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Community Organizer Saul Alinsky categorized people into three classes; (i) the Haves, (ii) the Have A Little, Want Mores and, the (iii) Have Nots. He wrote Rules For Radicals to instruct, “…the Have Nots on how to take it away” from the Haves. Mr. Alinsky preached that wealth was relatively static. In Alinskyland, if you were a Have Not, your only alternative to attain wealth was to take it away from a Have, preferably with the assistance of Government-sanctioned coercion. Mr. Alinsky rationalized such legalized theft with the oft-repeated phrase, “the ends justify the means.” It is difficult to believe that Mr. Alinsky actually believed this fanciful, binary view of reality. Yet the simplistic nature of his Marxist-based Haves / Haves Not argument did not stop him from encouraging a generation of under-educated people to believe that their only opportunity to obtain wealth was to gather around him so he could sufficiently intimidate wealth creators into giving away some of their lawfully earned fortune. Mr. Alinsky provided a malevolent disservice to his followers. Rather than cajoling his supporters to snatch wealth from the hands of those who created it, he should have encouraged them to become wealth creators, as opposed to wealth confiscators. Mr. Alinsky incited his followers to demand something for nothing. Such thievery is the antithesis of the entrepreneurial approach of creating something from nothing.

 You have authored two bestselling books explaining why certain companies will “Last” and how others have gone from “Good to Great” and subsequently a majority of the companies falter and some completely fail. What do you do? Do you introspectively evaluate your research methodologies and assess your failed assertions? Do you admit that you may have mistakenly analyzed the data? If you are Jim Collins, you ignore the fact that your underlying assumptions and interpretation of the data were flawed. To further enhance your state of denial, you write a new book entitled How the Mighty Fall and blame the previously vaunted companies for subsequently faltering.