Jim Collins - Böcker

Jim Collins, international bestselling author of Good to Great, offers transformative lessons on constructing — and reconstructing — a life through the cliff moments and transitions we all will face repeatedly in our lives.THE QUESTIONWhat to make of a life?It is a question we all wrestle with more than once. How do we find our way in the world? How do we make it past the cliffs, significant events that can radically change a life? How do we keep the inner fire burning bright, long and late?Inspired by relentless curiosity, Jim Collins devoted a decade to studying these questions and to minutely analysing those moments when life flips from clarity to confusion and casts us into a befuddling fog.THE STUDYHis exploration compares various lives side by side, paired together at cliffs, and analyses the different choices made and divergent paths taken.Two rock musicians confronting a future without the group that had brought them success.Two suffragists achieving their epic goal and then left with the puzzle of what to do next.Two public figures tainted by scandal having to make decisions about how to rebuild their lives.Two figure skaters seeking new purpose when their Olympic careers come to an end.What emerges from Collins’s extensive studies — of writers, actors, scientists, leaders, and many others — is a framework for understanding how individual lives can be built, sustained, and constantly renewed.THE FINDINGSBy examining the long arc of these remarkable lives, Collins tackles life’s questions. What does it take to:Discover a deeply fulfilling role in life — one that you are naturally 'encoded' for — and then find a second one, if the first one ends?Overcome a major cliff — a fracture point that forces choices about what’s next and calls for you to reenvision the years to come?Make your personal economics work so that you can focus on One Big Thing that feeds your inner fire?Navigate the fog when you feel uncertain or even outright lost, and build confidence step by stepMinimise the impact of bad luck and ensure the maximum return on good luck?Build personal momentum decade upon decade, so that your most creative and energetic years are spread across an entire lifetime?Achieve the imperative to 'Know Thyself' and apply self-knowledge to each phase of life?THE TRANSFORMATIONFor the first time, Collins movingly chronicles his own story to reveal how undertaking this project transformed him, changing his thinking and reshaping his emotions in fundamental ways. 'After this study,' writes Collins, 'I will never look at life the same ever again.'Surprising, story-driven, deeply researched, and uplifting, What to Make of a Life is a book like no other and convincingly shows how a richly fulfilled life is within reach for us all.

Can a good company become a great one? If so, how?After a five-year research project, Jim Collins concludes that good to great can and does happen. In this book, he uncovers the underlying variables that enable any type of organisation to make the leap from good to great while other organisations remain only good. Rigorously supported by evidence, his findings are surprising - at times even shocking - to the modern mind.Good to Great achieves a rare distinction: a management book full of vital ideas that reads as well as a fast-paced novel. It is widely regarded as one of the most important business books ever written.

Bring on the Books for Everybody is an engaging assessment of the robust popular literary culture that has developed in the United States during the past two decades. Jim Collins describes how a once solitary and print-based experience has become an exuberantly social activity, enjoyed as much on the screen as on the page. Fueled by Oprah’s Book Club, Miramax film adaptations, superstore bookshops, and new technologies such as the Kindle digital reader, literary fiction has been transformed into best-selling, high-concept entertainment. Collins highlights the infrastructural and cultural changes that have given rise to a flourishing reading public at a time when the future of the book has been called into question. Book reading, he claims, has not become obsolete; it has become integrated into popular visual media. Collins explores how digital technologies and the convergence of literary, visual, and consumer cultures have changed what counts as a “literary experience” in phenomena ranging from lush film adaptations such as The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love to the customer communities at Amazon. Central to Collins’s analysis and, he argues, to contemporary literary culture, is the notion that refined taste is now easily acquired; it is just a matter of knowing where to access it and whose advice to trust. Using recent novels, he shows that the redefined literary landscape has affected not just how books are being read, but also what sort of novels are being written for these passionate readers. Collins connects literary bestsellers from The Jane Austen Book Club and Literacy and Longing in L.A. to Saturday and The Line of Beauty, highlighting their depictions of fictional worlds filled with avid readers and their equations of reading with cultivated consumer taste.

