Includes bibliographical references (p. 255-293) and index.

Thriving in uncertainty -- 10xers -- 20 Mile march -- Fire bullets, then cannonballs -- Leading above the death line -- SMaC -- Return on luck -- Epilogue: great by choice -- Frequently asked questions.

"Great by Choice" distinguishes itself from Collins's prior work by its focus not just on performance, but also on the type of unstable environments faced by leaders today. With a team of more than twenty researchers, Collins and Hansen studied companies that rose to greatness--beating their industry indexes by a minimum of ten times over fifteen years--in environments characterized by big forces and rapid shifts that leaders could not predict or control. The research team then contrasted these "10X companies" to a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to achieve greatness in similarly extreme environments.