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

by Jim Collins

the size of a bullet grows as the enterprise grows;

A bullet is low risk.

low risk means that there are minimal consequences if the bullet goes awry or hits nothing.

A bullet is low distraction.

low distraction for the overall enterprise;

high distraction for one or a few...

10X companies used a combination of creative bullets (such as new products, technologies, services, an...

For an acquisition to qualify as a bullet, it needs to meet the three tests: low cost, low...

Acquisitions would be made with little or no debt, and only when the balance sheet would remain strong after the purchase, thereby ensuring that acquisitions would remain low risk, low cost, and relatively low distraction.

Fire bullets. Assess: Did your bullets hit anything? Consider: Do any of your successful bullets merit conversion to a big cannonball? Convert: Concentrate resources and fire a cannonball once calibrated. Don’t fire uncalibrated cannonballs. Terminate bullets that show no evidence of eventual success.

confirming calibration—empirical validation gained through actual experience—

a cannonball fired before you gain empirical validation an uncalibrated cannonball.

firing an uncalibrated cannonball that succeeds, generating a huge windfall, can be even more dangerous than a failed cannonball. Keep in mind the danger of achieving good outcomes from bad process.

reinforces bad process and can lead to firing more uncalibrated cannonballs.

10X cases fired uncalibrated cannonballs, they quickly learned from their mistakes and returned to a bullets-then-cannonballs approach.

view mistakes as expensive tuition: better get something out of it, learn everything you can, apply the learning, and don’t repeat.

10Xers recover by returning to the discipline of firing cannonballs only when they have empirical validation.

you can only know if something will actually work if you gain empirical validation, no matter how many slide decks support the idea.

Analytic skills still matter, but empirical validation matters much more.

And that’s the underlying principle: empirical validation. Be creative, but validate your creative ideas with empirical experience.

you can learn from the empirical experie...

More important than being first or the most creative is figuring out what works in practice, doing it better than anyone else, and then making the very most of it with a 20 Mile March.

Know the competition and understand them, using that information to focus and improve your own systems over the long term

10Xers do not have any particular genius for visionary prediction.

“How can we bullet our way to understanding?” “How can we fire a bullet on this?” “What bullets have others fired?”

“What does this bullet teach us?” “Do we need to fire another bullet?” “Do we have enough empirical validation to fire a cannonball?”

you don’t know, so you need to fire bullets, knowing full well that a number of them will never hit anything.

Eventually, however, there comes a time for commitment, when you have enough validation to fire the cannonball;

in fact, it came about as a multistep iterative process based more upon empirical validation

fanatic discipline and empirical creativity

Empirical creativity same as lean startup approach? Small tasks to collect information and test hypotheses about your world, before taking a big leap and building something unique for your customers.

Jobs had turned himself from a creative entrepreneur into a disciplined, creative company builder.

A bullet is a low-cost, low-risk, and low-distraction test or experiment.

Failure to fire cannonballs, once calibrated, leads to mediocre results.

The difficult task is to marry relentless discipline with creativity,

We concluded that each environment has a threshold level of innovation, defined as a minimum level of innovation required even to be a contender in the game.

However, once above the innovation threshold, being more innovative doesn’t seem to matter very much.

The combination of creativity and discipline, translated into the ability to scale innovation with great consistency,

From a 10X perspective, the most important decisions were made before the teams even got to the mountain, months before, when Breashears sat in Boston planning and preparing.

The planning provided the “why” for the decisions or the “what” made by each team in that day on the mountain

The 10X winners in our research always assumed that conditions can—and often do—unexpectedly change, violently and fast.

hypersensitive to changing conditions, continually asking, “What if?”

bounding their risk, and honing their disciplines in good times and bad, they handled disruptions from a position of strength and flexibility.

the only

mistakes you can learn from are the one...

“Hitting the Death Line” means that the enterprise dies outright or becomes so damaged that it can no longer continue with the quest to become an enduring great company.

prepare for unexpected events and bad luck before they happen.

Bound risk—

and manage time-based risk.

sense changing conditions and respond effectively.

Intel’s cash position had soared to more than $10 billion, reaching 40 percent

of annual revenues

In those rare scenarios, which inevitably come, Intel would be able to continue its relentless 20 Mile March,