How Bill Wilson Cofounded Alcoholics Anonymous and Created a Lasting Social Movement
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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 dependency 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 2.5 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 Kenney, 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. And that's perfectly appropriate for what we're going to talk about today. Bob, welcome back. Hi, Brian. Good morning. Great to be here. We were just chatting before we went live here about the 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. So listeners, you can find those if you look back in the catalog. But 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. So thank you for writing it, and thank you for being here to talk about it.

My pleasure. Look forward to our discussion of a figure that many, many people don't know, but has had a huge impact on the world. Yeah, and I think people are going to really probably look him up even after we're done here. But let me ask you to start by telling us what drew you to Bill Wilson's story. And I should say, because I didn't really say it explicitly in the introduction, but Bill Wilson is the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous. Yes. And alcoholism is something that...

that touches almost everybody's life in some way. So this is a person they need to know about. But what drew you to his story and what made him a compelling figure for a case? So, 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. And our students, I think, are quite captivated by learning about these people. And we, as a matter of policy, went back and tried to look at

at analyses of the most important people in history. So, 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. And 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. Yeah, yeah.

I thought it was remarkable in the beginning of the case, he talks about how he knew he was destined for greatness. And that, when you, 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. Yes. How do you think he was able to sort of have that premonition about himself and then eventually live up to it? 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 hardworking. He did very well in school after he got over his initial self-doubts. And 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. And 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. Yeah, and 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? This is very sobering for our students. He was born small town in Vermont, and his parents at an early age decided that they did not want Bill.

either him or his sister. And so they literally dropped the two kids off at the grandparents' house, left them on the doorstep, and drove away. And 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. And so I think this, so just tremendous self-doubt and insecurity in him as a young man,

And later in life, he suffered from depression. It's hard to know to what extent this came. But 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. Yeah, yeah. We've talked in some of the other cases that we've discussed. And I've also, I did a case about Martin Luther King with Bill George and Martin and

Bill talks about crucible moments, and I feel like many of your cases have crucible moments that are sort of wedged in there. And for Bill, this came out in the form of almost a vision that he had that he calls a hot flash. Yes. Can you describe that? Well, he was basically sent to the hospital, Townsend Hospital, one, two, three, four separate times in absolute broken-down alcohol conditions.

and 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. And apparently he said that his room was overtaken, and 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, his friend Thatcher had advised him that he should reach out for help. And Bill claims...

that a white light completely engulfed the room. And he felt like he was standing on the top of a mountain and wind was flowing by him. And he emerged from that room literally a changed man. And after that moment, he never drank again. And so people read different things into that story. I mean, 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. Yeah. And this follows on years and years of momentary recoveries and relapses. Yes. Over and over and over again, promising to do better, failing, promising to do better and failing. And he would disappear for days on end with these drunken binges.

And he lost every job he ever held. He had great promise, accumulated wealth. He lost it all. He lost everything. Was just at the absolute bottom of where he could be in life. It was just an absolute train wreck. And 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? Lois is the unsung hero in this story. For sure. And if it had not been for Lois, there would be no Alcoholics Anonymous today. She is

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. And she worked odd jobs and worked at Macy's and stores trying to earn enough money to keep the family afloat. And she discovered the only way they could survive was she gave him an allowance.

And 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. And 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. 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

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. And it's important to understand that Bill Wilson was an atheist. He did not actually believe in God himself. Mm-hmm.

And 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. And there was no substitute for this.

and 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. And so as he called it, all you need to have for an AA meeting is two drunks and God. And he basically used this to leverage the organization where people would gather together in meetings

And try to share with 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. Yeah. And importantly, every meeting begins with people acknowledging that they're an alcoholic. Yes. As people will know, you've seen this in many movies, I'm sure, standing up and, my name is Bill Wilson and I'm an alcoholic. And that's the opening line. Yeah. 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. Yes. And this is a very interesting insight, I think, into his reasoning and perspective

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. And for Bill, as he was starting to build Alcoholics Anonymous, one of the underlying principles was that there would be no hierarchy, no bosses, everyone would be equal. And as you mentioned, he was offered the job of going back to Townshend Hospital to work with alcoholics. And this would be a paid position for

And 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. And so 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. And he basically respected their decision and turned down the offer. You mentioned earlier that he was a smart guy, had a good business sensibility about him. That kind of gets lost a little bit in the ebb and flow of his life 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 business.

organization. Bill was amazingly entrepreneurial, and I guess this does play through into his building AA. But this was coming out of the roaring 20s, and everyone was making giddy kind of money on the stock market. And it just was a gambling, and it was going up, up, up, and everyone was getting rich. And 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. And he was really the first financial analyst in the country to do this. He was a vanguard for what became an industry. And he would visit a plant, a general electric plant in upstate New York, for example, and

And he would buy one share of the company stock. He'd arrive at the door and introduce himself. And he'd have the management walk him around the facility and share with him his strategy. And then from that, he would write up position papers or investment papers, giving people advice. And he was selling that advice and doing very, very well. And he made just a ton of money doing this.

