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book2009

How the Mighty Fall

Disciplines:
management
leadership
research/business research
management/organizational decline

Summary

Jim Collins's 2009 book identifying the five stages of organizational decline — Hubris Born of Success, Undisciplined Pursuit of More, Denial of Risk and Peril, Grasping for Salvation, Capitulation — applicable to companies, nations, and institutions.

Core Contribution

Provides the most systematically researched model of how previously great organizations decline — and the hopeful finding that organizations can arrest decline even at stage 4 — making it applicable beyond business to any institution or personal situation involving a trajectory from success to failure.

Historical Influences

Jim Collins

Intellectual Lineage

Jim Collins Research TraditionGood to Great FrameworkBusiness Research

Allied Works

Good to Great The Innovator's Dilemma Only the Paranoid Survive

Contemporaries & Peers

The Innovator's Dilemma The Halo Effect Barbarians at the Gate

Minds Influenced

Organizational decline discourseLeadership failure analysisMW organizational excellence content

Intellectual Posterity

Five stages of declineHubris Born of Success

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