How The Mighty Fall

Find a Diagnosis

The question “How would you know?” motivated Jim Collins, author of Good to Great and other business classics, to write this book. He first asked this question as the mystery of unexpected disaster struck his family when his apparently healthy wife was found to have cancer.

I began to think of decline as analogous to a disease, perhaps cancer, that can grow on the inside while you still look strong and healthy on the outside. It’s not a perfect analogy…organizational decline, unlike cancer, is largely self-inflictedJim Collins

This led him to compare corporate failure to “a staged disease” – hard to “detect,” but easier to cure in the beginning stages and much more difficult to stop later.