Most Popular Books by Jim Collins

The Challenge Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The Study For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great? The Standards Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world''s greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. The Comparisons The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don''t. The Findings The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include: Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology. The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap. “Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.” Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?

"This is not a book about charismatic visionary leaders. It is not about visionary product concepts or visionary products or visionary market insights. Nor is it about just having a corporate vision. This is a book about something far more important, enduring, and substantial. This is a book about visionary companies." So write Jim Collins and Jerry Porras in this groundbreaking book that shatters myths, provides new insights, and gives practical guidance to those who would like to build landmark companies that stand the test of time. Drawing upon a six-year research project at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Collins and Porras took eighteen truly exceptional and long-lasting companies -- they have an average age of nearly one hundred years and have outperformed the general stock market by a factor of fifteen since 1926 -- and studied each company in direct comparison to one of its top competitors. They examined the companies from their very beginnings to the present day -- as start-ups, as midsize companies, and as large corporations. Throughout, the authors asked: "What makes the truly exceptional companies different from other companies?" What separates General Electric, 3M, Merck, Wal-Mart, Hewlett-Packard, Walt Disney, and Philip Morris from their rivals? How, for example, did Procter & Gamble, which began life substantially behind rival Colgate, eventually prevail as the premier institution in its industry? How was Motorola able to move from a humble battery repair business into integrated circuits and cellular communications, while Zenith never became dominant in anything other than TVs? How did Boeing unseat McDonnell Douglas as the world''s best commercial aircraft company -- what did Boeing have that McDonnell Douglas lacked? By answering such questions, Collins and Porras go beyond the incessant barrage of management buzzwords and fads of the day to discover timeless qualities that have consistently distinguished out-standing companies. They also provide inspiration to all executives and entrepreneurs by destroying the false but widely accepted idea that only charismatic visionary leaders can build visionary companies. Filled with hundreds of specific examples and organized into a coherent framework of practical concepts that can be applied by managers and entrepreneurs at all levels, Built to Last provides a master blueprint for building organizations that will prosper long into the twenty-first century and beyond.

Ten years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns withanother groundbreaking work, this time to ask: why do some companies thrive inuncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Based on nine years of research,buttressed by rigorous analysis and infused with engaging stories, Collins andhis colleague Morten Hansen enumerate the principles for building a truly greatenterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous and fast-moving times. This book isclassic Collins: contrarian, data-driven and uplifting.

Bring on the Books for Everybody is an engaging assessment of the robust popular literary culture that has developed in the United States during the past two decades. Jim Collins describes how a once solitary and print-based experience has become an exuberantly social activity, enjoyed as much on the screen as on the page. Fueled by Oprah’s Book Club, Miramax film adaptations, superstore bookshops, and new technologies such as the Kindle digital reader, literary fiction has been transformed into best-selling, high-concept entertainment. Collins highlights the infrastructural and cultural changes that have given rise to a flourishing reading public at a time when the future of the book has been called into question. Book reading, he claims, has not become obsolete; it has become integrated into popular visual media. Collins explores how digital technologies and the convergence of literary, visual, and consumer cultures have changed what counts as a “literary experience” in phenomena ranging from lush film adaptations such as The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love to the customer communities at Amazon. Central to Collins’s analysis and, he argues, to contemporary literary culture, is the notion that refined taste is now easily acquired; it is just a matter of knowing where to access it and whose advice to trust. Using recent novels, he shows that the redefined literary landscape has affected not just how books are being read, but also what sort of novels are being written for these passionate readers. Collins connects literary bestsellers from The Jane Austen Book Club and Literacy and Longing in L.A. to Saturday and The Line of Beauty, highlighting their depictions of fictional worlds filled with avid readers and their equations of reading with cultivated consumer taste.

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.

