Great by Choice Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

Jim Collins (Narrator, Author), Morten T. Hansen (Author), HarperAudio (Publisher)

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The new question: Ten years after the worldwide best seller 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.

Listening Length

8 hours and 45 minutes
Author

Jim Collins, see all
Narrator

Jim Collins
Audible release date

Oct. 11 2011
Language

English
Publisher

HarperAudio
ASIN

B071NXJ9B9
Version

Unabridged
Program Type

Audiobook
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Product details

Listening Length	8 hours and 45 minutes
Author	Jim Collins, Morten T. Hansen
Narrator	Jim Collins
Audible.ca Release Date	October 11 2011
Publisher	HarperAudio
Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B071NXJ9B9
Best Sellers Rank	#4,200 in Audible Books & Originals (See Top 100 in Audible Books & Originals) #120 in Small Business & Entrepreneurship #126 in Entrepreneurship #185 in Management & Leadership (Audible Books & Originals)

Customer reviews

5 star		76%
4 star		15%
3 star		5%
2 star		1%
1 star		3%

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Top reviews from Canada

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Reviewed in Canada on February 5, 2020

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Hello,

I ordered 4 copies of this book for my senior leadership team. It is an excellent book. However, all 4 of our copies exhibit the same issue - a misprint of multiple pages.

Who can I speak to in order to have the replaced?

One person found this helpful

Helpful

Another great book by Jim

Reviewed in Canada on July 6, 2018

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Another great book by Jim, it has shaped a framework for me that I am using at work with great success and getting results and influencing others with this material in a good way for the benefit of your organization.

Helpful

High impact, easy to read

Reviewed in Canada on October 19, 2015

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The fundamental nature of excellence is well developed in Collins' easy-to-read style, while also driving home the point of consistency and reproducibility in the long-term. The topics resonate strongly with my own vision and experience in leading teams and companies.

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P. Madhava Rao

Quite a few very useful tips. The book was delivered in good condition ...

Reviewed in Canada on January 18, 2018

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Interesting book, especially if you are planning to start your own business. Quite a few very useful tips.
The book was delivered in good condition and on time.

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Christian Martinez

After reading good to great

Reviewed in Canada on September 2, 2017

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After reading good to great, this book is an excellent follow up book! Unlike built to last it does not regurgitate the same concepts over and over.

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Ted Falk

Great read

Reviewed in Canada on September 12, 2019

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I think every business Leader should read this book. Apply where necessary!!

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Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada on December 17, 2017

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Amazing.

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robc

Made me challenge some of my existing beliefs

Reviewed in Canada on April 14, 2020

Having read Good to Great, I was very excited to dive into the latest book from Jim Collins. What I loved about Good to Great was the statistical analysis and deep investigative work which was done to reach the conclusions presented.

Great by Choice uses this same analysis style to produce what I though were some very surprising results. The main difference between Good to Great and Great by Choice is the criteria used to select the great companies and their comparison companies. The criteria used is based upon the notion that both companies had equal opportunity, equal luck events (good and bad), and functioned in unpredictable and uncertain times leaving much out of their control. For each pair of companies, one succeeded while the other did not.

I say I was surprised because using empirical evidence gathered from the analysis the book challenged some believes I had held for a long time. Do you believe in being first or being dead? Do you believe that the company or person who innovates early and gets into the market first is always successful in the long run? I won't give away the details, but needless to say you should read Great by Choice if those questions intrigue you.

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

M. Chaffer

Thought-provoking analysis of why some listed companies out-perform their competitors.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 17, 2020

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This US book analyses the performance of 7 leading US listed companies, comparing them with 7 rival companies over the 30 years to 2002. It studies these businesses through good and bad times, and tries to distil what made the differences over these longer periods. This has real relevance for today.

It specifically looks at businesses that have out-performed their industries and the Dow/Nasdaq indexes by more than 10 times - in other words 1000%. In fact these 7 businesses exceeded the industry and share averages by 36 times over the 30 years. They include companies like Intel & Microsoft.

The book is around 300 pages long, and is an easy read, but only 200 pages are the story - the last 100 pages are the methodology employed and the very long bibliography.

Overall the view is that these super-companies have at their core, 4 behaviours that excel at over time - 3 of these are covered in full detail within the book.

Disappointingly, the fourth (Level 5 Ambition) is hardly mentioned, as readers are presumed to have read the earlier book "Good to Great". For that reason I can't give this a top score. Given that there are nearly 100 pages of notes, it would have been sensible to have a chapter on "Level 5 Ambition" to make the book a stand-alone read.

