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Great by Choice

By Gino Blefari
President & CEO
Intero Real Estate Services, Inc.

For the past few weeks, I have been listening to the bookGREAT BY CHOICE: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck – Why Some Thrive Despite Them All by Jim Collins. This book is that good and powerful. It’s also my second time reading it. Jim has authored and co-authored six books that have sold in total more than ten million copies worldwide. They include: the international bestseller Good to Great, translated into 35 languages; the classic Built to Last, a fixture on the Business Week best seller list for more than six years; and How the Mighty Fall, a New York Times bestseller that examines how great companies can self-destruct.

For the next several weeks I would like to share the book Great by Choice and Jim Collins’ insight on how the choices we make determine our success.

Jim Collins is a student and teacher of enduring great companies – how they grow, how they attain superior performance, and how good companies can become great companies. He has invested nearly a quarter of a century of research into the topic.

His most recent book Great by Choice, co-authored with Morten Hansen, shares the principles for building a truly great enterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous, and fast-moving times. Based on nine years of research, it answers the question: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not?

Great by Choice distinguishes itself from Jim’s prior books 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 characterized 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.

The study results were full of stimulating surprises such as:

• The best leaders were not more risk taking, more visionary, and more creative than the comparisons; they were more disciplined, more empirical, and more paranoid.
• Innovation by itself turns out not to be the trump card in a chaotic and uncertain world; more important is the ability to scale innovation, to blend creativity with discipline.
• Following the belief that leading in a “fast world” always requires “fast decisions” and “fast action” is a good way to get killed.
• The great companies changed less in reaction to a radically changing world than the comparison companies.

Great by Choice is classic Collins: contrarian, data-driven, and uplifting. He and Hansen show convincingly that, even in a chaotic and uncertain world, greatness happens by choice, not chance.

Stay tuned for next week’s Thought on Leadership which will cover Chapter 1: Thriving in Uncertainty.

Source from Intero Real Estate Services