Word: greates
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...never really seen our work as being about business. These are human questions - how do you take something mediocre and make it exceptional? Why do some people become great in a world that's full of tremendous volatility, uncertainty and rapid change? That's a human question that we happen to address by looking through business, which we can do because of the rigor of the data...
Circuit City. Lehman Brothers. Fannie Mae. The economic crisis has devastated a slew of companies that once ranked among the country's most admired. Best-selling author and corporate researcher Jim Collins spent five years studying the decline of great businesses for his fourth book, How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In. He spoke with TIME about finding lessons amid the corporate wreckage, his choice for "entrepreneur of the decade" and why the rocky business climate may be here to stay. (See the top 10 bankruptcies...
There are three things worth keeping in mind about any great enterprise that eventually falls. Number one, the seeds of decline are usually in place long before decline becomes visible - like a disease where you look strong on the outside but you're already ill on the inside. Second, we tend to think decline happens because of complacency - people just sitting still, not being aggressive or innovating. But we found there's often tremendous change and innovation leading right up to the point of fall. It's overreaching: undisciplined growth, undisciplined risk-taking. Finally, I was surprised...
What happened in all the great companies that fell is they made a shift from a humble drive to an arrogance, the belief they somehow magically deserved all that success - "We're just really better than everybody else, and we always will be." The great irony is that leads to the undisciplined pursuit of more, and it's very hard to preserve your values and your basic model if you grow too fast...
...been one of my great classrooms. Gravity does not care if you didn't get enough sleep - you've got to be on your game. El Capitan [a perilous rock formation in Yosemite National Park] is unforgiving, and gravity is unforgiving. That's what we're studying - how you build something great in an environment that's unpredictable, uncertain and ultimately unforgiving...