In How the Mighty Fall, Collins confronts these questions, offering leaders the well-founded hope that they can learn how to stave off decline and, if they find themselves falling, reverse their course.
Decline can be avoided.
Decline can be detected.
Decline can be
reversed.
Amidst the desolate landscape of fallen great
companies, Jim Collins began to wonder: How do the mighty fall? Can
decline be detected early and avoided? How far can a company fall before
the path toward doom becomes inevitable and unshakable? How can
companies reverse course?
In How the Mighty Fall, Collins
confronts these questions, offering leaders the well-founded hope that
they can learn how to stave off decline and, if they find themselves
falling, reverse their course. Collins' research project–more than four
years in duration–uncovered five step-wise stages of decline:
Stage
1: Hubris Born of Success
Stage 2: Undisciplined Pursuit of More
Stage
3: Denial of Risk and Peril
Stage 4: Grasping for Salvation
Stage
5: Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death
By understanding these
stages of decline, leaders can substantially reduce their chances of
falling all the way to the bottom.
Great companies can stumble,
badly, and recover.
Every institution, no matter how great, is
vulnerable to decline. There is no law of nature that the most powerful
will inevitably remain at the top. Anyone can fall and most eventually
do. But, as Collins' research emphasizes, some companies do indeed
recover–in some cases, coming back even stronger–even after having
crashed into the depths of Stage 4.
Decline, it turns out, is
largely self-inflicted, and the path to recovery lies largely within our
own hands. We are not imprisoned by our circumstances, our history, or
even our staggering defeats along the way. As long as we never get
entirely knocked out of the game, hope always remains. The mighty can
fall, but they can often rise again.
About the Author:
Jim Collins is a student of companies - great ones, good ones, weak ones, failed ones - from young start-ups to venerable sesquicentenarians. The author of the international best seller Good to Great and coauthor of Build to Last, he serves as a teacher to leaders throughout the corporate and social sectors. His work has been featured in Fortune, BusinessWeek, The Economist, USA Today, and Harvard Business Review.
Selling Rights | Indian Sub-Continent Only |
Packing Weight | 0.5 kg |
ISBN | 9781847940420 |
Author | Jim Collins |
Publisher | Random House Business Books |
Language | English |
Page count | 222 |
Book Format | Hardbound |