______________________________THE BOOK THAT REED HASTINGS AT NETFLIX TOLD EVERY ASPIRING CEO TO READNearly thirty years ago, Stanford University faculty members Jim Collins and Bill Lazier showed you how to turn an entrepreneurial business into an enduring great company.Beyond Entrepreneurship became a leadership staple, particularly among small and early-stage companies. And while Collins would go on to write a series of famous bestsellers that have sold more than ten million copies worldwide, this lesser-known early work remains the favourite of many of his loyal readers.Now, with Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0, Collins re-shares the timeless insights in Beyond Entrepreneurship alongside new perspectives gleaned after decades of additional research into what makes great companies tick. In Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0, you'll learn how to turn your company into the 2.0 version of itself. You'll be challenged to grow your own leadership as your company grows, from 1x to 2x to 5x to 10x. You'll learn Collins's newest reflections on people decisions, insights that extend beyond his seminal "first who" principle about getting the right people on the bus. You'll learn why luck favours the persistent, and what it means to look for "who luck." You'll learn about the origins of the "BHAG" (Big Hairy Audacious Goal), and why even a small business needs a galvanising BHAG to have a complete and inspiring vision.You'll also unlock what Collins calls "The Map." The Map is a road map that pulls together the key concepts developed from thirty years of research and writing into one integrated framework for building a company that delivers superior results, makes a distinctive impact, and achieves lasting endurance.Finally, you'll learn the lessons that Jim Collins himself learned from the most influential mentor in his life, Bill Lazier.Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0 is the ambitious upgrade to a classic. In Beyond Entrepreneurship 2.0, you'll discover that the goal to turn your business into an enduring great company is as relevant - and as within your reach - as ever.

Tio år efter att han skrev Good to Great ställer Jim Collins frågan: "Varför blomstrar några bolag under förhållanden präglade av osäkerhet, ja till och med kaos, när andra inte gör det?" I Great by Choice, lägger Collins och hans kollega Morten T. Hansen fast principerna för att bygga verkligt enastående bolag i tider som är oförutsägbara, tumultartade och snabbrörliga. Den nya boken skiljer sig från Collins tidigare genom sitt fokus på de slags instabila miljöer som dagens ledare står inför. De företag som valts ut för studien har minst 10 gånger bättre resultat än jämförelseföretagen trots svåra tider. Därför kallas de 10-gångersföretag i boken. Och deras framgång har inget med tur att göra. Det handlar snarare om disciplin och därmed gedigna förberedelser och att hålla sig till uppgjorda planer. Som Collins berättar i sin bok nådde Amundsen Sydpolen mer än en månad före Scott mycket tack vare sina omsorgsfulla förberedelser där han försökte förutse allt som kunde gå snett. Amundsen lärde sig t.ex. att hundar var de bästa dragarna de svettas som bekant inte och har därför bättre förutsättningar att klara extrem kyla. Scotts hästar blev fuktiga av ansträngningarna och frös så småningom ihjäl, och hans manskap fick då dra slädarna. Amundsen höll sig till sin plan att vandra c:a 30 km om dagen och därefter slå läger för att vila. Däremot drev Scott på extra mycket de dagar när solen sken och det var vindstilla, med följd att hans manskap blev uttröttat och inte orkade ge sig ut de dagar det blåste intensivt. Amundsen kom tillbaka till basen precis på dagen medan Scott och hans manskap dukade under för svält och kyla bara ett kort stycke från ett av sina stora förråd. Parallellen med företag och företagsledare är uppenbar. De disciplinerade klarar sig utmärkt det är ju en tes som också upprätthölls av Jim Collins i Good to Great. Jim Collins: Professor Jim Collins är författare till sex böcker, bland dem Good to Great, Built to Last och How the Mighty Fall, som har sålt i mer än 10 miljoner exemplar tre riktiga rekordsäljare. Jim började sin forsknings- och undervisningsbana på Stanford Graduate School of Business, där han fick priset som den bäste läraren 1992. Han driver nu ett management laboratorium i Boulder, Colorado. Morten T Hansen: Morten T. Hansen är professor i Management vid University of California, Berkeley (School of Information), och vid INSEAD. Morten har skrivit boken Collaboration, var tidigare professor vid Harvard Business School, och är PhD från Stanford Graduate School of Business, där han var en Fulbright stipendiat. Professor Hansen stammar från Norge.

