How the Mighty Fall

Jim Collins again, and once you've read Built to Last and Good to Great you basically know the shape of this one. It's the inverse study: how great companies, at the very peak of their power, manage to fall apart. He lays out five stages of decline, from hubris born of success all the way down to capitulation to irrelevance or death. I liked it. Collins is rigorous and the stages stick with you. But it's not in the same league as the other two, and the honest summary is almost: don't do the opposite of what Good to Great told you to do and you'll be fine. The catch is that it's only really useful if you're already mighty, or close to it. If you're early stage, the failure modes he describes, overreach and denying risk and grasping for a silver bullet, are problems you'd love to have. Read it when you're big enough that falling is a real possibility.