How the Mighty Fall: And Why Some Companies Never Give In by Collins Jim

Author:Collins, Jim [Collins, Jim]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Itzy, Kickass.so
ISBN: 9780061956461
Amazon: B0058DRTYY
Publisher: CLBusiness
Published: 2011-09-06T04:00:00+00:00

The signature of the truly great versus the merely successful is not the absence of difficulty, but the ability to come back from setbacks, even cataclysmic catastrophes, stronger than before. Great nations can decline and recover. Great companies can fall and recover. Great social institutions can fall and recover. And great individuals can fall and recover. As long as you never get entirely knocked out of the game, there remains always hope.

We all need beacons of light as we struggle with the inevitable setbacks of life and work. For me, that light has often come from studying Winston Churchill. In the early 1930s, Churchill’s career had descended into what biographer Virginia Cowles called “a quagmire from which there seemed to be no rescue.” Entering his late fifties, fattening up, and losing hair, he’d been widely blamed for Britain’s financial dislocation in the Depression, having put Britain back on the gold standard as the Chancellor of the Exchequer. He’d broken with his party, isolating himself from the mainstream by his opposition to Indian self-rule, refusing even to meet with Gandhi. He’d been forever tagged as the architect of the World War I tragedy at Gallipoli (a botched plan to knock Turkey out of the war, and to attack Germany and Austria from the southeast), which cost 213,980 British casualties for zero gain; even though the Dardanelles Commission cleared him of blame, he remained tainted by the disaster. The 1929 stock market crash cost Churchill a considerable fortune. And on December 12, 1931, he stepped off a curb on Fifth Avenue in New York, looking to his right to check for traffic as he would in London rather than to his left as he needed to in America. Passers-by heard a sickening “thwaump!” as a car driving more than 30 miles per hour blindsided Churchill, knocking him yards down Fifth Avenue. The accident threw him into the hospital, a long recovery, and a severe depression.168

At the end of Volume I of his series, The Last Lion, William Manchester captures Churchill’s position in 1932. Lady Astor visited with Joseph Stalin, who quizzed her on the political landscape in Britain. Astor prattled on about the powerful, the up-and-coming, naming Neville Chamberlain as the star.

“What about Churchill?” asked Stalin.

“Churchill?” Astor’s eyes widened. Then with a disdainful wrinkle of her nose, “Oh, he’s finished.”169

Eight years later, on June 4, 1940, Churchill stood in front of Parliament as prime minister while Hitler’s Panzer divisions swept across France. Poland: gone. Belgium: gone. Holland: gone. Norway: gone. Denmark: gone. France: collapsing. England: reeling from the rout leading up to the evacuation from Dunkirk. Most world leaders, including many in Britain, saw no choice but to cede Europe to the Nazis. Churchill’s rivals expected Churchill to see no other alternative than a negotiated peace with Herr Hitler and his Nazi henchmen, and they hoped to capitalize on his taking the political fallout for capitulation.

They were to be disappointed.

Clutching his notes, for he always feared that without his carefully prepared text

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