Great By Choice Uncertainty Chaos and Luck Why Some Thrive Despite Them All

THE NEW QUESTION

Ten years after the global bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns with another groundbreaking work, this time asking: why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Drawing on nine years of research, backed by rigorous analysis, and peppered with compelling stories, Collins and colleague Morten Hansen enumerate the principles for building a truly great company in unpredictable, turbulent, and fast-moving times.

THE NEW STUDY
Great by Choice differs from Collins's earlier work in that it focuses not only on performance but also on the kinds of unstable environments that leaders face today. With a team of more than twenty researchers, Collins and Hansen studied companies that rose to greatness in environments characterized by large forces and rapid changes that executives could not predict or control-and outperformed their industry indexes by at least ten times over fifteen years. The research team then contrasted these "10X companies" with a carefully selected group of peer companies that failed to achieve greatness in a similarly extreme environment.

THE NEW RESULTS
The results of the study were full of provocative surprises. For example:
* The best leaders were not more risk-taking, visionary, or creative than their peers; they were more disciplined, empirical, and paranoid.
* Innovation alone does not prove to be an asset in a chaotic and uncertain world; more important is the ability to scale innovation, to combine creativity with discipline.
* The belief that leadership in a "fast world" always requires "fast decisions" and "fast action" is a good way to get killed.
* Large companies have changed less in response to a radically changing world than their peers.

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.