Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns with another groundbreaking work, this time to ask: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not?
In Great by Choice - based on nine years of research, buttressed by rigorous analysis and infused with engaging stories - Collins and his colleague, Morten Hansen, enumerate the principles for building a truly great enterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous, and fast-moving times.
No mere sequel, Great by Choice distinguishes itself from Collins's prior work by its focus not just on performance, but also on the type of unstable environments faced by leaders today. With a team of more than twenty researchers, Collins and Hansen studied companies that rose to greatness - beating their industry indexes by a minimum of ten times over fifteen years - in environments characterised by big forces and rapid shifts that leaders could not predict or control.
The research team then contrasted these “10X companies” to a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to achieve greatness in similarly extreme environments.
Jim Collins is author or co-author of six books, including the bestsellers Good to Great,Built to Last, and How the Mighty Fall, which have sold more than 10 million copies worldwide.
Jim began his research and teaching career on the faculty at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he received the Distinguished Teaching Award in 1992. He now operates a management laboratory in Boulder, Colorado, where he conducts research, teaches, and consults with executives from the corporate and social sectors.
Morten T. Hansen is a management professor at the University of California, Berkeley, (School of Information) and at INSEAD. Formerly a professor at Harvard Business School, Morten holds a PhD from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he was a Fulbright scholar.
He is the author of Collaboration and the winner of the Administrative Science Quarterly Award for exceptional contributions to the field of organisation studies. Previously a manager with the Boston Consulting Group, Morten consults and gives talks for companies worldwide.