"Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Jared Diamond is not your typical business book, perhaps falling more easily into the categories of sociology, anthropology or history. Even so, as it has climbed the best-seller lists to become a mega-hit, its business audience has contributed significantly to its success. Certainly, it can be argued that its application is all about business, as it details familiar concerns of leadership, teamwork, strategic planning, and the importance of individual initiative, in contexts that are fascinating, compelling, and at times frightening.
Put into the historical context of why past societies succeeded or failed, Diamond places business in a unique role as one of the major forces that shape our current society. Will we survive or collapse? At least part of the answer lies with how we operate our businesses.
The author's 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, led readers on an incredible journey exploring 15,000 years of human history. His accessible and brilliant synthesis took the book to the best-seller list and made the author an uber-guru and something of a rock star.
Collapse continues that journey, focusing on the human element in examining why past societies failed or succeeded. Easter Island, Greenland, the Native American civilizations of the Maya and the Anasazi are among the societies whose self-destruction he documents. He then looks at the status of current situations - China, Australia, Rwanda, and Montana - and urges us to use the lessons of the past in order to create a different future.
The author identifies five factors why societies fail or succeed: climate change, hostile neighbors, trade partners, environmental problems, and a society's response to its environmental problems. Diamond suggests that the first four factors may or may not prove to be significant in the failure of particular societies, but the last factor always does. His point here is clear: the way a society responds to problems is a choice. As he purports, even in the book's title, societies can "choose to fail."
Is the same true of our businesses? Certainly. In our era of globalization and rapid change, each of these factors can be interpreted in ways that apply to the success or failure of a business. The author highlights the point that companies that ignore the impact of their actions may find themselves in the same situation as the collapsed societies he describes.
How do societies (and businesses) make such bad decisions that may lead to their destruction? Diamond proposes a road map of factors contributing to failures of group decision-making. First comes the failure to anticipate a problem before it arrives. Second is the group's failure to perceive the problem, and third, the failure to even try to solve the problem. Fourth, the group may be unsuccessful in its attempt to solve the problem.
To illustrate his points, the author looks at five industries: oil, hardrock mining, coal, logging and fishing. While he uses many global examples, Kentucky readers will find these chapters particularly interesting, given the state's dependency on many of those industries as well as their ensuing environmental concerns.
With the ominous title "Collapse," the reader may well expect this to be a difficult book to digest. It can be argued that the book is permeated with despair and that businesses and societies today are as slow to learn as those of the past. There are fundamental patterns of catastrophe that occur when we squander our resources, ignore our environment and refuse to react to change.
But the author also suggests that there are solutions and choices we can make for the future. His example of two oil companies whose approach made one field a failure and the other a showcase of success brings in the light of possibilities and triumph for the long term. Still, there are profound difficulties, conflicts of priorities, and economic and environmental clashes that are yet to be resolved, he writes.
Ultimately, the author suggests that success depends upon two choices: long-term planning and core values. Regarding the first, the author states that, in the business world, the American corporations (e.g. Proctor & Gamble) that remain successful for long times are ones that don't wait for a crisis, but look for problems and take action.
That same proactive stance is true for value clarification. "Perhaps the crux of success or failure of a society is to know which core values to hold onto, and which ones to discard and replace with new values," Diamond says.
Whether you read this extraordinary book with environmental, political, social or business reasons in mind, you will no doubt find that these concerns ultimately result in one question: "To fail or succeed?" The answer, Diamond argues, is our choice."