Blog

With Self Confident Women now focussing on the development of ‘individual’ women through personal development emails, self-paced programs, psychometric testing and performance coaching, we have decided SR Group will focus on the needs of our Corporate Community.

In a nutshell, personal development emails will come from Self Confident Women and Corporate development emails will come from SR Group.  Some of you will be belong to both communities.

While women in leadership and diversity remain issues, SR Group will focus on these areas, along with general employee development, business book reviews and up-to-date research and survey results.

Our training, psychometric testing and performance coaching will be available to men and women alike.

We have also added the extra service of Technical/ Document Writing and Instructional Design.  This enables us to write, or tailor, training programs as needed or help out with any other document writing your company may need assistance with.

Feel free to check out our new website www.srgroup.net.au

Now we have clarified the new ‘look and feel’, it’s back to business.  Today I’d like to share a book review I read recently.

Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos and Luck-Why Some Thrive Despite Them All

by Jim Collins and Morten T. Hansen

The new question?Ten 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 findings: The 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 chance.

Available in bookstores and on Amazon – I’m sold and off to buy it!