Why Some Thrive Despite Them All - Uncertainty - Chaos and Luck

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. The point is that the reader can learn from what these companies did during their periods of success, regardless of whether some of the companies lost their way later on. Interestingly, one company, Wells Fargo, actually went from the comparison list in "Built to Last" to the focus list in "Good to Great." Okay, forewarned is forearmed regarding investing in the subject companies.

A couple of years ago Collins wrote another book, "How the Mighty Fall," which is a study of leadership failure, not success. This short book is a very enjoyable and informative read, but somewhat different from the books I mentioned above. All of Collins' books are interesting, hard to put down, and written with a passion for understanding the mechanisms of corporate success. When it comes to writing, I think of him as the Michael Lewis of management gurus. Collins is also an exceptional speaker, if you ever have the chance to hear him.

In "Great by Choice," Collins and Hansen select just seven companies (out of an initial list of over 20,000) as examples of those that have thrived during chaotic times. The companies are Amgen, Biomet, Intel, Microsoft, Progressive Insurance, Southwest Airlines and Stryker. These companies are called "10X" companies, given that their stock prices outdistanced the comparison companies by roughly an order of magnitude during the study period. Consider, for example, Southwest Airlines. During the study period (1970s through 2002), Southwest faced fuel price jumps, deregulation, labor problems in the airline industry, competitors moving through the revolving door of bankruptcy, and an absence of flyers in the aftermath of September 11, 2001. Still, the company consistently grew and prospered. During this time, comparison company Pacific Southwest Airlines had an entirely different experience.

So how does Collins explain the different fortunes between the subject companies and the comparison companies? Simplistically put, the great-by-choice companies were much better able to differentiate between situations and factors they could control and those they couldn't. Also, they exemplified "fanatic discipline, empirical creativity and productive paranoia." If you have read Collins' other works, these terms have a certain familiar ring to them.

This wouldn't be a Jim Collins book if it didn't coin some new expressions, like the "big, hairy, audacious goal (BHAG)" from "Built to Last" and "Level 5 leadership" from "Good to Great." This time one of the main new expressions is the "20-mile march," which Collins uses to describe the very steady progress, through good times and bad, of the companies that thrive best during chaotic times, versus those companies that make exceptional progress during better times, but perform more poorly during tough times.

There is no such thing as a management guru with perfect insight or analysis, so I am not holding Collins to that standard. The real measure of a book such as this is more in its ability to raise important questions and through sound (even passionate) discussion help stimulate the reader to come to grips with important concepts. That's how people grow. If you have read and enjoyed Collins earlier books, chance are good you will like this one, too. If you are new to Collins, but have an interest in what makes companies tick, this book--along with his earlier works--are worth your consideration.

I admit it. I'm a total Jim Collins fanboy.

Ever since I first read the book Built to Last in 2002, I've been a willing member of the cult of Jim Collins. At my previous company, we took some of the ideas from Built to Last as inspiration for the process we used to uncover our organizational values. Then we later employed many of the principles from Collins' next book Good to Great as we further developed the positioning, brand, and culture.

While many of the Big Concepts (TM) expressed in these books may initially seem a bit cheesy and Overly Branded (TM), I've come to love and occasionally use some of the terms like BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals), the Tyranny of the OR, Level 5 Leadership, and my longtime favorite The Hedgehog Concept. Why?

Because they are just so damn useful. They make the incredibly complex mechanics behind successful and not-so-successful organizations and leaders simple and easy for anyone to understand. They are accessible ideas and you don't have to be a former management consultant with an MBA from Harvard in order to understand how to apply these principles to your own organization.

I'd go so far as to say that over the past fifteen years, no one has done more than Jim Collins to democratize the process of creating a great organization.

So when I found out that Jim Collins had a new book coming out, his first since the rather dark and depressing (but no less useful) How the Mighty Fall in 2009, and that he'd been working on this new book with his co-author Morten Hansen for the last nine years, I was ready for my next fix.

I finished the new book, entitled Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck--Why Some Thrive Despite Them All a few nights ago, and here are my thoughts.

This book comes from the same general neighborhood Collins explores in his previous books (I'd describe this neighborhood as "what makes some companies awesome and others... not so much"), but instead of simply rehashing the same principles, this book explores a particularly timely subject. From Chapter 1, here's how Collins and Hansen set up the premise:

"Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? When buffeted by tumultuous events, when hit by big, fast-moving forces that we can neither predict nor control, what distinguishes those who perform exceptionally well from those who underperform or worse?"

In other words, what common characteristics are found in companies that thrive when the going gets wacky? (Times like, for instance... right now.)

In this book Collins and Hansen clearly did an immense amount of research to answer this question. In fact, as with Built to Last and Good to Great, the appendixes at the end "showing the math" for how they reached their conclusions take a third or more of the book.

Their research led to a set of companies that they refer to as the "10x" cases because, during the study period, these companies outperformed the rest of their industry by 10 times or more. After looking at over 20,000 companies, the final organizations that made the cut were Amgen, Biomet, Intel, Microsoft, Progressive Insurance, Southwest Airlines, and Stryker.

Now you may look at this list, as I did, and say to yourself, "Okay, I get Southwest Airlines and Progressive Insurance... but Microsoft????"

Well, as it turns out, the period they were studying wasn't up until the present day. Because this research began nine years ago, they were studying the companies from 1965 (or their founding date if it was later) until 2002. So in that context, the choice of Microsoft makes a lot more sense. In 2002, Microsoft was still firing on all cylinders.

I won't spoil the whole book for you, but Great by Choice has an entirely new set of Big Concepts (TM) that will help you understand the characteristics that set these companies apart from their peers. This time around, we are introduced to:

- The 20 Mile March: Consistent execution without overreaching in good times or underachieving in bad times.
- Firing Bullets, Then Cannonballs: Testing concepts in small ways and then making adjustments rather than placing big, unproven bets. But then placing big bets when you have figured out exactly where to aim.
- Leading above the Death Line: Learning how to effectively manage risk so that the risks your organization take never put it in mortal danger.
- Return on Luck: My favorite quote from the book perfectly articulates the concept: "The critical question is not whether you'll have luck, but what you do with the luck that you get."

Many of these concepts come with an awesome allegorical story to illustrate them. That's the great thing about a Jim Collins book: you can't always tell whether you are reading a business book or an adventure book. In this case Collins (who is also an avid rock climber himself) shares tales from an ill-fated Everest expedition, the race for the South Pole, and a near death climbing experience in Alaska interspersed with specific stories from the businesses he is profiling.

Overall assessment: The book is a fitting companion to Built to Last, Good to Great, and How the Mighty Fall. Simple, accessible, easy to digest, and with some very actionable key concepts that you can immediately put to use. And, unless you read all of the research data at the end, you'll find it to be a quick read that you can likely finish on a plane trip or in an afternoon.

I have read and enjoyed other books by Collins. Once again, I was glued to the content, even though it was written in the context of one of my least favorite subjects...statistics. This book is now my new favorite Collins piece. Oh, how simple life can be...if we choose.

I wanted to enjoy this book more. The author is highly respected by people in my organization, and the book was an assigned text for a class. The data analysis is solid, the focus on discipline a validation, and the cautionary lessons are particularly good for what is probably a dominant reading audience of men. But, to be frank, the fact that on one hand the authors are saying in their epilogue that what we do is dominantly responsible for making the most out of our circumstances rather than what happens to us, and yet, in the book of 183 pages (not including the FAQ and extensive references) they use _no_ (Zero) actual business cases involving women _At_ _All_ except for one elementary school looking to improve performance (and sorry, but, can you be any more stereotypical than picking an elementary school as the one spot to mention women?) None. Also the only non-case-study anecdote in the book which involved a woman was an unnamed Japanese Everest climber who, based on her named (male) guide's assessment and planning, didn't actually get to reach the summit.

It seems to me that in 2011 the authors could have found relevant anecdotes at least, even where the historic data may have been leaner, and many examples of women who exemplify the kind of 10x habits represented in the book. After all, the aggressive and brash behavior, speaking stereotypically, being cautioned against is more of a male trait to begin with. There are already articles out there discussing how investment funds run by women perform better for what sound like the same reasons presented in this book.

The absence of Any examples of women as high performers feels like the authors just didn't bother to try looking.

Also when it comes to the world-sacrificing type of behavior shown as examples in the book, I do question, for example, the life-wisdom of the sort of "everything for the business" that this sort of effort seems to promote. I ask myself what outside resources and assumptions are being drawn upon by the business case individuals that don't show up in this book? For every obsessively focused, raw-dolphin-eating 93 days in a hotel for an FDA filing world-changer, who's at home washing his underwear? What emotional and physical labor by other people, unpaid and paid, isn't being even accounted for in the analysis at all?

If the analysis were to account for the actual labor of 2 people instead of 1 when accounting for the married one-income executives (and to be honest, at a certain level of income they probably have a household staff), would the level of performance for these individuals actually be so remarkable? In the case of single people or lower-income couples where both work, or simply the type of couples who choose to separate household duties more equitably (because hey, it is 2011 not 1956) could a very strong case be made for so-called "perks" such as on-site child care, flex hours, generous remote working permissions, pet-friendly offices, which would allow people who cant display the same level fanatical (one could say slavish) devotion more of an opportunity to perform at their highest level?

I agree that holding all factors equal, the less performing (non-10x) companies probably had similar spousal conditions. However, the world has changed, and using these historic cases to recommend high-performance habits to a 2011 (and onward) workforce disregards both major areas of problem and opportunity.

This does not feel like a case of "all CEOs wear red socks." There has either been an omission of women from the examples, or the examples involving women in business were too hard to find. In any case, we still live in a world where female tech founders need to invent a digital male 3rd founder to be taken seriously. It seems to me that the book's primary "bootstrap" arguement is nullified (or at minimum, needs to come with _Serious_ caveats) if the authors themselves don't even bother to provide examples which include half the population in a book saying that "anyone" is capable of greatness.

The women the authors dedicated this book to - an audacious grandmother and two daughters who will build the future, deserve SO much more than this. Do better.

Do any companies thrive through uncertainty, chaos and bad luck? If any do, is there something that all they do which explains why they thrive when others fail? If there is, is it a set of actions or decisions that are replicable for in your business?
Here is the surprising answer to these three questions: Yes, yes and yes.
Jim Collins has used his signature research methodology once again to produce a profoundly useful book that should be read by all. The approach is to take a huge body of information on large and well-known companies who have all thrived through a 30 years period which included booms, busts, changes in the regulatory environment, new competitors, viable alternatives and more. Then Collins and his team compare them to companies with very similar profiles, in the same industries who were inconsistent in their success or simply failed. Finally, they identify what the companies that thrived all had in common that the comparison companies did not. The result is a reliable body of practical information which forms the basis of this book.
What makes Jim Collins work exceptional is that all his books are written in a very accessible and popular style despite the academic rigour behind them. A quality very rarely found in business books.
The 7 companies that form the basis of the book include Intel, Amgen and Microsoft. If you had invested $10, 000 in any of them in 1972 and held them until 2002 the lowest performer of the 7 (Biomet) would have been worth $ 3.4m and the highest performer (Southwest Airlines) would have been worth $12m! The Biomet outperformed the market for the period by 18.1 times and Southwest by 63.4 times! Compared to their own industries Biomet outperformed the medical instruments industry by 11.2 times and Southwest outperformed the airline industry by 550.4 times!
In the same industries, same economies, same business environment they produced staggeringly different results. Jim Collins calls these companies 10X-ers, more than ten times better than the comparative companies.
That companies with this performance record exist is surprising, but what is more surprising is why they performed this way. They were not more creative, not more visionary, not more charismatic, not more ambitious, not blessed with more luck, not more risk seeking, not more heroic and not more prone to making big, bold moves.
The all shared three characteristics: Fanatical discipline, productive paranoia, and empirical creativity. They all shared a particular style of leadership, what Collins calls “Level 5 Amtition.”
Each of the three characteristics is encapsulated by the authors in a metaphor that cleverly gets to the heart of the matter and substantiated by examples from the companies selected.
You are trekking to the South Pole, your team intends to be the first people in modern history to get there. To succeed you have to march walk 20 miles a day. Some days are very favourable and you can probably do 40 miles, others are extremely difficult with wind and driving snow making progress excruciating. You could take advantage of the good days and sit out the bad ones, but then your progress would be uncertain and others could reach the pole before you making your journey a wasted effort. The 10X-ers all chose to march their 20 miles each day, painfully when the weather was against them and pleasantly when it wasn’t. They kept to the 20 miles when it was hard and no more than 20 miles when it was easy using this time to rest and regain strength. What the 10X-ers chose as their “20 mile marches” were all specific to their contexts and all essential to the attainment of their goals. And they pursued them with fanatical discipline.
10X-ers know that they cannot reliably and consistently predict the future and so they prepare themselves ahead of time. They assume a series of negative events in quick succession could kill their companies and so they prepare obsessively to protect themselves against what they cannot predict. They plan and ensure that they stay above the “Death Line.” Far from being risk takers, in an analysis of the risks taken by the 10x-ers in contrast to the comparison companies they 10x-ers were a third less likely to take risks. They also held 3-10 times the ratio of cash to asset of the median of 87,117 companies analysed by the Journal of Financial Economics. Such is their “productive paranoia.”
The “empirical creativity” demonstrated by the 10x-ers is most easily demonstrated by the Apple in its re-birth under Steve Jobs, round two. When they decided to go into retail they have a blitz roll-out of forty stores, they “shot lots of bullets before firing a cannonball.” First they hired the CEO of The Gap, a chain of highly successful retail stores and had him design a prototype store in a warehouse. After a number iterations and adjustments they rolled out the stores – all two of them. Only when those were tweaked in real world conditions, and proved to be successful, did they launch the nationwide roll-out. The cannonball was fired only after many bullets has found the right spot.
This book is a major contribution to our understanding of a key business issue – how to thrive in uncertainty and chaos.

