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: