• Home
  • Articles
    • Books
    • Business News
    • Community
    • Economics
    • Environment
    • Food
    • Human Rights
    • Observations
    • Politics
  • About
  • Subscribe
  • Contact
The Mirror is a bi-monthly magazine which looks at the social, spiritual, political and environmental issues in our world
Reflections and Observations
  • Analysis
  • Books
  • Business News
  • Change the Conversation
  • Climate Change
  • Comment
  • Community
  • Economics
  • Energy
  • Environment
  • Food
  • Health
  • Human Rights
  • Observations
  • Politics
  • Social Networking
  • Spirit
  • The Daily News
  • Uncategorized

Great by Choice Uncertainty, Chaos and Luck

 

 

Morten T. Collins Jim/Hansen

Random House
$60

Following on from 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? In Great by Choice – 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.

No mere sequel, 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 characterised 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 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 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 by chance.

Share this:

Related Posts

Keeping an eye...TM

Business News /

Nuclear powered submarines to keep an eye on the “wolf warrior”

The-Big-Con-TM

Economics /

The ‘Big Con’

Getting-to-Diversity-TM-1

Business News /

Getting to Diversity

‹ Eco marketing: What price green consumerism?› Businesses not adapting to climate change
15th March 2023

Recent Posts

  • The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism
  • Trump’s unprecedented call for protests is the latest sign of his aim to degrade America’s institutions
  • Nuclear powered submarines to keep an eye on the “wolf warrior”
  • Getting to Diversity
  • The ‘Big Con’

Categories

  • Analysis
  • Books
  • Business News
  • Change the Conversation
  • Climate Change
  • Comment
  • Community
  • Economics
  • Energy
  • Environment
  • Food
  • Health
  • Human Rights
  • Observations
  • Politics
  • Social Networking
  • Spirit
  • The Daily News
  • Uncategorized

Archives

JEZ Media

Back to Top

  • Analysis
  • Books
  • Business News
  • Change the Conversation
  • Climate Change
  • Comment
  • Community
  • Economics
  • Energy
  • Environment
  • Food
  • Health
  • Human Rights
  • Observations
  • Politics
  • Social Networking
  • Spirit
  • The Daily News
  • Uncategorized

To subscribe, advertise or contribute articles to themirrorinspires.com contact publisher@xtra.co.nz

(c) The Mirror Inspires, 2023