For Jim Collins, No Question Is Too Big - NYTimes.com

For Jim Collins, No Question Is Too Big - NYTimes.com

For This Guru [Jim Collins of "Built To Last" and "Good To Great" Fame], No Question Is Too Big
By ADAM BRYANT
Published: May 23, 2009

Excerpts:

Rather than presenting silver-bullet formulas that are easily forgotten, Mr. Collins’s books offer tangible frameworks for understanding why organizations succeed. His winning streak is about to be tested with his just-released book, which takes a turn, as he says, to the “dark side,” focusing on why companies fail. At any other time, it would seem a long shot, in that it lacks the upbeat message of his previous books. But his timing, given the number of once-great companies now in ruin, couldn’t have been better.

He started researching his new book, titled “How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In,” in 2005. Back then, the Dow Jones index had passed 10,000 and was still climbing, eventually to more than 14,000, and Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, General Motors and Fannie Mae still had bright futures.

Now the stages of decline that he maps out in the book — hubris born of success; undisciplined pursuit of more; denial of risk and peril; grasping for salvation with a quick, big solution; and capitulation to irrelevance or death — offer a kind of instant autopsy for an economy on the stretcher.
He writes that he’s come to see institutional decline as a “staged disease” — harder to detect but easier to cure in the early stages — which is likely to foster a sense of corporate hypochondria in many readers.


Read full article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/business/24collins.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=For%20this%20guru,%20no%20question%20is%20too%20big&st=cse
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This posting was made my Jim Jacobs, President & CEO of Jacobs Executive Advisors. Jim also serves as Leader of Jacobs Advisors' Insurance Practice.