The new question: Ten years after the worldwide bestseller “Good to Great,” Jim Collins returns to ask: Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not? In “Great by Choice,” Collins and his colleague, Morten T. Hansen, enumerate the principles for building a truly great enterprise in unpredictable, tumultuous, and fast-moving times.

The new study: “Great by Choice” distinguishes itself from Collins’s prior work by its focus on the type of unstable environments faced by leaders today.

The new findings: The best leaders were more disciplined, more empirical, and more paranoid. Following the belief that leading in a “fast world” always requires “fast decisions” and “fast action” is a good way to get killed. The great companies changed less in reaction to a radically changing world than the comparison companies.

This book is classic Collins: contrarian, data-driven, and uplifting. He and Hansen show convincingly that, even in a chaotic and uncertain world, greatness happens by choice, not by chance.