Publisher, Harper Audio (October 2011)

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The new question: Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns to ask: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? In Great by Choice, Collins and his colleague, Morten T. Hansen, enumerate the principles for building a truly great enterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous, and fast-moving times.

The new study: Great by Choice distinguishes itself from Collins’s prior work by its focus on the type of unstable environments faced by leaders today.

The new findings:

• The best leaders were more disciplined, more empirical, and more paranoid.

• 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.

This book 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 by chance.

About the Authors: Jim Collins is the coauthor of Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies. Formerly a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, he jettisoned a traditional academic career in order to chart his own path. Today, he operates a management research laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. Previously, Collins held positions at McKinsey & Company and Hewlett-Packard.

Morten T. Hansen is a management professor at the University of California, Berkeley (School of Information), and at INSEAD. Formerly a professor at Harvard Business School, Morten holds a PhD from Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he was a Fulbright scholar. He is the author of Collaboration and the winner of the Administrative Science Quarterly Award for exceptional contributions to the field of organization studies. Previously a manager with the Boston Consulting Group, Morten consults and gives talks for companies worldwide.