The book goes to print next week in Australia and the following week in the US. So now it’s time for a winter’s break by the ocean. Back in the second week of July.

Here’s a Business Week interview with Jim Collins on his new book How the Mighty Fall. There’s also a good summary of the book.

More on Jim Collin’s five stages of decline from organizational greatness.

1. Hubris born of success
Faith and confidence become pride and arrogance. Hard work and focus turns into a sense of entitlement to future success, “We’re so great we can do anything!”

2. Undisciplined pursuit of more
That is, more scale, more growth, more acclaim, more of whatever those in power see as `success’ They stray from the disciplined creativity that led them to greatness in the first place. Abandonment of the hedgehog concept in favor of the rabbit’s pursuit of quick gains.

3. Denial of Risk and Peril
Now that you are chasing things that are not part of your core, you fail to see the problems or blame the problems on the outside world. In this stage you are blind to the brutal facts. Although internal warning signs begin to mount, they are ignored because external results remain strong enough to `explain away’ disturbing data or to suggest that the difficulties are `temporary’ or `cyclic’ or `not that bad,’ and `nothing is fundamentally wrong.

4. Grasping for salvation
Often in the form of the silver bullet, such as a visionary leader. Attention is no longer on from the core and the flywheel, but on the quick fix. The cumulative signs of peril and/or evidence of risks-gone-bad force leaders to decide: return immediately to being and doing what achieved greatness before or the “grasp for salvation”? The longer a company remains in Stage 4, repeatedly grasping for silver bullets, the more likely it will spiral downward.

5. Capitulation to irrelevance or death
The process of erosion and deterioration continues until either the leaders just sell out or the institution atrophies into utter insignificance; and in most cases, the enterprise simply dies outright. This is the terminus of the lifecycle and the one place you cannot recover from.

Having a think about how this paradigm relates to the lifecycle model of Ichak Adizes.

Stage 1: Hubris Born of Success

Stage 2: Undisciplined Pursuit of More

Stage 3: Denial of Risk and Peril

Stage 4: Grasping for Salvation

Stage 5: Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death

Movements become institutions and institutions decline. The mighty today are the fallen tomorrow. That’s the pattern of history. Although Collins’ research emphasizes, some organizations do recover—in some cases, coming back even stronger—even after having crashed into the depths of Stage 4.

Decline, it turns out, is largely self-inflicted. We are not imprisoned by our circumstances, our history, or even our staggering defeats along the way. The mighty can fall, but they can often rise again.

It seems that America, not Western Europe, is the norm. Outside of Europe, the very things that were supposed to destroy religion — democracy and markets, technology and reason — are combining to make it stronger.

What makes Europe different? The centuries-long legacy of state-supported, monopoly churches. Pluralism and diversity is what it takes to keep faith on the boil. That’s the lesson of American religious history pre and post 1776.

Around the world in Asia, Latin America and Africa religion is asserting its influence. Those states that have sought to push religion out of national life are now finding that it is pushing its way back in.

Despite decades of religious oppression, by 2050 China will be the nation with the largest population of Christians. Already there are more active Christians in China than members of the Communist Party.

God is back? Actually He never left, we just didn’t notice.

John Micklethwait was interviewed recently by Counterpoint. and while you’re there check out the interview of Richard Hackman on his book Leading Teams.

Meanwhile where was the Roman church with all it’s learning, wealth and political power?

map

While the Arab Muslim conquests of the seventh century subjected the Christians of the Middle East to incredible pressures, the ancient communities nonetheless not only survived, as underscored by the remarkable renaissance of the Church of the East during the patriarchate of Timothy I, but even managed to thrive. “Only around 1300,” writes Jenkins, “did the axe fall, and quite suddenly.”

The aftereffects of the Mongol invasions certainly played their part, by terrifying Muslims and others with the prospect of a direct threat to their social and religious power. Climatic factors were also critical, as the world entered a period of rapid cooling, precipitating bad harvests and shrinking trade routes: a frightened and impoverished world looks for scapegoats.

Thus “Muslim regimes and mobs now delivered near-fatal blows to weakened Christian churches.” According to Jenkins, the number of Christians in Asia fell, between 1200 and 1500, from 21 million to 3.4 million. During the same years, the proportion of the world’s total Christian population living in Africa and Asia combined fell from 34 percent to just 6 percent, and the remnant that survived virtually disappeared in the massacres of Armenians, Assyrians, Syrians, and other ancient Christian communities during the 19th and 20th centuries, which led the Polish Jewish lawyer Raphael Lemkin argue for a new category of crime to which he subsequently gave the name “genocide.”

From Pham’s review of The Lost History of Christianity

“The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia–and How It Died” (Philip Jenkins)

In his recent Cairo speech President Obama drew attention to the contribution of Islamic culture to civilization. He said,

As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam. It was Islam — at places like Al-Azhar — that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe’s Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed.

What is not as well-known is the contribution to the legacy above, of Christians who had been conquered by Islam. Historian Phillip Jenkins writes,

It was Christians—Nestorians, Jacobite, Orthodox, and others—who preserved and translated the cultural inheritance of the ancient world—the science, philosophy, and medicine—and who transmitted it to centers like Baghdad and Damascus. Much of what we call Arab scholarship was in reality Syriac, Persian, and Coptic, and it was not necessarily Muslim. Syriac-speaking Christian scholars brought the works of Aristotle to the Muslim world: Timothy himself translated Aristotle’s Topics from Syriac into Arabic, at the behest of the caliph. Syriac Christians even make the first reference to the efficient Indian numbering system that we know today as “Arabic,” and long before this technique gained currency among Muslim thinkers…Such were the Christian roots of the Arabic golden age.

The “Timothy” referred to was Timothy I (727-823) patriarch of the Church of the East. He was based in Seleucia, twenty miles southeast of modern Bagdad. In terms of his prestige, and the geographical extent of his authority, Timothy was arguably the most significant Christian spiritual leader of his day.

Peter Pham has written an excellent review of Jenkin’s work.

Christian Audio has announced a sale on audio books. Plenty of titles. Among them the ESV audio Bible for $7.49 USD.

The offer is good until July 3, 2009.