Jim Collins

Morten T. Hansen

Jim Collins ... is the most influential management thinker alive

A sensible, well-timed and precisely targeted message for companies shaken by macroeconomic crises

Jim Collins has built a reputation as something of a myth buster ... This book is recommended

“Luck is not a strategy” the authors conclude. What determines any organization’s success is how it prepares for both good and bad luck. They call this getting a “positive return” on luck and, if Good to Great’s four million-plus sales are anything to go by, this idea will be embedded in corporate speak before you know it

Philip Delves Broughton, author of What They Teach you At Harvard Business School

The fascinating detail of the book is its attempt to engage with the role of luck in the success of an enterprise and its finding that they become great by choice rather than chance

If you want to understand what it takes to run a great company in any circumstances and you admire brilliant analysis and a clear, evocative writing style, then Great By Choice is worth five stars out of five

The findings are quite staggering. Many of the assumptions we have made about managing in these challenging times are questioned and often found wanting … The book really does provide a new prospective on leadership

Uncertainty, Chaos and Luck - Why Some Thrive Despite Them All

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 by chance.

Morten T. Hansen

Praise for Great by Choice

Jim Collins ... is the most influential management thinker alive

For this guru, no question is too big

A sensible, well-timed and precisely targeted message for companies shaken by macroeconomic crises

Jim Collins ... is the most influential management thinker alive

For this guru, no question is too big

A sensible, well-timed and precisely targeted message for companies shaken by macroeconomic crises

Jim Collins ... is the most influential management thinker alive

For this guru, no question is too big

A sensible, well-timed and precisely targeted message for companies shaken by macroeconomic crises

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