I Hur jättarna går under - och varför vissa företag aldrig ger upp ställer sig Jim Collins frågan: Hur går det till när mäktiga företag faller? Kan nedgången upptäckas i tid och undvikas? Hur långt kan ett företag falla innan dess totala undergång är oundviklig och alla räddningsförsök förgäves. Collins forskningsprojekt har pågått i mer än fyra år, och avslöjar fem distinkta steg av nedgång som han beskriver i boken. Genom att förstå stegen i nedgången kan ledare markant minska risken att falla hela vägen ned till botten. Man skulle kunna säga att boken är en spegelbild av hans tidigare storsäljare Good to Great som beskriver uppgångens fem stadier. Det är nästan omöjligt att låta bli att tänka på ett specifikt svenskt företag när man läser boken. Facit, kanske. Eller SAS. Eller varför inte någon av de banker som inte längre finns. Hade de kunnat rädda sig om de varit mer observanta? Ingen institution, oavsett hur mäktig den är, är immun mot undergång. Det finns ingen naturlag som säger att de starkaste och största kommer för all framtid att stanna kvar på toppen. Vilket företag som helst kan börja falla, och de flesta gör det förr eller senare. Men som Collins forskning visar, så återhämtar sig vissa företag faktiskt och i vissa fall kan de komma tillbaka ännu starkare. Om du triumferar eller misslyckas, lider eller avlider, beror mer på vad du gör med dig själv än vad världen gör med dig. OM FÖRFATTAREN Jim Collins är en noggrann betraktare av företag stora, svaga, bra och misslyckade sådana från unga start-ups till aktningsvärda institutioner. Författaren till den internationella storsäljaren Good to Great och medförfattare till Built to Last, är Collins en vägledare för ledare inom både i den privata och offentliga sektorn. Hans artiklar har publicerats i Fortune, BusinessWeek, The Economist, USA Today och Harvard Business Review.

THE NEW QUESTIONTen years after the worldwide bestseller Good to Great, Jim Collins returns with another groundbreaking work, this time to ask: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Based on nine years of research, buttressed by rigorous analysis and infused with engaging stories, Collins and his colleague, Morten Hansen, enumerate the principles for building a truly great enterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous, and fast-moving times.THE NEW STUDY Great by Choice distinguishes itself from Collins's prior work by its focus not just on performance, but also on the type of unstable environments faced by leaders today. With a team of more than twenty researchers, Collins and Hansen studied companies that rose to greatness - beating their industry indexes by a minimum of ten times over fifteen years - in environments characterized by big forces and rapid shifts that leaders could not predict or control. The research team then contrasted these "10X companies" to a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to achieve greatness in similarly extreme environments.THE NEW FINDINGSThe study results were full of provocative surprises. Such as: * The best leaders were not more risk taking, more visionary, and more creative than the comparisons; they were more disciplined, more empirical, and more paranoid.* Innovation by itself turns out not to be the trump card in a chaotic and uncertain world; more important is the ability to scale innovation, to blend creativity with discipline.* Following the belief that leading in a "fast world" always requires "fast decisions" and "fast action" is a good way to get killed.* The great companies changed less in reaction to a radically changing world than the comparison companies.The authors challenge conventional wisdom with thought-provoking, sticky, and supremely practical concepts. They include 10Xers; the 20 Mile March; Fire Bullets then Cannonballs; Leading above the Death Line; Zoom Out, Then Zoom In; and the SMaC Recipe. Finally, in the last chapter, Collins and Hansen present their most provocative and original analysis: defining, quantifying, and studying the role of luck. The great companies and the leaders who built them were not luckier than the comparisons, but they did get a higher Return on Luck. This book is classic Collins: contrarian, data driven, and uplifting. He and Hansen show convincingly that, even in a chaotic and uncertain world, greatness happens by choice, not by chance.

'We must reject the idea - well-intentioned, but dead wrong - that the primary path to greatness in the social sectors is to become "more like a business".' So begins this astonishingly blunt and timely manifesto by leading business thinker Jim Collins. Rejecting the belief, common among politicians, that all would be well in society if only the public sector operated more like the private sector, he sets out a radically new approach to creating successful hospitals, police forces, universities, charities, and other non-profit-making organisations. In the process he rejects many deep-rooted assumptions: that somehow it's possible to measure social bodies in purely financial terms; that they can be managed like traditional businesses; that they can be transformed simply by throwing money at them. Instead he argues for radical new attitudes and strategies, using the analytical approach and clear thinking that lie at the heart of Good to Great.

Collins returns with another groundbreaking work, this time to ask, Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? Based on nine years of research, buttressed by rigorous analysis, and infused with engaging stories, Collins and his colleague Hansen enumerate the principles for building a truly great enterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous and fast-moving times. 320 pp. 500,000 print. (Business/Economics)