But again, this entrepreneurial spirit comes through very, very early in his life. Yeah. And the case, to my mind, was also fraught with all these tensions because Bill is a deeply conflicted person, right? He has this business acumen. You know, at some point in his life, he has the epiphany where he sort of turns things around. But even after that, he still – he had a lot of flaws, right?

There's no question. That is a huge understatement. He was a womanizer. Basically, he was not reliable on many, many dimensions. His poor wife, Lois, I mean, people just kind of are in such pain for her. He was a very, very flawed individual. And, of course, at the root of this was his dependence on alcohol, which –

As you said earlier, it cost him every position, every ounce of respect and money that he had. Yeah. Another tenet of Alcoholics Anonymous, of course, is that I mentioned this one step at a time. There's 12 steps to the program. Yes. You may be – you wouldn't have to go through all of them. But if you can talk about how that's a sort of good grounding mechanism for the way he established the program. Yeah.

Well, I think the lesson in the 12 steps and the 12 traditions is

really is the importance of having foundational principles that really underpin any organization and don't change over time. So 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. And the importance of these steps is they are there to guide people

guide you in tough decisions. As an individual, when I have to make a tough decision, these 12 steps are there. And 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. And again, these are, I think, very important principles

offer very important guidance when you're faced with tough decisions, either as an individual or as an organization. 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.

right? So you ask, what are three things that you like about me? What are three things you don't like about me? And just the thought of going through that exercise for me makes me feel like a little hesitant. I'm not sure I want to know. I know. I know. That's exactly right. But he said to people, they have to do a moral inventory. They have to reach out to people that are effective. They have to understand they've got to give up their power over themselves and really put yourself in

in the hands and he was very careful how he used these words. He says, "God as you understand him." And so there was no sense of preferencing or privileging any particular religion or view of God, but there was a sense that there is a higher power that you have to acknowledge. - Right, so lots of acts of humility there. And one of the greatest acts of humility that any founder encounters is at some point handing the reins of their organization over to others. How did that work out for Bill?

Well, it's a – 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 all the personal failings he had. So 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.

And so 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. Yeah. And we haven't talked about the scale and scope of AA today, but it's in the millions and it's global. Well, that's right. I look back and it's...

Over 150 countries, and this is an older piece I looked at. I know there are more than 2 million active members today, and I'm suspecting the number of people that have been helped by Alcoholics Anonymous since its founding would reach into the tens of millions. Yeah, yeah. And not to mention the loved ones and families and supporters of these people because there are analog groups.

organizations that do the same thing for those folks. Absolutely right. And Lois, in fact, was one of the founders of one of those organizations focusing on families of alcoholics later in life. Yeah. That sounds very apropos, doesn't it? Yes.

So I'm just curious, you know, 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? I think yes. I think he would be pleased with the reach, the number, the scope of the organization. And I do want to remember as well kind of this notion of

The humility that he brought to this, everything being anonymous, I think was a very big part of his success story. 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, a very modest goal for the course. I mean, did he change the world? I think the answer is yes. You can go back. Before Bill Wilson, people saw alcoholism as a moral failing. And I think he really did help people understand that it is, in fact, a disease that

I do think he pushed very hard on the importance of putting principles before personalities. And this is why he drove the notion of anonymity so strongly into what he did. And I think that his ability to give people hope

And 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.

And 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. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, we watch the way that alcoholics are depicted in popular media, in movies and in television shows. It's often a comical character, you know, the uncle who overdoes it at Thanksgiving, that kind of thing. But I think Bill's

Deep down, we all know that this is a really tragic illness, and it's an illness that destroys families and destroys—it can really tax society in difficult ways. So for him to be able to call attention to it in that way, to me, seems like a world-changing achievement. No, I think that's right. And the interesting thing is—

everyone else we study in the course is famous. Every name you will know, from Walt Disney to Mahatma Gandhi, you can go down the list. And every time I teach this case study, I'll ask students how many people have heard of Bill Wilson.

And with very few exceptions, nobody has. And 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. And that's one of the foundational principles of his organization, trying to keep that balance.

I have the case in front of me, and 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? So 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? I would think it was the power that one individual has to drive change in the world.

And I think often we feel we have to be, 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.

And this notion of finding purpose, a way to lift up the lives of others, I think was just tremendously important for Bill Wilson and something all of us, I think, can remember. Yeah. Bob, this was great. Thank you for joining me on Cold Call. Brian, thank you for asking. A pleasure.

If you enjoy Cold Call, you might like our other podcasts, After Hours, Climate Rising, Deep Purpose, IdeaCast, Managing the Future of Work, Skydeck, Think Big, Buy Small, and Women at Work. Find them on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And 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 at hbs.edu. Thanks again for joining us. I'm your host, Brian Kenney, and you've been listening to Cold Call, an

official podcast of Harvard Business School and part of the HBR Podcast Network.