Readability Light ---+- Serious
Insights High +---- Low
Practical High -+--- Low

Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy

Great by Choice by Jim Collins and Morten Hansen represents a detailed assessment of companies thriving in times of uncertainty compared with similar organizations not performing so well. In the analytical tradition of Built to Last, Good to Great, and How the Mighty Fall, Collins and Hansen imperially demonstrate that organizations performing well in tumultuous times:

- Have leaders who were more disciplined, more empirical, and more paranoid
- Believed that a `fast world' necessitated `fast decisions' and `fast actions' was a good way to fail
- Changed less in reaction to the radically evolving world than their poorer performing comparison companies

I like Great by Choice for its data-driven analysis of organizational performance in turbulent times. I believe this assessment and its findings are particularly relevant given today's highly uncertain marketplace.

However, I believe there are some flaws in Collins and Hansen's analysis. First, it appears that a majority of the 10x companies were small, fragile, and subsequently more nimble than their comparisons during the early portion of the comparison period. I feel this difference in organizational structure materially influenced the results each company was able to achieve; the 10x companies having `less to lose' were better positioned to take the actions necessary for a higher long-term payoff whereas their peers were laden with `historical scaring' - legacy contracts and obligations, well established shareholder expectations, etcetera - and were subsequently more confined in what they are able to do and so were less likely to be able to take the action needed to achieve 10x gains.

Another flaw was the comparison of Microsoft to Apple. While both were high tech companies during the assessment period, Microsoft was a software company whereas Apple was an integrated software and hardware company; placing it in a very different business. I disagree that these companies were comparative.

Finally, Collins and Hansen do not broaden their analysis to include companies such as Microsoft and Apple that change performance positions over time. Subjectively, if a company can be great by choice, then turnarounds such as that which Apple orchestrated in the 2000s should not only be possible but, given the vast number of businesses in the marketplace over the past 100+ years and the several periods of market turbulence, should have occurred in other instances. Validating the Great by Choice principles against several turnaround examples would help strengthen their assertions - assuming they are true.

In spite of my analytical reservations, I like Great by Choice and believe it offers significant, if not groundbreaking, insight to the principles for building a successful organization regardless of the marketplace environment. For its data-driven insights of how to succeed during uncertain times, Great by Choice is a StrategyDriven recommended read.

All the Best,
Nathan Ives
StrategyDriven Principal

Cut to the Chase:
This is an interesting look into some companies that have thrived throughout the sometimes chaotic economic ups and downs of recent years. Similar to what he has done in his past works, Collins (working with Hansen here) researched a variety of companies and then chose the ones that significantly outperformed their peers despite similar circumstances and starting points. The book focuses on the set of companies that succeeded despite uncertain environmental influences and conditions. If you’ve read other works by Collins, it has a similar feel and ring — with a lot of well told/interesting anecdotes followed by seemingly boiled down, bare bones advice and to-dos. It’s an interesting read, though a little repetitive compared to Collins’s past works.

Greater Detail:
As with his past works, Collins (and Hansen) here have sifted through performance data and given you a series of comparisons, highlighting not only the theory of what worked, but also specific examples of companies that used or didn’t a particular method. The companies that worked/were great here are called 10Xers, meaning that they were the companies that beat the industry by a factor of 10.

The ideas here are familiar. Two examples:

1. 20 Mile March talks about discipline, following a plan that is specific and has benchmarks and is a little reminiscent of his previous “Flywheel Effect” where you spin the flywheel so that it slowly builds momentum. Here the difference is that he says: spin the flywheel, build momentum, but make sure you’re marking the steps and benchmarks along the way. A great example within this book is Genentech, and how they had, in some ways, invented the “next big thing” but weren’t initially able to capitalize because they weren’t disciplined, they didn’t approach long-term goals seriously. and they hoped that they could achieve 2% four years in a row and then 90+% in the fifth and final year… which never worked.

2. Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs talks about not being more creative or innovative, but rather taking small measured steps (small innovations) and knowing what your strengths are… first, shoot a bunch of small, inexpensive bullets as research and then load up the one cannonball after you know what works. This reminds me a bit of the “Hedgehog Concept” where you find the one thing you’re good at, and do it well. In previous books, Collins talked about how Walgreens converted to the corner model, and concentrated on convenience, getting rid of their diner-like options; here he talks about Genentech vs. Amgen and the surprising revelation that more patents (even great ones like many filed by Genentech) doesn’t lead to better profitability if it’s not managed appropriately; Amgen outperformed Genentech over the comparison period even though Genentech out-innovated Amgen.

Some of the examples are interesting outside of the business world — Amundsen vs. Scott in the race to the South Pole was interesting in that it highlighted the sometime extreme measure Amundsen went to in order to prepare for the unexpected (eating raw dolphin meat, for example). And many of the comparison are interesting just for the sake of cocktail conversation despite no longer holding true (for example, Microsoft was the successful comparison case held up against Apple, which, though both are quite successful now, was still interesting to read about). There’s also an interesting chapter on luck at the end, which gives evidence that some of best companies performed despite bad luck, even figuring out a way to learn from extraordinary bad luck (Progressive Insurance and their response to California passing a proposition which ended up hurting all car insurance companies was an example), and failing companies being completely unable to capitalize even with extraordinary good luck (like AMD, which did poorly and was unable to benefit from Intel’s missteps). The underlying message throughout is that luck and brilliant strokes of next-big-thing genius aren’t necessary, and that almost any company can recover, given the right attitude and strategy. It’s a fun, quick read, though I don’t know if I learned more than from Collins’s other works.

Comparisons to Other Books:
Unlike some of Collins’s other works (which I discovered many years later), most of the companies showcased here are still performing relatively well (since this book was published in late 2011), and so you don’t have to hold back your disbelief: you’re interested in how Progressive, Southwest, etc, came to be successful despite turbulent times. It’s interesting to take a deeper delve into Southwest, which has expanded slowly and was one of the few airline companies to still turn a profit after 9/11. In contrast, some of Collins’s earlier works (like Good to Great) unfortunately held up companies like Fannie Mae or Circuit City as their “great” examples, and are much harder to take as seriously.
Nothing against this particular book, but I’m starting to think that whatever book was your first book by Collins will be your favorite. The writing is lucid and clear and the examples interesting and compelling. But… there is a sameness to these works.

This book is so full of contradictions and misplaced certainty. But it's not amazing that this book sells because it tickles the ears of most Americans who have no ability to tell when logical fallacies arise, or have the ability to discern their right hand from their left. Everything of value in this book most people know already. But, as is typical these days, authors put new names to their old ideas and pass them off as something revolutionary. And ignorant people fall for it.

I feel bad for Jim Collins because I don't think he writes books just to make lots of money. I think he really tries to write highly enlightening and useful books. Except he doesn't. This book like his previous efforts is intended to help you get/keep your company ahead or build it to last. The problem is despite all of his research Jim still has little true understanding of the typical evolutionary pattern of a business space and therefore is unable to offer really useful lessons about how to outduel your competitors and get/keep your company achieving it's full potential. He is flying blind so he analyzes a bunch of super successful companies for common traits and concludes those traits are the key. But they aren't. That's why his super successful examples don't hold up over time. He gives you tips that will probably help but far less important than other more strategic matters. By the way Jim it takes a lot of nerve to publish a book in 2011 that uses Apple as a control group/underperforming company-I don't care how you explain it, in the words of Len Berman of ESPN, c'mon man. Also, the giant key to Admunson's success and Scott's failure was smart innovation (dogs) versus dumb innovation( all of Scott's stupid ideas). The 20 mile march rule was relatively far less important and now that's your big headliner. That's a great example of my main point. I would agree that he is an excellent writer.

Review and Summary
Business is plagued with ups and downs; how companies deal with those variables separate them from one another. Since every company experiences these trials, what variable makes some companies rise and some crash and burn? The answer is the mentalities of the leadership. Through a thorough analysis of what Collins and Hansen labeled “10Xers” companies, many, if not all of the individual companies in the analysis exuded fanatic discipline, productive paranoia, and empirical creativity in order to create and sustain the company success.
Beginning with fanatic discipline, a story about a march across the United States is used to exemplify this principle. The man walking did so by walking 20 miles a day. When the weather was beautiful he did not travel more than 20 miles and exhaust himself. When the weather was treacherous he struggled to complete the 20 miles, but did not sit the day out. Like the guy in the march, 10Xers can ensure positive growth for many years in the future without the rise and fall of testing the market capacity and riding the success by using fanatic discipline.
Empirical creativity is the second facets of “10Xers." Always remain one trend behind; innovators fade and lingerers disappear. By remaining in the center of the creativity, a business can perfect the latest trend and capitalize on the shortcomings of the innovators by firing “bullets” (ideas) without falling too far behind and leave no room for improvement. “Bullets” can be fired by companies to see if the market will accept the new idea, once these bullets land, then a company can implement and fire “cannonballs” (actions).
Productive paranoia; leading above the death line. Perhaps the most controversial precept within the book is healthy paranoia. When leaders assume a level of paranoia and face the challenge head on, aware of the risks, the company typically is more successful. The analogy used is the efforts and preparation for a Mt. Everest climb. One leader barely had enough supplies; the other took more than enough supplies. The result was horrible weather and the success of the team with the leader that was productively paranoid. Leaders that are productively paranoid are prepared for the worst but expect the best.
These three ideologies go into effect when a leader begins the SMaC process. SMaC stands for Specific, Methodical, and Consistent. Specific and detailed programs with a Methodical plan that are Consistent all make up the necessary legs of what is coined a good venture. Adopting this strategy can maximize profitably and decrease risk of failure. When a leader holds all the new decisions to this standard, the company, according to the authors’ research, is far more successful.
ROL “return on luck” is a critical factor that can catapult a company or break them in half. Everyone experiences luck and everyone must maximize or withstand this luck accordingly. Luck does not make a company great for a length of time, however, it can make a company get ahead or fall behind for a short amount of time. Capitalizing on luck is tricky, but if taken with the three above precepts luck can help a company continue to grow.
I agreed with the majority of the principles within the book. The one I found particularly important is productive paranoia. Being prepared for the worst, but not living or running a business in fear is very important to make a company and the employees both thrive. One precept that I had a hard time accepting was empirical creativity. The importance of innovation in a field of business I believe is so important, but the authors were hesitant in being an innovating company due to the higher risk of error. However despite my disagreements, the authors provided extensive research data that prove their ideologies to be factual.

Becca Lee, BBA
MBA Student at Dallas Baptist University

Jim Collins has a great analytical approach to studying companies using pair-comparisons of companies that demonstrate characteristics he wants to study and pairs each with a contra-example. The approach uses empirical and anecdotal information. The facts are interesting and the stories are memorable. He has used this approach in a number of books over the last twenty years.

Jim Collins studied "10Xer" companies, companies that beat their peers by 10X or better performance over a 15-year period. 10Xers show four sets of characteristics: fanatical discipline, empirical creativity, productive paranoia, and ambition. 10Xers plan, create buffers, innovate (not necessarily the most innovative), use empirical measures to build their own opinions. They are disciplined and understand that they cannot predict the future.

Leaders at 10Xers: tend not to be charismatic leaders, do not build personality cults, often are non-conformists, look to empirical data to build their own opinions rather than seeking the opinion of others and are self-disciplined. They are not the rock-star megalomaniacs who build personality cults around themselves.

10Xers set a "20-mile march" each day. They set up upper and lower bounds of acceptable performance and behaviors. 20-mile marches build confidence, enable companies to survive adversity and create self-discipline in chaotic environments.

10Xers tend to be less innovative companies than failed competitors but they are sufficiently creative to succeed in their industries. They shoot "bullets", then "cannonballs". 10Xers use bullets as empirical tests/validations. They are low cost, low risk and low distraction for the organization. Once 10Xers have empirical validation, they fire cannonballs which are major investments of resources and time. Uncalibrated cannonballs are expensive and dangerous. Even if an uncalibrated cannonball hits its mark, it rewards the wrong behavior. Good outcomes from bad process are dangerous.

