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How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In |  | Author: Jim Collins
Publisher: Jim Collins
Category: Book
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Rating:  98 reviews
Sales Rank: 2024
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 240
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 7.9 x 5.3 x 1
ISBN: 0977326411
Dewey Decimal Number: 658.16
EAN: 9780977326419
ASIN: 0977326411
Publication Date: June 1, 2009
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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 and avoided? How far can a company fall before the path toward doom becomes inevitable and 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 and, 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 and 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, and 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 and 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, and 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.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 98
 Honest Follow-up On Greatness May 29, 2009
S. Durocher (Los Angeles)
60 out of 73 found this review helpful
One thing that strikes me about Jim Collins' work is that he is passionate about what he does. He and his researchers dig down deep into companies and examine them from different perspectives over a period of time. As he says, "We do not decide which companies we 'want' to study... we lay out the criteria for the study-set selection before we see the data and systematically eliminate companies from consideration based on whether they meet the criteria." This has given him great insight into what success is, not just for corporations, but for any institution.
What comes through in his recent book, along with passionate study, is honesty. Collins previously chose Fannie Mae as a "Good to Great" institution. Recently, they have demonstrated anything but greatness in facing economic and marketplace changes. There are other companies he chose, like Circuit City, that have gone the same path. Collins discusses why these enterprises were chosen in his previous book and why they fell on hard times after once being great. Because a great company stumbles into mediocrity does not mean the criteria is flawed or the framework wrong. Rather, as the study shows, somewhere along the way these companies strayed away from what once made them great. "How the Mighty Fall" uses the same criteria from "Good to Great," only in reverse, to show how and why once great enterprises have fallen. Collins does this with the same attention to detail and passion as in his previous works.
There are a couple of parts that I found most interesting from the book. First is the chapter entitled "The Undisciplined Pursuit of More." The examples of Ames and Rubbermaid, along with the other ideas presented in this chapter, really hit home in light of recent developments in our financial markets. The second part is appendix 6 where he gives brief case studies on IBM, Nucor and Nordstrom using the "Good to Great" framework to demonstrate how they went from struggling companies back to greatness. I recommend this book to anyone who is interested in an honest assessment of either business success or success principles in general.
"Fire, Ready, Aim" Management Described July 13, 2009
Professor Donald Mitchell (Thanks for Providing My Reviews over 97,000 Helpful Votes Globally)
19 out of 24 found this review helpful
"Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower whose top is in the heavens; let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be scattered abroad over the face of the whole earth." -- Genesis 11:4
How the Mighty Fall takes a methodology similar to Built to Last and Good to Great and searches for differences among paired companies (Loser--Winner; A&P--Kroger; Addressograph--Pitney Bowes; Ames--Wal-Mart; Bank of America--Wells Fargo; Circuit City--Best Buy; Hewlett Packard--IBM; Merck--Johnson & Johnson; Motorola--Texas Instruments; Rubbermaid--None qualified; Scott Paper--Kimberly-Clark; and Zenith--Motorola) As you can see, it all makes for strange bedfellows (Motorola is on both sides of the divide and Rubbermaid doesn't have a winning comparison partner). As before, the analysis relies on public information from that period (such as annual reports, business journalism articles, and analyst reports).
From these data, Jim Collins discerns the following taxonomy of stages:
1. Hubris (excess pride) due to prior success
2. Undisciplined pursuit of more
3. Denial of risk and peril
4. Grasping for salvation
5. Capitulation to irrelevance or death
Reaching any one of these stages doesn't mean that stage 5 is inevitable in Collins' view.
The result is more like a monograph than a full business book with limited examples and observations. Many readers will find themselves hungering for more.
I was grateful to Mr. Collins for the excellent way that he defined and described his cases. As a result, I was able to look into what he was measuring to see what else might be there.
I had the good fortune to work with most of these companies as a consultant either just before or during the measurement period. As a result, I was able to think about what people inside the company had told me at the time about what they were doing and why they were doing it as well as what I observed about how they went about doing their work.
From those additional perspectives, I thought there were some other lessons:
1. Capable continual business model innovators (Kroger, Pitney Bowes, Wal-Mart, Wells Fargo, Best Buy, IBM, TI, and J & J) outperform those who mostly try to make old business models more efficient and effective.
2. Companies are more likely to try to do too much and swerve off in weird directions because the CEO feels insecure (Addressograph, Ames, Bank of America, Merck, Motorola, Scott, and Zenith) compared to a predecessor and the predecessor's track record (or a competitor CEO and that CEO's track record) rather than because of excess pride.
3. Denial of risk and peril arrives long before the company's performance peaks (Addressograph, Ames, Bank of America, Circuit City, Motorola, Scott, and Zenith). It just shows up as a problem later after a change in the environment causes the company to be exposed to worse results because of risk than before.
4. Ignorance about how to do big acquisitions successfully is rampant in large organizations (Ames, Hewlett Packard, Merck, and Motorola). Do a difficult large acquisition without understanding how to succeed, and you will probably fall flat on your face. Your stock will fall flatter than a pancake.
5. Pursuit of seemingly higher-growth markets is an irresistible lure for the portfolio-strategy-focused CEO (these names shall remain unidentified, but they know who they are) regardless of the real opportunity (think of the AOL-Time Warner merger).
This subject, I think, would be much better studied as a methodology by long-term tracking studies that include annual interviews and visits with a large number of competitors, customers, suppliers, and employees among the comparison companies. Perhaps someone from academia will move beyond the desire to write a quick case and do this kind of fundamental research to help answer the question: "How can we know when we are headed for a fall?"
