3. Market Peaks and All the Red Flags They Wave

After writing Good to Great, author Jim Collins wrote another book, How the Mighty Fall, in which he looked at the trajectory of corporate decline. In that book, he offers:

We anticipated that most companies fall from greatness because they become complacent—they fail to stimulate innovation, they fail to initiate bold action, they fail to ignite change, they just become lazy—and watch the world pass them by. It’s a plausible theory, with a problem: it doesn’t square with our data. Certainly, any enterprise that becomes complacent and refuses to change or innovate will eventually fall. But, and this is the surprising point, the companies in our analysis showed little evidence of complacency when they fell. Overreaching much better explains how the once-invincible self-destruct.