10Xers engage in productive paranoia (think Jack Welch at GE). Such companies keep cash reserves that are 3-10X the industry average. They zoom-in and zoom-out looking for risks. They stay above the "death line" - the point where a company risks its existence when things go badly. Below the death line, a company has substantial risk of going out of business. 10Xers build buffers in good time to survive black swans (significant unpredictable events).

10Xers engage in SMaC (specific, methodical and consistent) behaviors. It combines consistency and change. Change when empirical creativity and constructive paranoia say so. Mediocre organizations change too often and do not have regard for SMaC.

Owen Jackson, Adam Smythe and Mark P. McDonald have done a great job summarizing this book. I'd like to give it 4.5 stars, as there are many lessons to glean from here and one can skip over some of the oft told B-School stories of Intel, Microsoft, and SouthWest Airlines.

The race between Amundsen and Scott to the South Pole is worth reading and the comparisons drawn from it are still relevant today.

The Aesop Fable "The Ant and the Grasshopper" comes to mind, as the ant (the 10xer) works hard and consistently to store away its food (or in this case, cash. 10xer's carry a higher cash-to-assets ratio and higher cash-to-liabilities ratio than their comparisons) to help prepare for when the winter (or tight economic) times hit.

The 2nd Aesop Fable "The Tortoise and the Hare" rings true amongst the 10xers. Like the tortoise, the 10xers are disciplined and their actions are consistent. From p.21 "...consistency with values, consistency with long term goals, consistency with performance, consistency of method, consistency over time... True discipline requires the independence of mind to reject pressures to conform in ways incompatible with values, performance standards, and long-term aspirations...having the will to do whatever it takes to create a great outcome, no matter how difficult."

Throughout the book, there are many grey boxes that help to summarize the key points of the current notion being presented and there are chapter summaries at the end of each chapter, serving as a helpful way to understand and reinforce the concepts.

Firing bullets vs. cannonballs is analogous to the baseball cliché of one should try to hit singles and doubles in their efforts (bullets), rather than trying to always try to hit swing for the fences in the attempt to hit the homerun (cannonballs).

This is just small sample of this well written book. It certainly worth reading.

I had read "Good to Great" when it first came out and found it to be pretty interesting with some memorably named attributes and drivers that successful companies had in common. When I learned that people in my company were reading "Great by Choice," I was excited to read it. There are many references to Progressive Insurance, where I worked for 8 of the years covered in Collins' research period. In fact, having worked on some of the projects that are referenced I thought the examples were described very accurately to fit the points Collins was making about all the 10X companies.

In general though, I was a bit disappointed by the brevity and story focus used in the book. Many of those stories are meant to be cases, but they are written more in story-telling mode to make Collins' points. The survival stories are great adventure reading. It doesn't seem right to criticize the book for having well-written stories, but when you examine the pages that are left to explore the common characteristics that 10X companies share ...

* The continuing focus on values by the founders and executives charged with running the company
* Building a much deeper empirical foundation for their decisions and actions
* Fixating in a paranoid way on the events, risks and bad luck that could kill the company
* Sticking to a steady schedule for advancing the company
* Approaching big initiatives with many smaller test projects leading up to the bigger implementation
* Making decisions by first zooming out to see the bigger picture before zooming back in to make the decision
* Having a recipe of strategies and tactics that would form the basis for performance

... there isn't a lot of space left to get into how those companies actually implemented those decisions and cultures. A charismatic leader or founder must have the vision, work habits and discipline to give a company the potential to be a 10X organization. Progressive's Chairman Peter Lewis absolutely had and has those personality traits and work habits that Collins raises as critical.

But it's also important to understand how the people in those organizations adopt those visions and follow through on those ideas and ideals to make those companies great. "Great by Choice" fails to go into enough detail to explain how that motivation and buy-in happens. So, in general, I think this is a good book to show the value of having charismatic 10X leaders, but Progressive wasn't a cult of personality. It was a place where skilled and talented people found a way to implement strategies and customer and employee experiences that made them great.

What does it take to build a great company? This question is at the heart of all of Jim Collins' works. I see Built to Last, Good to Great, and Great by Choice as a trilogy on great companies. Great by Choice is slightly different than the previous two because it examines great companies despite harsh environments. Somehow, someway, these companies not only survived, but thrived during the harshest conditions in their industry. What are the reasons?

Collins' goes through 5 principles that have led the companies in the book to greatness. The companies covered were: Amgen, Biomet, Intel, Microsoft, Progressive Insurance, Southwest Airlines, and Stryker. Thousands of documents were researched to discover what made the difference. For example, one difference these companies have over comparison companies is their 'Productive Paranoia.' They keep cash reserves 3X-10X higher than most companies, they manage risk, and focus on objectives. The stories are interesting and relevant. Everything seems to make logical sense.

Collins' gives his own terminology throughout the text. This makes the concepts easier to remember and more enjoyable to read. Some concepts you'll read about are: Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs, Zoom Out then Zoom In, and the SMaC recipe.

I found this to be Collins' most enjoyable book. He has excellent chapter summaries and highlights information in a great way. By reading the stories, you can't help but absorb additional greatness. For business owners, entrepreneurs, etc., this is a worthwhile read.

Despite the high degree of disruptive change, some companies not only survive, but thrive. Collins reaches into his treasure trove of data (decades of data on thousands of companies) to determine how they do it.

Not surprisingly, the conclusions are in line with those of his other books which eschew conventional wisdom in favor of tried and true “old-school” wisdom and what eventually amounts to common sense.
The 10X companies (those that outpaced their industry index by ten times or more over a significant period of time) are not more creative, visionary, charismatic, ambitious, risk seeking, heroic, blessed by luck or prone to making big bold moves. Rather, they exercise fanatical discipline, productive paranoia, empirical creativity, and “Level 5” ambition. Read the book to find out more.

As with his other books, this one is filled with thought provoking stories and analogies and is sprinkled with Collins-esque terms to help the reader grasp the concepts.

The message is not one that many will like hearing. In a world of the “quick fix” few rally around discipline, for instance. This makes it even more of an important read for managers in any organization

--Nick McCormick, author, Acting Up Brings Everyone Down

I am a big fan of Jim Collins. When I read Built to Last 10 years ago, I came away committed to being a leader who builds clocks more then simply tells time. His concepts from that book of being a hedgehog, and especially to preserve the core (values) and stimulate progress have guided me as a leader.

His book Good to Great affirmed my desire to be what he calls a Level 5 leader.

Saw while waiting for a flight from Delhi to Chicago to San Diego, and seeing his newest book Great by Choice on sale. I picked it up. You know it's a good book, when on a day that featured 21 hours of plane time out of 24 1/2 hours, and you can stay awake to read it, then it has to be good. Indeed, it was great.

Collins writing style is based on research he has done with comparison companies. Same industry, 2 companies. One thrives, the other does not. His research seeks to answer why? As the subtitle of the book says: "Uncertainty, chaos, and luck why some thrive despite them all."

Leaders of the companies that thrive are nicknamed, "10xers" for they led consistent growth over 15+ years. Each company that fit this category outperformed its industry by 10x.

Such leaders demonstrate:

1. Fanatic Discipline: Consistent action based on core values, goals, and methods. They are consistent in their commitment to growth. They don't look merely for one exceptional year, but consistent growth that fits who they are.

2. Empirical Creativity: They rely on direct observation. They fire bullets, then canon balls. Instead of making the initial big investment. They test and calibrate with small case studies, and then when they hit the target, they fire the "cannon ball", the big initiative they have discovered that works.

3. Productive Paranoia: They prepare for the worst, and navigate their way through chaos. When tough times come (and they will come), they have prepared the work to do to lead their company/organization forward.

Such leadership is done with humility (a tie into Good to Great).

What I like about Collins writing in this book and his others is his ability to look at the data of his research and discover practical principles to apply to business, organizations, and yes churches as well as one's life. He communicates this information not with simply stale data, but connecting it with lessons from life. He begins with the story of Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott's attempts to reach the south pole. Amundsen accomplished his goal, Scott's attempt ended in disaster.

For a long flight home, Collins book was a great read. For navigating these times of chaos, Collins book was an essential read.

This is perhaps one of the best business books I've ever read.

The goal of the authors was to identify traits which are shared by companies which have long-term success in uncertain and unstable environments, but which are NOT shared by companies which are less successful in the same environments. The hope was that the extreme environments would highlight the traits of high performers.

Starting with a pool of more than 20,000 companies, they identified 7 such companies, each of which had at least 10x greater average stock growth than the overall market over a period of at least 15 years (between 1972 and 2002), and for each of these companies they selected a less successful counterpart in the same industry. In essence, the research methodology was a "case-controlled observational study," and the project took nine years to complete with a large team. They don't include any formal statistical analysis in the book, and correlations don't prove causality anyway (as the authors note), but I would still say that their methodology is about as good as you're going to get in the business world.

That said, here's a summary of the key findings from their study (some of which are counterintuitive) regarding traits of 10x leaders and companies:

(1) Their leaders may have an ego, but they mainly work for a cause larger than themselves. And their leaders come from all social classes.

(2) They think independently and review empirical data themselves to draw their own conclusions. This may involve making creative inferences and thereby deviating from conventional beliefs.

(3) They set realistic performance targets, tailored to their particular situation (including their values and goals), to be measured at appropriate time intervals. They do everything they can to meet these targets consistently, year after year, but allow for falling a little short of the targets when times are tough, while also avoiding trying to far exceed the targets when times are good (so that they don't overextend themselves and lose control).

(4) To help ensure long-term success (possibly spanning decades), they develop their own set of specific, methodical, and consistently-applied (SMaC) rules for their operations, and they're willing to be nonconformist in establishing these rules. The rules cover both what to do and not to do (checklists are helpful here). They question the rules often and do change them, but only one at a time, and not very often, so that change is generally incremental rather than revolutionary. Consistently applying the rules (ie, discipline) is critical.

(5) They pay attention to both the big picture and implementation details, zooming in and out often.

(6) They don't assume they have good predictive ability, but rather make small bets ("bullets") in various areas to see what works empirically, then they make big bets ("cannonballs") on the small bets that worked out. They don't generally make untested big bets, and they learn from their mistakes if they ever do so.

(7) In making small bets, they don't necessarily try to be the most innovative company in their industry. They just need to be innovative enough, and they have no problem with copying the innovations of others. Follow-through is just as important as innovation.

(8) Their overall luck is about average, so they don't usually succeed simply or mainly because of good luck. The difference is how they manage good and bad luck to get a high return on luck (ROL). Generally, they monitor very closely to keep an eye out for opportunities and risks and detect them early, particularly when the environment is more uncertain and unstable. More specifically, regarding opportunities (good luck), they prepare in advance to capitalize on them, and they don't let them slip by (eg, hiring and retaining the right people in the right roles). But more importantly, they're constantly paranoid about potential risks (even when things are going well), so they're proactive in trying to prevent problems, and they maintain safeguards to be resilient and limit damage if major problems do arise (eg, maintaining large cash reserves). The most important thing is to not get killed!

(9) They don't panic in reaction to changing situations. Rather, they take as much time as is available, but no more, to make the best possible decisions, and they proceed systematically, even when they must work fast, never allowing standards to be compromised.

(10) While they recognize uncertainty and instability, they ultimately believe their success (or failure) is in their hands.

Again, this is a great book, so I highly recommend it. It rings very true with my own business experience, and indeed I think these findings largely apply outside the business world as well, perhaps to all of life.

Book review by Richard L. Weaver II, Ph.D.

Jim Collins has a great reputation going into the writing of this book: "six books that have sold in total more than ten million copies worldwide! Wow!

It is clear why he has been successful, even though I have not read any of his previous bestsellers: Good to Great, Built to Last, and How the Mighty Fail. Great titles, too!

If those books provide a template for this one, it is easy to see why they are bestsellers.

Great by Choice has 38 pages of incredible notes. There are 14 pages of "Frequently Asked Questions." There are 52 pages on "Research Foundations." And the "Index" is nine pages long. In a book that totals 304 pages, the actual text (narrative) is only 183 pages. This is not an indictment, because the book reads well, the research is effectively presented, the examples are expertly injected into the content, and the "Key Points," "Unexpected Findings," and "Key Questions" used to end each of the seven main chapters of the book are valuable, helpful, and insightful additions.

I loved the emphasis on the discipline, empiricism, and paranoia of leaders (as opposed to the risk takers, visionaries, and more creative). I thought the examination of a leader's ability to scale innovation and blend creativity with discipline in a chaotic and uncertain world is a useful finding.

When you contrast the kind of leadership style of George W. Bush with that of Barack Obama (or any intellectual), you quickly discover that leading in a fast world does not require fast decisions and fast actions. The best leaders are thoughtful, analytic, patient, and intuitive. That is precisely the kind of leadership that will protect businesses and help them survive.

I loved the thought provoking nature of the book, the numerous practical concepts, and the fact that the findings here are data-driven. There is no question that the authors clearly prove that greatness happens by choice--and they effectively establish how choice can be directed, managed, and controlled.

