Why did some firms weather the financial crisis and others not? This book investigates inner workings of over a dozen major financial and nonfinancial companies, reveals what went wrong and proposes a remedy. Regulators too must learn from past mistakes and require "constructive dialogue" for companies they supervise.

Can a good company become a great one and, if so, how?After a five-year research project, Collins concludes that good to great can and does happen. In this book, he uncovers the underlying variables that enable any type of organization to

The Challenge Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The Study For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great? The Standards Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. The Comparisons The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't. The Findings The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include: Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology. The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap. “Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.” Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?

This book presents a new approach to risk management that enables executives to think systematically and strategically about future risks and deal proactively with threats to their competitive advantages in an ever more volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. Organizations typically manage risks through traditional tools such as insurance and risk mitigation; some employ enterprise risk management, which looks at risk holistically throughout the organization. But these tools tend to focus organizational attention on past actions and compliance. Executives need to tackle risk head-on as an integral part of their strategic planning process, not by looking in the rearview mirror. Strategic Risk Management (SRM) is a forward-looking approach that helps teams anticipate events or exposures that fundamentally threaten or enhance a firm's position. The authors, experts in both business strategy and risk management, define strategic risks and show how they differ from operational risks. They offer a road map that describes architectural elements of SRM (knowledge, principles, structures, and tools) to show how leaders can integrate them to effectively design and implement a future-facing SRM program. SRM gives organizations a competitive advantage over those stuck in outdated risk management practices. For the first time, it enables them to look squarely out the front windshield.