How the Might Fall - Review

How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In

By: James C Collins

Publication: May 19th 2009 by JimCollins

240 pages

Genre: Non-fiction, Business, Leadership, Self-Help

Source: Personal Library

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Goodreads description--Decline can be avoided.

Decline can be detected.

Decline can be reversed.

Amidst the desolate landscape of fallen great companies, Jim Collins began to wonder: How do the mighty fall? Can decline be detected early and avoided? How far can a company fall before the path toward doom becomes inevitable and unshakable? How can companies reverse course?

In How the Mighty Fall, Collins confronts these questions, offering leaders the well-founded hope that they can learn how to stave off decline and, if they find themselves falling, reverse their course. Collins' research project—more than four years in duration—uncovered five step-wise stages of decline:

Stage 1: Hubris Born of Success

Stage 2: Undisciplined Pursuit of More

Stage 3: Denial of Risk and Peril

Stage 4: Grasping for Salvation

Stage 5: Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death

By understanding these stages of decline, leaders can substantially reduce their chances of falling all the way to the bottom.

Great companies can stumble, badly, and recover.

Every institution, no matter how great, is vulnerable to decline. There is no law of nature that the most powerful will inevitably remain at the top. Anyone can fall and most eventually do. But, as Collins' research emphasizes, some companies do indeed recover—in some cases, coming back even stronger—even after having crashed into the depths of Stage 4.

Decline, it turns out, is largely self-inflicted, and the path to recovery lies largely within our own hands. We are not imprisoned by our circumstances, our history, or even our staggering defeats along the way. As long as we never get entirely knocked out of the game, hope always remains. The mighty can fall, but they can often rise again.

Another excellent business book by Jim Collins. Like Good to Great, I think there are some principles that apply to so much more than business. And in the same way, like Good to Great, I can't rate this as 5 stars because it's not my genre.

This book was really timely for a lot of things I'm going through with my own job. I'd highly suggest it for anyone interested in the workings of an organization. Plus I highly suggest it for anyone who is in a supervisor or managment position. The best we can hope to do is to continually better ourselves. This book is a major tool for managers and those in power. Use it!

Updated: July 7, 2018

Good to Great - Review

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...and Others Don't

By: James C Collins

Publication: October 16th 2001 by HarperBusiness

320 pages

Genre: Non-fiction, Business, Leadership, Self-Help

Source: Personal Library

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Goodreads description--To find the keys to greatness, Collins's 21-person research team read and coded 6,000 articles, generated more than 2,000 pages of interview transcripts and created 384 megabytes of computer data in a five-year project. The findings will surprise many readers and, quite frankly, upset others.

The Challenge
Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the very beginning.

But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness?

The Study
For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great?

The Standards
Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck.

The Comparisons
The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good?

The Findings
The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include: Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness.

The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence.

A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology.

The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap.

Just finished reading Jim Collin's Good to Great. This was an excellent business book. As the title reflects the book is about what it takes for a company/organization to go from good to great. Even though this book is about businesses, I believe the principles can be applied to different aspects of every day life. I'm definitely glad that I read it.

While I think this was an excellent book, it's not fiction...which is my true love genre. That being said, I just can't give this book a 5 star rating. Hey, I gave fair warning that only a select few would make said rating. Therefore, I'd give this book 4 3/4 stars.

I was actually assigned this book for the text of one of my classes, along with How the Might Fall: And Why Some Organizations Never Give In by Jim Collins. While it was assigned reading, I'm glad that I read it, and Good to Great was recommended to me by my brother at one time too. Definitely a good read, especially if you're even remotely interested in the inner workings of businesses/organiztions and what makes them great.

Updated: July 7, 2018