From Jim Collins, the most influential business thinker of our era, comes an ambitious upgrade of his classic, Beyond Entrepreneurship, that includes all-new findings and world-changing insights. What''s the roadmap to create a company that not only survives its infancy but thrives, changing the world for decades to come? Nine years before the publication of his epochal bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins and his mentor, Bill Lazier, answered this question in their bestselling book, Beyond Entrepreneurship. Beyond Entrepreneurship left a definitive mark on the business community, influencing the young pioneers who were, at that time, creating the technology revolution that was birthing in Silicon Valley. Decades later, successive generations of entrepreneurs still turn to the strategies outlined in Beyond Entrepreneurship to answer the most pressing business questions. BE 2.0 is a new and improved version of the book that Jim Collins and Bill Lazier wrote years ago. In BE 2.0, Jim Collins honors his mentor, Bill Lazier, who passed away in 2005, and reexamines the original text of Beyond Entrepreneurship with his 2020 perspective. The book includes the original text of Beyond Entrepreneurship, as well as four new chapters and fifteen new essays. BE 2.0 pulls together the key concepts across Collins'' thirty years of research into one integrated framework called The Map. The result is a singular reading experience, which presents a unified vision of company creation that will fascinate not only Jim''s millions of dedicated readers worldwide, but also introduce a new generation to his remarkable work.

Jim Collins argues that postmodernism and popular culture have together undermined the master system of "culture." By looking at a wide range of texts and forms he investigates what happens to the notion of culture once different discourses begin to envision that culture in conflicting ways, constructing often contradictory visions of it simultaneously.

A companion guidebook to the number-one bestselling Good to Great, focused on implementation of the flywheel concept, one of Jim Collins’ most memorable ideas that has been used across industries and the social sectors, and with startups. The key to business success is not a single innovation or one plan. It is the act of turning the flywheel, slowly gaining momentum and eventually reaching a breakthrough. Building upon the flywheel concept introduced in his groundbreaking classic Good to Great, Jim Collins teaches readers how to create their own flywheel, how to accelerate the flywheel’s momentum, and how to stay on the flywheel in shifting markets and during times of turbulence. Combining research from his Good to Great labs and case studies from organizations like Amazon, Vanguard, and the Cleveland Clinic which have turned their flywheels with outstanding results, Collins demonstrates that successful organizations can disrupt the world around them—and reach unprecedented success—by employing the flywheel concept.

Building upon the concepts introduced in Good to Great, Jim Collins answers the most commonly asked questions raised by his readers in the social sectors. Using information gathered from interviews with over 100 social sector leaders, Jim Collins shows that his "Level 5 Leader" and other good-to-great principles can help social sector organizations make the leap to greatness.

Beyond Positive Thinking expounds on the Scriptures, making them come alive so they are relatable to those living in the 21st Century. These principles will help readers achieve freedom from fear, anxiety and negative thinking.

Baseball bonded the Collins family, culminating when Michael played in the junior college World Series in Enid, Oklahoma, while Jim was coaching University High School in the Illinois state finalsseven hundred miles apart! Those bonds reached new heights with Jim as a head coach and Michael his assistant at University High School. A doorbell rings and lives are changed forever. A drunk driver and a horrific crash. Two brain surgeries. Five days in the hospital. A funeral. All played out in a very dramatic and public manner. But with all the pain comes some miracles, including a Pay It Forward movement with positive impact around the world in honor of Michael. Knowing it is what Michael would want, Jim returns to the dugout to coach the University High School Pioneers. How does a team of high school kids attend the funeral of their assistant coach one day, then resume their season the next? Players, parents, and coaches pull together unlike any team Jim has coached before. There are no complaints about playing time, just a focus on the emotional well-being of this savvy group of teenagers and their still-grieving head coach. One post-season win would be an upset. A regional championship seemed impossible. The team discovers that no adversity on the field can come close to what they have already experienced off it. Coaches, players, and parents learn the power of one team playing with a purpose bigger than the game. The season ends where Jim never could have imagined that first day of practice.

Highlights the origins and meaning of many superstitions.

Most executives have a big, hairy, audacious goal. But they install layers of stultifying bureaucracy that prevent them from realizing it. In this article, Jim Collins introduces the catalytic mechanism, a simple yet powerful managerial tool that helps turn lofty aspirations into reality. The crucial link between objectives and results, this tool is a galvanizing, nonbureaucratic way to turn one into the other. But the same catalytic mechanism that works in one organization won’t necessarily work in another. So, to help readers get started, Collins offers some general principles that support the process of building one effectively. Since 1922, Harvard Business Review has been a leading source of breakthrough ideas in management practice. The Harvard Business Review Classics series now offers you the opportunity to make these seminal pieces a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world.

