Most business owners understand that they need to create a differentiated, high-quality product or service to be successful in today’s marketplace.
However, many businesses derail because they are trying to create a “perfect” product. Perfectionism causes them to either never launch or launch too late to capture the market they are after.
Worse yet, many companies think they know what the market wants and they spend millions of dollars creating an amazingly perfect product that no one wants!
What causes a highly successful business, that outperforms the stock market by 6.9 times for over a decade, to all of a sudden become irrelevant and fail?
Jim Collins’ book, “How the Mighty Fall” takes a detailed look at companies that were great companies as defined by Collins’ previous book “Good to Great” but fell to irrelevance. Collins defines a great company as one that had to significantly outperform the market for at least 15 years in a row. On average, the companies that Collins studied as great companies outperformed the general stock market by at least 6.9 times.
. . . And then, they failed!
There were quite a list of companies that were studied for this book but some of the more dramatic failures include:
As a new feature of Thinking Business Blog, I am posting a brief summary of the business books that I am reading. This will be a very high level synopsis of the book and what I gained from it. I will publish these summaries as I complete the books and not on a predetermined schedule. I trust you will benefit from them.
The first book I reviewed was Procrastinate on Purpose.
The second review was Bill Browder’s book, Red Notice
The third review was Atul Gawande’s book The Checklist Manifesto
The fourth review was Brad Lomenick’s H3 Leadership
The fifth review was Eula Bliss’ On Immunity: An Inoculation
The sixth review is Give and Take by Adam Grant
Grant provides a detailed compilation of research in the area of giving and receiving. The results from this research, backed up by reams of data and an overwhelming number of examples is that there are three types of people; Givers, Takers and Matchers.