For as long as I can remember, Jim Collins has been a research-driven business thinker. In each of his prior books, he and his associates (usually Morten Hansen among them) share what was revealed during many years of research to learn the answer to an especially important question. For Built to Last, it was "Why are some companies able to achieve and sustain success through multiple generations of leaders, across decades and even centuries?"; in Good to Great, "Why do some companies make the leap from good to great... and others don't?"; then in How the Might Fall, "How and why do some once great companies fall and other companies never give in to the same challenges, problems, and setbacks?"; and now in Great by Choice, "Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not?"

Collins, Hansen, and their colleagues conducted a nine-year study (2002-2011) and share what they learned. Here are the findings that caught my eye:

1. For reasons best revealed within the book's narrative, in context, some companies and leaders thrive in chaos. Those on whom the book focuses have out-performed their industry's index by at least 10 times and (key point) under the same extreme conditions with which others in the same industry must also contend.

2. Characterized as "10X" companies, those selected were paired in a "near-perfect match" -- for purposes of both comparison and contrast - with companies during "eras of dynastic performance that ended in 2002, not the companies as they are today. It's entirely possible that by the time you read these words, one or two of the companies on the list [i.e. Amgen, Biomet, Intel, Microsoft, Progressive Insurance, Southwest Airlines, and Stryker] has stumbled, falling from greatness."

3. The research invalidates well-entrenched myths (see Pages 9-10) with regard to the 10X companies and their leaders. For example, "the evidence does not support the premise that 10X companies will necessarily be more innovative than their less successful comparisons [during the same timeframe]; and in some cases, the 10X cases were [begin italics] less [end italics] innovative."

4. Leaders of 10X companies display three core behaviors that, in combination, distinguish them from the leaders of less successful comparison companies. They also call to mind the behaviors of Level 5 leadership, examined in detail in Good to Great. Specifically, 10Xers exemplify fanatic discipline ("utterly relentless, monomaniacal, unbending in their focus on their quests"), empirical creativity (reliance on "direct observation, practical experimentation, and direct engagement with tangible evidence"), and productive paranoia (channeling their fear and worry into action, preparing, developing contingency plans, building buffers, and maintaining large margins of safety").

5. In the Epilogue, Collins and his associates acknowledge their sense that "a dangerous disease" is infecting today's culture, one that incorrectly suggests that greatness "owes more to circumstance, even luck, than to action and discipline." Yes, they agree, good or bad luck plays a role for everyone, including 10Xers and Level Fivers. However, they offer an eloquent reassurance that many of us need to hear: "The greatest leaders we've studied throughout all our research cared as much about values as victory, as much about purpose as profit. As much about being useful as being successful. Their drive and stamina are ultimately internal, rising from where deep inside."

Organizations do not make choices, their leaders do, and the fate of each of those organizations depends on the quality of the choices its leaders make, especially amidst uncertainty, chaos, and luck...three realities that even the best leaders can only manage rather than control. That is the challenge but also the opportunity to which the book's title refers. The single most important difference between the 10X companies that Collins and Hansen discuss and those with which they are compared/contrasted is that those who lead them make better choices as they build and then sustain a culture within which everyone else does.

I feel bad for Jim Collins because I don't think he writes books just to make lots of money. I think he really tries to write highly enlightening and useful books. Except he doesn't. This book like his previous efforts is intended to help you get/keep your company ahead or build it to last. The problem is despite all of his research Jim still has little true understanding of the typical evolutionary pattern of a business space and therefore is unable to offer really useful lessons about how to outduel your competitors and get/keep your company achieving it's full potential. He is flying blind so he analyzes a bunch of super successful companies for common traits and concludes those traits are the key. But they aren't. That's why his super successful examples don't hold up over time. He gives you tips that will probably help but far less important than other more strategic matters. By the way Jim it takes a lot of nerve to publish a book in 2011 that uses Apple as a control group/underperforming company-I don't care how you explain it, in the words of Len Berman of ESPN, c'mon man. Also, the giant key to Admunson's success and Scott's failure was smart innovation (dogs) versus dumb innovation( all of Scott's stupid ideas). The 20 mile march rule was relatively far less important and now that's your big headliner. That's a great example of my main point. I would agree that he is an excellent writer.

Review and Summary
Business is plagued with ups and downs; how companies deal with those variables separate them from one another. Since every company experiences these trials, what variable makes some companies rise and some crash and burn? The answer is the mentalities of the leadership. Through a thorough analysis of what Collins and Hansen labeled “10Xers” companies, many, if not all of the individual companies in the analysis exuded fanatic discipline, productive paranoia, and empirical creativity in order to create and sustain the company success.
Beginning with fanatic discipline, a story about a march across the United States is used to exemplify this principle. The man walking did so by walking 20 miles a day. When the weather was beautiful he did not travel more than 20 miles and exhaust himself. When the weather was treacherous he struggled to complete the 20 miles, but did not sit the day out. Like the guy in the march, 10Xers can ensure positive growth for many years in the future without the rise and fall of testing the market capacity and riding the success by using fanatic discipline.
Empirical creativity is the second facets of “10Xers." Always remain one trend behind; innovators fade and lingerers disappear. By remaining in the center of the creativity, a business can perfect the latest trend and capitalize on the shortcomings of the innovators by firing “bullets” (ideas) without falling too far behind and leave no room for improvement. “Bullets” can be fired by companies to see if the market will accept the new idea, once these bullets land, then a company can implement and fire “cannonballs” (actions).
Productive paranoia; leading above the death line. Perhaps the most controversial precept within the book is healthy paranoia. When leaders assume a level of paranoia and face the challenge head on, aware of the risks, the company typically is more successful. The analogy used is the efforts and preparation for a Mt. Everest climb. One leader barely had enough supplies; the other took more than enough supplies. The result was horrible weather and the success of the team with the leader that was productively paranoid. Leaders that are productively paranoid are prepared for the worst but expect the best.
These three ideologies go into effect when a leader begins the SMaC process. SMaC stands for Specific, Methodical, and Consistent. Specific and detailed programs with a Methodical plan that are Consistent all make up the necessary legs of what is coined a good venture. Adopting this strategy can maximize profitably and decrease risk of failure. When a leader holds all the new decisions to this standard, the company, according to the authors’ research, is far more successful.
ROL “return on luck” is a critical factor that can catapult a company or break them in half. Everyone experiences luck and everyone must maximize or withstand this luck accordingly. Luck does not make a company great for a length of time, however, it can make a company get ahead or fall behind for a short amount of time. Capitalizing on luck is tricky, but if taken with the three above precepts luck can help a company continue to grow.
I agreed with the majority of the principles within the book. The one I found particularly important is productive paranoia. Being prepared for the worst, but not living or running a business in fear is very important to make a company and the employees both thrive. One precept that I had a hard time accepting was empirical creativity. The importance of innovation in a field of business I believe is so important, but the authors were hesitant in being an innovating company due to the higher risk of error. However despite my disagreements, the authors provided extensive research data that prove their ideologies to be factual.

Becca Lee, BBA
MBA Student at Dallas Baptist University

Jim Collins has a great analytical approach to studying companies using pair-comparisons of companies that demonstrate characteristics he wants to study and pairs each with a contra-example. The approach uses empirical and anecdotal information. The facts are interesting and the stories are memorable. He has used this approach in a number of books over the last twenty years.

Jim Collins studied "10Xer" companies, companies that beat their peers by 10X or better performance over a 15-year period. 10Xers show four sets of characteristics: fanatical discipline, empirical creativity, productive paranoia, and ambition. 10Xers plan, create buffers, innovate (not necessarily the most innovative), use empirical measures to build their own opinions. They are disciplined and understand that they cannot predict the future.

Leaders at 10Xers: tend not to be charismatic leaders, do not build personality cults, often are non-conformists, look to empirical data to build their own opinions rather than seeking the opinion of others and are self-disciplined. They are not the rock-star megalomaniacs who build personality cults around themselves.

10Xers set a "20-mile march" each day. They set up upper and lower bounds of acceptable performance and behaviors. 20-mile marches build confidence, enable companies to survive adversity and create self-discipline in chaotic environments.

10Xers tend to be less innovative companies than failed competitors but they are sufficiently creative to succeed in their industries. They shoot "bullets", then "cannonballs". 10Xers use bullets as empirical tests/validations. They are low cost, low risk and low distraction for the organization. Once 10Xers have empirical validation, they fire cannonballs which are major investments of resources and time. Uncalibrated cannonballs are expensive and dangerous. Even if an uncalibrated cannonball hits its mark, it rewards the wrong behavior. Good outcomes from bad process are dangerous.

10Xers engage in productive paranoia (think Jack Welch at GE). Such companies keep cash reserves that are 3-10X the industry average. They zoom-in and zoom-out looking for risks. They stay above the "death line" - the point where a company risks its existence when things go badly. Below the death line, a company has substantial risk of going out of business. 10Xers build buffers in good time to survive black swans (significant unpredictable events).

10Xers engage in SMaC (specific, methodical and consistent) behaviors. It combines consistency and change. Change when empirical creativity and constructive paranoia say so. Mediocre organizations change too often and do not have regard for SMaC.

Owen Jackson, Adam Smythe and Mark P. McDonald have done a great job summarizing this book. I'd like to give it 4.5 stars, as there are many lessons to glean from here and one can skip over some of the oft told B-School stories of Intel, Microsoft, and SouthWest Airlines.

The race between Amundsen and Scott to the South Pole is worth reading and the comparisons drawn from it are still relevant today.

The Aesop Fable "The Ant and the Grasshopper" comes to mind, as the ant (the 10xer) works hard and consistently to store away its food (or in this case, cash. 10xer's carry a higher cash-to-assets ratio and higher cash-to-liabilities ratio than their comparisons) to help prepare for when the winter (or tight economic) times hit.

The 2nd Aesop Fable "The Tortoise and the Hare" rings true amongst the 10xers. Like the tortoise, the 10xers are disciplined and their actions are consistent. From p.21 "...consistency with values, consistency with long term goals, consistency with performance, consistency of method, consistency over time... True discipline requires the independence of mind to reject pressures to conform in ways incompatible with values, performance standards, and long-term aspirations...having the will to do whatever it takes to create a great outcome, no matter how difficult."

Throughout the book, there are many grey boxes that help to summarize the key points of the current notion being presented and there are chapter summaries at the end of each chapter, serving as a helpful way to understand and reinforce the concepts.

Firing bullets vs. cannonballs is analogous to the baseball cliché of one should try to hit singles and doubles in their efforts (bullets), rather than trying to always try to hit swing for the fences in the attempt to hit the homerun (cannonballs).

This is just small sample of this well written book. It certainly worth reading.

I had read "Good to Great" when it first came out and found it to be pretty interesting with some memorably named attributes and drivers that successful companies had in common. When I learned that people in my company were reading "Great by Choice," I was excited to read it. There are many references to Progressive Insurance, where I worked for 8 of the years covered in Collins' research period. In fact, having worked on some of the projects that are referenced I thought the examples were described very accurately to fit the points Collins was making about all the 10X companies.

In general though, I was a bit disappointed by the brevity and story focus used in the book. Many of those stories are meant to be cases, but they are written more in story-telling mode to make Collins' points. The survival stories are great adventure reading. It doesn't seem right to criticize the book for having well-written stories, but when you examine the pages that are left to explore the common characteristics that 10X companies share ...

* The continuing focus on values by the founders and executives charged with running the company
* Building a much deeper empirical foundation for their decisions and actions
* Fixating in a paranoid way on the events, risks and bad luck that could kill the company
* Sticking to a steady schedule for advancing the company
* Approaching big initiatives with many smaller test projects leading up to the bigger implementation
* Making decisions by first zooming out to see the bigger picture before zooming back in to make the decision
* Having a recipe of strategies and tactics that would form the basis for performance

... there isn't a lot of space left to get into how those companies actually implemented those decisions and cultures. A charismatic leader or founder must have the vision, work habits and discipline to give a company the potential to be a 10X organization. Progressive's Chairman Peter Lewis absolutely had and has those personality traits and work habits that Collins raises as critical.

But it's also important to understand how the people in those organizations adopt those visions and follow through on those ideas and ideals to make those companies great. "Great by Choice" fails to go into enough detail to explain how that motivation and buy-in happens. So, in general, I think this is a good book to show the value of having charismatic 10X leaders, but Progressive wasn't a cult of personality. It was a place where skilled and talented people found a way to implement strategies and customer and employee experiences that made them great.

What does it take to build a great company? This question is at the heart of all of Jim Collins' works. I see Built to Last, Good to Great, and Great by Choice as a trilogy on great companies. Great by Choice is slightly different than the previous two because it examines great companies despite harsh environments. Somehow, someway, these companies not only survived, but thrived during the harshest conditions in their industry. What are the reasons?

