The new question: Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns to ask: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? In Great by Choice, Collins and his colleague, Morten T. 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 Collinss prior work by its focus on the type of unstable environments faced by leaders today.
The new findings:
The best leaders were more disciplined, more empirical, and more paranoid. 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.
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.