| November 2009 Cape Town |
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(More about the book below)
Gateways Business Book Breakfasts have been held every year from February through November for the past 14 years! Venue and Date: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it to email Seipati to make your booking. MORE ABOUT THE BOOKS How the Mighty Fall, Jim Collins In his two previous books, “Built to Last” and “Good to Great”, Jim Collins identified great companies and what made them great. Some of those profiled are no longer great, some no longer exist. The danger to companies, says Collins, is that like human beings they can look healthy on the outside with a cancer-like disease growing on the inside. But unlike a cancer, with companies, the disease is largely self-inflicted. How the Mighty Fall is a description of a research project undertaken by Collins and his team to answer a set of very important questions: Are there clearly distinguishable stages of decline, and if there are, how can you spot them early? Can you reverse the decline and if so how? Is there a point of no return? The research appears to be rigorous and the sample large enough to draw conclusions. As with his previous work he uses “a control comparison set” of companies – successes and failures - to arrive at a conclusion, a methodology that avoids the pitfalls of examining only failed companies. The result is a five stage model of decline, complete with indicators and the constant reiteration of the emergent fact: decline is not inevitable and is reversible. We do ourselves a disservice by only studying success. There is much to be learned from discovering why great companies decline. The keys to sustained performance are more likely to lie in the understanding, how greatness can be lost. Join me at breakfast and find out. Knowledge worth having The Next Hundred Years, George Friedman This is a forecast for the 21st century by the founder of Stratfor, the world’s leading private intelligence and forecasting company. Using geopolitical theory and huge bodies of data, Friedma is able to make some insightful forecasts. Geopolitics is concerned with broad impersonal forces that constrain nations and human beings and compel them to act in certain ways. The most brilliant leader of Iceland will never turn it into a world power, while an inept leader of Rome at its height, could not undermine Rome’s fundamental power. The winners of the century? This is the American century, its power makes it an unassailable leader that doesn’t need to win wars (trade or military), it needs only to disrupt things sufficiently for others to be incapable of building up sufficient strength to challenge it. And then there is Turkey and Poland, the other two major powers, and no, China is not going to be a big league player. His arguments are based on demography, economics, and geography, and are compelling. Find out why! Venue and Date: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it to email Seipati to make your booking. |
