How the Mighty Fall


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Hardcover
222 pages
ISBN 9780977326419 Published May 2009
HarperCollins
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How the Mighty Fall
And Why Some Companies Never Give in
By James C Collins 

Related Blog Posts
Inc. Magazine's Best Books for Business Owners
Posted Dec. 14, 2009 7:35 a.m. by dylan
In - 800 CEO Read Blog

Jack was asked—along with author and editor-at-large Bo Burlingham, Inc.'s Leigh Buchanan, columnist Joel Spolsky, and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh—to recommend books for Inc. Magazine's list of The Best Books for Business Owners of 2009. Together, they a have put together a really stellar list of books. The are:

Head on over to the Inc.'s slide-show to read more about these great books.



Amazon's Best of 2009
Posted Dec. 4, 2009 6:11 a.m. by dylan
In General Business - 800 CEO Read Blog

Amazon does an interesting thing every year, putting their best selling books in each genre on the same page as their editors' pick so you can easily compare the two.

I am sure that, were I an author, I'd hope to see my name on the bestsellers list. It would mean that I had not only done well financially for the year but, more importantly, that my book had made it into the hands of more readers—my ideas into the minds of more people.

That said, as a reader I always look at the editors' list first. I don't know who Amazon's editors actually are—come to think of it, the only person I know works for Amazon is Jeff Bezos—but I'm guessing that, like us, they spend their days at work poring over the many books that come across their desks, and they've probably become pretty damn good at picking which ones they're going to take home and focus on. There are a lot of books every year that will never see the light of a bestsellers list—that will never catch the popular eye—that nonetheless contain provoking insights for thought leaders and have a greater long-term effect on our lives than a flash-in-the-pan bestseller.

Ideally, of course, you'd make both lists. Congratulations to Matthew B. Crawford, author of Shop Class as Soulcraft, and the authors of Animal Spirits, George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, on that feat.

Here are the complete lists in Amazon's Business & Investing category for 2009:

The customer favorites:

  1. House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street by William D. Cohan, Doubleday

  2. The Ultimate Depression Survival Guide: Protect Your Savings, Boost Your Income, and Grow Wealthy Even in the Worst of Times by Martin D. Weiss, John Wiley & Sons

  3. Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse by Thomas E. Woods, Regnery Press

  4. Suze Orman's 2009 Action Plan: Keeping Your Money Safe & Sound by Suze Orman, Spiegel & Grau

  5. The Great Depression Ahead: How to Prosper in the Crash Following the Greatest Boom in History by Harry S. Dent, Free Press

  6. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford, Penguin Press

  7. Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Princeton University Press

  8. How The Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In by Jim Collins, HarperCollins

  9. Strengths-Based: Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow Leadership by Tom Rath and Barry Conchie, Gallup Press

  10. I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi, Workman Publishing Company

The editors' list:

  1. The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street by Justin Fox, HarperBusiness

  2. Fool's Gold: How the Bold Dream of a Small Tribe at J.P. Morgan Was Corrupted by Wall Street Greed and Unleashed a Catastrophe by Gillian Tett, Free Press

  3. Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work by Matthew B. Crawford, Penguin Press

  4. How Did That Happen?: Holding People Accountable for Results the Positive, Principled Way by Roger Connors & Tom Smith, Portfolio

  5. Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life by Winifred Gallagher, Penguin Press

  6. In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke's War on the Great Panic by David Wessel, Crown Business

  7. Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust by Chris Brogan & Julien Smith, John Wiley & Sons

  8. Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism by George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, Princeton University Press

  9. SuperCorp: How Vanguard Companies Create Innovation, Profits, Growth, and Social Good by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Crown Business

  10. Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity by Hugh MacLeod, Portfolio

Other notable editors' picks are T.J. Stiles' The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt published by Penguin Press, winner of the NBA in nonfiction and put in the Biographies & Memoirs category by Amazon's editors, and Greg Grandin's Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, published by Metropolitan Books, which was the number one editors' pick in the History category.

Other customer favorites include Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World by Liaquat Ahamed and The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes by Bryan Burrough, both published by Penguin Press, and This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly by Kenneth S. Rogoff and Carmen M Reinhart and published by Princeton University Press. All of these were in the History category.

To delve into the lists more, head on over to Amazon's Best of 2009.



Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year - The Longlist
Posted Aug. 12, 2009 10:40 a.m. by dylan
In General Business - 800 CEO Read Blog

The longlist for the 2009 Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award has been announced. The press release states that "The award is designed to highlight the book that provides the most compelling and enjoyable insight into modern business issues, including management, finance, and economics."

