right. Lois, in fact, was one of the founders of one of those organizations focusing on families of alcoholics later in life.

BRIAN KENNY: That sounds very apropos, doesn’t it?

ROBERT SIMONS: Yes.

BRIAN KENNY: I’m just curious, your take on what Bill would think today if he was around and he saw how this thing had grown. Would this have been success in his eyes?

ROBERT SIMONS: I think yes. I think he would be pleased with the reach, the number, the scope of the organization. I do want to remember as well, this notion of the humility he brought to this. Everything being anonymous I think was a very big part of his success story.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. I’ve asked you in each of the other times that we’ve talked about cases from your course whether or not you think these are people who changed the world in your, as you said, your very modest goal for the course. Did he change the world?

ROBERT SIMONS: I think the answer is yes. You can go back before Bill Wilson, people saw alcoholism as a moral failing.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah.

ROBERT SIMONS: I think he really did help people understand that it is in fact a disease. I do think he pushed very hard on the importance of putting principles before personalities. This is why he drove the notion of anonymity so strongly into what he did. I think that his ability to give people hope. All of us know, I play a clip in class where talking about everybody knows an alcoholic. Someone who works for you, a relative, everybody knows someone who’s an alcoholic. I think Bill gave all those people in the world and their families some sense of hope that there was a possibility for recovery and for a productive life.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, yeah. We watch the way that alcoholics are depicted in popular media, in movies, and in television shows. It’s often a comical character. The uncle who overdoes it a Thanksgiving, that kind of thing. But I think deep down, we all know that this is a really tragic illness. It’s an illness that destroys families and it can really tax society in difficult ways. For him to be able to call attention to it in that way, to me seems like a world-changing achievement.

ROBERT SIMONS: No, I think that’s right. The interesting thing is everyone else we study in the course is famous.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah.

ROBERT SIMONS: Every name, you will know. From Walt Disney to Mahatma Gandhi, you can go down the list. Every time I teach this case study I’ll ask students, “How many people have heard of Bill Wilson?” With very few exceptions, nobody has.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah.

ROBERT SIMONS: It’s hard to think of someone who’s had more of an impact on the world today in terms of people he’s helping today than Bill, but he chose very carefully to always be anonymous. That’s one of the foundational principles of his organization, trying to keep that.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. I have the case in front of me. I thought it was really interesting, the way you started it out, because you have a series of questions. I’ll just read a few of them. “I was one of the first financial analysts to visit company factories to help investors decide if a company’s stock is worth anything. I had a vision, a hot flash that took me to the top of a mountain, swirled around me and freed my mind. A Hollywood film was made about my life. Who am I?” I thought that was a really provocative way to start the case off.

You may have already answered it with your last two responses, but I’ll ask you anyway. If there’s one thing you want people to remember about Bill Wilson and this case, what would it be?

ROBERT SIMONS: I would think it was the power that one individual has to drive change in the world. I think often, especially in today’s society with influencers and social media, we feel we have to increase our fame to have an impact. But here’s somebody who, by design, kept himself in the shadows, made sure the focus was not on him, but on the recovery of others. This notion of finding purpose, a way to lift up the lives of others, I think was just tremendously important for Bill Wilson and it’s something all of us I think can remember.

BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. Bob, this was great. Thank you for joining me on Cold Call.

ROBERT SIMONS: Brian, thank you for asking me. A pleasure.

BRIAN KENNY: If you enjoy Cold Call, you might like our other podcasts After Hours, Climate Rising, Deep Purpose, IdeaCast, Managing the Future of Work, Sky Deck, Think Big, Buy Small, and Women at Work. Find them on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you could take a minute to rate and review us, we’d be grateful. If you have any suggestions or just want to say hello, email us at coldcall@hbs.edu. Thanks again for joining us. I’m your host Brian Kenny and you’ve been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School and part of the HBR Podcast Network.