Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck--Why Some Thrive Despite Them All Author: Jim Collins | Language: English | ISBN:
B0058DTIC0 | Format: EPUB
Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck--Why Some Thrive Despite Them All Description
Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns withanother groundbreaking work, this time to ask: why do some companies thrive inuncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Based on nine years of research,buttressed by rigorous analysis and infused with engaging stories, Collins andhis colleague Morten Hansen enumerate the principles for building a truly greatenterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous and fast-moving times. This book isclassic Collins: contrarian, data-driven and uplifting.
- File Size: 3389 KB
- Print Length: 183 pages
- Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0062120999
- Publisher: HarperBusiness; 1 edition (October 11, 2011)
- Sold by: HarperCollins Publishers
- Language: English
- ASIN: B0058DTIC0
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
X-Ray:
- Lending: Not Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #18,115 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
- #14
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Biography & History > Company Histories - #39
in Books > Business & Money > Biography & History > Company Profiles - #61
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Management & Leadership > Management
- #14
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Biography & History > Company Histories - #39
in Books > Business & Money > Biography & History > Company Profiles - #61
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Business & Money > Management & Leadership > Management
In Collins' new book he relies on the method you've seen in previous books like Built to Last and Good to Great. What's different in this one is he selected companies not just on their status or explosive growth, but because they succeeded in an extreme and uncertain environment. However, there's a caveat here: his research stopped in 2002, meaning there's no thorough analysis of how companies performed in the last 10 years (aka one of the most uncertain and chaotic business climates in decades). Collins and Hansen believe the future will be unstable and environments will be extreme for the rest of "our lives" (remember, these guys aren't Spring Chickens). So, they try to analyze company performance/greatness within the context of difficulty.
I always wish Amazon would show an easy-to-find Table of Contents for books, so I've created one for you here, complete with a summary of each chapter/section.
1 - THRIVING IN UNCERTAINTY
Collins and Hansen explain what the method for their book (what I described above), including the definition of a 10Xer, which is a company that beat their industry by 10 fold. Just 7 companies were selected as a 10X case out of 20,400 companies. The seven are Amgen, Biomet, Intel, Microsoft, Progressive Insurance, Southwest Airlines, and Stryker. They don't include Apple because their research lens of Apple vs. Microsoft focused primarily on the 1980s and 1990s (remember they stopped collecting data in 2002), which makes no sense to me. The present environment (the one in which Apple has exploded) is a far more difficult climate than the 80s-90s.
2 - 10Xers
Example of a 10xer is Southwest airlines, whose growth since 1972 is greater than that of Walmart, despite this period being a particularly harsh one for the airline industry.
Jim Collins is at it again. Collins, along with co-author Morten Hansen and a team of over 20 researchers, spent roughly nine years trying to determine why some companies thrive during chaotic, uncertain and unstable times while other companies do not. If you have read some of Collins' earlier books, the theme in "Great by Choice" certainly won't surprise you. In "Built to Last," published in 1994, Collins, co-author Jerry Porras and their research team wrote about what makes for a "visionary" company, comparing a group of objectively and subjectively defined visionary companies with comparison companies that weren't so visionary. The authors would argue that their company selections were much more objectively chosen, and I wouldn't argue much with that claim. In "Good to Great," published in 2001, Collins and his research team analyzed a number of good companies that took the next step to achieve greatness, while a comparison group of similar companies did not.
In both of these two earlier books, as well in the current one (I'll get to "Great by Choice" presently), the authors conspicuously note how much better the subject companies performed, stock market wise, compared to the comparison companies. However, it is important to realize that Collins and his co-authors are not suggesting that you run out and invest in their subject companies. If you did that for the "Built to Last" companies, your investments would have included Citigroup, Ford, Sony and other companies that subsequently didn't set the world on fire. Similarly, from the "Good to Great" focus companies, Circuit City eventually filled for bankruptcy and Fannie Mae proved to be a major disappointment, in more ways than one.
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