A focused, clear and actionable look at the cycle of corporate demise May 29, 2009
M. McDonald (Chicago, IL United States)
9 out of 12 found this review helpful
Jim Collins has already written some of the seminal works on business strategy and management with Built to Last and Good to Great. While those books are great, How the Mighty Fall a short eclipses them in my opinion, its stated as a focused side project and it stays just that focused at about the right length and tone.
My recommendation is simple: get this book, read it, reflect on it and see where you stand. This is an example of what a five-star business book should be.
Why? Well the answer is simple, its well researched, clearly written, devoid of significant pontification and provides advice that everyone can use. While these factors were present in Collins other works, they were not so to this degree.
Here is what I mean.
Good to Great provides the characteristics of great companies in terms of some simple to remember characteristics, for example, level 5 leadership. These characteristics in good to great described what executives aspired to become. That aspiration is born out of executive desire to be successful. That led to many people seeing themselves as having these characteristics when clearly they did not. When Good to Great came out I cannot tell you how many executives I met with you said that they were or aspired to be level 5 leaders when the best they could manage was 1 and 3/4s. We all want to see ourselves as successful and that undermined the applicability of the Good to Great ideas.
Not this book. How they Mighty Fall clearly describe five stages of enterprise failure and distress. Because no one wants to be them, the guidance these stages provide create an environment for real discussion about the company rather than self-reflective revisionism on how we are great. That clarity, which supports the Good to Great principle of "Confront the Brutal Facts," is what sets this book apart. It should a design principle for Collins current project on managing in turbulence.
The five stages all describe the antithesis of the Good to Great concepts, which is ok, but the book is more than just inverting good to great - it looks beyond that.
Stage 1: Hubris born of success - describing the cultural tipping point when hard work and focus to earn the business turns into a sense of entitlement to future success. This is the death of Level 5 Leadership.
Stage 2: Undisciplined pursuit of more - building from stage one is people chasing goals that take them away from their core, their competitive advantage all in the name of growth, or the grand strategy. This leads to thinking what before you think about who and abandoning the hedgehog concept in favor the rabbit's pursuit of quick gains.
Stage 3: Denial of risk and peril - now that you are chasing things that are not part of your core, you fail to see the problems or blame the problems on the outside world. In this stage you are blind to the brutal facts.
Stage 4: Grasping for salvation - often in the form of the silver bullet, visionary leader all of which keep your attention away from the core (Flywheel) and lead you into further decline. I lose a culture of discipline, abandong the flywheel and chase things outside the core.
Stage 5: Capitulation to irrelevance or death - the final demise when people throw in the towel and the cause is lost. This is the terminus of the lifecycle and the one place you cannot recover from.
Rather than re-write the book here are what I see as strengths and challenges
Strengths
Well researched and more importantly Collins makes key elements of the research process, scoring models and approaches visible to the reader. This is a piece of work that says see what I did so you can have confidence in the results - a true example of a well-done book.
Case studies that go beyond those done in Good to Great and Built to Last. This broadens the range of examples, a good thing. But there are still a number of repeats here.
Clear writing, the book is focused neat and trim. Sure its short, the book is physically small and the core text is only 123 pages, but each page is loaded with content. I read the book on two 90-minute airplane flights and will come back to it time after time.
Clearly structured and summarized information, which makes the book very usable. This is seen in the way Collins uses tables - sparingly but when needed and other summarization techniques.
Challenges
Descriptive without being prescriptive, which is a strength, but people looking for recipes to avoid failure - ala silver bullets - will not find them and for good reason - chasing them is a characteristic of stage 4. But some people will see this as a weakness. People who reflect on the book's principles will come up with more than enough things to take action.
Repeats some of the prior books concepts and precepts. This makes it seem a little repetitive in places and can lead the reader to think that this book is just the photographic/cognitive negative of Good to Great.
Takes the easy road in a couple of places use well-worn examples - IBM, the Challenger, among others where deeper or new analysis would be helpful.
Overall the best book so far for 2009 - it is well worth the read, the time and spreading the news.
How the Mighty Fall July 5, 2009
L. Howard (Boulder, CO USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
This is a small book and a quick read. It should be require reading in Business Schools and brokerage firms. Anyone who wants to invest in the stock market should read it also. The focus is on attitudes and thought processes, not finance or R&D or any other mechanical process. This book definitely gives a different slant to reading business news stories and looking at financial reports (what attitudes are reflected in these statements and what do they say about the company?). It also leaves one looking at Wall Street analysts somewhat differently. They don't know as much as they'd like us to think.
Good to Great and Back Again July 23, 2009
A Pace (Salt Lake City, UT USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
On a professional level, I am involved in the core leadership of a relatively small company that is striving to be great someday. When I first read Jim Collins' "Good to Great" I was completely enthralled. I have read a large number of books that are full of 'fluff and nonsense'. However, Mr. Collins' writing is anything but fluff and is definintely not nonsense. In "How the Mighty Fall" I was very impressed (as I was with "Good to Great") on their dedication to the research. It is very difficult to speak the language of research and Mr. Collins and his team do it very well. "How the Mighty Fall" is an exceptional book that highlights some of the most pervasive (and most ignored) problems in business. The veracity of what they say is evident in the patterns of the failed businesses of the last two years. This is a book that all major corporate executives should read. I believe the economic downturn that we have experienced could have been largely avoided had the "leaders" of our nation thought of some of these very principles before it was too late.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 98
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