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.
