Jim Collins:In His Own Words

摘要

fortune: Managing through turbulence is topic A for business leaders now, but you and your co-author Marten Hansen chose it as a research focus in 2002. What led you to it back then? COLLINS: We came to believe that growing up in a country like the U.S. in the second half of the 20th century (or in Norway, as Morten did) created a false sense of stability that would likely not return. Think about it: How many times in history does a people come of age in the seemingly safe cocoon of a dominant global superpower during an era of rarely stalled rising prosper-ity? Ancient Egypt, Greece in 500 B.C.E., the Roman Empire, England in the 1800s, and a few others—these, along with the U.S. in the second half of the 20th century, are rarefied slices of human history. And rarefied slices tend not to repeat. Morten and I came to believe that we were entering an extended period of uncertainty and turbulent disruption that might well char-acterize the rest of our lives. We wanted to understand what's required to perform exceptionally well in such a world.