The classic Harvard Business Review articles every manager and aspiring leader should read--and share with their teams--from such bestselling Harvard Business Review authors as Peter Drucker, Clayton Christensen, John Kotter, Daniel Goleman, Jim Collins, Gary Hamel, W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne, and many more. Each compact book represents the most important ideas on management, leadership, and life. Build your professional library and advance your career with these 16 timeless business classics. The HBR Classics Boxed Set includes: Peter Drucker''s bestselling "Managing Oneself," "What Makes an Effective Executive," and "The Theory of the Business"; Clayton Christensen''s inspiring "How Will You Measure Your Life?"; Daniel Goleman''s articles on emotional intelligence--"Leadership That Gets Results" and "What Makes a Leader?"; author of Good to Great Jim Collins''s "Turning Goals into Results"; W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne''s "Blue Ocean Leadership" and "Red Ocean Traps"; John Kotter''s "Managing Your Boss"; Jon Katzenbach and Douglas Smith''s "The Discipline of Teams"; Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad''s "Strategic Intent"; William A. Sahlman''s "How to Write a Great Business Plan"; Chris Argyris''s "Teaching Smart People How to Learn"; Theodore Levitt''s "Marketing Myopia"; Joseph B. Pine''s "Do You Want to Keep Your Customers Forever?". The Harvard Business Review Classics series offers you the opportunity to make seminal Harvard Business Review articles a part of your permanent management library. Each highly readable volume contains a groundbreaking idea that continues to shape best practices and inspire countless managers around the world--and will have a direct impact on you today and for years to come.

First Published in 1995. Much of recent theory has characterized life in media-sophisticated societies in terms of a semiotic overload which, allegedly, has had only devastating effects on communication and subjectivity. In Architectures of Excess, Jim Collins argues that, while the rate of technological change has indeed accelerated, so has the rate of absorption. The seemingly endless array of information has generated not chaos but different structures and strategies, which harness that excess by turning it into forms of art and entertainment. Digital sampling in rap music and cyber-punk science fiction are well-known examples of techno-pop textuality, but Collins concentrates on other contemporaneous phenomena that are also envisioning new cultural landscapes by accessing that array--hyper-self-reflexivity in mall movies, best sellers, and prime-time television; the deconstructive vs. new-classical debate in architecture; the emergence of the "New Black Aesthetic;" the development of retro-modernism in interior design and the fashion industries. The analyses of these disparate, discontinous attempts to develop a meaningful sense of location, in an historical as well as a spatial sense, address a cluster of interconnected questions: How is the array of information being "domesticated?" How has appropriationism evolved from the Pop-Art of the sixties to the sampling of the nineties? How has the relationship between tradition, innovation, and evaluation been altered? Architectures of Excess investigates how these phenomena reflect change in taste and subjectivity, considering how we must account for both, pedagogically.

The compelling story of a single season in the world''s finest amateur baseball league

