How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In

Product Description

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 & avoided? How far can a company fall before the path toward doom becomes inevitable & 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 & 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 & 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 & 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 & 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 & 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