Collins' goes through 5 principles that have led the companies in the book to greatness. The companies covered were: Amgen, Biomet, Intel, Microsoft, Progressive Insurance, Southwest Airlines, and Stryker. Thousands of documents were researched to discover what made the difference. For example, one difference these companies have over comparison companies is their 'Productive Paranoia.' They keep cash reserves 3X-10X higher than most companies, they manage risk, and focus on objectives. The stories are interesting and relevant. Everything seems to make logical sense.

Collins' gives his own terminology throughout the text. This makes the concepts easier to remember and more enjoyable to read. Some concepts you'll read about are: Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs, Zoom Out then Zoom In, and the SMaC recipe.

I found this to be Collins' most enjoyable book. He has excellent chapter summaries and highlights information in a great way. By reading the stories, you can't help but absorb additional greatness. For business owners, entrepreneurs, etc., this is a worthwhile read.

Despite the high degree of disruptive change, some companies not only survive, but thrive. Collins reaches into his treasure trove of data (decades of data on thousands of companies) to determine how they do it.

Not surprisingly, the conclusions are in line with those of his other books which eschew conventional wisdom in favor of tried and true “old-school” wisdom and what eventually amounts to common sense.
The 10X companies (those that outpaced their industry index by ten times or more over a significant period of time) are not more creative, visionary, charismatic, ambitious, risk seeking, heroic, blessed by luck or prone to making big bold moves. Rather, they exercise fanatical discipline, productive paranoia, empirical creativity, and “Level 5” ambition. Read the book to find out more.

As with his other books, this one is filled with thought provoking stories and analogies and is sprinkled with Collins-esque terms to help the reader grasp the concepts.

The message is not one that many will like hearing. In a world of the “quick fix” few rally around discipline, for instance. This makes it even more of an important read for managers in any organization

--Nick McCormick, author, Acting Up Brings Everyone Down

I am a big fan of Jim Collins. When I read Built to Last 10 years ago, I came away committed to being a leader who builds clocks more then simply tells time. His concepts from that book of being a hedgehog, and especially to preserve the core (values) and stimulate progress have guided me as a leader.

His book Good to Great affirmed my desire to be what he calls a Level 5 leader.

Saw while waiting for a flight from Delhi to Chicago to San Diego, and seeing his newest book Great by Choice on sale. I picked it up. You know it's a good book, when on a day that featured 21 hours of plane time out of 24 1/2 hours, and you can stay awake to read it, then it has to be good. Indeed, it was great.

Collins writing style is based on research he has done with comparison companies. Same industry, 2 companies. One thrives, the other does not. His research seeks to answer why? As the subtitle of the book says: "Uncertainty, chaos, and luck why some thrive despite them all."

Leaders of the companies that thrive are nicknamed, "10xers" for they led consistent growth over 15+ years. Each company that fit this category outperformed its industry by 10x.

Such leaders demonstrate:

1. Fanatic Discipline: Consistent action based on core values, goals, and methods. They are consistent in their commitment to growth. They don't look merely for one exceptional year, but consistent growth that fits who they are.

2. Empirical Creativity: They rely on direct observation. They fire bullets, then canon balls. Instead of making the initial big investment. They test and calibrate with small case studies, and then when they hit the target, they fire the "cannon ball", the big initiative they have discovered that works.

3. Productive Paranoia: They prepare for the worst, and navigate their way through chaos. When tough times come (and they will come), they have prepared the work to do to lead their company/organization forward.

Such leadership is done with humility (a tie into Good to Great).

What I like about Collins writing in this book and his others is his ability to look at the data of his research and discover practical principles to apply to business, organizations, and yes churches as well as one's life. He communicates this information not with simply stale data, but connecting it with lessons from life. He begins with the story of Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott's attempts to reach the south pole. Amundsen accomplished his goal, Scott's attempt ended in disaster.

For a long flight home, Collins book was a great read. For navigating these times of chaos, Collins book was an essential read.

This is perhaps one of the best business books I've ever read.

The goal of the authors was to identify traits which are shared by companies which have long-term success in uncertain and unstable environments, but which are NOT shared by companies which are less successful in the same environments. The hope was that the extreme environments would highlight the traits of high performers.

Starting with a pool of more than 20,000 companies, they identified 7 such companies, each of which had at least 10x greater average stock growth than the overall market over a period of at least 15 years (between 1972 and 2002), and for each of these companies they selected a less successful counterpart in the same industry. In essence, the research methodology was a "case-controlled observational study," and the project took nine years to complete with a large team. They don't include any formal statistical analysis in the book, and correlations don't prove causality anyway (as the authors note), but I would still say that their methodology is about as good as you're going to get in the business world.

That said, here's a summary of the key findings from their study (some of which are counterintuitive) regarding traits of 10x leaders and companies:

(1) Their leaders may have an ego, but they mainly work for a cause larger than themselves. And their leaders come from all social classes.

(2) They think independently and review empirical data themselves to draw their own conclusions. This may involve making creative inferences and thereby deviating from conventional beliefs.

(3) They set realistic performance targets, tailored to their particular situation (including their values and goals), to be measured at appropriate time intervals. They do everything they can to meet these targets consistently, year after year, but allow for falling a little short of the targets when times are tough, while also avoiding trying to far exceed the targets when times are good (so that they don't overextend themselves and lose control).

(4) To help ensure long-term success (possibly spanning decades), they develop their own set of specific, methodical, and consistently-applied (SMaC) rules for their operations, and they're willing to be nonconformist in establishing these rules. The rules cover both what to do and not to do (checklists are helpful here). They question the rules often and do change them, but only one at a time, and not very often, so that change is generally incremental rather than revolutionary. Consistently applying the rules (ie, discipline) is critical.

(5) They pay attention to both the big picture and implementation details, zooming in and out often.

(6) They don't assume they have good predictive ability, but rather make small bets ("bullets") in various areas to see what works empirically, then they make big bets ("cannonballs") on the small bets that worked out. They don't generally make untested big bets, and they learn from their mistakes if they ever do so.

(7) In making small bets, they don't necessarily try to be the most innovative company in their industry. They just need to be innovative enough, and they have no problem with copying the innovations of others. Follow-through is just as important as innovation.

(8) Their overall luck is about average, so they don't usually succeed simply or mainly because of good luck. The difference is how they manage good and bad luck to get a high return on luck (ROL). Generally, they monitor very closely to keep an eye out for opportunities and risks and detect them early, particularly when the environment is more uncertain and unstable. More specifically, regarding opportunities (good luck), they prepare in advance to capitalize on them, and they don't let them slip by (eg, hiring and retaining the right people in the right roles). But more importantly, they're constantly paranoid about potential risks (even when things are going well), so they're proactive in trying to prevent problems, and they maintain safeguards to be resilient and limit damage if major problems do arise (eg, maintaining large cash reserves). The most important thing is to not get killed!

(9) They don't panic in reaction to changing situations. Rather, they take as much time as is available, but no more, to make the best possible decisions, and they proceed systematically, even when they must work fast, never allowing standards to be compromised.

(10) While they recognize uncertainty and instability, they ultimately believe their success (or failure) is in their hands.

Again, this is a great book, so I highly recommend it. It rings very true with my own business experience, and indeed I think these findings largely apply outside the business world as well, perhaps to all of life.

Book review by Richard L. Weaver II, Ph.D.

Jim Collins has a great reputation going into the writing of this book: "six books that have sold in total more than ten million copies worldwide! Wow!

It is clear why he has been successful, even though I have not read any of his previous bestsellers: Good to Great, Built to Last, and How the Mighty Fail. Great titles, too!

If those books provide a template for this one, it is easy to see why they are bestsellers.

Great by Choice has 38 pages of incredible notes. There are 14 pages of "Frequently Asked Questions." There are 52 pages on "Research Foundations." And the "Index" is nine pages long. In a book that totals 304 pages, the actual text (narrative) is only 183 pages. This is not an indictment, because the book reads well, the research is effectively presented, the examples are expertly injected into the content, and the "Key Points," "Unexpected Findings," and "Key Questions" used to end each of the seven main chapters of the book are valuable, helpful, and insightful additions.

I loved the emphasis on the discipline, empiricism, and paranoia of leaders (as opposed to the risk takers, visionaries, and more creative). I thought the examination of a leader's ability to scale innovation and blend creativity with discipline in a chaotic and uncertain world is a useful finding.

When you contrast the kind of leadership style of George W. Bush with that of Barack Obama (or any intellectual), you quickly discover that leading in a fast world does not require fast decisions and fast actions. The best leaders are thoughtful, analytic, patient, and intuitive. That is precisely the kind of leadership that will protect businesses and help them survive.

I loved the thought provoking nature of the book, the numerous practical concepts, and the fact that the findings here are data-driven. There is no question that the authors clearly prove that greatness happens by choice--and they effectively establish how choice can be directed, managed, and controlled.

For as long as I can remember, Jim Collins has been a research-driven business thinker. In each of his prior books, he and his associates (usually Morten Hansen among them) share what was revealed during many years of research to learn the answer to an especially important question. For Built to Last, it was "Why are some companies able to achieve and sustain success through multiple generations of leaders, across decades and even centuries?"; in Good to Great, "Why do some companies make the leap from good to great... and others don't?"; then in How the Might Fall, "How and why do some once great companies fall and other companies never give in to the same challenges, problems, and setbacks?"; and now in Great by Choice, "Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not?"

Collins, Hansen, and their colleagues conducted a nine-year study (2002-2011) and share what they learned. Here are the findings that caught my eye:

1. For reasons best revealed within the book's narrative, in context, some companies and leaders thrive in chaos. Those on whom the book focuses have out-performed their industry's index by at least 10 times and (key point) under the same extreme conditions with which others in the same industry must also contend.

2. Characterized as "10X" companies, those selected were paired in a "near-perfect match" -- for purposes of both comparison and contrast - with companies during "eras of dynastic performance that ended in 2002, not the companies as they are today. It's entirely possible that by the time you read these words, one or two of the companies on the list [i.e. Amgen, Biomet, Intel, Microsoft, Progressive Insurance, Southwest Airlines, and Stryker] has stumbled, falling from greatness."

3. The research invalidates well-entrenched myths (see Pages 9-10) with regard to the 10X companies and their leaders. For example, "the evidence does not support the premise that 10X companies will necessarily be more innovative than their less successful comparisons [during the same timeframe]; and in some cases, the 10X cases were [begin italics] less [end italics] innovative."

4. Leaders of 10X companies display three core behaviors that, in combination, distinguish them from the leaders of less successful comparison companies. They also call to mind the behaviors of Level 5 leadership, examined in detail in Good to Great. Specifically, 10Xers exemplify fanatic discipline ("utterly relentless, monomaniacal, unbending in their focus on their quests"), empirical creativity (reliance on "direct observation, practical experimentation, and direct engagement with tangible evidence"), and productive paranoia (channeling their fear and worry into action, preparing, developing contingency plans, building buffers, and maintaining large margins of safety").

5. In the Epilogue, Collins and his associates acknowledge their sense that "a dangerous disease" is infecting today's culture, one that incorrectly suggests that greatness "owes more to circumstance, even luck, than to action and discipline." Yes, they agree, good or bad luck plays a role for everyone, including 10Xers and Level Fivers. However, they offer an eloquent reassurance that many of us need to hear: "The greatest leaders we've studied throughout all our research cared as much about values as victory, as much about purpose as profit. As much about being useful as being successful. Their drive and stamina are ultimately internal, rising from where deep inside."

Organizations do not make choices, their leaders do, and the fate of each of those organizations depends on the quality of the choices its leaders make, especially amidst uncertainty, chaos, and luck...three realities that even the best leaders can only manage rather than control. That is the challenge but also the opportunity to which the book's title refers. The single most important difference between the 10X companies that Collins and Hansen discuss and those with which they are compared/contrasted is that those who lead them make better choices as they build and then sustain a culture within which everyone else does.

Since bursting on the business book scene with Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, Jim Collins has been a fixture at the top of the business best seller list. His research-based approach to explaining success has struck a chord in the management corridors. I first became aware of Collins after being assigned to read Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't by my boss. We were attempting to turn a corner with our small company and he hoped this would give us the insight we needed to be successful.

I remember watching a presentation by Collins explain the methodology of sorting through the data to find the companies to study. He explained they first looked for a question that really interested him. I can understand the theory. Without a really good question to sustain him and his team of researchers, they wouldn't have the interest to spend several years seeking the answer. And he found a really good puzzle this time. I think this is perhaps his best work.

The latest research undertaking was centered around the question: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty , even chaos, and others do not? He and his team began by looking for enterprises who outperformed their industry averages by at least 10 times. Dubbed the "10Xers", they looked into what caused them to be successful when other, very similar organizations in the same environment, did not. From there, they dug into the lessons they can learn and found similar stories to describe the behavior.