Most of these businesses were small in 1971, in many ways the equivalent of UK AIM companies - so it is interesting to see how and why they were able to become the huge global successes they did, and why other companies in their sectors failed at the same time.

2 people found this helpful

The Salary Coach

8/10: Valuable extension of the concepts presented in Good to Great

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 21, 2018

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This book investigates why some companies perform so well in today’s increasingly volatile and uncertain economic environment while their peers often fall by the wayside.

Backed up by rigorous analysis the book identifies a handful of successful companies and then sets out to explain, with empirical evidence, why these companies performed so well in these uncertain times.

The book is structured around 6 main concepts (see below)

I find the writing of Jim Collins very succinct with a perfect blend of anecdote, theory and empirical evidence to make his points.

Please see below for the points I took away from this book:

10Xers
• Great companies (10xers) accept uncertainty but refuse to accept that forces beyond their control will determine their destiny. Instead they work very hard at a clearly defined goal to build up a reservoir of strength (e.g. through cash on balance sheet or reputation in the market)
• 10xers consistently exhibit three core behaviours to build a reservoir of strength:
1. Fanatic discipline: Consistency of action around clearly defined strategy
2. Empirical creativity: decisions are made from a sound empirical base
3. Productive paranoia: constantly operating with a heightened state of awareness against potential threats

20 Mile March
• 10xers' growth trajectories often exhibit a steady trajectory much like the arctic explorer Anderson’s concept of marching 20 miles every day to the South Pole to be Cpt Scott , regardless of whether the weather was good or bad
• Adopting such a ‘20 Mile March’ will require pushing hard in adversity and reign it in during good times
• Such a philosophy will increase confidence because the organisation will be able to achieve results regardless of conditions
• Conversely, it is not about growing as quickly as possible all the time. Indeed, the study found that there is an inverse relationship between pursuit of maximum growth and 10x success. Growing too quickly can often lead to companies over extending themselves.

Fire Bullets, Then Cannonballs
• 10xers use low-risk empirical tests (‘firing bullets’) to validate what ideas work.
• Only once a company has successfully tested an idea with bullets should they fire the ‘cannonball’
• 10xers are therefore not visionary geniuses but empiricists.
• Acquisitions can qualify as bullets if they’re low-cost, low-risk and low-distraction

Leading above the Death Line
• 10xers effectively identify and manage risk
• When risks are identified these companies spend significant time and energy on understanding the likely impact through empirical analysis and then working very hard to execute their risk mitigation plan

SMaC
• 10xers have a Specific, Methodical and Consistent (“SMaC”) recipe that they adhered to
• SmaC recipes endured for the long term and were changed by an average of 15% over the era of analysis
• See South Western airline’s SMaC in the book as a good example

Return on Luck
• All companies have good and bad luck. 10xers had their fair share of both
• The rest of the concepts above must be enthusiastically executed well to get a good return on luck

5 people found this helpful

V Ghezzi

It's a good reading, simple and full of examples

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 24, 2016

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It's a good reading, simple and full of examples. The method used in the analysis is explained, which is not often the case on this kind of books. The author claims that 4 key points have been found as the success factors in the companies analyzed: the 20 miles march (= stepwise progression), the bullets vs. cannonballs (= test small things before going big), building buffers (= keep a margin of safety, especially in finance), and the discipline (= follow the guidelines).
However, this recipe suffers the same problem as many others: the narrative fallacy (D. Kahnemann). It is quite easy to reconstruct the cases as to support the theory one wishes to promote. The points claimed by the author are surely important for success, but are not the only ones. This leads to the other two problems: the over-simplification and the role of randomness.
The parameters that may affect success (or failure) are just too many and inter-correlated in a complex cause-and-effect structure, as to support a simple 4-points theory. Indeed the author dedicates a chapter to the study of luck, but the role of randomness is not deeply analyzed and, to my opinion, generally underestimated.

One person found this helpful

Jon Busby

Another hit by Jim Collins - although shorter than usual for his books.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 3, 2017

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Another hit by Jim Collins - although shorter than usual for his books.

As usual Jim condenses years of his teams research into something that our mortal minds can understand, using his unique mix of framework thinking and empirical research to build a case thats easy to follow and apply in your business (or see in other businesses).

Perhaps not as great as Built to Last or Good to Great (and perhaps a lot shorter - but in some ways that makes it a lot easier to get through!)

Turnips

Meh

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on July 17, 2020

Verified Purchase

Well written and an easy read. Some good points but it suffers from outdated examples and survivor bias.

One person found this helpful

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Great by Choice Audible Audiobook – Unabridged

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