Good to Great
| Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't | |
|---|---|
 Front cover |
|
| Author(s) | James C. Collins |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | William Collins |
| Publication date | October 16, 2001 |
| Media type | Hardcover |
| Pages | 320 |
| ISBN | 978-0-06-662099-2 |
| OCLC Number | 46835556 |
| Dewey Decimal | 658 21 |
| LC Classification | HD57.7 .C645 2001 |
Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't is a 2001 management book by James C. Collins that aims to describe how companies transition from being average companies to great companies and how companies can fail to make the transition. "Greatness" is defined as financial performance several multiples better than the market average over a sustained period. Collins finds the main factor for achieving the transition to be a narrow focusing of the company’s resources on their field of competence.
The book was a massive best-seller, selling four million copies and going far beyond the traditional audience of business books.[1]
Contents |
Writing [edit]
Collins used a large team of researchers who studied "6,000 articles, generated more than 2,000 pages of interview transcripts and created 384 megabytes of computer data in a five-year project".[2]
Seven characteristics of companies that went "from good to great" [edit]
- Level 5 Leadership: Leaders who are humble, but driven to do what's best for the company.
- First Who, Then What: Get the right people on the bus, then figure out where to go. Finding the right people and trying them out in different positions.
- Confront the Brutal Facts: The Stockdale paradox - Confront the brutal truth of the situation, yet at the same time, never give up hope.
- Hedgehog Concept: Three overlapping circles: What lights your fire ("passion")? What could you be best in the world at ("best at")? What makes you money ("driving resource")?
- Culture of Discipline: Rinsing the cottage cheese.
- Technology Accelerators: Using technology to accelerate growth, within the three circles of the hedgehog concept.
- The Flywheel: The additive effect of many small initiatives; they act on each other like compound interest.
Great companies [edit]
Collins finds eleven examples of "great companies" and comparators, similar in industry-type and opportunity, but which failed to achieve the good-to-great growth shown in the great companies:
| Great Company | Comparator |
| Abbott Laboratories | Upjohn |
| Circuit City Stores (bankrupt in 2009) | Silo |
| Fannie Mae (involved in home mortgage scandal) | Great Western Bank |
| Gillette Company | Warner-Lambert Co |
| Kimberly-Clark | Scott Paper Company |
| Kroger | A&P (declared bankruptcy in 2010) |
| Nucor | Bethlehem Steel |
| Philip Morris | R. J. Reynolds |
| Pitney Bowes | Addressograph |
| Walgreens | Eckerd |
| Wells Fargo (received $25B from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) in 2008) | Bank of America (received $45B from TARP in 2008) |
Response [edit]
Good to Great is "one of the most influential business books of recent years." It was "cited by several members of The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council as the best management book they've read."[3]
Publishers Weekly called it "worthwhile", although "many of Collins's perspectives on running a business are amazingly simple and commonsense".[2]
Steven D. Levitt describes how he was inspired to read the book by the "phenomenon" it had become, and noted that many of the companies selected as "great" had since got into serious troubles, such as Circuit City, while only Nucor had "dramatically outperformed the stock market" and "Abbott Labs and Wells Fargo have done okay". Overall, investing in the portfolio of those 11 companies in 2001 would result in actually underperforming the S&P 500[4] Levitt concluded that books like this are "mostly backward-looking" and can't offer a guide for the future.[5]
See also [edit]
Reviews [edit]
External links [edit]
- JimCollins.com
- Wiki Chapter Summaries of Good to Great
- From Good to Great … to Below Average Article on Freakonomics New York Times blog
References [edit]
- ^ Bryant, Adam (May 23, 2009). "For This Guru, No Question Is Too Big". New York Times.
- ^ a b "GOOD TO GREAT: Why Some Companies Make the Leap... And Others Don't (Review)". 09/03/2001. Retrieved 13 July 2012.
- ^ Alan Murray (2010). The Wall Street Journal Essential Guide to Management. New York: HarperCollins. p. 11. ISBN 978-0-06-184033-3.
- ^ http://blog.asmartbear.com/business-advice-plagued-by-survivor-bias.html
- ^ Levitt, Steven D. (07/28/2008). "From Good to Great … to Below Average". Freakonomics.
