First Paragraph

Here is a puzzling fact: the best-performing firms often have more in common with humiliated bankrupts than with companies that have managed merely to survive. In fact, the very traits we have come to identify as determinants of high achievement are also the ingredients of total collapse. And so it turns out that, behaviorally at least, the opposite of success is not failure, but mediocrity. 

- From The Strategy Paradox: Why Committing to Success Leads to Failure [And What to Do About It] by Michael E. Raynor