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

by Jim Collins

They were more disciplined, more empirical, and more paranoid.

more important is the ability to scale innovation, to blend creativity with discipline.

On the one hand, 10Xers understand that they face continuous uncertainty and that they cannot control, and cannot accurately predict, significant aspects of the world around them. On the other hand, 10Xers reject the idea that forces outside their control or chance events will determine their results; they accept full responsibility for their own fate.

PSA’s demise illustrates the danger of firing uncalibrated cannonballs in an uncertain world full of turbulent disruption. If an enterprise gets slammed by a series of shocks just as its uncalibrated cannonballs go crashing off into space, it’s more likely to have a catastrophic outcome.

The iPod story illustrates a crucial point: a big, successful venture can look in retrospect like a single-step creative breakthrough when, in fact, it came about as a multistep iterative process based more upon empirical validation than visionary genius. The marriage of fanatic discipline and empirical creativity better explains Apple’s revival than breakthrough innovation per se.

Putnam didn’t issue some bland, generic “Southwest Airlines will be a leading low-cost airline” vacuous statement.