Built to Last was a phenomenal success: It is a fair assumption that as the seminal importance of this book begins to permeate the upper echelons of business and business schoolsCollins and Porras will emerge as the gurus to watch over the next decade. The Director. Good to Great explores a whole new concept, backed by the rigorous research standards which gave Built to Last such an impact. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Every summer, in ten small towns across Cape Cod, the finest college baseball players in the country gather in hopes of making it to "The Show." The hopes are justifiably high: The Cape Cod Baseball League is the best amateur league in the world, producing one out of every six major league players.Ten years ago, Jim Collins chronicled a season in the life of one team: the Chatham A's, perhaps the most celebrated team in the league. Set against the backdrop of a resort town on the bend of the outer Cape, the story charted the changing fortunes of a handful of players battling slumps and self-doubt in their effort to make the league playoffs and, more importantly, impress the major league scouts.Over the last decade, baseball's hard truths became evident for the Chatham stars who went on to play professionally, and the final chapter of their story can now be written. In a new afterword for the tenth anniversary, Collins explores questions that sports literature rarely touches: What does it mean to devote your life to an almost impossible goal and almost but not quite make it? Or make it only briefly before it slips away? What does a dream look like in retrospect? How does the game look now?

Jim Collins argues that postmodernism and popular culture have together undermined the master system of "culture." By looking at a wide range of texts and forms he investigates what happens to the notion of culture once different discourses begin to envision that culture in conflicting ways, constructing often contradictory visions of it simultaneously.

Film Theory Goes to the Movies fills the gap in film theory literature which has failed to analyze high-grossing blockbusters. The contributors in this volume, however, discuss such popular films as TheSilence of the Lambs, Dances With Wolves, Terminator II,Pretty Woman, Truth or Dare, Mystery Train, and JungleFever.They employ a variety of critical approaches, from industry analysis to reception study, to close readings informed by feminist, deconstructive and postmodernist theory, as well as recent developments in African American and gay and lesbian criticism. An important introduction to contemporary Hollywood, this anthology will be of interest to those involved in the fields of film theory, literary theory, popular culture, and women's studies.

First Published in 1995. Much of recent theory has characterized life in media-sophisticated societies in terms of a semiotic overload which, allegedly, has had only devastating effects on communication and subjectivity. In Architectures of Excess, Jim Collins argues that, while the rate of technological change has indeed accelerated, so has the rate of absorption. The seemingly endless array of information has generated not chaos but different structures and strategies, which harness that excess by turning it into forms of art and entertainment. Digital sampling in rap music and cyber-punk science fiction are well-known examples of techno-pop textuality, but Collins concentrates on other contemporaneous phenomena that are also envisioning new cultural landscapes by accessing that array--hyper-self-reflexivity in mall movies, best sellers, and prime-time television; the deconstructive vs. new-classical debate in architecture; the emergence of the "New Black Aesthetic;" the development of retro-modernism in interior design and the fashion industries. The analyses of these disparate, discontinous attempts to develop a meaningful sense of location, in an historical as well as a spatial sense, address a cluster of interconnected questions: How is the array of information being "domesticated?" How has appropriationism evolved from the Pop-Art of the sixties to the sampling of the nineties? How has the relationship between tradition, innovation, and evaluation been altered? Architectures of Excess investigates how these phenomena reflect change in taste and subjectivity, considering how we must account for both, pedagogically.

First Published in 1995. Much of recent theory has characterized life in media-sophisticated societies in terms of a semiotic overload which, allegedly, has had only devastating effects on communication and subjectivity. In Architectures of Excess, Jim Collins argues that, while the rate of technological change has indeed accelerated, so has the rate of absorption. The seemingly endless array of information has generated not chaos but different structures and strategies, which harness that excess by turning it into forms of art and entertainment. Digital sampling in rap music and cyber-punk science fiction are well-known examples of techno-pop textuality, but Collins concentrates on other contemporaneous phenomena that are also envisioning new cultural landscapes by accessing that array--hyper-self-reflexivity in mall movies, best sellers, and prime-time television; the deconstructive vs. new-classical debate in architecture; the emergence of the "New Black Aesthetic;" the development of retro-modernism in interior design and the fashion industries. The analyses of these disparate, discontinous attempts to develop a meaningful sense of location, in an historical as well as a spatial sense, address a cluster of interconnected questions: How is the array of information being "domesticated?" How has appropriationism evolved from the Pop-Art of the sixties to the sampling of the nineties? How has the relationship between tradition, innovation, and evaluation been altered? Architectures of Excess investigates how these phenomena reflect change in taste and subjectivity, considering how we must account for both, pedagogically.

An exploration by nine key thinkers of the popularization of elite tastes for mass audiences, High-Pop challenges the project of cultural studies to focus on all-but-ignored forms of mainstream culture.

Jim Collins argues that postmodernism and popular culture have together undermined the master system of "culture." By looking at a wide range of texts and forms he investigates what happens to the notion of culture once different discourses begin to envision that culture in conflicting ways, constructing often contradictory visions of it simultaneously.