The Brink of Chaos

Review

Rating: 7

Jim Collins makes some good points with great word pictures that are worth considering, but he wraps it all up in a statistical inductive process that gives it the guise of science which I find pretty odious. It doesn’t make his points less valid, but it doesn’t make them more valid either. It would be better if he did his comparisons to discover ideas that could then be used to argue from reason rather than statistics (which is more or less what he ends up doing). He mixes in a huge amount of narrative fallacy which makes any of his ideas easier to accept even though they aren’t necessarily more valid. He even quotes Taleb at one point in his book who strongly critiques Collins approach. Ultimately, I liked his word pictures and agree with his ideas even though I think they are not entirely new.