The new question
Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great,
Jim Collins returns with another groundbreaking work, this time to
ask: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos,
and others do not? Based on nine years of research, buttressed
by rigorous analysis and infused with engaging stories, Collins and
his colleague, Morten Hansen, enumerate the principles for building
a truly great enterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous, and
fast-moving times.
The new study
Great by Choice distinguishes itself from Collins''s prior
work by its focus not just on performance, but also on the type of
unstable environments faced by leaders today.
With a team of more than twenty researchers, Collins and Hansen
studied companies that rose to greatness-beating their industry
indexes by a minimum of ten times over fifteen years-in
environments characterized by big forces and rapid shifts that
leaders could not predict or control. The research team then
contrasted these "10X companies" to a carefully selected set of
comparison companies that failed to achieve greatness in similarly
extreme environments.
The new findings
The study results were full of provocative surprises. Such as:
- The best leaders were not more risk taking, more visionary, and
more creative than the comparisons; they were more disciplined,
more empirical, and more paranoid.
- Innovation by itself turns out not to be the trump card in a
chaotic and uncertain world; more important is the ability to scale
innovation, to blend creativity with discipline.
- Following the belief that leading in a "fast world" always
requires "fast decisions" and "fast action" is a good way to get
killed.
- The great companies changed less in reaction to a radically
changing world than the comparison companies.
The authors challenge conventional wisdom with
thought-provoking, sticky, and supremely practical concepts. They
include: 10Xers; the 20 Mile March; Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs;
Leading above the Death Line; Zoom Out, Then Zoom
In; and the SMaC Recipe.
Finally, in the last chapter, Collins and Hansen present their
most provocative and original analysis: defining, quantifying, and
studying the role of luck. The great companies and the leaders who
built them were not luckier than the comparisons, but they did get
a higher Return on Luck.
This book is classic Collins: contrarian, data-driven, and
uplifting. He and Hansen show convincingly that, even in a chaotic
and uncertain world, greatness happens by choice, not chance.