He begins be relating the story of the race to the South Pole by Amundsen and Scott. If you are unfamiliar with this story, the analogy alone is worth the read. Amundsen trained for the mission to the South Pole by living with eskimos, experimenting in eating sources of meat available in the Antarctic, learning to travel in snow with dog sleds and other similar preparations. Scott, on the other hand, decided to use ponies without checking see how they would hold up in the harsh conditions (they don't), investing in new, untested technology - motor sledges (the engines cracked within days) and packing lightly on the supplies (1 ton / 17 men compared to Amundsen's 3 tons / 5 men). Amundsen reach the pole first and returned safely with his men before winter set back in. Scott's team, reduced to pulling their sleds by hand, reached the pole over a month later. The entire team died, starving to death two miles from their supply cache.

Powerful stories like this are employed throughout the book, each graphically emphasizing the traits of the 10Xer companies. Those traits include:

The 20 Mile March
Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs
Leading above the Death Line
SMaC (Specific, Methodical, and Consistent), and
Return on Luck
Each lesson is something that a company leadership has control over. They can replicate the results of these hyper-successful companies, if they choose. That is the key point: Companies can choose to be great. Yes, there is some luck involved, but Collins proves it isn't a matter of getting a lucky break, but what one DOES with any luck, good or bad.

I can't possibly do this book justice in the few words of this review. I recommend reading this book more highly than any other book to date. The lessons he teaches are profound and simple. Every step is in reach. I believe this book to be one of the most useful of all the business books I have read. It is applicable to many cases beyond business as well. He discusses other applications to nonbusiness organizations as well. This book should be on a list to be reviewed annually by every leader of an organization. It should be discussed in staff meetings and the concepts implemented everywhere. If you only buy one book on changing an organization, make it this one.

I really liked the easy readability of this book. Didn't try to be too wise in its vocabulary and used stories to tie in its ideas and concepts.

I didn't like the chapter on luck. Is there really such a thing?

I would recommend this book to those who want a general concept of how to build great companies based on research and easy to use ideas and policies. Great for entrepreneurs and executives or those who want to be one of those in the future.

I had read all books by the author. So far, I like this the most for two major reasons, besides his excellent organisation and writing skills already proven in his previous books. First, the key concept is simple. The author coined "fanatic discipline, productive paranoia and empirical creativity" as the triad of core behaviours of "10Xers" (those companies which thrive in extreme conditions). To me, that is the simplest one amongst all works of the author, and "simple is beautiful". By the way, I quite like those passages about ROL (return on luck). Second, the use of "Amundsen vs Scott" about their quest for becoming the first to reach South Pole is brilliant. To prepare himself, Amundsen, the winner, had practically tried everything, including cycling for 2k miles, tasting raw dolphin meat in case of shipwreck, apprentising with Eskimos, building enoromous buffers for unforeseen events and so on. It fully manifested the author's theory that 10Xers do not wait until they are in an unexpected storm to discover that they need more strength and endurance. In short, a must read for all. Highly recommended!

This book is based on research about organizations that do well despite a constantly changing environment. Since that latter phrase applies to all of us, there is something for everyone in this book. It's chock of ideas for how organizations and their leaders can ride the wave of uncertainty that seems to be the only constant in organizational life these days. All these ideas come together in what is referred to in the Art of Hosting as "the chaordic path" - the path between chaos and order. An organization that can effectively navigate that path will develop strength and clarity, and the successful journey requires a leader (or leaders) who can discern the nuances between how much order and how much chaos will illuminate the path. It's a tricky process, and this book highlights this.

That said, I have one caveat to throw in. This book was written by men about men, so it did not always resonate with me. In particular, when the authors describe the characteristics of 10xers, the term they use to describe leaders of these successful organizations, I had to ask, "Whose definition of success? Do these guys have a life?" It seemed to me that the only measurement of success was the bottom line. In this day and age, I truly believe that a more accurate measure of success is the triple bottom line. Organizations can no longer focus solely on profit to the exclusion of social and environmental impact.

Jim Collins gave us Good to Great and Built to Last. In Great by Choice he has joined with Morten Hansen to inform readers about how successful business firms perform under conditions of uncertainty and chaos. They formed a research team to determine what successful firms do in uncertain times to out perform their industry. They then report the characteristics of firms that outperformed their industries by ten times labeling those firms 10Xers. In a chapter titled 20 Mile March, they use the march metaphor to explain how 10Xers create a plan and pace themselves to completion. In Leading above the Death Line, they describe how the management of those firms maintains a "productive paranoia" which is their saving grace. My favorite chapter dealt with ROL or return on luck as they say. Were the 10Xers just at the right place at the right or were the non-10Xers just at the wrong place at the right time? The book isn't hard to read. You don't have to be a finance or operations wiz to understand what is detailed in this good book. If you benefited from Good to Great or Built to Last you will not be disappointed with Great by Choice. If you missed the earlier works, don't miss this one.

In Collin's "Built to Last", vision and values were key factors. In "Good to Great" even though at the start Collins believed the CEO had little influence, research showed the CEO was a key factor. In "Great by Choice" the CEO disappeared as a factor other than being ambitious. The "Apple" case is made to fit the his "recipes" for success. Jobs hired John Sculley, a marketing expert and Vice President of Pepsi to become the CEO of Apple. In Collin's terminology, Jobs "got the wrong man on the bus". When Jobs came back, he had become a better manager. He had been highly successful after leaving Apple and gained self-confidence. He realized that he had made a mistake, and that he could lead the company as the CEO. This case certainly demonstrates the importance of having the right CEO.

However, this book is definitely not a waste of time. One of the great values is a long list of questions CEOs should ask about their own company. Therefore also read the Research Foundations chapter too. Answering the question will give additional insights about what to change and improve.

Best Collins book yet. Good to Great was a breakthrough. Great by Choice will be a classic. In this book, Collins and Hansen describe what it takes to be a great company (10Xer) in turbulent and changing times. By comparing 10X companies (public companies that consistently exceed expectations and beat the market year after year) with companies in similar situations who did not perform over the course of two decades, it is easy to see what these companies became "great by choice."

With compelling storytelling and great metaphors, Collins creates vivid images to help the reader understand and learn the lessons presented. Key concepts include the 20-mile march (being consistent day after day in the little things), making the most of the Luck that comes your way (ROL--Return on Luck), and firing bullets then canons (find out what works with pilots before scaling). These concepts comes from the research, are time tested, and they work in and out of season.

Educational leaders invested in reform have much to learn from its pages. Worthy.

Jim Collins is one of the most influential business thinkers of our time. His distinct methodology of identifying matched pairs of companies to shed light on how and why high performers behave differently has captivated the readers of his best sellers, Built to Last, Good to Great, and How the Mighty Fall. The contrast between what works and what doesn't work creatively encapsulated in compelling visuals such as the "Flywheel" or the "Hedgehog Concept" has provided harried executives with much needed insights and grounding in an increasingly complex world.

Collins's latest book, Great by Choice, co-authored with Morten T. Hansen, once again employs the now familiar matched pairs methodology to contrast seven pairs of companies and focuses on how high performers master unstable environments. This research effort is clearly worthy, given the sudden emergence of the unprecedented combination of accelerating change and escalating complexity over the past decade. However, because the matched pairs methodology requires longitudinal data from publically traded companies, the research period for this latest study covers the 30-year period between 1972 and 2002. Unfortunately, the conclusions derived from the research may be of limited value today because they are based on the untested assumption that the world before and after 2002 is essentially the same. This may explain why in this latest study, Microsoft is the high performer and Apple is the contrasting comparison company.

Like the proverbial person who looks under the lamppost to find his keys because the light is better there, Collins and Morten fall prey to a methodological bias that systematically blinds them to the most important business realities of our time. Had the study focused on the past decade, it's more likely that Apple would be the high performer and Microsoft the comparison company, and if the methodology had been designed to include privately held firms, then businesses such as W. L. Gore & Associates, Linux, or Wikipedia - who are primary forces in the reinvention of management and the redefinition of leadership for a hyper-connected world - may have yielded more relevant observations.

Throughout the book, the authors draw insights for their conclusions from the sagacious actions of heroic individuals, such as Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines and Andy Grove of Intel. In particular they focus on two instances of extreme physical challenges where the choices of contrasting individual leaders were the difference between life and death for their teams. In the first instance, the authors contrast the discipline behind Roald Amundsen's unprecedented expedition to and from the South Pole in 1911 with the contemporaneous journey led by Robert Falcon Scott that tragically perished in the extreme cold. In the second instance, Collins and Morten compare the actions of a little known production team led by David Breashers, who achieved the incredible goal of shooting an IMAX film on top of Mount Everest, and the calamity of the Everest expedition led by Rob Hall and Scott Fischer, notably chronicled in Jon Krakauer's book, Into Thin Air.

An unspoken assumption in the Collins and Hansen's research is that the past is a proxy for the future. According to this assumption, analysis of historical trends is the portal to future success, which may explain why traditional managers love data-driven forecasts. Until recently, this assumption has been a reasonable management guide. Given the relatively slower pace of change of the world before the Internet, the past did serve well as a proxy for the future. However, we now suddenly find ourselves in a hyper-connected fast-changing wiki world where the unprecedented has become commonplace. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, iTunes, and Skype - none of which existed or could be forecasted as we celebrated the birth of new millennium a mere dozen years ago - are the harbingers of the new rules of a very different world where the past is clearly no longer a proxy for the future.

The revolutionary dynamics that define our new wiki world are that nobody is smarter or faster than everybody and that networks are far smarter and faster than hierarchies. That's why Wikipedia has displaced traditional encyclopedias, why the late-entry Google became the world's most popular search engine, and why, this past summer, a group of online gamers leveraging their collective intelligence took only three weeks to solve a molecular problem in AIDS research that had evaded the world's most intelligent individual scientists for over a decade. In a post-Internet world, just as the past is no longer a proxy for the future, the smartest organizations are no longer those with the smartest individuals. Today's smartest companies are those who know how to aggregate and leverage their collective intelligence.

Research focused on how the choices of the smartest individuals are the key ingredient behind great companies provides very limited lessons in a world reshaped by digital technology. The intelligence of highly skilled heroic leaders may still be preferable when it comes to leading physical expeditions. However, when the key challenge facing business executives is mastering the complexities of fast-changing times, the relevant leadership lessons are more likely to come from the new breed of leaders who build networks leveraging collective intelligence rather than hierarchies amplifying the individual smarts of heroic leaders. And when we understand these lessons, we are likely to discover that creating great companies is more about organizational design than individual choice.

Few of the networked companies being built by this new breed of leaders have 30-year histories and many are not publically traded firms. Nevertheless, the secrets behind their innovative approaches to creating great companies in a post-digital world are the lessons that are most needed for our time. Perhaps it's time for Collins and Hansen to step out from under the "light of the lamppost" and adapt their methodology to enlighten us about the new rules and the new realities of the wiki world. Their insights into the discipline and the habits of a new breed of great companies and their leaders would be most welcome and certainly very valuable.

Rod Collins
Author, Leadership in a Wiki World: Leveraging Collective Knowledge to Make the Leap to Extraordinary Performance

This is by all accounts, a worthy follower to the previous books, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don'tand How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In. However, a key issue in this book (and the earlier ones) is that prescribing the granularity for a trait or characteristic - whether it is of a leader or an organization is still elusive - and the limits of retrospective analysis are evident. One would benefit more if a particular dataset is chosen to develop a descriptor model - a learning dataset...and then apply the findings to another dataset - to see how well that theory holds up. Depending primarily on the stock market returns where the vagaries of multiple expansion/compression depending on which sector is deemed "hot" can skew results even within a sector. Moreover, the three 10X cases from healthcare may have very unique issues that are difficult to characterize (drug discovery certainly depends on luck). It is infact the treatment of the role of luck in one of the later chapters that is a clear standout in this book. The counterintuitive nature of how innovative a 10X company should be also is interesting - but perhaps limited in its generality due to lack of a clear theory supporting them - for example, will any of the analysis change if a "evolutionary analysis" or those based on Christensen's theories change the findings (here again, the dependence on stock performance is at best an incomplete representation).

Nevertheless, the book provides excellent thought framework for both business model analysts and leaders and can raise interesting questions - that in itself is well worth the read. Almost half the book is "Research foundations", that provide detailed instruments and background of the research. The summary notes for each chapter is also a welcome feature. A good read, but one should manage the expectations with respect to being able to define a prescriptive model.

This was a great business book to read if you are interested why some businesses succeed regardless of turbulent operational environment, global competition, economic depression, and fast pace of technology.
The author has taken some examples like South West airlines and Wall-mart to show why he thinks they succeed regarldess of the economic hardship and unemployment situation. Some people and some companies seem to be able to predict the future and how to be successful.

Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Jim and coauthor Morten Hansen describe the principles how to create a great business regarless of the surrounding environment.

The chapters are: Thriving in Uncertainty, 10Xers, 20 Mile March, Fire Bullets Then Cannonballs, Leading above the Death Line, SMaC, Return on Luck, and Epilogue: Great by Choice.
This book has partly same topic as the previous one of the same author (Collins), except some new findings were introduced: (1 The best leaders are more disciplined, more empirical, and more paranoid.
2 "fast decisions" and "fast actions" are not good in today's world.
(3)Fast change is not always needed: The continuously successful companies changed less than the comparison companies even if the surrounding environment changed fast.

