How the Mighty Fall
And why some companies never give in
Jim Collins   |  August 14, 2009  

By Reg Nordman

The Good to Great author has done it again. He explains that this was a much harder task than finding the commonalities for Good to Great. He has done a good job.

He shows there are five stages of decline:

1. Hubris born of success
2. Undisciplined pursuit of more
3. Denial of risk and peril
4. Grasping for salvation
5. Capitulation to irrelevance or death

He illustrates how the basics of Good to Great still apply and indicates that many of the fallen (A&P, Zenith, Circuit City, Merck ...) were unable to do what the ones who came back did (Nordstrom, Xerox ...), which was where they fell away from their basic strategy that helped them to grow in the first place.

From our practise we see that companies who fail to work a scenario strategy a la Schwartz (what is the best/worst that can happen and what indicators will show you the trends) are the ones who often make the wrong bets. Check out last months Wired magazine article on scenarios. It really works. This prevents the search for the silver bullet.


How the Mighty Fall
And why some companies never give in
Jim Collins
2009
ISBN 9780977326419