The books on the longlist are:

The shortlist will be announced in September, and the overall winner will be announced at gala dinner in London at the end of October. We will, of course, keep you informed of further developments.



Business Book Reviews From Indonesia
Posted July 27, 2009 6:54 a.m. by todd-sattersten
In Strategy - 800 CEO Read Blog

I love running across other passionate business book readers. Riri Satria has some great reviews on his site rirsatria.com (here is the Google-translated link from Riri's native Indonesian to English). He favors the strategy category with posts on Human Sigma, Execution Premium, How The Might Fall, and Scenario Planning.

I hope we'll see more in the near future.






The Might and Myth of Good To Great
Posted April 24, 2009 4:39 a.m. by todd-sattersten
In Strategy - 800 CEO Read Blog

A growing wave of critics is taking shots at Jim Collins and his book, Good to Great, questioning the research and Collins' oft-followed path for corporate success. The arguments against Collins are nicely summarized in a Boston Globe article written by Drake Bennett titled "Luck Inc." Jim Collins is quoted, pushing back on some of the counterclaims to his contribution to "business-success literature." Bennett also gets a quote from Tom Peters, co-author of In Search of Excellence —- which takes its share of hits for similar offenses. (Peters posted two lengthy response on his own blog - part one and part two). Halo Effect author Phil Rosenwieg makes an appearance too, strongly advocating a second look at the validity of these types of books. In sum, I found that the article offers a good history of business books and shows great journalistic work on Bennett's part.

Rather than write a lengthy response here with additional claims, I am going to direct you to Bob Sutton's (whom Drake interviewed for his article) blog post, "A Well-Crafted Critique of Business "Success" Books and My Ambivalence About Good to Great." In typical form, Sutton delivers a response with substance and clarity, having explored this terrain well with Jeffery Pfeffer in Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths and Total Nonsense. One particular point of Sutton's that bears repeating, however, is the irony in that many of the findings that Collins reports are supported by other peer-reviewed research, something Collins fails to use in Good To Great. His theories about "Getting The Right People On The Bus" and "The Hedgehog Concept" might be worthy of pursuit, but given the shortcomings in the research it would be wrong to attribute the importance of thoughtful hiring and strategic focus to Collins' work alone.

The bottom line is this: there is enough evidence now to force us to reconsider Good To Great as the pinnacle management book of this decade. Michael E. Raynor, Mumtaz Ahmed, and Andrew D. Henderson in their recent HBR article say that success studies should be treated like fables and looked at as sources of inspiration, not how-to manuals. Good to Great is directionally correct, but it is hard to see the book as the roadmap for making your company great.

What makes all of this more interesting is the May 19th release of Collins' new book, How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In. The book's publisher, HarperCollins, is not releasing any advance copies, but here is the marketing copy for the new effort:

Good to Great and Built to Last identified the distinguishing characteristics shared by companies that not only achieved greatness, but also sustained it. In How the Mighty Fall, Jim Collins considers the "dark side," offering a perspective on how a fall from greatness can happen -- to even the seemingly invincible. Adapting the very methodology that established Good to Great as a landmark, How the Mighty Fall shows that every institution, no matter how great, is vulnerable to decline, but recovery is possible. In some cases, companies emerge stronger -- even after having crashed into the depths of a near-catastrophic fall. Collins presents a framework that will help business leaders and companies identify the "silent creep of impending doom" and swiftly set a correction course. Rigorous in its analysis, surprising in its findings, How the Mighty Fall is an in-depth look at the decline of some of our nation's greatest companies and a useful tool for companies and individuals seeking to avoid such a fate. Themes from How the Mighty Fall:

Whether you prevail or fail, endure or die, depends more on what you do to yourself than on what the world does to you.


An institution can look strong on the outside but already be sick on the inside, dangerously on the cusp of a precipitous fall.


The signature of the truly great versus the merely successful is not the absence of difficulty, but the ability to come back from setbacks, even cataclysmic catastrophes, stronger than before...As long as you never get entirely knocked out of the game, hope always remains.

Jim Collins' extensive interview with Bo Burlingham in the 30th anniversary issue of Inc. Magazine alludes to some of the new material. BusinessWeek is also going to have early coverage of the book according to a sales mediakit.

I find it intriguing that the promotional copy proudly touts the "very methodology" Collins used in creating Good to Great and think instead many will be looking at this book much more closely to see if Collins has corrected some of his research faults.




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