Throw leaders into an extreme environment and it will separate the stark differences between greatness and mediocrity, according to Jim Collins and Morten Hansen in this book. The book provides the results of a study of companies that thrived in conditions of uncertainty and chaos while other companies with similar opportunities did not.

The book follows the now familiar Jim Collins process, starting with identifying companies that have had exceptional results (in this case in the context of a turbulent business environment), then comparing them with similar companies to identify differences which helped in reaching the exceptional outcomes. The identified differences are then presented using memorable terminology as best-practice principles for others to learn from. Principles from the book include:

* The 20 Mile March: A disciplined steady annual gain, rather than wildly fluctuating results
* Fire Bullets Then Cannonballs: An approach which involves small-scale testing before making large commitments
* Productive Paranoia: Keeping a close eye on risks and changing conditions, and building reserves and buffers to prepare for unexpected events
* SMaC recipes: Specific, Methodical and Consistent operating codes for turning strategic concepts into reality
* Return on Luck: The outcomes achieved by the way a company responds to good luck and bad luck events

I expect that this book is destined to join Built To Last: Successful Habits Of Visionary Companies and Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't as a business classic. The text (excluding appendices) is somewhat shorter and the principles less detailed, but the work as a whole is convincing, and the illustrations are both entertaining and informative. Most business leaders will have much to gain from absorbing and applying the wisdom set forth by the authors.

Painful to listen to. Read by the author and nearly ruined by him. Overly dramatic reading with awkward pace and inconsistent pauses between words.
I have a long commute and really wanted the information contained in this book so I purchased the audiobook. I'm thankful that the audible app has a 1.5x listen speed. It's the only thing that makes the narration bearable.
Content is fantastic but it's a tough listen.

I read Good to Great and was fascinated and changed forever. It was an easy read, not terribly long (perhaps 210 pages of real meat; I study every page in books like this and still cut through it on a flight across the Atlantic), and the appendices of data and graphs were intriguing. I've listened to Great by Choice twice and am more fascinated. This is NOT a rehash of Good to Great. It is more of a "how to" about a handful of companies (perhaps eight to ten, at the most) out of 20,400 publicly-traded companies that sustained exceptional performance for at least 15 years and how they did it. I'm sure those who have read Good to Great think it is a rehash, but it is absolutely not. The last section responds to a a number of questions that lead Collins to address all of the four books in this series (i.e., Built to Last, Good to Great, How the Mighty Fall, and Great by Choice). This is not a boring book, doesn't squeeze every drop put of each idea, and is very practical.

It takes him a while to write his books, but man; are they good (scratch that - "they are great") when they do finally hit the shelves. I'm talking about Jim Collins' seemingly bi-decennial blockbuster business books, and his latest, Great by Choice is no disappointment. Picking up where his last hits (Built to Last, Good to Great and How the Mighty Fall) left off, Great by Choice examines the success (and failure) of great businesses in times of "uncertainty, chaos and luck."

Utilizing the strengths of his dedicated, multi-body research team, Collins - along with his new co-author, Morten T. Hansen - compared 11 company sets over a thirty-year period to determine if there were certain behaviours that could be identified in highly successful companies. (There are, by the way.)

Collins and Hansen labelled these successful companies "10Xers," meaning that over the 30 year study period, they outperformed the general market by a factor of at least 10. What the authors learned about the factors that led to this terrific accomplishment may surprise you.

Within the book reviews you will already find a number of examples that summarize the content and ideas of this book. As a school principal I found these concepts interesting and could relate many to school leadership. Three of the chapters really spoke to me and related to educational leadership. The chapter on having a long term vision (The 20 mile march) provides a great story as an analogy to the long term goals a school district or business may focus on. The method to successfully make a long term goal or vision a reality reminded us to take the big things slow and make intentional and strategic decisions. The chapter that discussed "bullets and cannon balls" or to experiment and then innovate correlates very close to what great schools districts do. When you are talking about student achievement or public funds, decision should be made with solid data the stakes are too high to be wrong. The last chapter that talked about luck was the most interesting to me. The message was not new but to see how these unique companies did not have any more or at times less luck than others but still excelled was interesting. The data to back it up or to measure luck was the new approach for me. The idea was that people were the luck, getting the right people on the bus and involved is what made the difference or luck.

I would highly recommend this book to any school leader. We read this book as a district and the common understanding has allowed us all to view our district in a similar and I think better light.

Collin's work Great By Choice is a great sequel to Good to Great. Here he does a great analysis of contrasting what he calls "10X" companies that outperformed their peers. In particular, how the disciplined approaches of these high performing companies in challenging times is particularly relevant to our "Great Recession period" of this present decade. There is great information that companies of any size can use. Both books are ones I will be referring to in my "Zoom Out" reading time for many years to come.

The Lessons Learned From the Book "Great by Choice"
Apply to Any Size Company

As a Vistage executive coach I spend a fair amount of time scouring the best business books on strategy and leadership. I like to recommend these to my Vistage group members and discuss the books' key principles that could be inculcated into their businesses.

One of the more prolific authors on the topics of business growth and strategy is Jim Collins, who coauthored the seminal books Built to Last and Good to Great. His most recent book is Great by Choice, written with Morten Hansen. Since its first edition in 2011 4 million copies have been sold. I bought one of them.

My group members and I have been discussing the poignant lessons from this book, which there are many. The authors and their team have spent years researching and identifying companies that have met three fundamental tests:

1. "Spectacular results for 15+ years relative to the stock markets and their industry.
2. Achieved these results in turbulent environments.
3. Began their rise from a position of vulnerability".

Collins noted the most successful companies in the research beat their industry averages by an order of magnitude of 10 times! These successful companies were labeled, not surprisingly, "10xers." Moreover, the authors were able to identify several common attributes that led to the companies' extreme successes. Throughout the book Collins and his coauthor cite numerous examples of companies demonstrating these exemplary operational principles, which I've noted for you here (Some case studies were extracted from the book Quicklet on Jim Collins, by Jason Shen)

* Fanatical discipline: relentless focus on their objectives.
* Empirical creativity: rely on direct observation, practical experimentation and direct engagement with tangible evidence.
* Productive paranoia: stay highly attuned to threats and changes in their environment, they assume conditions will turn against them and prepare contingency plans, build buffers and maintain large margins of safety.
* Passion for a cause larger than themselves.

In addition, by researching thousands of companies, the authors were able to analyze and identify common attributes of these so-called 10xers. A few of these categories include:

* 20 mile march: requires delivering high performance in difficult times and holding back in good times. Southwest Airlines had its 20 mile march of being profitable each year between 1990 and 2003 -- a demanding task when the U.S. airline industry as a whole turned a profit on only 6 of those14 years. Despite major changes in the industry where big players went bankrupt, Southwest was able to stay profitable for 30 years straight.

* Fire bullets then cannonballs: Bullets are low cost, low risk efforts that help validate concepts. Once validated, you can fire a precisely aimed "cannon" to quickly scale the business initiative.
* Apple stores spent a year testing its store concept before launching the first two stores in 2001. Apple's stores were quickly deployed (cannon ball) following the first few bullets.
* SMaC: Stands for specific, methodological and consistent: the more uncertain your environment, the more "SMaC" you need to be. It's a set of durable operating practices that creates a replicable and consistent success formula. Amendments can be made to one element while leaving the rest of the recipe intact. The challenge is figuring out what works, understanding why it works and grasping when to change and knowing when not to.
* ROL (return on luck): This may be more important than ROA, ROE, ROS or ROI (return on assets, equity, sales or investment). The 10x companies had as much bad and good luck as poorly performing comparison companies yet had a great return. The best way to find a strong current of good luck is to swim with great people and build deep and enduring relationships with people for whom you'd risk your life and who'd risk their lives for you.
* In the mid 90s,AMD had a huge amount of good luck flow in their direction: computer makers were kind of sick of Intel's dominance in chip making and wanted an alternative. A federal jury allowed AMD to make Intel chip clones, and thus earned record sales. IBM then announced they were pulling hundreds of computers because of a flaw in the Intel Pentium chips, forcing Intel through a $475 million recall process. This was insane great luck for AMD. People were preordering AMD's K5 chip like crazy. And what happened? They blew it. The project slipped months behind schedule and people started moving back to Intel. By the time AMD fixed their problems, Intel had released a new generation of chips, forcing AMD behind again. AMD wasn't disciplined about their hardware production and failed to build up the buffer to "throw money at the problem". Thus, they failed to take advantage of their good luck.

You'll find the lessons learned from this book timeless and appropriate for any size business. We'll continue to make it must reading for my Vistage Minnesota groups.

When Jim Collins was about to graduate from Stanford Business School he received employment offers from everywhere. I did my level best to convince him to join our investment bank in New York City. During our first meeting I asked him why he had selected Stanford Business School over Harvard Business School. Half humorously he replied "Because the buildings at Stanford are better." I had no idea what he meant until after a couple of probing questions I realized that he was talking about how suitable they were for being climbed. Jim was then of course a world class rock climber and apparently he sometimes would free climb the outside of multi-story buildings at Stanford. Throughout his life Jim has been reaching for the highest degree of excellence, striving to understand how certain individuals and organizations reach it, and why most others don't. Most importantly for all of the rest of us, Jim also possesses an extraordinary ability to share his insights and conclusions. He writes and communicates in such a natural, easy, clear, and effective manner that reading what he writes is almost the same as having a direct conversation with him. I have followed his career ever since he left Stanford Business School and I must have read most of what he has written. Great by Choice, his latest, is certainly a contender for being his best. It is vital reading, and great fun in the bargain. I recommend it most highly.

Kenneth E. MacWilliams
Portland, Maine

I believe I have read each book of Mr. Collin's and this one is also a great addition to the company library. I remain a huge fan of Good to Great but I feel this and How the Mighty Fall have the biggest impact on me & my outlook on keeping my head above water while trying to constantly improve my company.
This book does a great job at breaking down and explaining the 3 common behaviors of leadership within companies of long term success. I think it also does a great job pointing out that it is good to be productively paranoid, to use empirical evidence for decision making, and to live / create a culture of discipline. Too many books focus on flashy, hollywood CEO behaviors and not nearly enough on nose to the grind stone, push the flywheel, weighted choices. I am tired and suspect of the call for hyper-creativity, always-on, keep moving as fast as possible and we'll call it innovation hype. Thanks for the book, Mr. C!

Jim Collins has a great way of telling stories about the firms and organizations he studies. I heartily reccommend this book to those who want to improve organizational success. As an added bonus the reader gets to learn more about the race to the South Pole which in and of itself is alot of fun. More seriously I think many organizations could learn much from his 10X triangle and the steps suggested for managing through unchartered waters. As the book notes well, if you prepare for a chaotic environment and no big bad event happens, you are already better prepared for a smoother upward trajectory in easier times. In essence, there's very little downside to planning as if the future is unknowable and probably dicey in your industry of choice.

I love this book. As far as I know, the Chinese translation of this book is also very popular among Chinese management scholars, executives and managers. I recommended this book to my MBA and EMBA students, they like it very much. When I was an assistant director of President Office in a investment group which is a Chinese listed company, I also recommended it to the upper echelons. I got highly positive responses about the book from them.

Jim Collins has an undisputed reputation for cranking out management books; his biggest mistake in Great by Choice was choosing to be the narrator.

His voice is cluttered and unclear. He over enunciates to compensate for the guttural quality of his voice. He slurs all of his "s" whether at the beginning or end of his words. He refers to his co-author as MorTTen...imagine 2 capital T's stumbling off the tip of his tongue.

He over "acts" the narrative. Exclaiming repeatedly; Again and Again and Again and Again. Each time with an exclamation point and over stressed syllables.

I am reading this book only because it was recommended by my company's CEO - and because I have a long commute I opted for the CD instead of the text.

I will NEVER (over enunciated, stressed and acted) purchase another book narrated by Jim Collins.

For fans of Good to Great who are wary of reading something that may muddy the waters of the mind by offering new secrets of greatness, I'd say you have nothing to fear. Collins and Hansen do sharpen their understanding of the key principles by looking at how the best firms cope with extreme conditions, but Great by Choice doesn't overturn the findings of their previous classic.

By way of help, it has an excellent FAQ section that connects the ideas of Great by Choice to those of Good to Great, which I found helpful.

Overall, it's interesting, well-written and recommended. Not too long either (the main part of the book is only 184 pages).

This review refers to the audio book. The content of the book is okay, with some good analysis and advice. However, the author chose to do the reading of the book himself. Rarely is someone gifted in two areas - writing and reading. Please, authors, hire a voice actor to read your book. They are far, far better. The author stops mid-sentence as if surprised by his own words. He ad-libs and reads very slowly. I almost see someone in his office distracting him or he is looking out the window and then suddenly remembers he is being recorded and finishes the sentence after a ridiculous pause. Buy the book if you want to skim and get the main ideas but avoid the audio book

If you're familiar with Jim Collins' work, this will be a short but enlightening read (I picked this up at the airport, and read it from cover to cover by the time I reached my final destination). Most of the the principles that allow companies to succeed are similar enough to the principles from "Built to Last," or "Good to Great," that they are easy to understand, but differ in key aspects. Simply, this is a solid book, thoroughly researched and easy to read, another Collins classic. My only complaint might be the brevity of the book, I think actual content was under 200 pages, with the remaining 120 or consisting of the explanation of research methodologies.