「優秀」是「卓越」之敵！ 這不只是企業要面對的問題，也是人類共通問題。 全球狂銷超過2,200萬冊經典鉅作， 帶領企業與個人看見盲點、邁向卓越！ 卓越推薦（依姓名筆劃排序） Jenny Wang（JC 趨勢財經觀點創辦人） Mr. Market 市場先生（財經作家） 丁菱娟（新創團隊導師、世紀奧美公關創辦人） 于為暢（資深網路人、個人品牌教練） 艾蜜莉（財經作家） 何飛鵬（城邦媒體集團首席執行長） 林之晨（台灣大哥大總經理、AppWorks 董事長暨合夥人） 林以涵（社企流執行長） 林揚程（太毅國際顧問公司執行長） 洪雪珍（斜槓教練） 張孝威（竹科廣播董事長） 張國洋（《大人學》共同創辦人） 游舒帆（商業思維學院院長） 雷浩斯（價值投資者、財經作家） 楊斯棓（方寸管顧首席顧問、醫師） 齊立文（《經理人》月刊總編輯） 鄭志凱（矽谷Acorn Pacific Ventures創投基金共同創辦人） 盧世安（「人資小週末」專業社群創辦人） 謝文憲（企業講師、作家、主持人） 全球狂銷超過2,200萬冊，好書認證獎不斷 ● 《哈佛商業評論》年度好書 ● 美國《商業周刊》年度好書 ● 亞馬遜網路書店年度好書 ● 台灣經濟部「金書獎」 全球企業推崇影響最深商管書 ● 亞馬遜總裁貝佐斯採用《從A到A+》中的原則，建立組織營運的良性迴圈，造就今日的亞馬遜奇蹟。 ● 英特爾、蘋果、微軟、星巴克、嬌生等知名公司深受本書影響，推動企業改造。 管理大師彼得‧杜拉克盛讚： 這部經過嚴謹研究、寫作又極出色的著作，推翻了許多目前流行的管理概念──從吹捧超人執行長、崇拜資訊科技到購併熱等。平庸的公司或許無法靠這本書提升競爭力，但本書應該能幫助已具競爭力的公司躍升至卓越境界。 柯林斯花了五年時間，從1435家企業篩選出11家從優秀到卓越的公司，抽絲剝繭分析之後，透過本書指出他們成功的關鍵與祕訣，這些祕訣包括： ● 第五級領導：能推動企業邁向卓越的領導人員具備什麼樣的特質？他們通常沉默內斂、不愛出風頭，甚至有點害羞，謙沖為懷的人格特質和不屈不撓的專業堅持齊集於一身。 ● 先找對人，再決定要做什麼：柯林斯團隊原以為「從優秀到卓越」的領導人上任之初，一定先提出新願景、新策略，卻發現他們忙著找到適合的人上車，請不適任的人下車，並且把對的人放在對的位子上，然後才釐清該把車子開往哪個方向。 ● 面對殘酷現實，但絕不喪失信心：所有從「從優秀到卓越」的公司邁向卓越之路，都先從誠實面對眼前的殘酷現實開始。因此，領導人必須塑造能聽到真畫且不掩蓋事實的企業文化。 ● 刺蝟原則：從優秀躍升到卓越，必須以能反映三個圓圈交集的簡單概念來取代原有的核心事業。刺蝟原則不是目標、策略或意圖，而是深入的理解。 ● 強調紀律的文化：當有紀律的文化和企業精神相結合時，就能點石成金，創造卓越的績效。 ● 以科技為加速器：「從優秀到卓越」的公司對於科技的角色有與眾不同的想法。柯林斯發現，「從優秀到卓越」的公司會把科技當做動力加速器，而不是啟動器。 ● 飛輪和命運環路：從優秀到卓越的蛻變過程不是一蹴可幾的，轉變的過程好像無休無止地推著巨輪朝一個方向前進。 這些祕訣不僅是從優秀到卓越的恆常法則，而且是可以學習的。任何組織都有可能變成卓越公司，只要用心研讀本書，就會找到許多可以應用於公司（無論公司大小或新創公司）及個人生涯規畫的實用法則。價值投資人更可以依循這些法則，進行「人」、「能力圈」及「護城河」三項選股要素的質化分析，找到最具潛力成長標的。

A discussion of several UFO sightings including a description of the objects and speculations about their origins.

This book is full of anecdotes of people and events encountered over a lifetime of sailing in South East Asia, Australia, and the Middle East—treasure hunters, magicians, the American Mayor of Osaka, smugglers, a brave flier, and lone sailors.

Every summer, in ten small towns across Cape Cod, young college baseball players showcase their talents in hopes of making it to the "show." A vicious filter, the league has produced one out of every six major league players, from Nomar Garciaparra and Todd Helton to Jeff Bagwell and Barry Zito.In this brilliantly crafted narrative, Jim Collins chronicles a season in the life of the Chatham A''s, perhaps the most celebrated team in the Cape Cod Baseball League. Set against a seemingly bucolic backdrop--a well-heeled resort town on the bend of the outer Cape -- the story charts the changing fortunes of a handful of players, all of whom battle slumps and self-doubt in an effort to impress major league scouts and make the playoffs. Several players go home with career-threatening injuries; one blue-chip prospect fulfills great expectations while another is dubbed "the biggest disappointment on the Cape." A pitcher hides an arm injury while negotiating a minor league contract; another leaves early to tend to his dying father. And nearly all look to the following year''s major league draft as a barometer of their worth. Far more than a baseball book, The Last Best League is an engrossing story about dreams fulfilled and dreams destroyed, about Cape Cod and the rites of summer, about coming of age in America.

Discusses numerous firsts in outer space exploration including the Apollo, Sputnik, and Explorer flights.

Discusses the many mysterious, unexplained losses of ships and planes in the area of the Atlantic Ocean between Florida and Bermuda.

A leading management consultant outlines seven organizational rules for improving effectiveness and increasing productivity at work and at home.