Your share price is rising and falling like a roller coaster. Your supply chain is long, complex and uncertain. Raw materials prices spike and fall. The view ahead on taxes and regulations is clear as mud. You're scrambling to hire and keep the best engineers and skilled workers.

In his new book, "Great by Choice," co-written with Morten Hansen, Jim Collins finds that chaos and uncertainty may be nerve-wracking, but they don't spell doom for companies. In fact, he says, some companies positively thrive in such conditions.

To show how, Collins and Hansen contrasted the performance of seven companies that exceeded the financial performance of their peers by a factor of 10 for 15 years with seven competitors that did not do as well. They picked companies that were young or small and rose to have great results despite operating in environments subject to rapid shifts that were potentially harmful. The 10X companies profiled in the book are Stryker, Southwest Airlines, Progressive Insurance, Intel, Microsoft, Amgen and Biomet.

Collins and Hansen found that the 10X cases were not led by executives who were the most daring, visionary or creative. The companies were not the most innovative. Perhaps most surprisingly, these companies didn't react to a changing world by changing the most or the fastest. 

Instead, the 10X companies were led by executives who exhibited three common traits: fanatic discipline, productive paranoia and empirical creativity.

IndustryWeek interviewed Collins recently to find out what he and Hansen had discovered during their nine years of research.

IW: The question you address in "Great By Choice," "Why do some companies thrive in uncertainty, even chaos, and others do not?" suggests choppy waters ahead for companies. Your message seems to be, "Better get used to it and deal with it."

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