Excellent!!! Talks about how some companies thrive in chaos while others don't. Has a lot to do with knowing who the company is, and being consistent to applying it to business decisions.

Karen L. Jett, CMA
Author Grow Your People, Grow Your Business
Facilitator and Creator of Strategic Plan-ting(TM) Workshops

you know Jim Collins and we all know that he could not disappoint us. and he didn't! he put out a great book, fun and easy to read, interesting and enchanting, i really think it is one of the best book he ever wrote!i advise you also this Get Instant Access: How To Generate Online Leads And Sales Profitably

the store would benefit greatly by adding an obvious Table of Contents for all the books, particularly non-fiction, as one reviewer here points out. I have read this book and found an obvious flaw, which disallows the position of usefulness the book might otherwise have: the choice of companies is inherently flawed and almost useless. The authors have chosen companies that are so elite in their fields and esoteric, in many ways (an airline company) that the applicability to most business endeavors is not correlatable.

I didn't care for any of the companies that were used as the examples. Particularly Microsoft, which has a horrid reputation for, ahem, shall we say, "modeling" what others actually create. (Acknowledging a prejudice for Apple as I am one of their users) Collins does not seem to give enough of a nod to the role of the real creator, those who are truly visionary, of which no one would ever call Bill Gates. But anyone who doesn't see the sheer absolute mad creativity of Steve Jobs has to be wearing some kind of blinders as these authors apparently are. I also found the overuse of "cutesy" descriptive terms for a particular business step annoying. Must everything have some kind of special name? Reminds me of kindergarden.

Certainly worth reading, but not really what it purports to be: ie, not ground breaking and if one ignores the company comparisons, which are not truly companies that are comparable, there are a few nuggets in the book if one looks hard enough. So how did the authors do here? Good but not great!

'Great by Choice' is the outgrowth of nine years of research. The authors studied high-performing firms that had beat their industry index by at least 10X for at least 15 years between 12/31/1972 - 12/31/2002. The resulting list, along with their paired less successful competitors, included: Amgen (77.2X its industry, less successful competitor Genentech), Biomet (11.2X, Kirschner), Intel (46.3X, AMD), Microsoft (118.8X, Apple), Progressive Insurance (11.3X, Safeco), SouthWest Airlines - SWA (550.4X, PSA), and Stryker (10.9X, U.S. Surgical Corp.). These most successful firms did not have visionary ability to predict the future, were not necessarily more innovative nor faster moving than their comparison firms.

They were, however, paranoid. Bill Gates ('I consider failure on a regular basis') worried about competitors, technology, legal cases, customer support problems - per a 6/1991 memo, while Apple's Sculley instead took a nine week vacation in 1988, a good year for Apple. Its ROE, however, began falling from 40% in 1988 to 13% in 1994, and went negative in 1996. Similarly, they credit SWA's Kelleher with 'predicting eight of the last three recessions,' and Microsoft with keeping expenses low even in good years, in preparation for the bad years.

Another finding - 10X leaders were incredibly ambitious for their company and cause, but not themselves. The less successful comparison cases pursued much more aggressive growth and took big-leap radical change adventures to a much greater degree. So much for 'big, hairy, audacious goals - BHAG, per Collins and Porras in 'Built to Last' and 'In Search of Excellence' by Peters and Waterman. And that provides a healthy warning against literally taking the content of 'Great by Choice' and similarly books seriously.

Continuing, the most successful firms committed to high-performance, even in difficult conditions - eg. SWA pursued annual profits every year and obtained them even though the entire industry had a profit in just 6 of 14 years during 1990 - 2003. Progressive Insurance only grew at rates it could achieve with a combined ratio of 96% (losses + overhead no more than 96% of income), and did so 27 out of 30 years. Stryker committed to 20% growth in net income/year, and accomplished that 90% of the time. Intel committed to following Moore's Law (doubling the complexity of chips every 18 - 24 months), and Microsoft made continuous iterations of software products, often buggy at first and sometimes merely vaporware. Finally, Amgen pursued incremental product innovation and extending existing products to new treatments. The authors also contend that the most successful pursued steady growth, not big bang leaps. SWA expanded slowly - four new cities in 1996, out of the 100 or so requesting SWA to enter, and took eight years just to expand outside Texas. Similarly, Intel limited its growth between 1981 - 1984, allowing AMD to gain ground; then came the 1985 recession, and AMD's rapid debt growth made it unable to recover quickly enough to again challenge Intel.

The preceding is credible, especially the overly-subdued warning about excess debt; however, the 'finding' is not infallible nor always easy to recognize in practice. For example, the drug industry has a dark reputation for minor molecule manipulation to extend patent lives and fend off generics, managing research findings to give the appearance of greater value than reality merits, and trying to skate around FDA marketing limitations. Sometimes this suffices, other times not. Intel would not have succeeded to the degree it did had it not first gotten out of the overly competitive memory market it began in. New businesses in China repeatedly leap to the forefront through fast growth and maximizing scale economies. And SWA would not have succeeded to the degree it did without also bringing a radically new business model to a senescent industry. Thus, a second warning against taking 'Great by Choice' too literally.

And what about Apple? The butt of Collins' comparison vs. Microsoft, it has since become the world's most valuable company! Yet, Jobs' focus was on implementing product innovation, simplification and superb aesthetics - always immediately or within seeming impossible time-frames, and never on steady financial, product development, or growth. Microsoft, during this more recent time period, despite its paranoia fell behind as it missed out on the social media craze, seriously lagged Google in Internet search, and was a clunky also-ran vs. Apple in phones, pads, and music. Then there's Facebook - suddenly appearing out of nowhere and without any business plan, now seriously threatening Google's advertising revenues. Oops - that would be the third warning.

Genentech outpaced Amgen in patent productivity by > 2X and was named by 'Science' magazine as having an unmatched record in the industry for creating major new breakthroughs. Overall, the authors found 3 instances where 10X firms were more innovative and 4 where their less successful competitors were. They concluded that the 10X companies were not more innovative than their counterparts; that conclusion, however, would never pass any valid test of statistical validity, nor most people's test of common sense validity. Thus, a fourth reason not to take their conclusions literally.

Bottom-Line: 'Great by Choice' has some good material for leaders to be aware of; however, they should not make it their only diet.

This book answers in many ways questions of our daily concerns in running businesses in a high level context, but it's the perfect guide to create a better landscape downwards. It's an important reading for middle management with aspirations to grow within a company...it's a great reading for senior positions and especially CEOs and of course interesting for all readers that want to understand how we end having big conglomerates in our world.

Jim Collin's is a wonderful follow through to his masterful Good to Great. Collin's is one of the best thinkers in the leadership genre. Instead of just repeating cliches, Collins performs the heavy task of sorting through the data, pondering interrelationships that few others recognize. His 20 mile march concept alone is worth the price of the book. I highly recommend this book to anyone who is leading a community and strives for greatness.

Jim Collins continues to crank out new iterations of the same basic research, though it is updated to factor in the changing world. The result is further refinement and credibility of the aspects that make companies and leaders great. While nothing can top Good To Great, all of his books are worth hearing or reading. This one is no exception.

I found the observations of this book to be very insightful. It challenges the assumptions for a successful organization. But I expected that after reading Good to Great. I find the ideas useful in my role on the community's Board of Education. My pastor is reading Great by Choice to apply it to our church.

Reminder that it take discipline and consisted execution to keep your business moving forward even in turbulent times with a good measure of paranoia too. I liked the references to the race to the South Pole and the IMAX expedition on Everest in 1996. Preparation was essential to both successful expeditions.

If you read Built to Last and Good to Great, there is nothing new in this book. It is boring and repetitive. I enjoyed the first two book, but there is no real purpose on this book. There are better choices out there.

The research that went into this book is so thoughtful and overwhelming. I loved reading how Southwest has consistently stood by their "20 Mile March" values and grown successfully because of it. Great book!

It's really 183 pages (the rest is just research notes). The whole book is summarized on page 175. There's some interesting anecdotes and the ideas make sense, but this is a very slight (as in not very deep) book. What makes a company great is that they do deep analysis of the business, prepare, take advantage of success without endangering the company, re-evaluate periodically, and work steadily for success, making adjustments if necessary.

The in-depth analysis and research of the profiled companies keeps you quickly turning the page. If you like books that deep-dive into thoroughly explained case studies, you will love 'Great by Choice'.

This book does a brilliant job of explaining the differences between companies that are truly successful, and those that never quite reach the same level excellence. It is a clear look into research that has produced a doable plan for companies everywhere to not only weather the current economic storm, but thrive in spite of it!

I found Great by Choice to be a tedious read. There is so much repetition that it is obviously an attempt to fluff up the word count to justify a minimum price.
I have been in the semiconductor business for 35 years, I found their comparison between Intel and AMD prety much gibberish.
Half way through I threw the book away.
Save your money.

Great by Choice is a compelling read, but falls short of being a great business book. Collins is a wordmaster and is able to make boring business analysis interesting. But his analysis is too much social science and conjecture. Perhaps I am remembering that in his first book Circuit City and Fannie Mae were held up as examples of companies that achieved greatness over time, but too often Collins skims the surface and apparently his analysis doesn't always stand the test of time.

There is much to gain from reading the book - just take it with a healthy grain of salt.

Somehow despite the fact that the numbers are compelling, something is missing. Perhaps I was looking for a more people and process, purpose-driven thesis. Whatever the case, I found no inspiration in the research of these highly successful companies.

As a business owner, I did not feel like he drew accurate conclusions based on the evidence and anecdotes that he provided.

I love Jim Collins and have read his earlier books more than once, but this book was a disappointment.

It was like he had extra research (including some very good and inspirational stories) leftover from his previous books that he didn't want to go to waste, and so he created concepts out of thin air in order to tie them together.

I will start off by stating I am a fan of Collins book Good to Great. It was a well research book that found ideas that have been born out by other scientific research. Great by choice is a different story. While his ideas are fun and interesting this is not research or scientific. He chose 7 companies that out performed the stock market by at least 10x. Chance would claim that there would be a small number of these companies. Of the seven none were 10xs for the last 10 years. In fact Microsoft has under performed the market while its control company apple has out performed microsoft by 1400%.

The next problem is interpretation. With no methods to determine before hand how to decide it is easy to make things fit into your preconceived ideas. Bullets then cannons. The example of apple firing bullets with the ipod by creating it for the apple first then going big by developing for windows is just not true. In Isacsons book he states jobs never wanted to make an ipod for windows, he felt it was a way to attract windows users to apple. latter he reluctantly agreed. Yet this is used as an example of bullets before cannons.Simply not true.

Another example is the idea that you can quantify luck. They use the example of Amgen hiring a key employee as an example of luck. If that is true then would you not have to look at ever employee who turns out well to see if it was luck and look at every employee who made a bad decision to see if their hire was luck? The other error inherent in this thinking is the idea that any event occurs independantly. To stick with the same example. They state that the employee hire was luck because he read the ad at a time when he was looking for a new job. Well why was he looking for a new job. Is his reason bad luck for the company he left?

In scientific terms at best this is a derivation set. It shoudl be validated on another era.

Hi, can you say "SPIN" book? If you're new to this "author" start by putting this book down and get "Good to Great" (ROFL). Once you get past the list of the "Good to Great" list, you will stop reading INSTANTLY. And then you will take this Great By Choice (Oh man I think I laughed so hard milk came out of my nose!) and shred it, throw it onto the BBQ and then spread the ashes while driving down the road at 65 mph so NO ONE could EVER get something from either of these books!!!

Crap book in 2001, Crap book in 2011.

Retire old man, you have no valid points. Old school 1950-1980 thinking/business ideas.

This was a great business book to read if you are interested why some businesses succeed regardless of turbulent operational environment, global competition, economic depression, and fast pace of technology.
The author has taken some examples like South West airlines and Wall-mart to show why he thinks they succeed regarldess of the economic hardship and unemployment situation. Some people and some companies seem to be able to predict the future and how to be successful.

Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Jim and coauthor Morten Hansen describe the principles how to create a great business regarless of the surrounding environment.

The chapters are: Thriving in Uncertainty, 10Xers, 20 Mile March, Fire Bullets Then Cannonballs, Leading above the Death Line, SMaC, Return on Luck, and Epilogue: Great by Choice.
This book has partly same topic as the previous one of the same author (Collins), except some new findings were introduced: (1 The best leaders are more disciplined, more empirical, and more paranoid.
2 "fast decisions" and "fast actions" are not good in today's world.
(3)Fast change is not always needed: The continuously successful companies changed less than the comparison companies even if the surrounding environment changed fast.